Anthropology as practice: Artists of Africa and the ethnographic field in contemporary art1

Since the 1990s the understanding of contemporary art has taken on a broader implication. It encompasses artistic practices and art worlds beyond Western Europe and North America in what is called global contemporary. Foster, arguably, was clearly aware of this unfolding development and thus criticized what he felt was the entrenched “West-centrism” in ethnographic practice in contemporary art. George Marcus suggests that Foster’s site of subversive ethno-graphic fieldwork, the context of radical artistic practice and political transformation is no longer the marginal spaces and enclaves of alterity outlined by traditional anthropology. Photographer Makhubu conducts artistic research in South Africa and Nigeria. She has explored South Africa’s colonial history as it relates to the invention of ethnic types and racial identity, using her indexed image as a vehicle. In the beginning Makhubu turned her attention to the family album. The images were appealing and did not suggest anything about ethnicity.