The Third Figure: The Creation of Intersubjectivity in

Ethnographic Drawing
Jasamin Kashanipour
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
University of Vienna
Universitaetsstrasse 7
Vienna, A –­1010, Austria
jasamin.kashanipour@univie.ac.at

SUMMARY In this article, I discuss ethnographic drawing by differentiating be-

tween the practice of drawing people from that of drawing objects. Unlike drawing
architecture, landscapes, or cities, drawing people is not only a practice of seeing but
also of being seen. I follow the epistemological question of what happens at the core of
drawing people ethnographically by considering the perspective of the person drawn.
I introduce the notion of the “third figure,” which emerges from the anthropological
study of the self and the other through drawing. The third figure is a distinctive state
of mutual consciousness that incorporates the material and the intersubjective and im-
material dimension of the drawing process into ethnography. [ethnographic drawing,
mimesis, epistemology, intersubjectivity, intercorporeality]

In my fieldwork experience and field drawings, I encountered challenges as-

sociated with ethnographic drawing that have led me to differentiate the practice
of drawing people from that of objects. Unlike drawing architecture, landscapes,
or cities, drawing people involves not only seeing but also being seen. Drawing
requires a certain sensibility toward life drawing, especially drawing people.
While I have discussed elsewhere the potentials of ethnographic drawing as “a
creative and heuristic way of attentive thinking and a process involving both
unlearning and learning by becoming connected thoughtfully with the envi-
ronment and people” (Kashanipour 2021, 92), here I discuss how this practice
also challenges conventional understandings of ethnography and anthropology.
What happens when we consider the perspective of the person being drawn?
I argue that the epistemological experience of what ethnographers apprehend
results from the study of the self and the other. This experience is a distinctive
state of mutual consciousness that incorporates the intersubjective and immate-
rial dimensions of the drawing process into ethnographic research. Both the ma-
terial and the immaterial dimensions of the drawing process become perceptible
within the triangular relationship among the drawer, the subject drawn, and
the drawing. The totality of what emerges in the process of drawing—­both the
material and the immaterial—­is what I call the third figure.

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 0, Issue 0, pp 1–13, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.
© 2021 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12339.
2 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 0, Number 0

Challenges of Drawing
Drawing is a matter of choice. Depending on the study’s subject and the re-
search question, each anthropologist has their visual methodological preference
that heightens consciousness and generates ways of knowing. Engaging with
drawing as a transformative process creates an appreciation for “an experiential
and heuristic aesthetic epistemology” (Kashanipour 2021, 85). The deep mean-
ing of ethnographic drawing lies in slowing down so that we see and perceive.
Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (2015, 258), who examine Tim Ingold’s
and Michael Taussig’s conceptions of drawing, argue that the debate on draw-
ing’s significance as a special kind of knowledge practice is crucial in “offering
a bridge across separate areas of disciplinary practice.” For Ingold, “to draw
is to be drawn, literally and metaphorically, into the world, to engage through
eye, hand, and body with its contours and movement, and to generate a line
or trace that charts a journey both shaped by and shaping of the material land-
scape through which one navigates” (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015, 259). Similar
to Ingold, Taussig understood drawing as a practice that is not about “enclosing
or framing but rather an opening out.” Taussig is specifically interested in the
“corporeal, immersive, and exploratory quality of drawing and the complex
web of relationships” it creates between the drawer, the drawn, and the viewer
(ibid., 260). However, Grimshaw and Ravetz (2015, 270) also remark that “it is
not clear from Ingold’s and Taussig’s work how, when, and under what cir-
cumstances these particular states of consciousness emerge, or, indeed, their
significance for a ‘transformative’ anthropology.”
In my view, there are two reasons for this lack of clarity. While scholars have
discussed drawing in the abstract, few have addressed particular states of con-
sciousness derived from anthropological fieldwork. There is a distinct lack of
examples drawn from person experience that demonstrate what occurs when
facing drawing situations in practice from a non-­artistic view (Kuschnir [2014]
is an important exception). The second reason is that, so far, most discussions
of drawing in anthropology have focused on drawing’s potential, but have not
explored its limitations in a multi-­contextual way (but see Causey [2017]).
Following Kuschnir and Causey’s examples, by discussing more specific cases
related to field drawing, I aim to provide a constructive perspective on the partic-
ular states of awareness that may be relevant to a transformative anthropology. By
drawing, I experienced its potential as a gradual practice of understanding and
embodying fragments of my interlocutors’ life stories, narrations, social actions,
socio-­cultural perspectives, skills, and emotions. Based on my experience, I argue
that we need to anthropologically contextualize discussions of how particular
states of consciousness arise with respect to drawing and its various settings.
I focus here on the epistemological quality of life drawing and, in particular,
of drawing people. We cannot ignore the relationship between the drawer and
the person drawn, the subjectivity of the fieldworker, and the lived experiences
of those in the field. The preeminent part of this event is the gaze: the person
drawn returns the drawer’s gaze. I discuss two stages: 1) when the fieldworker
carries out the act of drawing, creating, and forming the image in the present
time, and 2) when the actual drawing can be seen in its “final” state and belongs
to the existing past or, in Rudolf Arnheim’s terms (1969, 80–­96), to “the past in
the present.”
Kashanipour The Third Figure 3

