Introduction

Anthropology is the discipline of counterintuition. It seeks to find the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the incomprehensible. When finished, the process starts again, this time in reverse. In the hope that a synthesis will manifest itself. What kind of art is this, the ‘non-participatory’? What does dissent flee from? For this purpose, we will use our work in participatory art projects in the last two years as fieldwork. 

We are Wamãe l Public Anthropology, a non-profit organization based first in Lisbon, and now in Funchal, that focus applying visual anthropology to participatory art, cultural mediation, and educational projects. In its first two years, it has worked with dozens of institutions from the most varied disciplinary areas, and as a partner of academic institutions in research projects. The association was created as a way to facilitate the work of anthropologists who develop their work outside academia. Wamãe I Public Anthropology privileges the work of newly graduated anthropologists and works with the conviction that anthropology is the discipline of agility, a quality necessary to reconcile the knowledge of various disciplines around problems that can only be effectively addressed if faced in their complexity(ies). Our anthropology is one of action. We try to understand each one’s space-time. We look at what exists between people. But we mostly look at people, work with people and allow people to look at us back.

In a contemporary era during colonial deconstruction, grappling with identity movements, issues of representativeness, in a present where political extremism goes hand in hand with horizontal experiences of governance, what fate will remain for what is not participated in, only exercised? This article transforms into fieldwork the daily life of Wamãe I Public Anthropology, starting from a participatory art project that lasted two years, in a school in the Ajuda neighborhood, in Lisbon, we try to talk about the process of discovery that is to do non-academic anthropology.

The project

Yellow Cusca Cultural Association is an artistic academy that consists of the integration of experimental methodologies and artistic practices in the curriculum of all students at a school, combining the syllabus of the core disciplines with artistic practice, articulating three dimensions: the programs of the disciplines, artistic experimentation, and the development of social and emotional skills that collective creation provides. It aims to develop skills of self-regulation, problem-solving, resilience, communication, creative thinking, and critical thinking, intervening in school contexts in the fields of education, art, and culture in the municipality of Lisbon. It is a non-profit cultural association committed to community development and social cohesion, through training and cultural programming and artistic practice we seek to promote the empowerment of people at risk and in exclusion, believing that valuing identity through Art is a powerful tool for social inclusion.

This Association was founded by the Gulbenkian Knowledge Academies initiative, born of the Gulbenkian Programme for Knowledge, created with the aim of stimulating and mobilizing knowledge, know how, social skills and knowing how to think, it focuses on promoting the skills of everyone and the ability of organizations to enhance them in a sustainable way, based on scientific evidence. It also aims to contribute to the prevention and solution of complex social problems, by mobilizing existing knowledge and supporting the generation of new knowledge by expanding the frontiers of what is known in priority areas, being organized into two major areas of education and health.

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation supported a report called “The Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future”, a year-long consultation with education and arts professionals, as well as policy makers. This report studied the education system in the United Kingdom in today’s world, and provided recommendations for a reimagined system, where arts subjects are recognized for equipping children with skills for life and work. 

There is a recognition that the arts play a fundamental role in human flourishing, Gulbenkian is an independently foundation, and has a responsibility to look ahead and consider social issues at the systems-level, and beyond political cycles, and have supported the culture sector in the United Kingdom for almost 70 years, as well as equitable access to arts. 

The report “The Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future” found evidence of inspirational practice across the United Kingdom but highlights deep concerns about the principles and provision underpinning the arts in schools. It shows that progress isn’t always linear or lasting.  It calls for greater recognition of how the arts shape human experience and development; a reimagining of the purpose of education; and more equitable access to cultural experiences. It considers that arts subjects and experiences have an evidenced role in contributing to improving outcomes for children and young people, providing them with skills for life and skills for work. 

Five core policy principles are considered vital to improve and see flourish the arts in schools: rationale and clear purposes for schooling; equal status for arts subjects with other curriculum areas; access to opportunities built on inclusion and equality; education for personal development and wellbeing, beyond academic achievements; and education for the importance of the present, and the future.

It also considered recommendations for the future that can provide a sustainable foothold and improve processes of inclusion in education, such as: new curriculum areas; a change on arts subject approaches; the creation of arts promotion within schools, as well as extra-curricular arts programs; teacher and learner (student) agency; evidence-based case-making; and support for the arts in schools from professional organizations, associations, and the overall sector.

These findings and recommendations are considered relevant for other countries and contexts too, as this report states, with the hope that it would encourage similar debates, initiatives, and efforts, as it highlights the necessity and pressing work for greater and more equitable access to arts for all. The work developed was based in this report, efforts, and adaptation to the Portuguese context.  

