Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner
Check out the website for The Fast Runner, the Inuit film depicting their creation myth. I really love this movie because there is no explanation for why things are--you just have to watch it and interpret the different facets of Inuit life, such as courtship or passing time in the igloo. Like Itam hakim,hopiit it's a totally different viewing experience. Inuit humor is really silly and awesome. Check it out!
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Museum Talk Overheard
So, in order to get closer to children and gain insight into their learning process at the museum--I carried a digital recorder around, sidling up to different groups of people and recording their conversations. Most people didn't know I was around.
One has to listen very cafefully to these samples. Below is a playlist and synopsis of what each clip is dealing with. I've also added transcripts of the conversations where it is difficult to hear. Sometimes the best part doesn't come until the end, so listen to the whole thing.
Real Cheetah Fur--two little girls ask their mom "Is that real cheetah fur?" in the African Peoples Hall.
Transcript:
Girl 1: Is that real cheetah fur?
Girl 2: I think so.
Girl 1: Let me see it.
Girl 2: Now wonder why they’re almost extinct.
Mother: (Reads sign)
Yes, Lindsay.
Girl 1: It’s real?
Girl 2: It’s Leopard?
Girl 1: Leopard?
Girl 2: It looks like cheetah!
He's Naked!--little boy and dad look at the model of an ancient Egyptian irrigation system in the African Peoples Hall
Mermaids and Dragons--the current show at the AMNH is about mythical creatures. also the IMAX film. listen and ponder...
Great Wall--sometimes it doesn't matter what is written on the placard. two kids in front of a model of Peking in the Asian Peoples Hall
Uncle Charles--the child says, "Take a picture of Uncle Charles," while pointing to Akeley's favorite gorilla from the diorama
Giant Whale--we learn children aren't the only one looking for it
In'juns--how the John Wayne generation explains native America; Hall of Native American Peoples
Mother (to her son): These are all Indian chiefs here, ‘cause they got headdresses on.
They’re trying to make a fire and they’re gonna try and decide, if they’re gonna attack the white man! ARRRR!
(laughs)
No, I think they’re tradi’n their goods.
So that’s nice…
Look at all the food in the bowls and stuff.
Look they got pretty dresses on, let’s go look at their costumes over here.
Motherly Mead--taped this at the entrance to the Pacific Peoples Hall, from a video about Mead
Let's Read It--the classic scenario: kids ask questions, parents consult the placard
Listening to what people say while interacting with the museum shines a lot of light on how the technology (now so embedded into the narrative of childhood) funtions, even if it looks like a Wes Anderson movie in there.
One has to listen very cafefully to these samples. Below is a playlist and synopsis of what each clip is dealing with. I've also added transcripts of the conversations where it is difficult to hear. Sometimes the best part doesn't come until the end, so listen to the whole thing.
Real Cheetah Fur--two little girls ask their mom "Is that real cheetah fur?" in the African Peoples Hall.
Transcript:
Girl 1: Is that real cheetah fur?
Girl 2: I think so.
Girl 1: Let me see it.
Girl 2: Now wonder why they’re almost extinct.
Mother: (Reads sign)
Yes, Lindsay.
Girl 1: It’s real?
Girl 2: It’s Leopard?
Girl 1: Leopard?
Girl 2: It looks like cheetah!
He's Naked!--little boy and dad look at the model of an ancient Egyptian irrigation system in the African Peoples Hall
Mermaids and Dragons--the current show at the AMNH is about mythical creatures. also the IMAX film. listen and ponder...
Great Wall--sometimes it doesn't matter what is written on the placard. two kids in front of a model of Peking in the Asian Peoples Hall
Uncle Charles--the child says, "Take a picture of Uncle Charles," while pointing to Akeley's favorite gorilla from the diorama
Giant Whale--we learn children aren't the only one looking for it
In'juns--how the John Wayne generation explains native America; Hall of Native American Peoples
Mother (to her son): These are all Indian chiefs here, ‘cause they got headdresses on.
They’re trying to make a fire and they’re gonna try and decide, if they’re gonna attack the white man! ARRRR!
(laughs)
No, I think they’re tradi’n their goods.
So that’s nice…
Look at all the food in the bowls and stuff.
Look they got pretty dresses on, let’s go look at their costumes over here.
Motherly Mead--taped this at the entrance to the Pacific Peoples Hall, from a video about Mead
Let's Read It--the classic scenario: kids ask questions, parents consult the placard
Listening to what people say while interacting with the museum shines a lot of light on how the technology (now so embedded into the narrative of childhood) funtions, even if it looks like a Wes Anderson movie in there.