I begin with the first stage by discussing street drawing, that is, drawing
people in public. Then I turn to life drawing courses. These two very different
types of drawing provided me with a useful educational experience that helped
me cope with the epistemological challenges of drawing people.
There are several uses of the term street drawing. One definition refers to the
design drawing of streets by urban planners. Another refers to the drawing of
graffiti in public places, such as on walls or streets. In the context of ethnogra-
phy, however, I understand street drawing as a research tool in public space in
the presence of more-­or-­less-­involved people. It records impressions that have
relevance for the researcher. This form of street drawing tells stories of places
to which we travel and people we encounter in our everyday lives in the field.
The most important characteristic of street drawing is that it is created in pub-
lic. It differs from other drawing situations in its unstructured setting and the
moving nature of its subjects and objects.
Anthropologists strive to carefully consider the choice of their medium in ad-
vance, such as drawing, photography, video, or film, along with its adaptation
to their research focus, environment, and field situations. Still, sometimes the
medium causes difficulties or awkward situations in the field. Anthropologist
Andrew Causey, for example, gives a first-­hand account of challenges he en-
countered during on-­site drawing. He describes his experience trying to draw
the “Weberian ideal type” of Western tourists: “My prying eyes betrayed me
nonetheless, and I was almost always ‘caught’: the subjects of my sketch would
pick up and leave, scowling at me as they passed by. It was for this reason that I
began to memorize tourist features and styles that I would re-­create in line and
paint at home” (Causey 2017, 50). Apparently, he had not expected people to
return his gaze, and in an unpleasant way.
Dealing with challenges during visual experiences has always existed and is
not unique to our time. Street drawing—­whether we are drawing people or ar-
chitecture—­is never entirely private. It sometimes involves other people we do
not actually want to draw, but who interfere, out of curiosity or other motiva-
tion. Sometimes the most interesting ethnographic insights emerge from such
interference. Some two hundred and thirty years ago, even Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe ([1829] 2013, 22) had not expected to experience what he calls in one
of his diaries “a dangerous adventure” concerning drawing. He used ethno-
graphic drawing to deepen his visual experiences on journeys. At Lake Garda,
Goethe sat in an old castle courtyard in front of a rock tower; here, he had found
a very comfortable place to draw. He had not been drawing for long when a
large crowd surrounded him. Goethe noticed he had caused quite a stir, but
he continued drawing calmly. A man suspected him of spying on the border
between Venice and the Austrian Empire and reported him to the podestà. But
a man who happened to be familiar with Goethe’s native city convinced the
podestà of Goethe’s innocence. Like Goethe, who was falsely accused of espio-
nage, or Causey, who became the object of angry glances, field researchers can
encounter such problems even when they use fast media such as photography
or film (e.g., Larcher and Oxley 2015; Pink 2007). The ever-­present nature of
recording and issues of privacy, trust, participant rights, representation, and
other ethics surround ethnographic image-­making.
4 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 0, Number 0