The experience

On a day in October 2020, Inês Tecedeiro and I stepped out of our recent office, decorated with borrowed plastic chairs, for our first day of work. We had created an association, Wamãe I Public Anthropology, which brought together several anthropologists, mostly still students, interested in developing projects outside the academic context.

We crossed Lisbon in a graffiti-pink Toyota Corolla from 1993. The first project we took part in, by Yellow Cusca Association, funded by the Gulbenkian Knowledge Academies, proposed using artistic practices to work on curriculum content of the first cycle at Manuel Sérgio School, in Ajuda, a Lisbon school focused on pre-school, first cycle and special needs education.

We were glazing over Appadurai at the time. Along the way we talked about anthropology as a way to design futures, and the cosmopolitanism of the subaltern classes; we had studied David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky’s project, Anthropology for Kids1, but we didn’t know what to do with this material. With some guilt, we felt that we should have prepared something for the first session. We would have to combine the content of elementary school environmental studies with audiovisual technologies and anthropology; and we had no idea how.

The Manuel Sérgio School is nice, in that “New State” public architecture, nestled among the trees of Monsanto. In the classroom, computers coexist with old maps. We arrived in time to attend 15 minutes of class and would pick up the session from there. In a group of ten children, many were newcomers from somewhere: Bangladesh, Brazil, Cape Verde. Some of them were amusing themselves reproducing coats of arms of Lisbon’s parishes, others were watching the teacher’s explanation, who was talking about countries while pointing to some drawings hanging on the wall.

Sometime later, we started our session:

• Where are you from, Iara?
• From Torres Novas.
• Can you show on the map where it is?

Poor Iara, she thought to look up Torres Novas on the World Map. Then Pedro, tired of sitting down, came to the front to stretch his legs. He risked looking for Cape Verde on the map of Portugal. But why is Portugal huge on one map and almost invisible on another? When Abdul “came on stage”, and hit the location of Bangladesh without hesitation, a wonderful chaos ensued: … and here is India, this huge country, said Inês. A girl from the 2 de Maio neighborhood cheered up: The gypsies came from India!

Z – And how long ago did the gypsies come from India?

 X – Tchiii! A long time ago! It must have been more than 40 years ago!

Y – And was that before or after the dinosaurs? 

X – Then, because there were already cars!

1 https://a4kids.org

The following sessions went very well: We designed stop motion exercises, done in real time with a camera and a video projector, so that we could work on space and time scales. Who made the longest journey to get to Portugal? Pedro or Abdull? And the plasticine became airplane. What came first, the apartments or the cars? And soon the plasticine dolls would mold themselves into whatever came after them.

We continued to work at Manuel Sérgio School for two more years. The disagreements about the order of things multiplied in concentric cycles: teachers who didn’t know about the specificities of Roma families, Roma who needed to know about the school, schools that didn’t understand the decisions of the school cluster, funding bodies that made surveys for middle-class children, partners who felt we were going too far.

The Toyota Corolla, meanwhile, said goodbye to the world. In 2021 I was reading Writing Culture, Ethnography means writing culture, says James Clifford. But that was before. Before observation had to be participant, before knowledge had to be made with. I don’t have much appreciation for the epithet public, in front of the designation anthropology. It only serves to distinguish an application of the discipline that does not work to produce diagnosis. Today we don’t look at knowledge as a monolith that accumulates. It is more like a place where something is missing; an attempt to deal with this irony of being all connected, but still not knowing about each other.

We have a green Opel Astra now. 2000 liters of trunk for carrying equipment. We never ran into the children from Manuel Sérgio School again. But I hope Iara will continue to look for Torres Novas, and herself, on the World Map. That was the anthropology we learned with her.

Conclusion

This first experience, this first day at work and ended up lasting two long and truly phenomenal years was the first taste of applying anthropology to the greater good, to show how we can help grow, better, and participate actively in society as a force for advancement and improvement.

The application of visual anthropology and the arts as a vehicle to inclusion, teaching, and the breaking of barriers of social stigma and discrimination was an eye-opening experience to the impact our work and our efforts can achieve when directed to these questions.

The anthropology we learned in Manuel Sérgio School, the one learned from Iara, form Pedro, from Abdull, was an anthropology of caring, of understanding, of listening and of sharing. Our fieldwork daily life during these two years shows how much a participatory art project based on anthropology tenets, with an applied and public approach can achieve in helping the inclusion of marginalized communities, individuals, and children to have the opportunity to learn and grow in a sustainable manner. To do this non-academic anthropology was to allow this discipline to have a real life impact in the lives of those that need our support the most, was to be able to affect real change and progress in the inclusion of marginalized children in the education system, allowing them to reach ever closer to the equality so desperately needed.