Museum Talk
The role of the museum--specifically the AMNH--in the lives of young children was a theme that appeared in both Haraway and class conversations. Not only have natural history museums gained an equally natural place is the standard field-trip canon of childhood, this museum is highly identitfied with what it means to be a New York child. As Harlan mentioned, this museum shows up all the time in popular culture.
Why do we take children to the museum? To learn of course. Yet stripping back the layers of mediation, as Haraway does, we see that the museum funtions as a technology to expose participants to a certain normalizing ideology. Youth, Nature, Manhood, and The State aside, what do we really learn in museums? What does the child's mind, actually take away from the day spent with nose to the glass? What do adults learn, for that matter?
I became very interested in checking in with kids at the museum; to see if a certain knowledge was produced, and by who. I had a sneaking suspicion that parents know little beyond what's written on the trite little placard, and this "knowledge" is what they pass on to their irksome and trying children, hopped up on Juicy Juice, trying to make sense out of the real/fake stuffed giraffe standing next to their McClaren stroller.
At first, I wanted to take photos of the children. But as I soon realized, parents get creeped out when you try and take close-ups that capture pre-k enchantment. Here are the distant shots I was able to gather. But it wasn't close enough. So I decided to record. More later.
Monday, December 3, 2007
World Town: NYC Chronotype in 2007
“A refugee in New York during the second World war, the anthropologist [Claude Levi-Strauss] is bewildered and delighted by a landscape of unexpected juxtapositions. His recollections of those years, during which he invented structural anthropology, are bathed in a magical light…As Levi-Strauss tells it, the New York of 1941 is an anthropologists’s dream, a vast selection of human culture and history…In New York one can obtain almost any treasure….Everything somehow finds its way here. For Levi- Strauss New York in the 1940s is a wonderland of sudden openings to other times and places, of cultural matters out of place” (237-238).
Sixty years later, New York is still the place to obtain any treasure, still a dense, intense, overlapping and interacting space where countless cultural circuits are at work. At the same time, New York is also a nucleus of late capitalism; it is here where we may also view the gradual homogenization of global cities. The chief difference between Levi-Strauss’s New York and ours is perhaps that we think about those juxtapositions and sudden openings; today we worry less about vanishing words.
Once while walking up Broadway in Soho, I passed a familiar face. Celebrity sighting number 587687667, big deal. A tall interesting-looking dude with a distinctive nose passed, sporting a hot purple jacket, baggy dark jeans, and a pair of bright Nike Air Max sneakers. He was carrying a skateboard and talking sweetly to an equally stylish girl by his side. I walked passed and heard an excited group of teenagers squeal, “That was Mos Def!”
This celeb moment has stuck with me, because I love Mos Def, but also because it was a visual example of why today, “cultural matters” in fact do not seem out of place in New York. We live in the age of hybrids and mash-ups and we are accustomed to it. What did I imagine a rapper to look like? Mos Def was carrying a skateboard, not a sports jersey. His jacket was skate but his jeans were hip-hop. Self-consciously I thought about the enormous fake gold doorknocker earrings I was rocking at the time, the ones that made me feel a little sheepish in the subway—did people think I was trying to be Puerto Rican? First I was a gentrifier; now I was appropriating the very culture of the folks I was displacing! But here was Mos Def, culture-crossing along with me.
In “On Collecting Art and Culture,” J. Clifford posits that traditionally “culture” has been viewed as whole, unified, and enduring. “Culture is a process of ordering, not of disruption. It changes and develops like a living organism. It does not normally ‘survive’ abrupt alternations” (235). Clifford brings forth the example of Margaret Mead and the Mountain Arapesh. “Mead found Arapesh receptivity to outside influences ‘annoying.’ Their culture collecting complicated hers” (232). The Arapesh, like our modern day New Yorkers, interact within several cultures at once, and quite naturally so. Mead wants the Arapesh to have an isolated culture, enduring from times past, that does not demonstrate the influence of “the outside world” (230-231).
This model, viewing cultural authenticity as related to historicity or preservation in “another time,” is the same technology that Donna Haraway analyzes as functioning at the American Museum of Natural History in Teddy Bear Patriarchy. “To see ethnography as a form of culture collecting…highlights the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached, from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement” (231). In the context of the Museum, this means that certain ways of presentation may lead to essentialist notions of cultures, rather than nuanced and materially complicated ones. For example, a sign reads “Masks and Magic,” above an assortment of African masks. All the masks are grouped together, inferring similar uses and meanings, when in actuality they could have been collected from all parts of the continent and function in very distinct ways.