The responsible use of other people’s images, the ownership and control
of images, the loss of anonymity, and issues of representation are important
ethical issues to consider when using of visual images in research (Weber 2008).
Following Melisa Cahnmann-­Taylor (2018, 252), “when ‘private’ vs. ‘public’
and ‘fact’ vs. ‘fiction’ become increasingly blurred, we need to be more atten-
tive to attribution and ethics than ever before.” We know from Adorno (2002)
that aesthetics do not lie; rather, they blur “fact and fiction as a way to support
invention and imagination in our own work” (Cahnmann-­Taylor 2018, 251).
The complexity of ethnographic drawing lies in the fact that many people ex-
pect research to reproduce reality as accurately as possible, while drawing at-
tempts to get beneath the surface of perception with the drawing gaze.
In response to the ethical considerations raised by Weber and Cahnmann-­
Taylor, we must conduct ethnographic research with the consent of those we
study and draw. Ethnographic field studies that involved drawing offer in-
structional examples. For instance, Zoe Bray (2013), while researching identity
politics in the Basque Country in France and Spain, immersed herself in the
culture through portrait painting. She and her interlocutors worked together as
painter and models and became acquainted with each other over an extended
period. José Miguel Nieto Olivar (2007) made ethnographic drawings of pros-
titutes. He writes that his interlocutors felt safer and more comfortable with
him as a fieldworker who draws than they had with researchers who pointed
a camera at them. His drawings are a phenomenological reconstruction of his
field experience, offering new understandings of prostitution and promoting
sexual rights and sexual health.
All in all, the well-­being of people who are the subjects of visual methods de-
pends very much on how anthropologists approach them, how they ask people
to become their interlocutors and, more importantly, what anthropologists un-
derstand by participant observation. Once, in Tehran, I was sitting in a café and
noticed a woman drinking a cup of tea. Her relaxed posture made me curious.
Instead of trying to talk to her, I preferred to draw her because I felt that I could
better record my impression. I did not plan to include the sketch in my research,
but simply to give duration to the moment. Although I could have drawn her
from my seat without speaking to her, I asked her if she minding my sketching
her. Approaching people was not something I had done at first; I learned to do
so over time as a drawing anthropologist.
First and foremost, the people we study and draw in the field must perceive
us as fieldworkers. In some cases, such as complex political contexts, covert
participant observation is considered necessary for obtaining truthful informa-
tion (Scheper-­Hughes 2004; Calvey 2013). Aside from this, however, “partici-
pant observation is a practice of correspondence … [and] is absolutely not an
undercover technique” (Ingold 2014, 388–­9). Thus, while the ethnographer’s
gaze looks for hidden meanings and explores the deep structure under the skin
of the social, it is not a hidden gaze.
After drawing the woman back at the café in Tehran, I showed her the
sketch (see Fig. 1). It was not a masterpiece, but she liked it. She asked me why
I wanted to draw her and whether she really had the friendly expression she
saw in the drawing. We had a long conversation. In the end, she photographed
the sketch, and I kept the original for myself. When she learned that I was using
Kashanipour The Third Figure 5

Figure 1.
A Woman in the Café. © 2014 Sketch by the author.

drawing in anthropological research, she was very excited; she did not mind
my publishing the sketch as part of my research.
Reflecting on this very spontaneous act of asking the woman’s permission
to draw her, I realized that I had learned a lot in the process. First, it was prac-
tical to have a drawing pad and small pencils or charcoal with me, even if it is
limited equipment. In street drawing, it is necessary to scale back a bit on the
high standards we usually set for our drawing; for example, when I attend life
drawing classes, I typically take huge rolls of paper with me, attaching them
to easels with clips. But when traveling and doing field research, I have small
charcoal pencils and a drawing pad with me instead. And if I don’t have them,
I can draw on a piece of paper, a newspaper, or a napkin. When we focus on the
research process rather than producing drawings for an exhibition or an audi-
ence, we can make do with what is at hand. Second, and more importantly, my
6 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 0, Number 0

