Fieldwork. Diary of a clinical anthropologist

Abstract

My contribution will focus on the visual composition of a field diary that I wrote during two and half years of research as a clinical anthropologist within a European project for refugees and asylum seekers. The images, conceived as pieces of a mosaic, tell of the encounters, suggestions and evocative power of the stories heard in the clinic.

The project, already selected in international photography calls, proposes the objective of composing an artistic narrative of doing ethnography. As Anna Grimshaw (Edwards, 2015) uphold, anthropology (and ethnography) can be seen as a project of visual imagination. In this perspective, photographs can be thought of as a translation of an affect, a matrix of the subjectivity of experience.

Thus, the images that composed my field diary are a ‘way of seeing’, a recording of thought in a synaesthetic manner, as some of the literature on the practices of visual anthropology claims (McDougall, 2006; Marano, 2013). The resulting mosaic presents itself as a possible way of traversing and experiencing ‘difficult’ terrains such as those of ethnoclinics.