Showing papers in "Visual Anthropology in 2007"

The Corporeal Image

Abstract: A new book by David MacDougall is always as event, as he is one of the few practicing ethnographic filmmakers who has written in a sustained way about the mutually informing relationship between hi...

Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology

Abstract: This paper explores the use of repeat photography as a powerful method to produce knowledge about place. I use examples from research in Waterton Lakes National Park, Canada, to describe the process of making a repeat photograph, from locating images in archives, to the embodied act of locating a historic vantage point, to the production of a new photograph. This act brings art and anthropology into a shared space to recreate photographs, an act that goes beyond looking at historical images in archives to move our thinking onward about how we relate to images.

What Is Visual Knowledge, and What Is It Good For? Potential Ethnographic Lessons from the Field of Legal Practice

Abstract: A firm basis exists for an instructive exchange between anthropologists and legal scholars regarding the production, dissemination, and interpretation of visual meaning in this digital era. The practice and theory of law and anthropology today are increasingly being shaped and informed by what appears on electronic screens—in the field, the workplace, and inside the classroom. Practicing lawyers and ethnographers need new tools of analysis and representation to meet the intellectual and aesthetic demands of digital visual rhetoric. This article offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the visual meaning-making process on the open source borderland between disciplinary expertise and pop cultural communication.

Drama, Desire, and Debate: Mass-Mediated Subjectivities in Urban Mali

Abstract: In this article, the author takes the engagement of Malian urbanites with US American soap operas and Brazilian telenovelas as a point of entry into an exploration of the forms of public subjectivity that mass-mediated entertainment culture in Mali creates, and simultaneously presupposes. To that end, she examines the extent to which, and forms in which television intervenes in the daily experiences of different groups of urban consumers, as the principal channel through which particular visions of a modern subject-as-consumer are conveyed, yet also locally rearranged. Moreover, drawing on recent scholarship on the articulation of new media technologies, an expanding commercial entertainment culture, and the work of imagination, she assesses the multi-dimensional opportunities and practices of sense-making that soap operas and telenovelas generate as a specific media genre.

Telenovelas Reception by Women in Bouaké (Côte D'Ivoire) and Bamako (Mali)

Abstract: In Bamako and Bouake, women's craving for telenovelas evidences the fact that television triggers an identity dynamics in them. First of all in their external appearance, imitating clothing and hairstyle makes of these series a source of inspiration for fashion. Secondly, television, as a window to an alien world, allows them to become aware of their own social relations and to want them transformed. This is done through parent/child relationships, their conditions as spouses or spouses-to-be, and lastly, the daily exposure to love manifestations.

Church Festivals and the visualization of identity in Collingwood Bay, Papua New Guinea

Abstract: In Collingwood Bay, people celebrate the individual saints after which each Anglican church is named. These church festivals are a combination of Christian worship and traditional music and dances. They vary from small, village-based happenings to large regional performances in which objects and food are exchanged. For the Maisin people, the festivals not only express dedication to the church, they also embody the spirit of past clan festivities that connected clans and commemorated clan ancestors. This article 1 discusses how, for the Maisin people, church festivals provide a contemporary arena in which various identities, emotions, and knowledge as well as affiliations are actually embodied and expressed visually.

Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues: Rouch's Family of “Scoundrels” in Niger

Abstract: This article is an investigation of the dialogic collaboration between Jean Rouch and his family of “Scoundrels,” with whom Rouch made numerous films in Niger. By “walking in the footsteps of Jean Rouch” and making a film with these informants, friends, and collaborators, the author has studied their methodologies. In this essay, she discusses their dialogic aspects, including the impact of this collaboration on the lives of the informants. She poses the question of whether dialogic methods may lead not only to the sharing of knowledge but also to a dialogic exchange of ways of knowing.

Seeing the invisible: Yolngu video as revelatory ritual

Abstract: This paper describes a video conceived and codirected by a first-time Yolngu video-maker, Bangana Wunungmurra. Made in local languages and in accordance with indigenous protocols and priorities, the video, Gularri: That Brings Unity, works to reproduce the potent, socially constitutive effects of highly restricted revelatory ritual—for an unrestricted television audience. The paper explores how, under Yolngu direction, the video camera becomes a powerful technology for mediating the relationship between the inside and outside of things, the sacred and the public, the invisible and the visible, thereby challenging conventional Western understandings of image-making and spectatorship, representation, and “cultural resistance.”1

Video for Development

Abstract: This paper breaches the traditional frontiers of visual anthropology and argues for a greater advocacy role within the research-based community. Arguing that visual anthropology should now move “beyond theory” to the more pragmatic science of “development communication,” the paper examines techniques commonly used in ethnographic film, and analyzes media case studies from development projects in Egypt and Pakistan. It demonstrates that video can capture voices and communicate ideas to planners and policy makers better than any other communication tool, and achieve a greater impact in transforming, for example, the image of rural women and the hierarchies of power that constrain their participation in development. It concludes that visual anthropologists, as media producers, are uniquely well equipped to use their expertise and knowledge of the field and of local languages to act as mediators, spurring interactions and building consensus between different developmental “actors.” In this way they could work...

