Introduction1

3Several overviews of ethnologists’ use of drawing have been published, notably by Kim Tondeur (2018), or by Fabien Roussel and Emilie Guitard (2021). My aim here, however, is to provide a detailed case study and to argue that not being gifted or trained in drawing should not stand in the way of such a practice because its potential for anthropologists far exceeds the illustrative or artistic qualities of what is finally put down on paper.

Early Pathway to an Ethnographic Use of Drawing

4My PhD thesis was about three dance practices closely linked to one another through their histories and networks of participants – 5 Rhythms Dance, Movement Medicine, and Open Floor – which I referred to as Free-form Mindful Dances. They are often presented as ‘moving meditation’ or ‘mindful movement’. During weekly sessions of approximately two hours, a few dozen participants gather and dance ‘freely’, without any choreography or specific gesture imposed by a teacher. Teachers or facilitators prepare a musical playlist including several ‘rhythms’, ‘energies’ or ‘states’ they want dancers to feel, explore and embody through their bodily movement. They regularly utter indications to encourage a conscious focus on a specific perception or feeling, type of gesture, way of moving around the room, manner of interacting with a partner, etc. Participants are not professional dancers and these dance practices are never performed on stage. Their aim is neither to create a show, nor to teach a choreographic tradition. According to participants’ statements, they are situated at the intersection of a leisure activity, a therapeutic or healing initiative (although teachers never refer to themselves as therapists), a wellbeing technique or a process of personal transformation, and a contemporary spiritual practice.

5Bodily expression, sensations, emotions, gazes and small gestures, relational dynamics, and intimate issues all lie at the heart of the ethnography I proposed, drawn from this field. I had to observe and then account for embodied processes that could be either excessive and intense, or tiny, largely internal, and only partly visible. For example, I had to find a way to describe and analyse the circulating ‘energies’ dancers constantly talked about, or the out-of-the-ordinary feelings they always mentioned but also qualified as impossible to define. People often danced to sweat-soaked exhaustion, shouted, cried, or laughed, and shared intimate feelings and significant life events. As one might imagine, I had to undertake this ethnography without the use of photographs or video film: both were forbidden in these ‘safe spaces’. Moreover, in order to enter the dance studio, I had to participate fully myself, becoming completely engaged in the experience. The methodological requirements that such a ‘full participation’ (Halloy 2016) entails – the distancing one must reintroduce and the constant resonating process between distinct sources (Halloy 2007) – are set out in my thesis (Mazzella di Bosco 2020). What follows, concerned with drawing as an ethnographic tool, can be seen as a development about one of the ways I found to manage this double bind: the necessity of both a visceral, existential engagement in the field and all the distance the anthropological posture requires.

6I have drawn for as long as I can remember. I never had real lessons or training for this, but it was an important activity for me all throughout my childhood and afterwards. Surprisingly, when I started my career path in ethnology, I did not even think of drawing as a possible tool (maybe because the anthropology courses I followed and books I read did not really mention it as such). Then, two aspects of my object of study pushed me in that direction. First, in the wake of the first handful of dance sessions I participated in, and during fieldwork, I periodically felt the need and desire to draw or paint the scene I was involved in, to capture its sensuousness, lines, colours, and intensity. Secondly, when I began presenting my fieldwork material in seminars and articles, I had no images to show and my audience had difficulties imagining what the dance sessions looked like. As a result, I finally began to ‘draw my fieldwork’. However, I was never totally satisfied with what I saw in my sketchbook. The beauty or the nuances of a particular moment did not really appear, or the drawing itself was not precise or complete enough to illustrate the notions I wanted to share with my colleagues. There was always something missing or unsatisfactory (to me). But I kept on drawing, and this process did not just produce more sketches: it opened up a whole new way of thinking about and presenting my research subject. The initial and main benefit of these drawings was thus the reflexive, meditative, (re)embodied path they put me on, with a great heuristic potential.