experience with the woman in the café taught me that approaching a potential
subject to ask permission when street drawing is not only ethical but creates a
connection between us. Had I not asked the woman’s permission to draw her,
the drawing would have no story and would have remained identity-­less.
When approaching people in this way, conversational situations arise that
address and resolve ethical questions about creating and using the drawing.
Such conversations open up opportunities to negotiate ethical agreements ap-
propriate for both sides rather than fixed on rigid principles. Ethical practices
in field drawing are not rigid; they must be renegotiated depending on the sit-
uation and the people involved. But one principle always applies: I allow them
to photograph or take one of the sketches.
The way I use drawing as a field practice has little to do with reaching new
audiences or exhibiting my drawings to an audience; my role as a drawing an-
thropologist is limited to the field research process. I seek to understand the
anthropology of people and things through drawing and better perceive and
comprehend my interlocutors and the environment in which they live and work.
My commitment is to not draw research subjects against their will or from mem-
ory without their knowledge. Interestingly, most research subjects are delighted
to learn that I make these sketches because of my anthropological interest.

Transference and the Third Figure

Unlike street drawing or café drawing, drawing studios and life drawing
courses are cultural settings in which it is natural to draw. One of my main
areas of research is the artistic field, where I have studied contemporary female
and male life drawing models, exploring what meaning they give to them-
selves and their work. My anthropological study with life drawing models en-
tailed exploring how socio-­cultural and political dynamics shape perceptions
of and understandings about life and the human body and how life drawing
models relate to and negotiate these perceptions and understandings in their
daily lives (Kashanipour 2016). Integrating drawing into participant observa-
tion allowed me to learn from life models as my interlocutors through immedi-
ate, prolonged, and repeated contact, not only during drawing classes but also
in public and private places that were relevant in life models’ everyday lives. I
experienced drawing as slowing down and as “deliberate bodily mimesis,” to
borrow the terms used by Judith Okely (2007, 71), referring to ways in which
fieldworkers initially learn through “unknowing, unconscious imitation.” By
slowing down and slow mimesis, I mean an unhurried movement that leads to a
cautious approach to the field, not a conquest of the field.
When I visited life drawing classes in which my interlocutors were posing, I
was granted a unique position in a setting in which I had “the right to look” and
draw. Field drawing in my ethnographic study entailed a different gaze than
street drawing and drawing unknown people. By referring to visual theorist
Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of the right to look, I want to adapt it to settings like
those in life drawing classes. As Mirzoeff writes:

The right to look is not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the
look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look
must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. As such, it is unrepresentable.
Kashanipour The Third Figure 7

The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim
to a political subjectivity and collectivity: ‘the right to look. The invention of the
other.’1 (Mirzoeff 2011, 473)

