10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3636
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2239-625X
3636
2
en
Tomás Sánchez Criado
Anuac
DIY Anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
8
Thematic section: Changing margins and relations within European anthropology
2019-12-29
2019-03-27
2019-12-29
2019-12-29
143-165
1
Tomás Sánchez Criado
2019/12/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3636
143
Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
2239-625X
2
en
165
DIY Anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis
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                                        2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 143-165




DIY anthropology
Disciplinary knowledge in crisis

Adolfo ESTALELLA
Universidad Complutense, Madrid
Tomás SÁNCHEZ CRIADO
Humboldt University, Berlin




ABSTRACT: This is an account of the transformations in our anthropological activity
during a period of crisis that set our disciplinary practice in an epistemic crisis. Working
in the cracks left behind by the politics of austerity that started after the global
financial crack of 2007-2008 in Madrid and Barcelona, we argue that our
anthropological practice was rebuilt in ways that blurred our disciplinary boundaries.
What there emerged was a form of anthropological knowledge whose contours may be
understood not as a disciplinary field but as practice of experimental collaboration. This
is an anthropological modality that re-learns its ways treating counterparts as
epistemic partners and setting up with them distinct ambiances of care: caring for one
another in situations of great difficulty and caring for our different forms of inquiry,
addressing the very situations we were under. This would be an anthropological
practice that assembles from scratch a conceptual body, also learning its ways from
others, taking care for the mundane issues that are very often forgotten and rendered
invisible by disciplinary fields: A DIY anthropology, as we would like to call it. Or even
better, an anthropology done together with others.

KEYWORDS: EXPERIMENTAL    COLLABORATIONS,   DO   IT YOURSELF   (DIY), EPISTEMIC   PARTNERS,   CARE,
INTRAVENTION.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Adolfo Estalella, Tomás Sánchez Criado
DIY anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 143-165.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3636
144                                             ADOLFO ESTALELLA, TOMÁS SÁNCHEZ CRIADO



Introduction
   The beginning of the 2010s was a period of political unrest in Spain. Like
many other countries, it suffered the harsh effects of the 2007-2008 global
financial crisis1. However, despite the crisis (or maybe because of it) cities
experienced a moment of political creativity and urban inventiveness:
People occupied empty buildings and unused plots of vacant land to create
all kind of projects, refurnishing the city with an impulse to reanimate
collective forms of life. All kind of knowledges blossomed in these
initiatives. Our several-years-long ethnographic investigations were carried
out in this period in Spain’s main two cities (Madrid and Barcelona). One of
us (Adolfo) came across architectural guerrillas that challenged the
conventional practice and work ethics of their own discipline, working in the
open air with neighbours in the common task of planning the city and
refurbishing public spaces. The other (Tomás) collaborated with a network of
both professional and amateur designers who, after meeting the activists of
the independent-living movement, united in different endeavours to defy
the knowledge, political and market lockup of personal and urban supports,
tinkering with the aspiration not only to forge alternatives to a receding
welfare state but also to carve spaces of mutual access. In such settings,
traditional forms of knowledge were thrown into crisis when institutional
canons of epistemic authority were challenged, be it by neighbours
intervening in the city or bodily diverse people taking care of their own
bodies and relations.
   Thrown into an urban landscape left behind by a policy of financial
austerity, we worked intimately with architects, activist designers, and
bodily diverse people. Singularly and unexpectedly for us, we found in them
the companions we lacked in our local institutional academic contexts. They
turned into epistemic partners: companions in the shared endeavour of
producing anthropological problematisations. Under these circumstances,
the knowledge we produced at the time emerged out of a moment of crisis:
knowledge in crisis.
   For some time now, in different reflections coming out of our ethnographic
encounters, we have highlighted the particular transformations these
“experimental collaborations” – as we have described them (Estalella,
Sánchez Criado 2018) – have operated in our fieldwork practices. In doing
so, we have engaged in a dialogue with a number of authors, who in recent

1. We would like to thank Francisco Martínez and the two anonymous reviewers for their
careful and insightful comments, which helped us improve our argument.


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                 145


times have argued that “fieldwork is not what it used to be” (Faubion et al.
2009; Rabinow et al. 2008), and more particularly that the study of the
contemporary seems to demand from anthropologists to “re-function” their
ethnographic practices (Holmes, Marcus 2005). While much attention has
been paid in these debates to the transformation of the norm and form of
ethnography in the empirical encounter, in this contribution we shift the
focus of discussion to a different issue. We discuss here how these
experimental collaborations with our counterparts in the field have shaped
and affected our disciplinary practices and institutional settings of
anthropology throwing our discipline into crisis. We draw on our experience
to offer a description paying attention to a key institutional context in which
disciplines are made: delving into the unusual presence of our counterparts
in the field in our scholarly spaces, our account displaces the locus of
empirical attention from the ethnographic encounter towards the
anthropological meeting.
   The expression “discipline in crisis” hints at two issues: First, we explore
what happened to anthropology during the financial crisis of 2007. The crisis
is not, in this case, a long-standing and inherent condition of anthropology
– as argued elsewhere (Comaroff 2010) –, but a sociohistorical moment
having distinctive effects over the shape and institutional expression of
anthropology. Second, we describe how this threw into crisis the very
concept of discipline, opening up a different imagination for the description
of our anthropological activities in the present. In this description, a little
reorientation of the discussion proposed in this special issue is attempted:
We do not intend to argue on the European condition of our anthropological
practice, neither we are interested in tracing geo-political frontiers of
disciplinary imaginations. Instead, drawing on our ethnographic experience
– and the collaborations we established with our epistemic partners in the
field – we feel urged to problematize the disciplinary boundaries
anthropology conventionally tends to assume. As James Clifford puts it: “a
discipline most actively defines itself at its edges, in relation to what it says
it is not. It does this by selectively appropriating and excluding elements”
(2005: 25). What if the exclusionary boundary work of the EU was not so
different from the epistemic exclusions exerted by anthropology? In this
case, European anthropology should be considered paying attention to both
the geopolitical borders the European Union traces, as well as the disciplinary
boundaries anthropology enacts. Or, to be more precise, in our description
we shift from a discussion around the geo-political identity of anthropology
to its status as a scholarly discipline.


