Thank you for this really informative, and spirited detailing of your way of working. I want to make just a few comments about its more general implication for the ways anthropologists produce ethnography today, across the quite diverse range of topics that animate their research. Juxtapositioning strategies of both thinking and writing in ethnography since Writing Culture have become more and more dominant. Theoretically, at least, I think they have escaped the dead hand and formal logics of a preceding binarism which they have effectively critiqued. Yet they remain rather undynamic, or at least, controlled by a narrow sense of what it is to experiment or to participate in the experiments of subjects–both as the frame and medium of an ethnographic project. Based on my continuing discussions with Douglas Holmes, among others, concerning anthropological research in a very different sector of cosmopolitan modernism (that dealing with projects of the rational and the hyperrational–law, technology, markets, banking etc), ethnography at its most powerful has become very much a second order enterprise– evoked in your expression of a movement from ethnographics to diagnostics, and your references to Luhmann and Paul Rabinow. But what kind of research practices does this enterprise of working within, alongside, and beyond the experiments, projects, and organized para- ethnography of subjects entail? You may have an advantage because you so identify intellectually with the historic movement of which your subjects are a part and seem to be very aware, but your account of the fashioning of an intricate way of,again, working alongside, within, and beyond your subjects has broader application and resonances. Certainly, it provides specific solutions to problems of practice that I have more generally posed as themes to develop at the Center for Ethnography which I established when I moved to the University of California, Irvine four years ago (see http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog/): the problem of the fully recognized reflexive subject in ethnography to whose projects and experiments the anthropologist defers in order to make progress on her own (not dissimilar to the ethical deferral to ‘nativeí cultural knowledge in classic anthropology, but across the gulf of alterity, which we can no longer establish in an age of cosmopolitan modernism); the problem of collaboration not as the conventional notion that working together and empathetically is ‘goodí, but collaborations challenge the highly individualist form of inquiry entailed in classic ethnographic fieldwork, and for which the complex evolution of curatorial practice as the primary form of your research is an exemplary improvisation of alternative; and more lately the use of design thinking and techniques as a means to rethink the classic idea of fieldwork, which opens it to exactly the sort of tailor-made invention in method that your own project, again, exemplifies.

Design thinking insists upon a highly reflexive and political practice of collaboration; it allows for the sort of mimesis of subjectsí methods and designs as a source of oneís own, still pursuing distinctively ethnographic ends (that is, it encourages the formation and intense relationships with ‘laboratoriesí and other kinds of entities which organize experiments and knowledge quests among oneís subjects these days ,e.g., most every student these days works her way into fieldwork by passing within and through the projects of NGOs which dominate the terrains of fieldwork everywhere today); and it allows for the conception of the products of research in terms other than the monograph or the film. Indeed, the idea of the installation, while a genre of the art world, has strong associations with the maquette, the model, and the presentation within design studios. As a wayofintroducingalternativeformsintothe methods that still retain authority, especially in the training of ethnographers, I have encouraged the production of para-sites. In the flow of highly conventional fieldwork investigation, para-sites provide space and occasion for the emergence of designed events of presentation and discussion where subjects and ethnographers develop collective, if not collaborative, thinking about an ongoing ethnographic project. No better example would be your development of curatorial practices in a range of venues and media across your ‘field.' The terms are set by the experiments of others to which you have a complex, appropriative relationship by curatorial presentations. These presentations expand the publics, so to speak, for your work within its evolving multi-sited boundaries. This may sum up to more abstract discussions–even a treatise–on "cosmopolitan modernism today among the artistic avant-garde of Mexico." But what we become exposed to through the forms to which you are actually devoting yourself is something far more embedded , yet in a performative and design way. You make accessible by public events in the varied venues that you have described what once resided in the private archives of fieldwork notes and recording, to which Writing Culture gave only minimal legitimated access as the limited forms of reflexive writing and expression that we have today. The installation, or installation book, poses a good example of an alternative and its challenges –clear in their occasions of presentation as ‘second orderí, but also powerful in their own ethnographic voice and detachment.