But the xenophobic logic of preservation that forms the underlying ideology of the AMNH has not persisted. As Clifford shows in his diagram of the “Art-Culture System,” today’s material culture can travel all over, a landscape stretching from MoMA to the souvenir shops of Times Square. And this is reflected in the real life materials choices of New Yorkers. When I wear my gold earrings, I’m participating in my own culture collecting, and this is a multi-layered process that shows how “appropriation” of culture cannot be defined as merely good or bad thing, appropriate or inappropriate. Now more than ever our definitions of culture are rapidly changing, with all rhetoric and concrete material processes of globalization. Gone are the days when we can be annoyed by the Mountain Arapesh reading the index of the Golden Bough.
On the subject of primitive art and its eventual inclusion in the modern fine art canon, Clifford writes, “What had begun with the vogue for l’art nègre in the twenties would become institutionalized by the fifties and sixties; but in wartime New York the battle to gain widespread recognition for tribal objects was not yet one” (239). Again in 2007, we find ourselves in war time New York. What objects are traveling through the art-culture machine today? How has the New York chronotype changed, and what therefore do we constitute as the material corpus of our hybridized, globalized culture? If we remade the AMNH today, with a focus on NYC, what would it look like?
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Tierra Santa!
Tierra Santa is a theme park in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that features a life size recreation of the Holy Land! A rich ethnographic space--I personally washed the feet of Jesus, observed the last supper, and dined on Holy Land pizza. It was amazing. I went during Holy Week, so entire families were out interacting with this visual/narrative/diorama. The AMNH wants to preserve, while this place wants to make a believed-but-not-seen past into a present, material truth. I went to here six months ago, and I still can't stop thinking about Tierra Santa.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
on claiming reality
The Little Dear, 1946. Frida Kahlo
When Breton saw Frida's work, he declared her a surrealist.
Frida said, "I paint my own reality."
She is also rumored to have said, "They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris."
Frida was en ethnographer in her own right, I think. She invested herself deeply in the folkloric of Mexico, and who else better to learn about embodied knowledge, than from someone whose body was mutilated and constantly reproduced through the image?
your FACE is surrealist!
“Ethnography combined with surrealism can no longer be seen as the empirical, descriptive dimension of anthropology, a general science of the human. Nor is it the interpretation of cultures, for the planet cannot be seen as divided into distinct, textualized ways of life. Ethnography cut with surrealism emerges as a theory and practice of juxtaposition. It studies, and is part of, the invention and interruption of meaningful wholes in works of cultural import-export” (147).
What does a surrealist ethnography look like? Or an ethnography that uses elements of surrealism? What is surrealist about Land Without Bread? Or better yet, how does Land Without Bread demonstrate a surrealist way of knowing? (I’m really posing these questions—answer me!)
Clifford notes, “I am using the term surrealism in an obviously expanded sense to circumscribe an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (118). I think Clifford is explaining that his conception of “surrealist ethnography,” or their intersection, or their mutual abilities to generate new meanings of self and other, doesn’t necessarily have to do with what we think of as “surrealist” art per se. In other words, I need not summon images of French aristocrats inspiring themselves with the wealth of spiritual and exotic outlets so many primitives may lend them. Right?
He wants to view surrealist as a way of seeing, that in turn will produce knowledges. Land Without Bread confused me though, because it seemed straightforward in its ethnographic methodology, whether it’s meant to be parody or not. When I first thought of “surrealism” and “ethnography” as related concepts, Juan Downey’s Laughing Alligator came immediately to mind. If surrealism is about being open to other realities, breaking down the whole and seeing the fragments, and juxtaposing those fragments in new ways, then Downey’s film seemed to demonstrate this well. The aspect of Laughing Alligator that appealed to me so was that it supposed that Yanomami consciousness, and sub-consciousness, aught to be explored, even through the somewhat cheesy tricks of late 70’s video art.
If we are not to think of surrealism in this context as directly aligned with the artistic movement of the same name, and more of an attempt to use “the full human potential for cultural expression,” then putting a surrealist label on ethnography seems to me to be more of a symbolic act than an actual practice (129). In practice, I hope, ethnographers have been attempting to see or capture alternate realities for a long while.
At the same time, I know Clifford is not advocating that we put a surrealist label on ethnography. He draws a distinction between ethnographic surrealism and it’s converse, surrealist ethnography (146). Yet I don’t understand what methodologies might support a surrealist ethnography. He states, “An ethnographic surrealist practice…attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. Two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other” (146). This is an interesting juxtaposition with MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema, which seemed to want us to look for the similar, the familiar, to find that the other and ourself were/are not so different or apart. Might MacDougall and Clifford be saying essentially the same thing, but phrasing it in distinct ways?