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146                                             ADOLFO ESTALELLA, TOMÁS SÁNCHEZ CRIADO


   In what follows, we offer an account of the interstitial spaces that we both
inhabited “in the vacuum of tradition” in the recent Spanish crisis (section
2), and how that enabled us to articulate singular relations with variegated
epistemic partners (section 3) with whom we set up distinct ambiances of
care (section 4). In our ethnographic description we pay attention to the
blurring of institutional and scholarly infrastructures and modes of
togetherness. In describing the particular transformations – or
“intraventions” (section 5) – that these joint spaces enacted, we would like
to intimate a different figuration anthropology took in our practice: Not a
disciplinary field but a field of experimental collaborations. As we show,
treating our ethnographic counterparts as epistemic partners has the
potential to retrofit our institutionalized settings and disciplinary practices
(section 6). The anthropology we describe, hence, is one assembled from
scratch, caring for the mundane issues that very often are forgotten and
rendered invisible: an anthropology done with others, a DIY anthropology?

Disciplines in disarray
   Disciplines are in disarray. The discussion proposed in this special issue
may be situated in conversation with a growing literature concerned with the
fate of disciplines since the turn of the century (Abbot 2001; Chandler 2009;
Menand 1996). Contemporary disciplines resulted from the practical
organization of knowledge bodies into institutional settings that crystallized
at the end of the 19th century. In diverse fields, however, a growing mismatch
is being experienced between disciplinary arrangements and academic
activities and communities (Chandler 2009). Clifford Geertz (1980) advanced
a similar symptom already decades ago, when intimating how disciplinary
genres (both writing styles and modes of thinking) had blurred and lost
distinctiveness. Four decades later, this diagnosis still appears to hold, as
James Clifford conveyed: “A sense of disciplinary disarray has been in the
air. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold” (2005: 31).
   Three vectors have spurred recent debates on the transformation and ill-
fated future of disciplines. The first refers to interdisciplinarity: A figure that
has come to be seen as a solution to all kind of contemporary problems
(Barry et al. 2008), especially by funding bodies, investing this type of
research with many virtues (Strathern 2011). According to Barry et al. (2008),
interdisciplinary practices are certainly diverse and range from
subordination to integration or agonistic-antagonistic relations. A second
vector signals the neoliberal transformation of university as a source of
disciplinary changes (Sahlins 2009). Changes in university governance and


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                147


the economic conditions of academic activity erode academic freedom and
reshape disciplines that progressively lose their authority (Menand 1996).
Finally, a third vector hinges on recent attempts to reorganize disciplinary
fields and traditions (for instance, on the redefinition of the fourfold bundle
in the USA, see Segal, Yanagizako 2005) or, as this special issue and other
recent endeavours evince, arguing a distinctive geopolitical disciplinary
identity (Green, Laviolette 2015; Martínez 2016).
   Our intervention in this discussion takes a different route, drawing on a
number of inspiring reflections from the field of Science and Technology
Studies (STS). Instead of discussing the ill-fated future of disciplines, these
works have discussed the shortcomings of the concept as a descriptor of
scientific practices. For instance, Karin Knorr-Cetina’s (1999) ethnographic
investigation of particle physics and molecular biology is exemplary in its
critique to the notion of disciplines: Attending to the complex materiality of
scientific practice in the laboratory, she argued four decades ago that the
notion of discipline was “not designed to make visible the complex texture
of knowledge as practiced in the deep social spaces of modern institutions”
(ibidem: 3). Instead, her description of laboratory practices revolves around
the notion of “epistemic culture”. Mario Biagioli (2009) has recently
proposed a similar argument, when referring to the progressive interweaving
of fields of knowledge. In his account, scientific activity is increasingly
organized today by novel temporal configurations shaped by diverse
collaborations, and oriented towards specific problems. Under these
circumstances, the notion of discipline “is less apt to capture the more
fragmentary and nimbler knowledge-making scenarios we observe today”
(2009: 819). In contrast, he suggests an alternative framework: “the keyword
is collaboration (not discipline or field), with each collaboration potentially
instantiating a different and temporary cross-disciplinary setup” (ibidem:
820).
   Resonating with these debates, our take of an anthropological discipline
in crisis aims to flesh out many conversations and reflections shared as a
result of our respective ethnographic fieldworks (happening between 2011
and 2016), and their effects on the institutional spaces and disciplinary
venues of our activity. Our reflections cannot be disentangled from the
economic crisis and austerity-prone milieu in which they took place. In this
sense, they add up to anthropological contributions that have taken out the
global financial crisis of 2007-2008 as their object of investigation. These
ethnographies have paid attention to the politics of austerity (Knight,
Stewart 2016), the effects of financialization over sovereign debt (Bear
2015), the temporal dimension of the crisis (Knight 2015), the many urban

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transformations imposed by austerity urbanism (Tomkiss 2013) or the
processes of recuperation (Martínez, 2020). The crisis has indeed intensified
the wide processes of academic transformation, affecting disciplines – as the
introduction and other contributions to this especial issue clearly evince.
Nevertheless, it has rarely been addressed as putting in crisis the very
discipline of anthropology, the topic we address in this piece.

