by Ariela Silber
Christina Hodge’s interdisciplinary ‘Experiential Observation + Synesthetic Analysis + Polysemous Interpretation’ (ESP) framework integrates visual analysis and multisensory observation with anthropological insights. It seeks to enhance understanding of material culture while promoting decolonization in anthropological practices through distortion and reflection of the western gaze. This contends with material culture study and moves beyond museum objects, as props exhibited to illustrate stories written by placards but instead produces a framework that allows a cultural competency, reflexivity, grounded within cultural relativism. In placing art under the focus of anthropology, a disruption of the “curational gaze” (Hodge 2018: 143) is established, where human subjectivity and meaning is emphasised in comparison to judgement based on an objects’ formal qualities which risk self-referential connoisseurship that detaches objects from their cultural and political contexts. Hodge’s ESP framework carefully acknowledges and mitigates the pervasiveness of the distanced gaze and ocularcentrism by incorporating multisensory experiential analysis at the forefront.
The project work we undertook with the Social Anthropology Teaching Collection is enmeshed with the colonial domination that Anthropologists in our institution propagated. When first establishing provenance work, research and creative outputs, a necessity to be in proximity with the objects was forefront. Our aim of emulating and adapting Hodge’s framework guided our ways of knowing beyond the visuality, with the co-presences of ourselves and our objects reaching all senses. Our thoughts, ideas and designs seen in our website, zine and catalogue are encouraged to challenge and destabilise the established inequalities which brought these objects into our custodianship, aiming for personal and institutional reflexivity, grounded within relativism. We usher active engagement from readers, academics and publics about our curatorial choices but go in knowingly that our position is representing an institution which remains embedded in facilitating its colonial pasts and presents.
Ariela Silber
References:
Hodge, C. J. (2018). Decolonizing Collections‐Based Learning: Experiential Observation as an Interdisciplinary Framework for Object Study. Museum Anthropology, 41(2), 142–158
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