Clifford closes his essay by using two examples that demonstrate “juxtaposition and intervention in the modern world system” (147). The first is the typified surrealist scenario—Picasso sees an “African” mask and voila—cubism! Clifford writes, “Something new was occurring in the presence of something exotic,” or, being exposed to something new but that also is a expression of the human experience will lead us to understand others, but mostly ourselves, in a fresh and meaningful way (148).
The second example is more specific. Trobriand islanders, handed the colonial practice of playing cricket, end up playing the game in the post-Malinowski era, but in a tricked-out, carnivalesque, and basically Trobriand way. So humans will ingest, invert and subvert the cultural mandates given to them; even the colonized are actors with agency and the power to negotiate meaning. For Clifford, the blue plastic Adidas bag from which the Trobriand shaman-umpire extracts his betel nuts can be viewed in a similar vein as Picasso’s African masks—and this exemplifies ethnographic surrealism. I see this interplay as less surrealist per se, and more of a plain old example of why we cannot talk about the tribe any longer. Ethnographic objects cross boundaries, are re-positioned, invested with new meanings, are re-presented.
I’m not doubting (read: criticizing) Clifford’s connections between surrealism and ethnography. I just need to understand more fully what he means when he writes of a surrealist ethnographic attitude.
What does a surrealist ethnography look like? Or an ethnography that uses elements of surrealism? What is surrealist about Land Without Bread? Or better yet, how does Land Without Bread demonstrate a surrealist way of knowing? (I’m really posing these questions—answer me!)
Clifford notes, “I am using the term surrealism in an obviously expanded sense to circumscribe an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (118). I think Clifford is explaining that his conception of “surrealist ethnography,” or their intersection, or their mutual abilities to generate new meanings of self and other, doesn’t necessarily have to do with what we think of as “surrealist” art per se. In other words, I need not summon images of French aristocrats inspiring themselves with the wealth of spiritual and exotic outlets so many primitives may lend them. Right?
He wants to view surrealist as a way of seeing, that in turn will produce knowledges. Land Without Bread confused me though, because it seemed straightforward in its ethnographic methodology, whether it’s meant to be parody or not. When I first thought of “surrealism” and “ethnography” as related concepts, Juan Downey’s Laughing Alligator came immediately to mind. If surrealism is about being open to other realities, breaking down the whole and seeing the fragments, and juxtaposing those fragments in new ways, then Downey’s film seemed to demonstrate this well. The aspect of Laughing Alligator that appealed to me so was that it supposed that Yanomami consciousness, and sub-consciousness, aught to be explored, even through the somewhat cheesy tricks of late 70’s video art.
If we are not to think of surrealism in this context as directly aligned with the artistic movement of the same name, and more of an attempt to use “the full human potential for cultural expression,” then putting a surrealist label on ethnography seems to me to be more of a symbolic act than an actual practice (129). In practice, I hope, ethnographers have been attempting to see or capture alternate realities for a long while.
At the same time, I know Clifford is not advocating that we put a surrealist label on ethnography. He draws a distinction between ethnographic surrealism and it’s converse, surrealist ethnography (146). Yet I don’t understand what methodologies might support a surrealist ethnography. He states, “An ethnographic surrealist practice…attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. Two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other” (146). This is an interesting juxtaposition with MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema, which seemed to want us to look for the similar, the familiar, to find that the other and ourself were/are not so different or apart. Might MacDougall and Clifford be saying essentially the same thing, but phrasing it in distinct ways?
Clifford closes his essay by using two examples that demonstrate “juxtaposition and intervention in the modern world system” (147). The first is the typified surrealist scenario—Picasso sees an “African” mask and voila—cubism! Clifford writes, “Something new was occurring in the presence of something exotic,” or, being exposed to something new but that also is a expression of the human experience will lead us to understand others, but mostly ourselves, in a fresh and meaningful way (148).
The second example is more specific. Trobriand islanders, handed the colonial practice of playing cricket, end up playing the game in the post-Malinowski era, but in a tricked-out, carnivalesque, and basically Trobriand way. So humans will ingest, invert and subvert the cultural mandates given to them; even the colonized are actors with agency and the power to negotiate meaning. For Clifford, the blue plastic Adidas bag from which the Trobriand shaman-umpire extracts his betel nuts can be viewed in a similar vein as Picasso’s African masks—and this exemplifies ethnographic surrealism. I see this interplay as less surrealist per se, and more of a plain old example of why we cannot talk about the tribe any longer. Ethnographic objects cross boundaries, are re-positioned, invested with new meanings, are re-presented.
