And, finally, evoking your discussion of the installation returns us to montage and its renewed potentials in these shifting coordinates that define fieldwork. To allude to the point with which I began this set of comments - that prevalent strategies of juxtaposition as the core of ethnographic styles of representation and analytics have become flat. Once inspired by theory and practices of montage, the deployment of juxtaposition becomes a way of managing representations and casting interpretation, though more subtly and richer than a preceding structuralist binarism. In the ethnography that invents practices for itself from its deferral to subjectsí experiments, in adapting creatively to imperatives to collaboration, and in the application of ideas from design process and the studio, the example of montage emerges again as a way to think about juxtapositioning as a key modality not only of analysis, but of movement, performance, and composition (editing?) as three operations of invention in ethnographic research that develops its distinctive thinking in a range of contexts of reception. Issues of representation are just as important as they were in the 1980s but these issues are now embedded in the folds of the relations of research. I think the evolution of curatorial practices as you have described them reflects this distinctive spirit of anthropological research today, in which montage performance animates the enduring importance of juxtaposition without its flattening analytic compass, ending in mere irony. Instead montage is inherently tied to the dynamics of constructing the performances that are shaped by and in turn shape the path of ethnography.

This essay was originally published in: George Marcus. "Disenos Curatoriales en la Poetica de la Etnografia Hoy / Curatorial Designs in the Poetics & Politics of Ethnography Today" in Iconos (Dossier: Visual Anthropology in Latin America), 42: 89-104, Ecuador: Flasco, January 2012.

NOTES:

(7) Paul Rabinow. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, Princeton University Press, 2003.
(8) The Cage of Melancholy: Identity & Metamorphosis of the Mexican Character. Rutgers University Press, 1992.
(9) The title of the program is inspired by the eponymous little known essay by Chris Marker (1966) for what he called a film imaginaire (Commentaires 2, Editions du Seuil). The curatorial project Soy Mexico fabulates on Markerís essay and can be called a curatorial program imaginaire.