"Don’t lean on a canon where none exists"

Tristan Partridge

Exhibited at: Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association
New Orleans, USA
Saturday 22 November 2025


“Don’t lean on a canon where none exists” is an annotated video collage of source materials reflecting the vast range of diagrams found across academic, aesthetic, and political pursuits. Despite seemingly limitless variations, they remain intuitively recognizable as communicative tools. Diagrams are devices of abstraction, rendering ideas, concepts, and relations visible. Echoing such processes of translation, the title of this piece quotes Sandy Stone describing the challenge of translating ‘incomprehensible weirdness’ into ‘institutional clarity’ – specifically for strategic, transgressive, or subversive ends. Within anthropology, diagrams are rarely analyzed or critiqued. They have become a ‘normal’ part of the anthropological canon, itself a narrow construct, shaped and reinforced through habit, violence, and particular notions of time. The canon renders anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles as peripheral. Scrutinizing diagrams and their use is an invitation to invert these processes – to reassess the role of the visual, to disrupt the replication of centralizing canons, and to refuse adherence to disciplinary normalcy.

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Tristan Partridge (2025)