I’m not doubting (read: criticizing) Clifford’s connections between surrealism and ethnography. I just need to understand more fully what he means when he writes of a surrealist ethnographic attitude.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
LA CIÉNAGA de Lucrecia Martel
Lucretia Martel is an Argentinian filmmaker whose fictional works are often mistaken for documental footage. I think that she employs sound as a way of immersing us in the perceptual, similar to the MacDougalls. She also uses a long-shot style, (althought I'm not sure it's as apparent in this clip), that is unusual in feature film. In this excerpt from La Cienaga, notice how the sounds inform our knowledge of the situation. In this media manipulated age, in which we see and believe, how might sound come to be the special refuge of the enthonographic filmmaker intersted in multi-voiced objectivities?
To give some background, this is a highly cerebral movie about Argentine cultural psyche, social decomposition, class, etc. It concerns a family of pepper-growers in the northern province of Salta, and what happens after the mother falls and cuts her chest on broken wine glasses.
View and (hopefully) love:
ohhhh, so this is Ethnographic Film!
Long before the Lumiere brothers, long before Guttenberg and his fantastic printing press, long before the Chinese rice paper—how did we know? How did we learn? How did cultures, such as Lorang’s people, the Turkana, persist in their beliefs, mythologies, ideologies and traditions without a material medium in which to record them?
Oral culture. The act of story telling. To listen closely to the words—cadence, sounds, and gestures—of the teller. Receiving information aurally, just knowing in this most ancient of ways, has almost been entirely lost today. The storyteller becomes invisible, fades into the background, when positioned amongst the images, texts and commentary that accompany his/her telling. The story-teller in a modern-day elementary school assembly is brought around because they are entertaining; but also because they impart knowledge, and a way of knowing, that the children will not get from Sesame Street, and later from documentary film. To sit in silence, to listen (not just hear) words that carry in them the significance of knowledge confirmed by the practice of its constant reiteration, knowledge that will be lost if the cycle is not repeated; this is an uncommon experience today.
David MacDougall’s essay Transcultural Cinema is indeed a treatise on the potentialities and importance of making use of anthropology of the visual, but it is also a manifesto of his personal filmmaking ethic. MacDougall states, “If social experience cannot finally be translated, except by being first conceived linguistically, it can be made perceptible in images and sounds. But how well we perceive the experience of others depends upon the fields of consciousness we share with them” (272). This idea triggered for me two of the most solid conclusions I have come to thus far in my exploration of ethnographic film: that seeing (as opposed to reading an ethnographic text that has been legitimized by the academic institution) is another valid way in which to establish knowledge about the world, and the most successful ethnographic films are dependent on and aware of the intense bonds between subject and filmmaker, making use of this bond to increase both the epistemological and objective integrity of the film.
The MacDougall’s usage of the continuous shot, sound, and interaction between subject and filmmaker go a long way in allowing the viewer to perceive the situation. I want to think of perception in this context as something entirely different from the way we usually intake media information. Perceiving knowledge, in the case of the MacDougalls’ films, seems to require a suspension of the usual modes in intake. For example, we are conditioned to understand the different documental sources of information in Bus 174. Documents from the court system underscore our trust in the rule of law. An interview from a social worker alerts us to the potent words coming from an authority or expert. We connect these knowledges to what we’re hearing/seeing; essentially these forms of information are filtered before we think about them.
However I think David MacDougall wants to bring us back a little, not in a nostalgic or romanticizing way, but in a practical way. He wants us to consider what knowledge we may come to possess as listeners to storytelling. He wants us to immerse ourselves in sensory intake. Somehow, he believes, this will take us closer to the subject, and thus closer to an understanding. “A significant feature of filmic representation,” MacDougall notes, “approached by only a few ‘first-person’ ethnographies, is a sense of the unique personal identity of social actors” (257). Continuing:
It is not uncommon for anthropologists, after a long period in the field, to observe that someone looks or talks or relates to others exactly like a remembered friend or teacher, even though the two belong to quite different societies and speak different languages. This has implications for what features of personality we consider culturally specific or typical of certain societies, and how we assess the sense of self and autonomy of individuals (257-258).
This experience seemed rather obvious to me, but nonetheless MacDougall is exposing the sense of identification viewers can feel when they are allowed to see ethnographic subjects in natural (not hyper-mediated) contexts. In the continuous shots of Lorang and his son talking, we get to see their movements, glances, sly smiles—we get to see how their bodies move. All of these details inform how we understand their words. Because so much of an oral culture is imbued in the performative aspect of the transfer of knowledge—not in the ways we read that culture as anthropological text.
