Complementarity between Art and Anthropology: Experiences among kolam makers in South India

Abstract

As their first daily task, women in South India draw geometrical images, kolams, in front of their homes to greet the deities. These images engender and reinforce moods in the community, they construct feminine gender and they define the landscape as social. The paper describes how the employment of an artistic practice—photography—can affect the understanding of the kolam, an artistic practice in itself. Photography has a key role in that it has been used as a tool during field work, as well as in the presentation of research in the form of photographic essays. The expressive aspects in particular of this media are considered as means to address visual and sensory experience and as complementary to analytical texts. It is suggested that the use of artistic practice, in dialogue with texts, productively engages the tension between the sensory and the discursive, between intimacy and distance. The aim is to contribute to anthropological understandings of, and approaches to, images, aesthetics and artistic practice. The aesthetic aspect of the kolam is presented as local social aesthetics; an appreciation founded in local morality, and continuously reproduced as well as contested in a social environment. Keywords: kolam, South India, visual anthropology, photography, art, aesthetics, gender

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