In the vacuum of tradition: Interstitial practices
   The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 that originated after the housing
bubble in the USA had devastating effects over Madrid, Barcelona, and most
Spanish cities. The Government applied a policy of harsh austerity since
2010 that impoverished many segments of the population 2. Under these
circumstances, many empty plots and buildings emerged out in the cities,
drawing neighbours into all sort of projects, speculating with different forms
of urban life: Illegally, and sometimes extra-legally occupied. A city like
Madrid witnessed the appearance of, say: a squatted social centre where a
luxury apartment building was under construction; an abandoned hotel
(next to the regional government location) was taken by people coming from
t h e 15M movement (Spanish version and precursor of the Occupy
movement); and vacant plots of land were “liberated” (in the vernacular
idiom) after illegal or alegal occupations all over the city. People with no
previous experience of squatting, or without any activist background,
became engaged in many of these initiatives. Composed of makeshift
constructions and auto-constructed infrastructures of different types,
informal norms and regulations were established by loose forms of
organisation. The emergence of these projects coincided with the
proliferation of ephemeral artistic/architectural interventions in other
geographies of the North during the economic crisis (Zeiger 2011).
   Madrid and Barcelona became places where an interstitial urbanism
developed (Mubi Brighenti 2013) in the cracks left behind by the austerity
policies, as described by Fran Tonkiss: “a mode of urban practice that works

2. Austerity policies were intended to reduce the volume of the public sector 5.5% of the
GDP between 2011 and 2016. Social spending was largely affected: for instance, investment
on housing and community services was reduced by 42.4% and leisure and culture by 36% in
the period 2011-2016 (Romero, Brandis, Melo 2015), public health and social care and
education operated under large cuts too. Although we are uncertain so as to its meanings –
given that different techniques of calculation and new flexible types of contracts have been
invented in the last years – in the most dramatic moments of the crisis (around 2012-2014)
the official unemployment rate reached 25%, and at the moment of writing this (June 2019)
it is still of around 14% (INE), hitting specially those under 40.


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                      149


in the cracks between formal planning, speculative investment and local
possibilities” (2013: 313). One of the most paradigmatic projects of the like
that developed at the time in Madrid was El Campo de Cebada (The Barley
Field), a large plot in the city centre (2,300 square metres), self-managed by
neighbours between 2011 and 2017. The story of the project is telling: The
vacant plot was used by an ephemeral artistic intervention as part of a
municipal festival (La Noche en Blanco, White Night), after a few weeks the
installation closed but some neighbours that still had access to the space
prepared a project and managed to obtain permission from the city council
to run the space. Operating without funding, the initiative was open to
anyone interested. Those willing to participate in decision-making and
intervene in the spatial arrangement, or contribute to the everyday
activities, were welcome to just drop by at the Monday weekly assembly that
was hosted on site. No formal requirement was needed to get involved, the
same organisational principle that had been followed in similar projects: like
the many urban community gardens that also proliferated during these
years. Many spaces like this flourished in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as in
other Spanish cities3.
   A completely empty plot at the beginning, neighbours made great efforts
to condition the space of The Barley Field, inventing all kind of devices to
run it and refurnish it with DIY infrastructures (Martín Sainz de los Terreros
2018): large structures to provide shelter from the sun during the summer,
benches of imaginative shapes, tables, plots for the community garden that
was built inside the space, sport equipment, etc. In a nutshell, a great array
of modest and precarious infrastructures was produced on site recycling
materials. A series of workshops organised under the original name of
“Handmade urbanismo” taught neighbours how to re-equip the city with
different infrastructures and the public space with new capacities. These
were organised by Zuloark, an architectural guerrilla that was deeply
involved in The Barley Field and similar projects at the time. People with
different backgrounds and knowledges met and worked together in projects
like The Barley Field. In their encounters, they not only occupied the vacant
spaces of the city but also the disciplinary interstices that the crisis had
made emerge: anthropologists working with architects, designers
collaborating with activists, they occupied knowledge interstices and those
vague epistemic terrains so often left behind by disciplinary boundaries.


3. We could also mention Can Batlló, a gigantic former factory reclaimed by the neighbours
and turned into a self-managed social centre in the Sants district of Barcelona as another
interesting case.