Watching Lorang talk about his life, I was struck by how his gestures and way of speaking reminded me of friends I’d known in Argentina (Argentines also love to use their hands when talking). I was struck by how his gestures, moving his hand in a large circle, communicated distance, space, and excess. Somehow, although I’m not quite sure, these gestures informed me that the Turkana have a sophisticated practice of telling. There seemed to be a lot of nuance in the way Lorang or his friend (filmed at the table), told a story.
In general, the MacDougall method seems to reinforce the authority of the subject (as actor who knows more than all about his/her own life), and allows the filmmaker to tell [the subjects’] stories on the subjects’ terms. The beginning scene of Lorang’s Way is a perfect example. Omnipotent, and aged, Lorang’s voice acts as the narrator of a powerful natural scene, and his words, combined with the image, convinces the viewer of his wisdom and knowledge about the themes we are about to embark upon discovering.
Surely there must be problematic aspects of the MacDougalls’ approach, but the film paired with the essay was a lovely way to realize the awesome (in the sense of “awe”) potentials of ethnographic film. Done with careful stylistic and ethical choices in mind, the viewer is forced to abandon other taught ways of knowing. We are drawn into a scene as fellow spectators, if not acquaintances. As cheesy as it seems, no one can hold onto false ideas for long if we meet and come to know well someone who defies those ideas. So ethnographic film, as practiced by the MacDougalls, allows us to be immersed in the experience of perceiving, getting to know Lorang or whoever it may be, intaking information in a way that may not lead us to the same conclusions as a written text.
Oral culture. The act of story telling. To listen closely to the words—cadence, sounds, and gestures—of the teller. Receiving information aurally, just knowing in this most ancient of ways, has almost been entirely lost today. The storyteller becomes invisible, fades into the background, when positioned amongst the images, texts and commentary that accompany his/her telling. The story-teller in a modern-day elementary school assembly is brought around because they are entertaining; but also because they impart knowledge, and a way of knowing, that the children will not get from Sesame Street, and later from documentary film. To sit in silence, to listen (not just hear) words that carry in them the significance of knowledge confirmed by the practice of its constant reiteration, knowledge that will be lost if the cycle is not repeated; this is an uncommon experience today.
David MacDougall’s essay Transcultural Cinema is indeed a treatise on the potentialities and importance of making use of anthropology of the visual, but it is also a manifesto of his personal filmmaking ethic. MacDougall states, “If social experience cannot finally be translated, except by being first conceived linguistically, it can be made perceptible in images and sounds. But how well we perceive the experience of others depends upon the fields of consciousness we share with them” (272). This idea triggered for me two of the most solid conclusions I have come to thus far in my exploration of ethnographic film: that seeing (as opposed to reading an ethnographic text that has been legitimized by the academic institution) is another valid way in which to establish knowledge about the world, and the most successful ethnographic films are dependent on and aware of the intense bonds between subject and filmmaker, making use of this bond to increase both the epistemological and objective integrity of the film.
The MacDougall’s usage of the continuous shot, sound, and interaction between subject and filmmaker go a long way in allowing the viewer to perceive the situation. I want to think of perception in this context as something entirely different from the way we usually intake media information. Perceiving knowledge, in the case of the MacDougalls’ films, seems to require a suspension of the usual modes in intake. For example, we are conditioned to understand the different documental sources of information in Bus 174. Documents from the court system underscore our trust in the rule of law. An interview from a social worker alerts us to the potent words coming from an authority or expert. We connect these knowledges to what we’re hearing/seeing; essentially these forms of information are filtered before we think about them.
However I think David MacDougall wants to bring us back a little, not in a nostalgic or romanticizing way, but in a practical way. He wants us to consider what knowledge we may come to possess as listeners to storytelling. He wants us to immerse ourselves in sensory intake. Somehow, he believes, this will take us closer to the subject, and thus closer to an understanding. “A significant feature of filmic representation,” MacDougall notes, “approached by only a few ‘first-person’ ethnographies, is a sense of the unique personal identity of social actors” (257). Continuing:
It is not uncommon for anthropologists, after a long period in the field, to observe that someone looks or talks or relates to others exactly like a remembered friend or teacher, even though the two belong to quite different societies and speak different languages. This has implications for what features of personality we consider culturally specific or typical of certain societies, and how we assess the sense of self and autonomy of individuals (257-258).
This experience seemed rather obvious to me, but nonetheless MacDougall is exposing the sense of identification viewers can feel when they are allowed to see ethnographic subjects in natural (not hyper-mediated) contexts. In the continuous shots of Lorang and his son talking, we get to see their movements, glances, sly smiles—we get to see how their bodies move. All of these details inform how we understand their words. Because so much of an oral culture is imbued in the performative aspect of the transfer of knowledge—not in the ways we read that culture as anthropological text.
