Shifting worlds, shaping fieldwork : a memoir of anthropology and art /

Ossman (Univ. of California, Riverside) calls her book a "memoir on shaping fieldwork by way of art" (p. xix). An artist and anthropologist, Ossman provocatively examines her academic and visual efforts, showing how her ethnographic field research inspires visual/material form just as artistic creations inform writing. She organizes her detailed account into three sections, which she refers to as "waves," each involving multiple projects with key themes, collaborations with artists and academics from different world areas, and various sites of research and presentation. The book begins with her early work on beauty salons in Cairo, Casablanca, and Paris before moving on to consider gendered domestic work focused on laundry and ending with a discussion of multi-sited academic and artistic endeavors on serial migration. Topics include gender, the body, materiality, mobility, globalization, and the daily rhythms of life. The collaborative efforts are shared publicly via different media, including dance, music, and installations, in different environments: galleries, museums, a mall. Community and collaboration are key throughout Ossman's work as she considers how people can create together. Other issues concern the limits of writing, sources of innovation, and the give-and-take between scholarship and artistic practice. The book includes numerous colored photographs. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. --Carol Hendrickson, emerita, Emerson College