On the Death of Anthropology (and the Erasure of Man) [section in progress]

      This section will revisit the 'ethnographic turn' in the practice and theory of contemporary art, paying particular attention to experimental ethnography and other instances where artists attempt to reframe the institutional codings of art and artifacts. Here we will examine Trinh T. Minh-ha's film entitled Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen, the performance art of James Luna, the primitivist interrogations of Jimmie Durham, and the counter-memory rearticulations of Edgar Heap of Birds.
      Are parody, irony, and reflexivity effective deconstructive tools even if we understand them as simultaneously destabilizing and recentering the subject? Do not these strategies assume dominant definitions of the negative and/or deviant even as they moves to revalue them? In these instances, we must be wary of allowing rhetorical reversals of dominant definitions to stand for politics as such. We must confront not the human sciences themselves, but rather the problem that their very existence represents. This desire to unveil our own non-(un)consciousness.

...this is why the problem of the unconscious - its possibility, status, mode of existence, the means of knowing it and of bringing it to light - is not simply a problem within the human sciences which they can be thought of as encountering by chance in their steps; it is a problem that is ultimately coextensive with their very existence. A transcendental raising of level that is, on the other side, an unveiling of the non-conscious is constitutive of all the sciences of man. (Foucault, The Order of Things, 364).

"Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?” (Foucault, 386)

In 'The Savage Mind' (1962) Claude Lévi-Strauss predicts that man will be dissolved in the structural-linguistic refashioning of the human sciences. At the end of 'The Order of Things' Foucault reiterates this famous prediction with his bold image of man "erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." (Foster, The Return of the Real, 179)

...

Foster, Hal. "The Artist as Ethnographer." The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. Print.

Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.

Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen. Dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1982. Web.