Watching Lorang talk about his life, I was struck by how his gestures and way of speaking reminded me of friends I’d known in Argentina (Argentines also love to use their hands when talking). I was struck by how his gestures, moving his hand in a large circle, communicated distance, space, and excess. Somehow, although I’m not quite sure, these gestures informed me that the Turkana have a sophisticated practice of telling. There seemed to be a lot of nuance in the way Lorang or his friend (filmed at the table), told a story.
In general, the MacDougall method seems to reinforce the authority of the subject (as actor who knows more than all about his/her own life), and allows the filmmaker to tell [the subjects’] stories on the subjects’ terms. The beginning scene of Lorang’s Way is a perfect example. Omnipotent, and aged, Lorang’s voice acts as the narrator of a powerful natural scene, and his words, combined with the image, convinces the viewer of his wisdom and knowledge about the themes we are about to embark upon discovering.
Surely there must be problematic aspects of the MacDougalls’ approach, but the film paired with the essay was a lovely way to realize the awesome (in the sense of “awe”) potentials of ethnographic film. Done with careful stylistic and ethical choices in mind, the viewer is forced to abandon other taught ways of knowing. We are drawn into a scene as fellow spectators, if not acquaintances. As cheesy as it seems, no one can hold onto false ideas for long if we meet and come to know well someone who defies those ideas. So ethnographic film, as practiced by the MacDougalls, allows us to be immersed in the experience of perceiving, getting to know Lorang or whoever it may be, intaking information in a way that may not lead us to the same conclusions as a written text.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
The Laughing Ethnographer
I interpreted Juan Downey's The Laughing Alligator as a relatively straight-forward critique of ethnography and of the history of anthropological practice around the Yanomami. Downey seemed to be telling two parallel narratives--one concerning the Yanomami themselves, and the interactions between outsiders; the other his own history, the history of a white South American and his relationship to the Others that have informed his acculturation. I appreciated many aspects of this short film, particularly the way Downey de-scientizes his portrait of the Yanomami, using what were at the time, "experimental" video techniques. Downey positions his camera as a weapon, going so far as to stage a shoot-out between himself with his camera, and his Yanomami guides holding a spear and shotgun. This simple but symbolic positioning is an excellent antidote to the view of Yanomami as violent. Might the camera's (i.e. institutionalized ethnography's) intrusion into Yanomami culture be as violent as a war between villages? In another bit, we see Downey dressed as a Yanomami--or at least donning the garb of an imagined Indian--and some Yanomami holding and looking through the lenses of cameras. Downey's willingness to exchange roles strikes me as uniquely gutsy, if not radical. When, in A Man Called Bee, we see Chagnon don Yanomami gear and strike a pose, we interpreted it as mockery. I felt that Downey chose instead to mock himself, his need to discover the mythological, to be free "physically as well as psychologically." When Downey presents his information wearing a suit, with a microphone, he seems to be asking, "In the role of incorporated ethnographer, why would be seek freedom in the experiences of a people ultimately relegated to the periphery?"
Overall, I enjoyed this work because of it's highly ambiguous nature, the merging of the anthropolgical and the autobiographical. It seems to contain many of the same themes as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena's work in Couple in the Cage.
Overall, I enjoyed this work because of it's highly ambiguous nature, the merging of the anthropolgical and the autobiographical. It seems to contain many of the same themes as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena's work in Couple in the Cage.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Exactitudes
Here are three images from photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek's project Exactitudes, which documents the way social cohesion functions even as we try to establish indivudual identities. The artists photograph real people wearing their own clothes, and have photographed in cities all over the world. For me this was a convenient way to visualize montage--taken alone, the photos are indivual cells, but together they state something greater about society. The work is also an interesting ethnography in it's own right, seemingly continuing the project of August Sander to chronicle all sectors of society.
Check out Exactitudes
Argentines: The People Who Wait In Lines
An excerpt from “Argentines: The People Waiting In Lines,” by Natalie Kuhl:
On the 15th of August I returned from six months of fieldwork in Cordoba, Argentina. During my stay in my encampment, I was forced to adjust to numerous cultural factors, many of which conflicted with the mores and codes with which I’d been raised! (OMG! Can you believe that??) For example, it was not advisable to throw used toilet tissue into the commode; the trash receptacle located just to the side of the toilet was a better bet, unless you are fond of dealing with wastewater. As a child, I would watch excitedly from the window as my mother lied to Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep, “No, sorry, we’re Jewish!” and shut the door in their faces. So the unannounced friend on the doorstep in Argentina always took me by surprise; didn’t they know I was enjoying alone time?