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   In one of the many open workshops organised by Zuloark in The Barley
Field, they built on site a series of pieces of furniture using recycled pallets: A
seedbed piece, a compost box, a planter, a table, and bench. Modest pieces of
furniture that were later finely documented in easy-to-read manuals of
instructions that were later made available online. As diagrammatic
expressions, these sketches bear witness to the efforts invested in these
spaces to activate new apprenticeships, since manuals were produced to
inspire and offer resources for others to replicate similar interventions in
other geographies. As accounts of a handcrafted city, manuals of instruction
come to epitomise an urban genre that expands the urban fabric of the DIY
city into a textual form, resourcing new city textures (Corsín, Estalella,
2016).
   This was not only happening in Madrid, as recounted in Adolfo’s work,
but in many other locales. In Barcelona, Tomás saw a very similar and coeval
landscape working together with the collective En torno a la silla (ETS): an
initiative that united in many exploratory spatial projects and open design
interventions people who could have never met were it not for the
emergence of these peripheral urban interstices. That is, wheelchair using
activists of the independent-living movement in their fight against spatial
and technological exclusion with designers, craftspeople and others
concerned with making space in our contemporary cities to bodily diversity.
In there, Tomás collaborated documenting and helping others document in a
great detail not only tutorials of their artefacts and gadgets but also their
experiential accounts of what this newly afforded mode of living and doing
together entailed for all of them (Sánchez Criado 2019).

Epistemic partners
   In these spaces, we came across a variegated number of professionals that
mixed with neighbours in many contexts: Architects, urban planners,
activists, artists, hackers, cultural managers, designers, and even some other
social scientists. Travelling with them throughout the city we traced a
precise urban geography composed of cultural centres, refurnished urban
voids, occupied buildings, and bars, constantly participating in public
meetings or more intimate – although always open to participation –
gatherings of diverse kinds and formats: assemblies in the open air, seminar-
like encounters, public events and production workshops, or gatherings
where common concerns were shared.
   These urban interventions were not antagonist projects whose ultimate
goal was to clash against traditional institutions – albeit this was the
invocation of some squatting collectives, for instance. In most of the cases,


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                   151


people just did what they could with the resources at hand. The emptiness of
urban voids turned into an opportunity to try things out and work together.
People engaged in these projects had to learn anew many things: how to
organise and manage an open assembly, speak in public, build
infrastructures (benches, tables, etc.), or take care of a space open to
anybody with diffuse norms of behaviour... A wild research practice pervaded
the goings and doings of these spaces: Engaged participants experimenting
with new forms of living together that mobilised all kind of knowledges.
Their material interventions in public space were very often paralleled by
many exercises of theoretical speculation – sometimes, in fact, they plunged
in attempts at critical design.
   Our respective ethnographic fieldworks were carried out in these urban
contexts, in close collaboration with our counterparts in the field. Adolfo, for
instance, devised with Basurama and Zuloark a project called Ciudad Escuela
(The City as a School)4. The project materialized in a series of workshops
(running until 2018) that operated in the diverse self-managed and urban
voids of Madrid, including a digital archive and a set of learning itineraries: a
travel methodology throughout the city and a pedagogical program that
equipped these circulations. Conceived as a learning infrastructure, Ciudad
Escuela was aimed at supporting the knowledges and learnings that were
produced at that time in the city.
   The project grew out of countless meetings with Basurama and Zuloark
for over 18 months. Meetings in their studios revolved around the state of
affairs of the city: in a moment of unrest ignited by the Indignados
movement, there was not any other explicit objective for these encounters.
It all started after an invitation to both collectives to become formal
members of a project funded by the Spanish Research and Development
Program. The invitation provided the material conditions to think together
and engage collectively in a process of problematizing of the urban
landscape.
   When the project finally saw the light of day, Adolfo had completed more
than two years of dedicated fieldwork. Also, a conceptual vocabulary for his
ethnographic findings had been elaborated: For instance, the notions of
“beta urbanism”, “urban archives”, “open source urban infrastructures” were
part of a tentative theoretical vocabulary produced out of his ethnographic
investigation. These were too the topics that organized the pedagogical
program of Ciudad Escuela, its seminars and workshops. The project thus
came out of the intersection of the ethnographic sensibility of anthropology
4. This was part of the sustained and long collaboration with another anthropologist,
Alberto Corsín Jiménez.

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and the material practices of architecture, bringing together the descriptive
aspiration and infrastructural imagination of one and the other (Estalella,
Sánchez Criado 2016).
   In both our works in Madrid and Barcelona, we shared a common
epistemic concern with the city: a preoccupation to understand what was
going on in these urban landscapes during such a period of crisis. Our
ethnographic researches were thus adjacent to, when not partaking the
investigations of our counterparts in the field. This is probably one of the
reasons that would explain our deep involvement in their design projects
and urban interventions, sometimes documenting different endeavours with
them (as it was the case of Tomás) and, in other occasions, co-designing
pedagogical programs and learning infrastructures (as it was the case of
Adolfo). The deep engagement we established in our respective fieldworks
with our counterparts in the field has been a key topic for our reflection in
recent years.
   We certainly did not expect to become so involved, a distinction we make
when comparing this ethnographic modality with our previous doctoral
research projects based on more or less conventional participant
observation. We have conceptualized these ethnographic encounters as
ethnographic modes of experimental collaborations (Estalella, Sánchez
Criado 2018): A fieldwork practice that occurred through processes of
material and social interventions turning the field into a site where we
constructed with our counterparts our anthropological problematizations.
Such epistemic collaborations extended in convoluted ways onto our
academic activities and institutional settings, as we describe in the next
section.