In the visual order of life drawing classes, there is no place for the voyeuris-
tic gaze because “voyeurism is the pleasure in looking while not being seen,
and carries a … negative connotation of a powerful, if not sadistic, position”
(Sturken and Cartwright 2003, 76). The art instructor prompts drawers to prac-
tice “looking,” disciplining the gaze to focus on anatomy by sketching the life
model. Here, Derrida’s (1998) right to look legitimates the drawers’ gaze and the
invention of the other by the act of drawing. While the set of visual conventions
or “scopic regime” (Jay 2008) of life drawing courses indicates the right to look
for those who draw, it indicates presence for the life model, being silent and
motionless with a gaze mostly directed into the void.2 Life models do not move
or break the pose, no matter how painful or tiring it is. Most of my interlocutors
refer to their profession as performance, implying there is movement in the act of
posing even when they must stand still, be silent, and often avoid direct eye
contact. They also refer to transference, a process in which “emotions,” “sen-
suality,” and “energy” are passed on and are displaced from the life model to
drawers by being present, connected, concentrated, and expressive. When life
models speak of transference, they do not use the term in the Freudian sense
of an unconscious process of projection (Freud [1912] 1971). Rather, transfer-
ence in life modeling is a practice in which the focus is mainly on conveying
what they are conscious of, their embodied consciousness. Drawing on Thomas
Csordas’s (2008, 111) notion of intersubjectivity as intercorporeality, I conceptu-
alize such non-­verbal transference (between the drawer’s eye and the model’s
body) via the “intercorporeal hinge,” the joint in which a connection between
subjective beings is made and held together in a mimetic practice. In the case of
my field study, then, the eye and the body are the hinges of what Csordas (2008,
114) calls “intercorporeal reciprocity.”
One of my interlocutors, a fifty-­three-­year-­old man I call Tony, was among
the most sought-­after and in-­demand life drawing models on the Viennese art
scene. Quite frequently, one hears that drawers prefer models with an athletic
body and toned arms and legs, proportioned like the ancient Greek and Roman
statues. Drawers perceived Tony not only as a model with a well-­built and ath-
letic body but also as a professional and skilled life model who could brilliantly
give expression to his body throughout whole posing sessions. During a break,
one of the drawers said to him: “Tony, you really did a great job.” Then she
turned to me and said: “He’s very expressive in his posing. Actually, he’s my fa-
vorite model.” Indeed, drawing him was more than just drawing and studying
the anatomy of a human form. It was about drawing his attitudes and expres-
sions as a human being—­expressions he transmitted through his skin, muscles,
body parts, and personality, including all the attributes that characterized him
as a unique individual. In this case, a transference resulting in intersubjectivity
took place with the outcome that participants in his class felt invited to draw
him as a character, not merely as an anatomical being.
A woman I call Doris, another Viennese interlocutor, forty-­nine years old and
trained in philosophy, was both a life model and an artist. When she attempted
8 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 0, Number 0

to explain what she meant by transference and the moving aspect of life model-
ing, she recalled an experiment. She had tested whether it was possible to move
drawers to leave the room without her saying any word:

As a model, I’ve tried getting in touch with drawers by simply looking at them or
by concentrating. This has gone so far that two participants left the room and said
they couldn’t stand this any longer…. Well, the two felt included in an unpleasant
way. But maybe it’s because they suddenly have become aware of something that
they’ve not wanted to be aware of. Life drawing is interesting because basically
you study yourself. You discover that it’s much more than drawing. It’s analyzing
yourself.

These and other stories expressed by my interlocutors about transference re-

minded me of my own drawing activities with life models. Indeed, I often
felt my concentration was due to their intense presence and concentration. In
some cases, I felt as if they conjured up my drawings, leading my hand while
drawing. The fantastic strangeness of this mimetic relationship made the act of
drawing magical for me—­as if my hand was simultaneously real and not real.
In such cases, even if the meaning of the drawing fades, the experience of the
“mimetic magic” remains.3
I also faced the counterpart of these cases: there were life models who left
me feeling alone when sketching them. I lost my concentration and allowed my
hand to slide down from the paper since we could not establish any intersub-
jectivity. Whether accompanied by life models’ intense presence or left alone,
transference exists in both instances. Drawers sense that life models return their
gaze. In a more general sense, John Berger (1972, 8) writes that “soon after we
can see, we are aware that we can also be seen.” Life drawing is not merely a
technique but an intimate activity involving observing and reflecting the other
and oneself.
The significant point that most interlocutors make about the process of
sitting is when they notice how the drawer moves beyond depicting them as
objects and starts to co-­create with them via the energy they generate and chan-
nel. Life drawing, then, is an act of dual becoming, a creative mutualism, a
reciprocity of sorts, or, more precisely, an “intercorporeal reciprocity,” to recall
Csordas’s term. Concerning the sense of becoming that emerges from the act of
drawing, Berger (2007, 3) writes: “Each confirmation or denial brings you closer
to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have
drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what
you have become.” While Berger’s comment is about drawing as an individual
activity, we can adapt it to life drawing as a joint activity of the drawer and the
person drawn. Doing so sheds light on the entanglement that characterizes the
third figure. The edge of what the drawer and the subject drawn have become
is not either of them but instead the third figure. The third figure is a process of
“each inventing the other,” to recall Mirzoeff. I offer the notion of the third figure
to indicate the material and immaterial dimensions of drawing. The third figure
involves creating a particular state of mutual consciousness, which engages the
performing body and its immaterial dimension. This state occurs when both
the drawer and the person being drawn are involved in creating drawings—­in
an intricate negotiation of seeing, knowing, and transference.
Kashanipour The Third Figure 9

