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This is a conversation between a student and a teacher. It takes place over an undefined period. Some of it on Zoom, some of it in passing at a convention center. Some of it took place years ago but reappears now. We talk about three subjects or topics: multimodality, fieldwork, and pedagogy. Partly because the teacher is interested in the work of their student. And partly because the student realizes the value of pedagogy. We question the stability of the student and teacher as “pair”, because both students and teachers have many other students and teachers. We approach these three subjects or topics through a central relationship in anthropology—that between a teacher and student. Mentorship is a fragile thing. Are we passing something on, developing colleagues, competitors, teachers? How do we come to terms with the university and the “field” in a discipline which so heavily relies on the relationship of these two distinct spaces?
Multimodality
Helena: Though we tend to think that we are in a multimodality turn, the strategy to include different data categories and approaches in research is as old as the discipline of anthropology. But there is a change in the type of contents, not least because of various digital opportunities, and there are often more and more varied elements included in one piece of research than used to be the case. Multimodality also applies to composing an anthropological text, and even more so to publishing it. Doing research on dance, I was struck by the role of the senses in my multimodal methods. Later I was figuring out how to convey, in talks and texts, experiences of sights, sounds, and smells of the dance world: in studios, on stage, and in the auditorium. There is, for instance, a characteristic smell of resin in the wings that dancers put on the soles of their shoes to avoid slipping. While I never filmed in the field, I found available video clips and pictures, key for conveying dance in motion to music, in my presentations. Words were simply not enough. What is your experience of multimodality and the senses?
Johann Sander: I think a key moment or passage for multimodality in contemporary anthropological work is attending to exactly what is in your experience of the space of the dance world. The stages and wings create passages between multiple worlds, in any meaning of the word/world. Multimodality and the senses are uniquely tied in the ways they point to each other, or allow each other to be seen not as appendices or backgrounds, but the very core of an event or encounter. Of course, multimodality brings with it a heightened attention to the usual suspects like video, drawing, and sound. But it also pushes an acknowledgment towards the plurality of themes in anthropology. The very fact of a more messy and unruly anthropology, like the backstage of a theatre or a workshop, allows us to recognize that not all tools are useful for all kinds of anthropology—be it thematic, material, or methodological. To me, the undervalued aspect of multimodal anthropology is in its capacity to differentiate. The impossibility of some kinds of methods or analyses highlights that anthropology is born from context and relation, rather than theories applied.
Fieldwork
Helena: That is a very good point. To me, multimodality is not unlike the idea of fieldwork itself, a mainstay of anthropological practice. In response to societal and environmental change, the format of fieldwork has expanded and multiplied. Now we often need multi-site, mobile, even transnational fieldwork in order to make sense of our participants’ reach, movements, and ideas. Had I not been able to go with the dancers when they went on tours, I would have been a fieldworker left without a field.
Johann Sander: Which is a scary thought, but increasingly a reality for many researchers. And I think it is important to highlight that a lack of a field is not only a result of disappearance, war, or catastrophe, but also a particular perspective to space and community.
Helena: When we think of fieldwork, issues of ethics have emerged as more key than ever, especially the debate on who has the “right” to study whom? Do you have to be a member of the group you study? In my capacity as a former dancer, I was an ex-native in the dance world. The dance world is a closed world. Dancers are vulnerable, they tend to see themselves as misunderstood by the outside world, not only by critics and media. I wouldn’t have been able to get both formal and informal access to this field, had I not grown up in the dance world. Because of this, dance people trusted me. But to what extent does this apply to other field contexts? What about anthropology’s comparative perspective, if we were limited to the study of groups to which we belong?
Fieldwork is often described in terms of a personal transformation. This was certainly the case for me when I came back to the dance world as an anthropologist: I had an epiphany. By being able to combine my intellectual side with my artistic side—heart and mind—that used to be in conflict, everything fell into place. I had found my way in anthropology—artistic practice such as dance, the arts and literary production, eventually considering field experiences and events in the form of creative writing. How was your experience of fieldwork in relation to these debates?
Johann Sander: Fieldwork seems to bring together all the themes we are talking about here, because it is the most vulnerable part of anthropology. Both protected and challenged, ethnographic fieldwork is the thing we present as uniquely anthropological. The way fieldwork is conducted has changed, but not in a way which has made some kind of previous fieldwork disappear. It is simply about having these constantly multiplying kinds of fieldwork coexist, some of which come from other disciplines and practices. Because of my own work, I often find myself worrying about not having a collective, group, or place with which I develop these deep and personal connections that we come up reading about. People are not ignorant about anthropology. They know exactly what it is, and why it has come to study them. I realize how ethnographic encounters, however fleeting, instruct the way we represent anthropology in the field and outside of it. All this is not to say that a multimodal, creative, or another kind of anthropology leaves behind the rigorous theory and methods which we spend years to study. It simply means we apply them differently. A gesture, a sound, an image, a drawing, a step, a pause sometimes tells you exactly how it is theorized.
Pedagogy
Helena: What you say about applying theory and method differently from how we learned them, especially how “a gesture, a sound, an image, a drawing, a step, a pause” can tell us how it is theorized, reminds me of how much I have learned from students over the years. Considering the student and teacher as “pair”, it is true that both students and teachers have many other students and teachers. Teachers also have teachers: sometimes they come as students. When I have lectured about my ongoing research, it has happened that students have contributed comments that have gone straight into my fieldnotes. In my new book Migrant Writing in Sweden: Diversifying from Within, I include quotes from an exam paper by a master’s student.
Johann Sander: For a discipline that is portrayed in constant crises (I cannot recall a period in which anthropology was not unsure of its survival), we pay poor attention to the relationships during the training of anthropologists. This has perhaps changed due to more public scrutiny of abuse, but does not extend to the uneventful yet hierarchical everyday. It is necessary to make sure a student is on track and gets through the different stages of undergraduate and graduate studies. But it can also become a strain on the way the student should learn about relationships in the discipline, and what I always saw as the main draw of anthropology—that it is cumulative. It is easy to overlook the importance of your comment about including your students’ words in your work. But most of anthropology is after all spent in classrooms.
Helena: Having taught thousands of students over four decades, some stand out in my memory. I am in touch with former students who are active in research, writing, and with conferencing. They now range from doctoral students to anthropology professors. The student-teacher “pair” has moved on to a collegial relationship, one where I am open for collaboration both in research and writing. I am happy to provide advice (and letters of recommendation) if asked, but then in my capacity as a senior colleague to a younger colleague. To me, I have succeeded as a teacher when I note that a student is taking my teachings further in new ways.
Johann Sander: Anthropology, I think, works best if it is porous, and willing to be part of the puzzle, rather than the whole puzzle. I have been lucky to have multiple mentors across different levels of study, and to be able to combine what they have taught me. When I moved from Europe to North America, I realized for the first time how broad anthropology is as a field. I encountered people gushing over anthropologists I had never heard of, and I saw the same reaction when I gushed over anthropologists my new peers had never heard of. In many cases, this was the outcome of who and what had been taught in classes. Running my first tutorials made it all the clearer. I think this corresponds with your definition of success as a teacher. The way we use text (and here I mean anthropology as text) is vital. We should not carry a bag full of knowledge from other people’s words if we are not willing to let those words do something different—and, more importantly, if we do not let others take these words and do something that we did not intend for them.
Helena Wulff is the section contributing editor for the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.