A Heuristic Potential

7In the beginning, I wanted to capture recurring gestures and postures as visible crystallizations, in the dancers’ bodies, of specific ways of being that seemed to be characteristic of these practices. I produced sketches and drawings from memory and my notes, as well as with the help of pictures from teachers’ flyers.

8However, the interesting process here is that, even if I was happy with the aesthetic result of some of these drawings, they somehow missed one point or another, which gave me food for thought. In order to represent these gestures and postures I favoured the simplest ones, choosing moments when people were still or moving very slowly, when they were mainly alone, concentrating within themselves and on what they were experiencing. This is indeed an important part of the practice that encourages to feel deeply within one’s body and to move while being conscious of these feelings. But I was frustrated by the sense of immobility these sketches produced, and above all by the lack of visible interactions between dancers. When I used these drawings in academic presentations, I could see how they reinforced my colleagues’ or other outsiders’ a priori perceptions of these practices as egocentric and individualistic. I came to realize then the extent to which relational aspects were fundamental in these dance practices, and how much I needed to develop my analysis of this specific dimension.

10Back to my first sketches’ teachings… As a consequence of what they highlighted, I made two parallel attempts. On the one hand, I tried to represent more movement: of course, missing the movement while studying such a practice was not really an option! I selected short sequences of moves and gestures that seemed recurring in the dance sessions and reproduced their different stages. From this I tried to establish a repertoire of consecutive gestures: aggregated on paper in front of my eyes, they gave a somewhat more solid grounding to the intuition that beyond the claimed ‘freedom’ in these practices, there were typical and shared ways of moving, and thus a form of body learning and shaping.

11On the other hand, I tried to account for the constant interactions and relational processes that could be observed and experienced in the dance sessions. It was far more difficult to render the subtle and fleeting facial expressions, gazes, and gestures that were at stake there.

12However, I was still not totally satisfied: I looked at the sketches, and if they succeeded in showing some typical kinds of gestures, distancing, or ways of touching, they failed to reveal their specific flavour. I realized in fact that this flavour lies precisely in between the body positions I could draw, within the negotiations between dancers (distance or proximity, touching or not, looking at each other or not…). Yet, these negotiations are a complex, elusive, often tiny, and ever-evolving process. So I tried to find a way to approach the qualities of these interactions that seemed absolutely fundamental in the experiences dancers look for.

‘To draw is to move my hand in keeping with what I am drawing, and as the hand moves, so does the body, which tenses and keeps changing the angle of vision along with the angle of the head looking out at the scene and then back at the page. This is an extraordinary act of bodily mimesis’ (Taussig 2011: 24).

15The anthropologist also writes that ‘Photography is a taking, the drawing is a making’: indeed, it implies a totally different relationship to time and action and this is fundamental. In her account of the experiment of visual field notes with students, Carol Hendrickson proposed ‘that the activity became an exercise in slowing down and thinking-while-seeing-while-drawing’ (Hendrickson 2008: 120). The time and body commitments required by the action of drawing provide a useful convergence of different processes: observing, thinking, remembering, selecting, describing, and leaving traces (see Ingold 2007).

16In other words, the drawing process requires a long-term and dedicated concentration that affords an opportunity to think about one’s object of study through another lens, without words or concepts. The time I devote to drawing, to observing directly or from memory what I want to put on paper, constitutes an opportunity to imbibe the object once again, to dive into it physically, with my hand but also with my whole body. And then, when the drawing is complete in front of my eyes, outside of my body and memories, I can watch it with renewed anthropological distance.

17Finally, as regards this specific example, making a comic strip from a short video extract showed the great subtlety and richness of gestures that can hardly be noticed when just watching a film once or twice, and that would be difficult to read if they were only described through words. It helped to deal with the fact that when you see such a dance session from the outside, on a video, the actions and interactions of dancers seem quite flat, easy, and flowing, while the experience of it is very intense, engaging, and complex, made up of a succession of trials and errors. The video, maybe unless produced by a professional in specific shooting conditions, fails to show what is really at stake within these danced interactions, because it is too tiny and fleeting: indeed, what dancers seem to appreciate the most are these sequences of instants when it’s hard / they try things / it fails / they try again (…) / suddenly ‘it fits’. The whole process leading to the comic strip helps to describe implicit norms in these tiny bodily negotiations and shows perfectly where the complexity and intensity lie: in the succession of little choices in body orientations, gazes, arm gestures, hesitations, and doubts about the other’s intentions.