The Creation of Mutual Consciousness

I turn now to the second stage of drawing, when the actual drawing can be
seen in its “final” stage and belongs to the existing past. The drawn line is still
present even if it belongs to the past. According to Norman Bryson (2003, 158),
the drawn line continues within the viewer:

The drawn line gathers to itself energies that exist on the boundary between the
self and the forces that operate upon the self—­whether those forces are those of
worldly authority and social convention, in the orthodox exercises of the acad-
emy, or those of the forces of dream, fantasy, and desire. And in the image’s mo-
ment of impact, those echoes and reverberations continue within the viewer, in
the real time of the drawn line, again and again.

In this regard, what connects the process of drawing and the actual drawing is
the viewer’s gaze upon the drawer’s gaze. The viewers of my drawings are my
interlocutors, who are life drawing models and the individuals being drawn.
Sometimes life models came to me and looked at my drawings. At times when
I “failed,” I felt ashamed to show them the drawings. It was as if I had of-
fended their personality by depicting them unfavorably (see Fig. 2). In many
talks with my interlocutors, therefore, I asked whether they often look at the
drawings after their sittings and what other drawers say to them when both of
them begin to look at the actual drawing. According to Ingold (2013, 128), “The
drawing that tells is not an image, nor is it the expression of an image; it is the
trace of a gesture.” Indeed, if the drawing not only shows but also tells and “is
the trace of a gesture,” then what does the drawing tell life models depicted in

Figure 2.
Life Model in Art Studio: An Attempt at “Deformation.” © 2012 Sketch by
the author.
10 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 0, Number 0

the drawing? To what extent do they perceive the drawing as a trace of their
gesture and to what extent as a trace of how the drawer sees them?
One of my interlocutors stated, “Sometimes I wondered whether the artists
draw conclusions about my character when they look at me. Do they think
about what kind of person I am? Do they draw conclusions because I look
like this and that?” From my life models’ responses, I began to understand the
source of my embarrassment and that I am not the sole drawer who sometimes
apologizes to them. Drawing people is more intimate than I first thought. In
some ways, drawing people can also mean transcending their personal limits.
For instance, one of my interlocutors said she always looked at the drawings
afterward, and the first thing drawers often said to her was: “Sorry that I’ve
depicted you so ugly. In reality, you look more beautiful.” Reflecting on such
conversations with various drawers, my interlocutor then explained the follow-
ing to me: “Of course, it’s very interesting to learn and see how they see you.”
From some of the life models’ perspectives, the drawers’ gaze is the gaze of the
other. It is quite understandable that some life models interpret the drawing as
a medium through which they assess how drawers “see” them. For some other
life models, the drawing is a trace of both their gesture and the drawer’s view
of that gesture. In both cases, the challenge for the drawer is more or less the
expectation of the person drawn.

