Each time we say farewell to a paradigm, a research area, a condition for the practice of anthropology or history in general, it soon turns out that it returns in a different, new form and not necessarily as a farce, as a classic of social thought would say. With the famous “end of history” of Francis Fukuyama we were supposed to move to a liberal society free of social frictions, formed by reference to the individual as the starting point of politics and social governance. Although politics and economics are still based on this individualistic paradigm, symptoms of an attempt to build community anew can be noticed. These attempts are additionally strengthened by the now permanent financial crisis, which began in 2008, or by the European universalism bursting at the seams. Here, from the anthropologist's point of view, the first issue arises, namely: how to link these global processes to local forms of identity or community generation? It is hard to find a direct impact of financial transactions made thousands of kilometres away from Poland on the specific community of allotment garden users and their struggle to maintain them. What links both processes is placing the intertwining of economics, culture, and ideology, for which "profitability" is the point of reference, into the global transformations. Here, of course, the problem of the anthropologist's involvement in research appears, and it is a problem not so much of research ethics as of the ethics of the researchers, that is, what set of values they will share. The so-called engagement turn in anthropology and ethnographic research has already been signalled in Poland and is more and more often treated as a basic paradigm. In the present publication we propose to look at this change from the perspective of attempts to set artistic and animation practices to ethnographic research.
 Such analyses, supplemented with a review of theories concerning methodology of this sort of research, constitute an attempt to identify the "zero degree" of practising anthropology.