Ambiences of care
   Experimental collaborations are very often the result of anthropologists
working with either professionals from other fields or non-professionals,
operating very often at the boundary of disciplinary spaces. Searching to
explore this “edgy” type of investigations, in 2015 we put together a
workshop dedicated to an in-depth reflection around forms of ethnographic
experimentation in the field. It was jointly organised in Intermediae (Matadero
Madrid), an art production centre devoted to experimentation with visual
aesthetics and participatory art. We assembled half a dozen young scholars
from different fields – singularly, none of them anthropologists – working
beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines and methods: such as an
architect doing an ethnography of The Barley Field (the aforementioned
urban void) or an art historian doing research of visual representations in


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                          153


Equatorial Guinea. All of them were bringing ethnographic methods and
diverse theoretical traditions to their own disciplines, while acknowledging
their methodological anxieties and disciplinary troubles in doing so.
   Under the title “Research at the edge: A curatorship of experimental
collaborations”, the workshop signalled the fertile exchanges between the
arts and the social sciences. Its curatorial gesture had a two-fold meaning,
referring both to the “curing” and “curating” practices needed by many
investigations. We were hinting at those forms of research in precarious
conditions – e.g. crossing conventional disciplinary boundaries and in the
verge of crisis – that were “in need of care”. As part of the workshop, we
invited the cultural collective ColaBoraBora, also a relevant actor in our field
of inquiry, to curate one activity. Based in the Basque Country, ColaBoraBora
is a professional association that has devoted considerable energies to
undertaking research on cultural production and open/free processes of
creation.
   Following the workshop’s main argument, ColaBoraBora proposed a
format that took the invocation around “care” seriously. The Klinika, as they
called it, was a clinic for researchers in need:
      An accompaniment service for the diagnosis and shared care, aimed at
      developing healthy collaborative research projects. It is especially appropriate
      for experimental projects leaving the orthodoxy and transgressing the canons
      that provoke tensions, anxieties, dizziness, and great doses of vulnerability and
      uncertainty in researchers5.

   They proposed a methodological device to organise the activity: a file card
mimicking a medical report, inviting participants to elicit their symptoms,
provide a diagnosis, and propose an appropriate treatment for those
troubled researchers and their processes. The apparently mundane file was,
however, key in the activity, prompting scholars to do what they are so used
to making: to write.
   Care was an extended discourse at that time in the urban contexts of our
ethnographies, taking expression in diverse conceptual figures. The
assemblies of the Indignados movement in which Adolfo participated as part
of his investigation turned the trope of “active listening” (escucha activa)
into a careful practice. Out in the open air, care involved all kind of
infrastructural arrangements (Estalella, Corsín, 2016) and social techniques,
you should listen with care, which meant both “without interrupting” and
“with an open mind”: trying to understand the others and making space for

5. Translated from http://xcol.org/blog/2015/07/kit-de-investigaciones-al-limite, accessed
on 14/07/2019.

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154                                             ADOLFO ESTALELLA, TOMÁS SÁNCHEZ CRIADO


those who spoke less. But the extended invocation of care resonates with
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s discussion around an ethics of care speculating
with alternative forms of living together, paying attention to the obligation
not to just be concerned but “to take care of the fragile gathering things
constitute” (2017: 45). These forms of care “assembling neglected things”
certainly require a constant speculative concern with regards to spaces,
materials, and techniques aimed at conditioning spaces in order to be
together, think together, and do things with others.
   In our projects we in fact attended many meetings and gatherings,
assemblies and seminars, production workshops and cultural events, where
very often there was a method, an explicit form of organising space,
distributing people, and maintaining the rhythms. Indeed, “care” was
usually invoked as a method allowing to experiment with what was possible
to do with others. This was indeed the motive behind ColaBoraBoraʼs very
name: they were exploring forms of cultural collaboration. We discovered in
these meetings the epistemic qualities of care: understood here as a precise
way of designing ambiences for “joint problem-making” (Sánchez Criado,
Rodríguez-Giralt 2017). Care was, on the one hand, a way of creating
conditions for actors with variegated knowledges – e.g. guerrilla architects,
neighbours, activist designers, or bodily diverse activists – to engage in
inquiries about the situations they were living in; on the other hand, care
entailed a series of practices whereby the very urban spaces that were
occupied turned into collective and speculative modes of response to the
crisis.
   Only a year later we brought the methods learnt from ColaBoraBora to the
very core of our own discipline in Milano’s 2016 EASA conference. There, we
organised another version of the Klinika, this time called CLEENIK: A clinic
offered for anthropologists doing ethnographic experimentation in their
fieldwork. The CLEENIK reproduced the therapeutic practice of care so
common in self-help groups. It was an attempt at bringing the sensibility we
had learned in our fieldwork into our own discipline. The invocation of the
therapeutic rhetoric of a clinic was a playful parodic gesture (mimicking
ColaBoraBora’s, which in our case entailed a form of self-deprecating
humour over colonial forms of understanding the ethnographic Other),
which implicitly highlighted the relevance of caring for the spaces of our
encounters, as well as research projects at the edge.
   Having learnt the importance of setting up ambiances of care from our
counterparts in the field, we brought this practice and its correlated
theoretical conceptualization into the institutionalized venues of anthropology.
Paying attention to the epistemic relevance of care in the adaptation and

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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                           155


expansion of this method was a form of taking seriously the knowledge
practices of our epistemic partners. And, as we will show in closing, this is
not the only instance that evinced their impact on our professional practice
and our understanding of anthropology beyond being discipline. The
practice of care and the experimental impulse that we found in our fieldwork
would during this time percolated our institutional venues and disciplinary
spaces. This was especially the case in an endeavour we participated at that
time, the constitution of a Science and Technology Studies Network,
originally called Red de Estudios de Ciencia y Tecnología (RedesCTS).

