Experimental sites and encounters: open formats as catalysts for the renewal of ethnographic arts

The text engages with the rise of collaborative methods in anthropology against the background of a transformation in anthropological knowledge production, itself part of a wider scientific and academic institutional project. It describes art and design-inspired methodological experiments presented at the first workshop of the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ #Colleex network (Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation) ‘Ethnographic Experimentation. Fieldwork Devices and Companions’, held in Lisbon July 2017. It foregrounds a mode of research explored there addressed as ‘open formats’. These are different from the critical approaches mostly seen hitherto, generally being focused on the production of venues or opportunities for knowledge creation. Three illustrations of these situations are presented.