Post-essay thoughts

"The liminal area between writing and drawing" continues to nag at me - which is perhaps as it should be, given that we had free rein to choose an essay topic and that we were told to choose something that's of interest to us. For months I researched and pondered the nature of drawing and of writing; then came a rather frantic period of setting down my findings and thoughts. Of course the moment that the "work" went to be evaluated, I had some clarity about its shortcomings - mainly, I used too many case studies and didn't restate my main findings in the conclusion - left them in the discussion of the case studies. So, it falls short in technical terms. And that's a disappointment, because I could have followed the "rules" and done it "right" - but instead I let myself get carried away with something I discovered very late in the writing, namely the "invisible support". After decades of dealing with scientific papers that (often unnecessarily) end by indicating the area in which "more research is needed", I fell into that same trap.

Originally the analysis was going to rest on social anthropologist Tim Ingold's work (2007) on traces and threads, but in the end this took up just one paragraph. If I'd thought to check whether he'd published more on this topic since, I would have found this book, published this spring -

which I bought recently. Opening it at random (to p 224) I found this:

"Drawing is a mode of description that has not yet broken away from observation. At the same time that the gesturing hand draws out its traces upon a surface, the observing eye is drawn into the labyrinthine entanglements of the lifeworld, yielding a sense of its forms, proportions and textures, but above all of its movements - of the generative dynamic of a world-in-formation. In recent anthropology, however, the potential of drawing  to couple observation and description has been largely eclipsed by an overriding dichotomy between the written text and the visual image ... What interests me is that the visual anthropology for which [Anna Grimshaw] calls should be understood as alternative to anthropology in writing. Do we not use our eyes to read and write, just as we do to observe a work of calligraphy or of drawing? Why else does almost every scholar wear spectacles? What does the characterisation of writing as non-verbal tell us about our understanding of vision?"

Interesting questions. It's going to take me a long time to read this book! The dilemma is - where to start? At the beginning ... or with the "drawing making writing" section at the end ...