Art and anthropology for a sustainable world

Both art and anthropology, this article proposes, are future-oriented disciplines, united in the common task of fashioning a world fit for coming generations to inhabit. The first step in establishing this proposition is to show how the objectives of anthropology differ from those of ethnography. Anthropology, it is argued, establishes a relation with the world that is correspondent rather than tangential, that prioritizes difference over alterity, and that places presence before interpretative contextualization. The second step is to rethink the idea of research – to show how, as an open-ended search for truth and a practice of correspondence, research necessarily overflows the bounds of objectivity. Art and anthropology, then, and not natural science, are exemplary in the pursuit of truth as a way of knowing-in-being. The third step is to show that only if it is conceived in this way can research be conducive to the processes of renewal on which our collective futures depend. Thus research as correspondence is a condition for sustainability. But sustainability is nothing if it is not of everything. We have to begin, therefore, with the idea of everything as a plenum, in which each apparent addition is really a reworking. The article concludes with some reflections on the proposed synergy of art and anthropology for education, democracy, and citizenship.