18Concomitantly, and quite soon in my fieldwork engagement, I felt like giving a sense of the very particular atmosphere of these dance sessions. While looking at my postures repertoire, black pencil lines on white paper, I told myself that I was really missing the feeling of the atmosphere. I already knew that the sensory and material aspects of the dance space were fundamental in the process people were engaged in. But it was as if the black and white, clean and simplified drawings revealed to my eyes which parts of the ambiance were important to look at, describe, and analyze. It was not the objects, statues, candles, and altar-like installations that were tickling my ‘drawing-eye’: I felt like capturing the chiaroscuro of the brilliant skins reflecting lights and contrasting with the ambient semi-darkness. Or a kind of visual scrambling due to the continuous movement of many dancers, the heat and dampness, one’s own dizziness as a dancer…

19One last type of ‘heuristic’ drawing in my fieldwork is akin to ‘flashes’ when I suddenly witnessed a scene that automatically made me think ‘I have to draw this’, and also ‘I wish I could take a picture now’ (but could not). These were salient, striking, dramatic moments that I felt stood for typical actions and interactions. The best example is the very quick sketch I made on the spot, leaving the dance space for less than one minute to draw on my notebook in the changing room. I quickly wrote above ‘jouer sérieusement au fou’, which means ‘playing the fool seriously’, then came back to dance. The situation I just saw was like a perfect concretization of an important feature in the dancers’ experience. And sketching this particular moment was an excellent way to imprint it in my memory in order to come back to it afterward and be able to describe thoroughly the postures, gestures, and actions. It eventually helped me to understand this specific type of moments in dance sessions.

20The sketch on the left was the one I made on the spot. I then wanted to make it ‘better’, but I was not satisfied at all with the second one (on the right). Even if it was more precise, clean, etc., it lacked the spontaneity and ‘rawness’ that were within the first one as well as in the situation itself. It reminded me of the opening sketch from Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This (2011): for him, this sketch completed in a taxi, of a scene he saw for no more than three seconds, crystallized a more global social, cultural and human situation, which he wanted to account for. For Taussig it became like a ‘talisman’, an iconic image with its own autonomy: something strikes our attention, maybe we don’t know exactly why, but drawing it allows us to put it outside of us, on a paper, without having to understand right away, and to come back later to this fieldwork intuition through the visual subjective trace.

21Through these latter two steps in my sketching ethnographic journey, we can see how the ‘drawing-gaze’ functions as a revealing tool that places important or different things under scrutiny, by their presence or absence in the images. Finally, I argue that drawing can be like a fruitful meditation pencil-in-hand: even if the lines on paper can find no use afterwards, the major interest lies in the prolonged concentration process and in the shifting of the gaze it allows.

From the Readers’ Perspective. Evocative and Sensory Insights

22Nevertheless, the initial lack of images to show to audiences or readers was still a problem. Therefore, even if I was not totally happy with all my drawings’ aesthetic qualities, I chose to use some of them within the PhD thesis manuscript and other publications. But my point in this last section is to show how their contribution was far more than simply illustrative. I will go through four brief examples.

23Let’s go back first to the case of the three-page comic strip showing a danced interaction between three men. The vignettes were accompanied by short texts offering a more detailed description of what was not shown in the drawings (type of music, lights, heat, actions around this moment), and transcribing the guidance uttered by the teacher (letters in white on black). At the beginning and end of the comic strip, I reproduced a few captions from the video, with blurred faces (with the authorization of the dancers). These captions provided a means to give the reader a sense of the atmosphere in the room, of colors and lighting, of how many people were in the session… The drawings then allowed me to focus on a pair of dancers, then a threesome, and finally one of the men alone. I could also focus successively on specific, tiny elements of the interaction (two hands almost touching and a gaze, a growing distance…) without interrupting the story flow.