Iraq in Fragments

Abstract: Iraq in Fragments is the most interesting—visually, conceptually, and ethnographically—of the spate of Iraq documentaries that had emerged by 2006. Filmed to enhance color contrast, with astonishing compositions and sound portraits, it offers a darkly beautiful picture of daily life in a war zone. Its greatest achievement, though, is to document movingly the enormous gap in cultural understanding between Iraqis and the Americans, and secondarily among Iraqis themselves. It says much, and gracefully, about Iraqis, but much more about what Americans do not know about them and, even more, if indirectly, about the wealth of ambiguity in cross-cultural encounter. The film takes place in three neatly and modestly delineated segments: Baghdad, where we follow the Dickensian plight of an 11-year-old orphan; a city in the Shiite south, where strident young Moqtada al-Sadr supporters wrestle with runaway success; and rural Kurdistan, where a pubescent sheep herder has to decide whether to keep on trying to study to be the imam of his father’s dreams. The tripartite organization recapitulates the argument of the film, made by several of its subjects: that the American invasion precipitated a political crisis that will shatter the country formerly known as Iraq. It also evokes the multifaceted, partial knowledge of the foreign observer. The film, a one-man effort by James Longley, won ‘‘best cinematography, editing, and directing’’ at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award, among its many other recognitions. These awards honored both the remarkable technical and narrative skill of the film and also the political moment in which the tide of American public opinion had shifted against the Iraq war. Iraq in Fragments was both a politically convenient and an appropriate place to make a critical statement. Longley is an observer by choice, a participant by method, a storyteller by trade. Armed with a B.A. in Russian from Wesleyan University and a desire to make a film, he headed blindly to Gaza out of frustration with what was missing in news coverage from Palestine. He settled in for months and, focusing on a 13-year-old boy, told a story of daily life under occupation that captured remarkable attention: Gaza Strip [2002]. As the war with Iraq loomed, he took his film’s DVD proceeds and visited there. After a brief departure during the invasion, he moved back for two years, until April 2005. Using contacts from Amnesty International and translators, he insinuated himself into the daily Visual Anthropology, 21: 91–93, 2008 ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460701689005

Women of Mauritania: Cathodic Images and Presentation of the Self

Abstract: The article analyzes the transformations the female body has been the site of among Mauritanians in recent decades, and the role which visual media play in this matter. These media, and television in particular, offer women, in process of breaking away from traditional definitions of their sex, models which they can embrace. Recently, tensions have not failed to arise between their aspiration for modernity and religious imperatives demanding reaffirmation, which themselves are also expressed through the medium of the television channel.

Embodiment of the Gaze: Vision, Planning, and Weaving between Filmic Ethnography and Cultural Technology

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss problems concerning the observation and cinematographic description of technical practices. Which meaning should we attribute today to this topic within the present framework of the ethno-anthropological disciplines? Starting from an experience of observation and video documentation of traditional weaving in Sardinia, I propose to define a visual approach based on the principles of cultural technology in some of its recent developments.

Felting Between East and West

Abstract: The tradition of felt-making today is closely associated with nomadic peoples. The archaeological remains of felt are sparse. Sizable fragments have been recovered from graves at Pazyryk and Noin Ula. Designs from felt occur in other arts, spanning a longer time frame that makes reconstructing a tentative history of felt-making possible. There is clear evidence from China expressed in ceramic designs and from felt designs on Turkish coins. Modern felts made in Hungary could be part of a very long tradition of felt-making by Central Asian nomads, or might be part of a historical “revival” of a transplanted historical tradition. There is certainly a perceived sense of identity with Central Asia that is supported by a long period of shared history.

A Review of: “Handbook of Material Culture”

Abstract: Handbook of Material Culture is just one of a number of compendia published by multinational companies as comprehensive reference works on very specific topics. Blackwell's Companions in Cultural S...

Jean Rouch and the Birth of Visual Anthropology: A Brief History of the Comité international du film ethnographique

Abstract: The true scope of Jean Rouch's international activities for the advancement of visual anthropology is little known. Few in the field today are aware that he was for more than 10 years the driving force of the Comite international du film ethnographique, where he was secretary-general as of 1958. It is thanks to his initiative, backed by UNESCO, that the first anthropologist–filmmakers were able to present their films (and often see them hotly debated) in Paris, Brussels, Prague, Venice, Florence, and Locarno. He was, together with sociologist Edgar Morin (with whom he would produce the influential film Chronique d'un ete), one of the collaborators of the Florence Festival dei Popoli, then entirely devoted to ethnographic and sociological films. Here Luc de Heusch, closely associated to Jean Rouch throughout those intrepid times, chronicles the seminal years of visual anthropology.