Intraventions
   We were part of the group of promoters of such STS network. From 2011
on, we started organising annual meetings (or rather encuentros, encounters)
bringing together people with shared interests in this field 6. The network
grew up as an informal and lose academic enterprise: a peer-based structure
without a managing committee, non-formal membership and operating
without budget, since meetings had no fees. The RedesCTS aimed for being
as open as possible. Perhaps the flexibility in its name was telling: Some
people used the name Red de Estudios Sociales de Ciencia y Tecnología, others
supressed the “social” in the name and some others added the geopolitical
location: del Estado Español (of the Spanish state).
   From the very beginnings, the network tried to welcome different
epistemic and political sensibilities (something especially relevant in a
country traversed by territorial tensions). We would describe the network as
“an experiment of prototyping a modality of academic formal association”
testing even “whether the network could be composed not only of
academics, but be open to other social actors” (Estalella et al. 2013). It was as
if the period of cultural creativity and urban unrest had infiltrated this
academic context where some brought the provocative and critical spirit of
their empirical sites of investigation into the design of an institutional
venues, as was our case.
   The experimental impulse present in our ethnographic investigations
percolated RedesCTS, taking expression both in the organisational practices
of the network and the design of its encounters. Great efforts were always
dedicated to the choosing of spaces: non-academic locations (and non-
commercial ones) were commonly picked, when available, in a gesture
attempting to go beyond more scholarly or purely commercial spaces (like
hotels or conference centres). The first and fifth meeting were organised in

6. There had been a couple of attempts in Spain to create this kind of institutional space, but
they hadn’t found the particular momentum (for a partial account, see Castillo 2011).

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Medialab-Prado, a public cultural institution that works at the intersection
of art, science and technology. It was the site were one of us (Adolfo) had
been conducting an ethnography the year prior to the first meeting.
   In these encounters, participants tested all kinds of formats, hosting
theatrical representations, performances, and workshops of diverse kinds
(Sánchez Criado, Calvillo 2014): for instance, one format re-enacted a Greek
drama in a pub to stage a discussion around technical democracy; another
one mobilised a hands-on discussion regarding open access and multimodal
publishing formats and academic writing registers and genres through an
inventive use of writing samples from participants. In such a space, we
collectively invited participants to play and experiment with the methods to
get together, a trail we have continued exploring in recent years in another
institutional venue: the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation
(#Colleex, an EASA network) that we founded in 2015 7. As a result, in the
two international workshops we have been co-organising to date, we have
been testing what we call “open formats”: experiments in getting together to
share knowledge and learn from one another8.
   Seeing many people straining to care for the conditions to get together
during this time of precarity – the case of the Indignados assemblies, the En
torno a la silla collective where Tomás was researching, or many other spaces
like The Barley Field – we sought to bring this caring ethos into these
networks. For instance, this meant re-shaping in singular ways the
traditional peer review process into what we called “care review”: a careful
evaluation practice in search to collaboratively re-work (instead of reject)
those precarious proposals coming from early stage researchers, or even
proposals at the margins, showing shaky learnings or coming from non-
academics. As one of us (Adolfo) wrote at the time:
      What would happen if we thought that an academic meeting is a place that
      should provide space and care for those less adequate communications? We
      might think that academic meetings should not be just a place of excellence but
      a kind of hospital that deals with the investigations most needed of care 9.

7. #Colleex is described as “a collaboratory, an infrastructure for promoting forms of
collaboration. It is open to anthropologists, specialists from other domains like artists,
cultural producers, designers and practitioners of any discipline interested in the creative
experimentation with ethnographic practice”, see https://colleex.wordpress.com/about/,
accessed on 14/07/2019.
8. As we have described elsewhere: “We meet to learn, but perhaps, and this is our point, we
should learn to meet […] we usually resort to the most conventional of formats: panels of
paper presentations and round tables. We want to explore new ways to get together”, see
https://colleex.wordpress.com/colleex-open-formats/, accessed on 14/07/2019.
9. S e e https://redescts.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/care-review-cuidados-para-los-encuentros-
academicos/, accessed on 14/07/2019.


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                                157


