Arts and the Study of the International

I received a BA in the late 1990s and an MA in the early 2000s, both in cultural anthropology. I subsequently spent the next 20 years working both as a conceptual artist and a development worker in support of contemporary artistic initiatives in Afghanistan, before returning to academia to pursue a PhD, once again in cultural anthropology. My approach in using anthropology to make art has been to listen to local communities to understand what issues are important to them and then to work with them on defining not only what to represent, but how to represent it. This approach can be seen as falling within what George Marcus has termed “para-ethnographic”, a process in which the ethnographer (or the artist) is “allied with the subject as intellectual partner in coming to terms with the understanding of a shared common object of curiosity” (Holmes and Marcus 2020:29).