Conclusion
The material and the immaterial dimensions of the drawing process become
perceptible within the triangular relationship among the drawer, the drawn,
and the drawing. Whether we call this emergence the spirit within the “magic of
mimesis” (Taussig 2009) or the third figure, the origin of this emergence remains
partly unclear. Both the drawer and the person drawn face this fascinating am-
biguity when looking at drawings. The verbal aspect of intersubjectivity comes
into play as a sort of social interaction. And that is what makes it essential for
ethnographers, depending on the occasion, to make the people they draw aware
that they are drawing them, whether they are drawing their interlocutors or
an unknown woman in a café. Participant observation in life drawing courses
taught me to see the sublime mechanisms of drawing people as if with a mag-
nifying glass. At the same time, it made me realize that life drawing courses can
be an ideal rehearsal stage for ethnographic drawing in other contexts.
Drawing people and considering their perspectives is a practice that in-
volves a distinctive state of mutual consciousness, which mirrors the inter-
subjectivity between the ethnographer and the people with whom they study.
Intersubjectivity as intercorporeality (Csordas 2008) and intersubjectivity as social
interaction play an epistemological role. Intersubjectivity in both respects dives
under the surface of people’s stories of joy, pain, hope, shame, and anxiety. I do
not assume intersubjectivity as a natural condition; rather, following Johannes
Fabian (2014, 207), “intersubjectivity must be made or achieved, opening [one-
self] to misunderstandings or getting embroiled in contradiction.” Advancing
the notion of intersubjectivity within cultural anthropology, Fabian (2014, 207)
rejects Claude Lévi-­Strauss’ and Victor Turner’s notion “that made intersub-
jectivity a natural condition, grounded in the neurophysiology of the human
Kashanipour The Third Figure 11

brain. When we communicate, we can think alike because we are built alike.” I
agree with Fabian that intersubjectivity is not “a given.”
In the same way that one builds intersubjectivity in other ethnographic sit-
uations, be they extended ethnographic research interviews, thick participation
(Spittler 2001), ethnographic filming, or any creative or visual ethnographic
mode, one must spend time and effort building supportive intersubjectivity
in ethnographic drawing. The third figure shows that a productive research
process is only made possible by making the research subjects familiar with
the research intention. To achieve intersubjectivity, we must go beyond merely
making clear that the research subject is being drawn.
The lessons of the third figure can be transferred to other research fields if a
trusting relationship with the research subject is established. Its lessons are more
likely to fail if space and time are limited and if respect and trust are lacking.
For these preconditions to arise, establishing a symmetrical relationship and
building mutual trust are necessary prerequisites—­as in other ethnographic
moments. The challenge of drawing people is comparable to difficulties of field
research conversations in the form of “communication free of domination”
(Habermas 1971) between researcher and research subjects. How we perceive
and meet the other depends on our preconceptions and must be negotiated in
consensual conversation.
Our knowledge and preconceptions are often obstacles to seeing. The emer-
gences of the deep structure of the drawing process emanate from what we see
and what we know. According to Berger (1972, 7), “The relation between what
we see and what we know is never settled.” If this is so, then we must con-
stantly prompt ourselves to depict what we see, not what we know. No matter
how much we try to escape this challenge, our sight and knowledge correspond
to each other. Therefore, what makes the drawing process complex may not
be merely the act of drawing itself but also what we think we know and what
position we take on the person and the thing depicted.
The third figure comes into existence precisely because of this never-­settled
relationship. Epistemologically speaking, the challenge of drawing people is
simultaneously its advantage. Therefore, what is striking about the act of draw-
ing people is that it constantly reminds us not only of the material but also of
the intersubjective and immaterial dimensions of ethnographic narratives.

Notes
1. The final quotation in this excerpt is from Derrida (1998).
2. According to Martin Jay (2008, 1), “the ‘scopic regime’ indicates a non-­natural visual
order operating on a pre-­reflective level to determine the dominant protocols of seeing
and being on view in a specific culture at a specific time.”
3. I discussed the “mimetic magic” as the experience of the drawer who, in the act of de-
picting somebody or something, notices that it is not only them who exerts power on the
subject being drawn but equally feels they are at the same time “under a magical force
whose origin is initially incomprehensible” (Kashanipour 2021, 91).