   This constant concern with the ways in which venues were chosen and
meetings designed reveals the importance of conceiving our undertakings as
ambiences of care: experimental spaces in which to inquire how to meet and
get together, welcoming many unusual suspects in academic venues. This
took an explicit expression in the title of our fifth encounter, held again in
Medialab-Prado in 2016: “overflowing academic boundaries”, a theme ex-
pressing one of the goals of the network. As expressed at the time: “we intend to
tackle the apparently overwhelming challenges we face by exploring the
ways in which we might articulate a joint response in alliance with those
located beyond the limits of academia”10.
   In such meetings we many times tested these attempts: Tomás and others
invited the Independent-Living Forum (Foro de Vida Independiente y Divertad),
an activist organisation key in his fieldwork, to take part in the closing plenary
in the third meeting held in Barcelona in 2013 – foregrounding “para-
academic” and “co-research” practices – where they made a presentation on
“networks of emancipatory knowledge”; Adolfo, with his colleague Alberto
Corsín Jiménez, co-presented his research a year later in Salamanca with one of
his companions in the field, Auroda Adalid, architect part of the collective
Zuloark11.
   But it was in the fourth meeting in Salamanca where this gesture towards
those located outside the boundaries of academia became especially fertile.
ColaBoraBora took part in the organisation of several special formats, at our
suggestion, and their intervention was very provocative. Txelu Balboa and
Ricardo Antón, from ColaBoraBora, appeared in front of a large audience in a
solemn medieval hall to show an edited video using fragments from a You-
Tube video of a guinea pig being surgically intervened. Their audiovisual work
had an automated voice-over reading a discourse from the point of view of
guinea pigs (cobayas), reclaiming their right to being treated not just as
research subjects but as co-researchers:
      Without PhDs, without publications, without patents, without score in the
      researcher’s affiliation card; activists, amateurs, para-scientists, restless agents of
      (dis)organised civil society collaborating, articulating multi/trans/inter/in-
      disciplinary networks, generating collective intelligence…
      In our extra-academic, un-homologated world there is no diaspora, no brain-drain
      nor return programmes because we aren’t even recognised as righteous citizen
      researchers. We are all (self)care – that’s all that’s left, the fundamental – not
      even in the back-stage but in the cages of the experiment room (a cage that
      looks every day more like the street, the street as laboratory).

10. Call for papers of the 2015 RedesCTS meeting: https://redescts.wordpress.com /2015/-
01/18/v-meeting-of-the-spanish-network-of-science-and-technology-studies-cfp/, accessed
on 14/07/2019.
11. For an exhaustive documentation of the RedesCTS’s meetings and their organization, please
check: https://redescts.wordpress.com/archive/, accessed on 14/07/2019.

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158                                               ADOLFO ESTALELLA, TOMÁS SÁNCHEZ CRIADO

      […] What do we want? To go way beyond participant observation, radicalising
      the idea of an activist ethnography. Because it’s not just that researchers take
      part of the situations you do research about, but also that the subjects
      configuring those situations would be taken as researchers, besides being
      research subjects12.

   This was the opening speech to a rather fun dynamic they proposed to the
activist researchers and researcher activists in the room: using as a metaphor
the film “See no evil, here no evil” – the 1980s comedy featuring the
adventures of a couple of guys, one blind the other deaf, force to collaborate
to solve a crime – as in the Klinika, they had produced a small booklet and a
series of lap pins – one with the face of Richard Pryor, the other with the
face of Gene Wilder, the main actors in the film – to instigate people to re-
enact the couple throughout the whole conference with different academic
and non-academic researchers, sitting together and filling in the booklet,
which contained questions regarding the research practices and conditions
of the two people in conversation.
   ColaBoraBora’s “See no evil, hear no evil” or their “Klinika”, the care
review, et cetera, were all interventions addressed at the very core our own
discipline. Or, as we would like to call them using the term of the architect
Alberto Altés and collaborators, they were “intraventions”: In a discussion
about “certain disconnection between what is happening inside academia
and the challenges found on the outside [...] with the ambition of opening up
possibilities for reflection on contemporary forms of practice” (2016: 23),
they employ this concept to name the self-learning emerging when taking
part “from within” collective practices that might challenge sound and
established disciplinary knowledges.
   Our notion of intravention contrasts with the more common and established
concept of intervention. In Design Anthropology, Rachel Charlotte Smith
and Ton Otto (2016) turn intervention into a central concept, signalling a
series of inquiry practices oriented to the transformation of the sites of
investigation and social reality, moving “academic reflection and
speculation towards a concrete process of emergence”. But intervention also
refers to specific art-like pieces (Marcus 2010), while engaged interventions
have been a traditional trope for anthropology’s critical practices, seeking to
improve the lives of peoples with whom they work (Biehl, McKay 2012). In
most of these cases the locus of these intervening activities is the empirical
field. And some of the most inspiring ethnographic experimentation projects
for us could also be described in those terms.

12. Translated from www.colaborabora.org/2014/05/21/nosotras-las-cobayas/, accessed on
14/07/2019.


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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                159


   Yet, in contrast to these interventionist practices, what we are describing
here is different: if anything, because they occurred in institutional spaces
and scholarly venues, like academic encounters. In addressing this we are
thus signalling a move from a concern with the ethnographic encounter – as
common trope in the discussions pointing that “fieldwork is not what it used
to be” (Faubion et al. 2009) – to a preoccupation with scholarly meetings,
shifting in this itinerary the discussion from the norm and form of fieldwork
to the boundary and expression of the anthropological discipline.
Intravention thus refers to modes of intra-disciplinary interventions
occurring in collaboration and complicity with our epistemic partners.
Setting up ambiences of care through which we intervene our discipline in a
process of reversion and recursion: bringing the epistemic counterparts from
empirical sites into the interior of academic venues and institutional spaces.
In doing so, we not only intervened in the field, but also reversed this
traditional gesture “intravening” our own scholarly spaces, drawing on the
practices we had learnt from them. We do not refer therefore to a conceptual
recursion that expands the conceptual infrastructure of anthropology
(Holbraad, 2013; Strathern, 2018) but to a recursivitity that brought into our
anthropological practice the ambiences of care we had learned in our fields;
hence intervening the more mundane and usually disregarded academic
process of getting together. In bringing our epistemic counterparts into the
interior of our institutional venues, we assembled and made room in our
scholarly contexts to those located beyond their boundaries, tensing in this
gesture the academic condition of anthropology and blurring its disciplinary
boundaries.

