Why sketchnoting: a primer for [aspiring] anthropologists and others
[hint: because it’s about drawing the world in!]
Why should an anthropologist [or an ever aspiring anthropologist] even bother with sketchnotes? Don’t you have more serious things to do? And shouldn’t I, as a reader, have more fun things to get to?
So first things first, I think there is a wide and bright rainbow spectrum between serious and fun!
What brought me to sketchnoting, I believe, is exactly what brought me to anthropology. Both share two essential qualities that can make the world just a little better:
bounciness: the ability to get creative on the spot and,
curiosity: an endless openness to wonder about everything and everyone.
Personally, as a professional anthropologist, I am interested in sketchnotes as a way to simplify the conceptualization and communication of otherwise complex and obscure ideas (notably in the fields of anthropology, ethnography and the humanities).
If it can’t be broken down in a sketchnote, why is that? Is it because the work we do is really too granular and refined to get caught in cloudy overviews, or is it because the theories we think with are too abstract to fit into sticky concrete representations?
I think that reflecting research through sketchnotes poses, overall, an interesting question about the relation between intellectual work and creativity and the inseparability of body and mind in the process.
In addition, as an anthropologist focused on representations, I approach the idea of “drawing as a universal language” with an obsessively nerdy eye for social, historical and cultural structures of power embedded in the universal.
And if you need seriousness there is actually a wide and growing field of academic research called “graphic ethnography” which is just about all of the above! We’ll talk about that more as The Sketchy Anthropologist grows up.
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