Anthropology and Cinema: Visual Representations of Human Rights, Displacement and Resistance in Come Back Africa, by Lionel Rogosin

Abstract: This article is devoted to reevaluating the anthropological importance of the work of Lionel Rogosin, whose films, like those of Jean Rouch and Robert Flaherty before him, reflect a symbiosis between cinema and visual research. Focused on apartheid, civil rights, and displacement, his filmmaking activity includes such important titles as Come Back Africa [2004], on the apartheid in South Africa during the 1950s, and On the Bowery [1956], located in inner-city New York in the 1960s. I believe his work should be positioned within anthropology and cinema, and analyzed for use of an approach of the “participant camera.”

In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman

Abstract: In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman. Anya Bernstein, director; 2006. 75 mins., color, in Russian and Buryat with English subtitles. Distributor: DER, 101 Morse St., Watertown, MA 02472.

Lives of the Bengali Painters

Abstract: These two films portray the lives and art of the patua or chitrakar scroll-painters of a village some 60 miles from Kolkata in India’s West Bengal state, where both of them were shot. They showcase a time-honored occupational tradition, the transmittal of both epic and folk narratives by creating marvelously painted scroll panels depicting the storyline which they convey through song. ‘‘Singing pictures,’’ as the title of one of the films aptly expresses it, is what these people make and do. Both films stress the patuas’ performance repertoire as including both the fabulous Hindu epics and the storied exploits of Muslim pirs (‘‘saints’’), emphasizing the group’s composite Hindu=Muslim religious identity, quite reminiscent of the Bauls of Bengal, a far-better-known group of itinerant religious folk musicians. All the singers and the painters of scrolls (of pat, the ‘‘leaf’’ of a plant or book) listed in the credits of both films are surnamed chitrakar, literally ‘‘picture makers,’’ suggesting an endogamous, caste-like identity; but neither film confirms that impression outright. Both films are replete with lovingly composed scenes of the Bengal countryside and sequences showing the persistence of rural subsistence, residential, and food-preparation patterns that could have been shot 50 years ago. If the viewer is interested primarily in the scroll painting as an art form, then Gone to Pat should be viewed first, or as a stand-alone, although ideally the two films should be seen together. Pat does a good job of showing technique, how and from what substances the paints are produced, and how the scrolls themselves are created. It does have some extended dialog with the men who paint, compose, and ‘‘sing’’ the scrolls, and from them we learn the basic economics as well as the challenges posed by modern media to their performance traditions. At the end of this film, allusion is made to the fact that the scroll painter=singers have had to adapt by composing songs that speak to contemporary social issues, especially those of concern to women. This film, however, contains no narrative, relying on written intertitles to provide basic background or interpretive commentary. Spoken Bengali dialog is clearly subtitled, but the several extended song performances are not, leaving non-Bengali viewers and others unfamiliar with Indian cultural Visual Anthropology, 20: 305–307, 2007 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460701424270

Web Anthropology: Some Potentials for Visual and Computer Anthropology

Abstract: About five years ago I designed and set up a website to test the possibilities of using the Internet for teaching and research. This site (www.alanmacfarlane.com) now has quite a wide range of mate...

A Review of: “South African Visual Culture”

Abstract: The editors of Visual Culture have assembled a densely packaged retrospective on South African visual culture. The questions addressed in the book include: What worldviews are created by contemporary South African visual culture? What does our visual culture tell us about our imagination, reality, fears, and expectations? What is the contemporary relevance of visual culture as an inherited legacy of Khoisan stone paintings, cyber-symbology, or urban graffiti? How are we to conceptualize such culture—is it by using a Western episteme of African gnosis or rather by striving for a dual historical axis? This publication is about visual culture from the early days of European settlement to the present hybrid of late capitalism. Most illuminating for this volume is its grounding in contemporary perspectives from writers living and working in thematic areas interrogated, such as marginalization of women and subcultures in South African urban settings. As the editors note, this book is written from multiple vantage points, interrogating cross-fertilization nodes in media theory, cultural studies, marketing research, popular culture, and e-zine sites. A thread running throughout explores the asymmetrical power relations defining, controlling, and sustaining participation of marginalized views; a directional objective simply being to offer visual culture of ‘‘everyday life’’ that is indicative of the democratization of cultural production and distribution. Jeanne van Eeden is interested in the role of the entertainment economy of postcoionial South African visual culture, while Amanda du Preez’s horizon alternates between gender and the new technologies interface. Contours of the editors and contributors tender a broad focus on historical scope and intimate knowledge on areas under discussion, ‘‘not in order to present a definitive overview of the field, but rather to map out some of the avenues that are currently being explored’’ (in advertising, film, video, magazines, etc.). An unfolding of historical moments framed within visual media hegemony should say something on the Berlin Wall’s fall, Tienanmen Square, the release of Nelson Mandela, 9=11, and Gulf War II. These occurrences have all marked what is described in Visual Culture as a ‘‘tele-sublime’’ commoditized image-making. Visual Culture is centered on a political economy of global media discourse. The preamble states, ‘‘the legacy of apartheid’s visualized system of racialization leaves a burden of suspicion to be negotiated by those who assert that the visual is central to the contemporary form of globalisation’’ [foreword]. But is visual culture—such as Visual Anthropology, 20: 337–342, 2007 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460701424437