Doing anthropology with others
   Anthropology seems to be in a constant state of turmoil and disarray: a
discipline, some have said (Comaroff 2010), whose permanent crisis –
conceptual, methodological, political – resources its critical nature and
nurtures its activity. In this paper we have described the disciplinary crises
of our anthropological practice during a period of economic austerity and
social suffering when carrying out our ethnographic investigations. Our
account of a discipline in crisis offers a description of an anthropological
experiment (as we would like to call it) in a Southern European country
(Spain) in the particular sociohistorical moment of the post-2007-2008
financial crisis.
   Despite the difficulties during this time, people were hopefully engaged in
experiments exploring what was possible to do with others in the city. In the
midst of a process of generalised precarity, we enjoyed the precarious

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160                                             ADOLFO ESTALELLA, TOMÁS SÁNCHEZ CRIADO


privilege of sharing with them their hope to construct other forms of living
together. This has certainly impinged on our anthropological practice: in a
recursive gesture, what we have attempted to practice (since then) and
portray (now) is an anthropology as hopeful as those projects of reinvention
of the city we learnt from. This is not to be seen as an amendment to the
wide description of neoliberal academic precarisation – that we have
suffered too –; it is just an attempt to show that amidst critical situations
one can also be able to inhabit interstices, where life and anthropology could
take a more hopeful expression.
   We are not offering here, thus, a grand disciplinary narrative on Spanish
anthropology but an account based on our embodied experiences and
personal stories: a situated experiment that tensed disciplinary boundaries
and explored novel institutional expressions for anthropology. To elaborate
our account, we have referred to a quintessential instance in which
disciplines are made (and sometimes remade): the scholarly meeting. A
moment in which boundaries are traced (on themes, methodologies,
approaches, etc.) and exclusions are made (of people, other disciplines, etc.).
Meetings are the moments when (and where) we get together, but this “we”
got blurred in the scholarly conferences we have described.
   In the interstitial scholarly spaces we inhabited and managed to create,
we mixed with our epistemic partners in a process that extended into
institutional spaces the experimental collaborations we had established in
the field. Our anthropological practice, hence, was brought into existence in
those occasions in particular venues and infrastructural arrangements,
mobilising methods to meet and practices to care for that we learnt from our
counterparts in the field. The anthropology that was there brought into
existence operated in particular “third spaces” (Fischer 2003), generative of
and welcoming to interstitial practices of knowledge, fully academic but
hospitable to non-academic practices too; fully anthropological but caring
for other epistemic sensibilities. Spaces in-between, characterised hence by
intimacy and trust: to fail and to err, together, learning from what these very
spaces allow to inquire together.
   The discipline in crisis we have described is therefore an anthropology
figuring out its contemporary shape with its companions in the field,
deploying, as Tim Ingold also conveys, an ethics of care: “We don’t care for
others by treating them as objects of investigation […] We care by bringing
them into presence, so that they can converse with us, and we can learn from
them. That’s the way to build a world with room for everyone. We can only
build it together” (2018: 131). The resulting anthropology is one that
dismantles its conventional epistemic hierarchies and disciplinary

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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                161


boundaries, learning from its companions how to inquire. A discipline no
more, but an experimental collaboration, we would like to suggest: an
anthropology that brings to the fore the need to care for ambiences to do
things with others – irrespective of their certified training, academic degrees
and institutional affiliations or lack of thereof, their previous knowledges
and abilities – engaged in the joint endeavour of constructing
anthropological problematizations.
   Lacking any disciplinary reference and in the void of tradition, we have
described and anthropology built from scratch, made taking this and that
from here and there. An anthropology constructed in the most DIY tradition.
Not a discipline anymore but an experiment on doing anthropology: a DIY
anthropology, or perhaps it would be better to say an anthropology done
with others. A DIWO (do it with others) anthropology that recognises the
need to redefine disciplinary boundaries and care for those traditionally
excluded from our institutional disciplinary spaces, reimagining its
endeavours with others.




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DIY ANTHROPOLOGY                                                                    163


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 Adolfo ESTALELLA is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Social
 Anthropology and Social Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid. He has
 an interest in grassroots urbanism and digital cultures. His work explores the
 contestation of traditional knowledge institutions and the emergence of epistemic
 practices among urban activists and architectural guerrillas. He is interested in the
 transformation of ethnography in the contemporary, a research line that has led
 him to inquiry into modes of ethnographic experimentation in collaboration with
 different disciplines like art and architecture. He has co-edited Experimental
 Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices (Berghahn, 2018). More on:
 http://www.estalella.eu
 estalel@ucm.es

 Tomás SÁNCHEZ CRIADO is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Urban Anthropology
 and the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology of the Department of European
 Ethnology, Humboldt-University of Berlin. Working at the crossroads of
 Anthropology and STS, he has developed a particular concern around
 interventions into the knowledge and care politics of city-making. In his work he
 has been experimenting with different forms of public ethnography, inquiry and
 pedagogy–from open documentation to digital platforms or games. He has co-
 e d i t e d Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices
 (Berghahn, 2018) and Re-learning design. Pedagogic experiments with STS in design
 studio courses (DISEÑA, 2018). +info: www.tcriado.org
 tomas.criado@hu-berlin.de




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Adolfo Estalella, Tomás Sánchez Criado
DIY anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 143-165.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3636
