19 mins in Sarah talks about the key surprising elements that always emerges from anthropological fieldwork, the thing we didn’t ask about, the thing that we could never have already known about that emerges from under the surface of our investigations. The point of research is to get to this, not to find evidence to ‘prove’ what we already know. 

Email from JA

Thank you JA! It is very important that you sent me that. I came across this very statement from Sarah Pink, too, but I did not recognize it for its significance, simply because to me this statement sounds like common sense. I have been saying things like this for years. I framed it the other way round, for example when ARTE asked me (2008?) to write what they called a „treatment“ for what later became Planet Galata. I refused (which almost killed the project right from the outset) because, I said that if I write beforehand what I want to find it is very likely that I will find just that and this is (mainly) what I had in mind prior to the investigation. The things I am not looking for are far more interesting.

This is why I don’t like questions, because the answer to a question is already predefined in the question, and this is why “messy questions” (questions not understood by the questioned) are good. I am pretty sure that I mentioned that in my first i-Docs talk. 

It is really important that I understand what is my internal common sense vs the common sense in the outside world. This cames up in conversation with MH regularly (he usually gets upset with me).

It is all about what is under the surface. I just wrote about this here. You can only ask about something that you are able to see, which is always surface. Curiosity and knowing that you don’t know can take you under the surface.

Prof Dr Sarah Pink: Futures Anthropology, Emerging Technology and Anticipating Experience, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h9R0o0CCmo.