References
Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. Translated and edited by Robert Hullot-­
Kentor. London: Continuum.
12 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 0, Number 0

Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.
Berger, John. 2007. Berger on Drawing. Edited by Jim Savage. London: Occasional Press.
Bray, Zoe. 2013. “Anthropology/Ethnography and Naturalist/Realist Painting: Parallels
in Ways of Seeing and Understanding the World.” In The Real Snake: Proceedings of
the Representational Art Conference 2012, edited by Michael Pearce, 141–­50. Thousand
Oaks: printed by California Lutheran University.
Bryson, Norman. 2003. “A Walk for Walk’s Sake.” In The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and
Act, edited by Catherine De Zegher, 149–­58. London: Tate Publishing.
Cahnmann-­ Taylor, Melisa. 2018. “Four Guiding Principles for Arts-­ Based Research
Practice.” In Arts-­Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice, edited by Melisa
Cahnmann-­Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, 247–­58. New York: Routledge.
Calvey, David. 2013. “Covert Ethnography in Criminology: A Submerged yet Creative
Tradition.” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 25 (1): 541–­50.
Causey, Andrew. 2017. Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Csordas, Thomas J. 2008. “Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality.” Subjectivity 22 (1):
110–­21.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Right of Inspection. Translated by David Wills. Photographs by
Marie-­Françoise Plissart. New York: Monacelli.
Fabian, Johannes. 2014. “Ethnography and Intersubjectivity: Loose Ends.” HAU: Journal
of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 199–­209.
Freud, Sigmund. (1912) 1971. “The Dynamics of the Transference.” In Collected Papers,
Volume 2, translated by Joan Riviere, 312–­22. London: Hogarth Press.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1829) 2013. “Italienische Reise: Auch ich in Arkadien!”
In Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, edited by Michael Holzinger, Band
11. Berliner Ausgabe: Edition Holzinger.
Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2015. “Drawing with a Camera? Ethnographic
Film and Transformative Anthropology.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
21 (2): 255–­75.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971 “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommu-
nikativen Kompetenz.” In Theorie-­Diskussion Jürgen Habermas/Niklas Luhmann, Theorie
der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie –­Was leistet die Systemforschung?, edited by Jürgen
Habermas, Dieter Henrich, and Jakob Taubes, 101–­41. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag.
Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Ingold, Tim. 2014. “That’s Enough about Ethnography.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic
Theory 4 (1): 383–­95.
Jay, Martin. 2008. “Scopic Regime of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal
Foster, 3–­23. Seattle: Bay Press.
Kashanipour, Jasamin. 2016. “Seeing and Being Seen: An Anthropological Study with
Life Drawing Models.” Doctoral diss., University of Vienna, Austria.
Kashanipour, Jasamin. 2021. “The Gradual Gaze: Drawing as a Practice of Ethnographic
Description.” Anthropology and Humanism 46 (1): 81–­94.
Kuschnir, Karina. 2014. “Teaching Anthropologists to Draw: A Didactic Research
Experience.” Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 3 (2): 23–­46.
Larcher, Jonathan, and Noémie Oxley. 2015. “Current Dilemmas of the Ethnographer
behind the Camera: Visual Inquiry and Idiomatic Filmmaking Practices.” Anthrovision
[Online] 3 (2). https://doi.org/10.4000/anthr​ovisi​on.1572
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. “The Right to Look.” Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 473–­96.
Olivar, Nieto, and José Miguel. 2007. “Dibujando Putas: Reflexiones de una Experiencia
Etnográfica con Apariciones Fenomenológicas.” Revista Chilena de Antropologia Visual
(10): 1–­14.
Okely, Judith. 2007. “Fieldwork Embodied.” The Sociological Review 55 (s1): 65–­79.
Pink, Sarah. 2007. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage.
Kashanipour The Third Figure 13

Scheper-­ Hughes, Nancy. 2004. “Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the

Organs-­Trafficking Underworld.” Ethnography 5 (1): 29–­73.
Spittler, Gerd. 2001. “Teilnehmende Beobachtung als Dichte Teilnahme.” Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie 126 (1): 1–­25.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. 2003. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual
Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taussig, Michael. 2009. “What Do Drawings Want?” Culture, Theory and Critique 50 (2-­3):
263–­74.
Weber, Sandra. 2008. “Visual Images in Research.” In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative
Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, edited by Gary J. Knowles
and Ardra L. Cole, 41–­53. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.