25First, the distinction between ‘panels separated by gutters’ (offering successive steps in the storytelling) and ‘overlapping panels’ (offering a way to zoom in on a main image, like in the two excerpts above), is a useful implicit convention between the comic reader and the author. But I find particularly interesting another implication of the use of gutters: these white stripes are empty spaces left between ideas and figures on the page. As such, they give time and space to the reader: a time and space to feel a movement in their own body, or to build part of the story for him/herself, or to literally fill in the blank and thus better embed the action. Camera movements and cuts in films also guide the watcher from one image to another, from an overview to a detail; and of course, in front of a film, the watcher can also build missing parts of the story, feel kinesthetic empathy, and fill in the blanks. But there are no real empty spaces, and very few still times left for that. In a way, the comic strip more openly asks for the reader to work on their own, in-between the panels.

28The next two examples bring in a complementary, slightly different angle. As Michael Taussig wrote, the main value of drawings comes from their ‘suggestive potential’, because, precisely, they ‘do everything a photograph doesn't. They are intimate, they are sketchy, they are suggestive (…)’ (2011: 15). In the repertoire of perceptive and attentional postures I tried to build (see above), the drawings were not totally accurate representations of well-defined postures that are by essence very changing from one person or moment to another. But through the gathering of a number of these drawings on a page, I gave the reader a kinesthetic and proprioceptive overall sensation that they could perceive.

29In another type of sketching, I tried to capture together, in a non-figurative but evocative way, different kinds of ‘energies’, movement ‘qualities’, or traveling schemes in the dance space, as if people produced traces and lines on the ground while dancing. It was neither realistic nor precise and exhaustive, but the drawings try to suggest the different shades of movements participants could embody and feel within each musical phase.

30Abstract and refined graphic lines allowed me to grasp a part of the reality that could be drowned in the multiplicity of other details to observe and account for: in this case, I tried to suggest collective kinesthetic sensations (called ‘intention’ or ‘energy’ by dancers and teachers).

31The very last example of the evocative power of drawings in ethnography beyond any illustrative and documentary intention, lies in the ‘interludes’ I placed between chapters of my thesis. Contrary to a majority of my drawings, I made these interludes with the clear intention of reproducing them in the thesis manuscript, but their aim was not really to illustrate any particular situation, gesture, or body posture. I wanted to offer the reader a kind of breather, like a meditative break within the flow of words and concepts, to allow them to dive into a feeling inspired by the drawing, into an emotional or sensory impression. I assumed this impression would be different from one reader to another. But almost every member of the jury took note of it in their comments, saying these interludes really brought something to their reading and evaluation work (some rest, an opening, new perceptions…). Even before that, for myself as an ethnographer, it was a valuable meditative break during the writing and correction phase, a way to ‘re-connect’ for a moment with some field sensations and emotions, which certainly changed my relationship to the manuscript writing process.

Conclusion and Openings

‘There is a huge difference between seeing a thing without a pencil in hand and seeing this same thing while drawing it. Or rather, these are two very different things you see. Even the object, which is the more familiar to your eyes, becomes totally other if you dedicate to draw it: you realize that you ignored it – that you had never really seen it.’ (Valéry 1936: 526, translation from the author)

33Valéry considered drawing as an ‘analytical process through which the drawer reasons with a pencil in hand’ (Kisiel 2017: 50, author’s translation). He distinguished drawings as works of art – thus as a goal – and drawing as action, that is as a way to grasp the world. Whatever the result is on paper, be it beautiful and realistic or not, the first and main contribution is the drawing-observing attitude that offers the possibility of another perception. Drawing a thing, a person, or a situation, transforms and expands the very act of seeing and observing. What else could be more important to an ethnographer?