Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork

Reflecting on fieldwork for the 21st century, anthropologist and artist Susan Ossman invites readers on a journey across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North America. Ossman makes art and text equal partners, creating three waves" of research, developed on media, globalization and migration. She reveals fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture, but instead creates a field, and sets the frame, rhythm and tone for research. Exploring diverse settings including a colonial villa in Casablanca, a Cairo beauty salon, a California mall turned gallery, and Amsterdam's Hermitage museum, Ossman guides the reader through the relationship of individual to collaborative work. Vividly drawing art and anthropology together, Ossman develops programs with multiple outcomes, from conceptual advances to dialogue, from artwork to new kinds of communities. Comprising a new kind of autoethnography, this book is a primer for anthropology, and a history of field design"--