Observational cinema' has long been central to debates in visual anthropology. Although initially hailed as a radical breakthrough in ethnographic filmmaking, the genre was subsequently criticized as naïvely empiricist and lacking in reflexive sophistication. In this article, we make a new case for observational cinema. It grows out of a renewed attention to practice. We argue that observational work be understood not as preliminary to anthropological proper but as a distinctive form of anthropology in its own right.

The ethnographic turn -and after: a critical approach towards the realignment of art and anthropologyThe ethnographic turn has been the focus of recent debate between artists and anthropologists. Crucial to it has been an expansive notion of the ethnographic. No longer considered a specialised technique, the essays of Clifford and others have proposed a broader and more eclectic interpretation of ethnography -an approach long considered to be the exclusive preserve of academic anthropology. In this essay, we look more critically at what the ethnographic turn has meant for artists and anthropologists. To what extent does it describe a convergence of perspectives? Or does it elide significant differences in practice?

Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re‐imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film‐based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image‐making practice.

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This article takes the question 'why drawing, now?' as a speculative way to enter the debate on the relationship of art to different understandings of community. Drawing offers a paradox around the place of art in society. Drawing can be thought about as a traditional medium that yields an individually focused interior exploration. It has also performed a social or ritual role historically, in different times and places. Imagine a think that it is individuals -singular units -that make up society. The second, however, suggests that community as already present can be made visible through the drawing activity. Our exploration draws on a period of a collaborative practice-led experimentation, in particular a three-day research workshop involving drawing and writing. The aim was not to focus on what the results 'looked like' as art products, an approach that arguably fails to reveal the knowledge underpinning art's appearances.Instead we set out to create the conditions for experiencing community through drawing. We found that drawing, in its most intimate relationship between maker/viewer, surface and mark, evokes a world to come, a world in formation rather than pre-formed. This revealed the need for careful scrutiny of the ways in which community itself is imagined. Our offer to the practice of participatory arts is to question deeply held assumptions about what community is rather than to propose new forms of access or techniques that can be transferred from one situation to another. Keywordsdrawing collaboration community experimental research participatory arts artistic knowledge