DISLOCATIONS: The Artlessness of Anthropology more

I .* September 1, 1992 2:18 PmDISLOCATIONS: The Artlessness of Anthropology by Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz Few everyday, common, real, people can tell you what anthropology is. This is revealed when they ask, "Do you dig up bones?" "Do you dig up dinosaurs?" "Don't all anthropologists study people in Africa?" "When are you going to New Guinea?" Anthropology is outside the common, the vernacular, the language of the everyday. Anthropologists can't talk to people, a delightful irony given anthropology's self-definition as the study of those same walking, talking folk. It is November, 1991. It is too early to meet my colleague and collaborator Michael at his office in Manhattan. I decide to go not to New Guinea but to the Museum of Modern Art. If I were to write an ethnography of what I saw that day, it would focus on all the anthropologists who were there at the museum. Not in the galleries, and certainly not walking around. The anthropology was in the artists, hung on the walls and filling the spaces, who have become better anthropologists than anthropologists. I am safe. I am both artist and anthropologist. Whew! They will not find me out. I have been called narcissistic for putting these ideas in my research. They are not anthropological. They are not scientific. They are artistic? Joseph Kosuth is an artist and a philosopher. Kosuth says (not in MOMA that day, but in a book) that, "The artist is a model of the anthropologist engaged" He put that emphasis there, to push the idea of praxis, activity, action, doing things. Kosuth calls for an "anthropologized