'Something' that you can't say: Indescribable intelligibility and 'otherness' in the making of art and ethnography.

摘要

There is "something" that is intelligible yet indescribable in human experience; I explain this "something" as a process of creative discovery in both making and appreciating artwork. This "something" frequently surfaced as artists critically discussed their artwork in an art school where I conducted ethnographic research. "There was something in it," an artist would recall when he/she discovered the potential of a visual object(s) within his/her art making. When positively evaluating their artwork, the artists often commented, "There is something in it." When criticizing artwork, the artists indicated this "something" was absent from the work. This dissertation records my theoretical search for this "something" through conducting ethnography among artists who pursue it by making artwork. There are two sections in the dissertation. The first section lays out theoretical characterizations of indescribable intelligibility that arise from my ethnographic findings. I argue the potential for anthropology of exploring indescribable intelligibility through a line of reflective criticism of its scientific reductionism. I highlight qualities of artistic and ethnographic relationships that are irreducible to a human intellectuality that is dominated by structural discourse of culture(s), even though those qualities work as a core faculty of artwork, which is a cultural product. I call these qualities gap---an otherness within the individual---and argue that the gap creates room for creativity when a human engages him/herself with his/her object(s) of creation, which can lead to a human's creation of the self and culture anew. In the second part, I consider my theory of gap and its creative potential within two case studies of art students in pursuit of "something", which the first student looked for within her self in order to express it through her work. The second student found "something" while including a complex interpersonal relationship between her friends in her art making. Comparing my ethnographic engagement with artists to their art making relationships with their artistic subject/objects, I suggest the potential of ethnography to evoke its own "something", or the indescribable-intelligible, as a communicative vehicle for cultural creation.