Ethnography/Animation/Art. A Methodological Defense

Abstract

The purpose of my text is to answer the question: how to introduce elements of the art to rural areas, without establishing at the same time relations of superiority and domination. To this, I reconstruct project Prologue. Unrecognized dimensions of cultural development from 2011, and then its extension, Ethnography/Animation/Art, from 2012. Both projects were led by a team of animators, artists, and ethnographers in the villages in the vicinity of Szydlowiec, in areas of unprofitable, small-scale agriculture, affected by local, permanent unemployment. Ethnographic research gradually enrich and ground animation, while animation brings about quasi-experimental research situations, in which ethnographic reality becomes “thick” and dynamic. I try to show how ethnography combined with animation reveals what is the most important in the life of the community – an implicit dimension of creative work, bottom-up, spontaneous self-organization. It is in this way that a new methodological perspective on action comes about. Its aim is not so much to induce “mechanical” social change as to construct common, creative event with unpredictable and emergent effects.