Despite these challenges to my cultural norms, the reader will be happy to know that, in the end, the natives of Argentina turned out to be a jovial and welcoming bunch! Even though I came from another place, the Argentines were quick to show me their ways and even invited me to participate in ritual inebriation on many occasions. Towards the middle of my stay, the village stylist, called a “hairdresser,” adorned me with the traditional Argentine female hair decoration, known commonly in North America as the “mullet.” After this transformative ceremony, most of my informants barely recognized me as the Yankee anthropologist of before; now I was “Nati,” a quasi-Argentine and capable of “passing” in their society. Success!
It’s true that my months in Argentina were not spent doing anthropological fieldwork. Or with indigenous peoples. Or in the Amazonian jungle. Or recording genealogical data on the ancestors of my informant-friends.
However, it occurred to me while reading the first chapter to Chagnon’s Yanomamo: The Fierce People, that you don’t need to be a trained anthropologist to know things ain’t gonna be the same way there as they are here, wherever that “here” and “there” might be. Chagnon’s naiveté, writing “I had visions of entering the village and seeing 125 social facts running about calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each waiting and anxious to have me collect his genealogy,” is imbecilic, and frankly made me concerned for anthropology as a discipline (10). Chagnon is famous and considered an expert in his field; if this is the field workers’ attitude, then we have far larger things to worry about than whether or not Chagnon is getting to eat his honey and saltines in peace.
To be fair, we must contextualize Chagnon and Fierce People. Chagnon was one of the first to write on the Yanomamo, and his ethnography comes well enough before many of the influential anti-oppression movements of the late 60’s and 70’s that changed our cultural standpoint on difference. But I don’t want to cut him too much slack; by 1968, it was post-colonial world, and we can expect more from someone in such a privileged, academic location than musings on the disappoints of “discovering that primitive man is not always as noble as you originally thought” (8).
I don’t doubt that Chagnon learned much about the Yanomamo, and it’s likely that anyone who sustained so many years of research on a single subject would come to have a great passion, appreciation, and respect for the subject (i.e. people) he studied. [It would be interesting to hear Chagnon speak or read more of his work.] But this first chapter is a terrific overview of the many problematics of the anthropological project in general. We learn that even the expert, who spends the time and talks the talk, can still be (or at least come off as) an ethnocentric buffoon.
What concerns me is the qualification of further anthropological study; the other approaches. Jacques Lizot’s work with the Yanomamo is supposedly more objective and his voice is not central to the accounts. On the other hand, Lizot was accused of giving goods in exchange for sexual favors from Yanomamo boys in John Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado . So we reach this pivotal, critical question: Is it really at all possible to be an anthropologist not implicated in some way of objectifying those you are studying?
Maybe we can explore this question through ethnographic film, through visual anthropology. Or maybe we can just admit that no, it’s not at all possible to make an objective portrait of a culture or people that is not one’s own, and more forward with this knowledge. I look forward to viewing more examples of specifically ethnographic film that I feel more positive about; that make me believe film makers have a good intention at heart when they expose a subject to a large viewing audience. One example I can think of that could be considered “ethnographic” is Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documentary about black youth in inner-city Baltimore, “The Boys of Baraka.” I felt sympathetic to the kids featured in this movie. Check it out: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/boysofbaraka/
On the 15th of August I returned from six months of fieldwork in Cordoba, Argentina. During my stay in my encampment, I was forced to adjust to numerous cultural factors, many of which conflicted with the mores and codes with which I’d been raised! (OMG! Can you believe that??) For example, it was not advisable to throw used toilet tissue into the commode; the trash receptacle located just to the side of the toilet was a better bet, unless you are fond of dealing with wastewater. As a child, I would watch excitedly from the window as my mother lied to Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep, “No, sorry, we’re Jewish!” and shut the door in their faces. So the unannounced friend on the doorstep in Argentina always took me by surprise; didn’t they know I was enjoying alone time?
Despite these challenges to my cultural norms, the reader will be happy to know that, in the end, the natives of Argentina turned out to be a jovial and welcoming bunch! Even though I came from another place, the Argentines were quick to show me their ways and even invited me to participate in ritual inebriation on many occasions. Towards the middle of my stay, the village stylist, called a “hairdresser,” adorned me with the traditional Argentine female hair decoration, known commonly in North America as the “mullet.” After this transformative ceremony, most of my informants barely recognized me as the Yankee anthropologist of before; now I was “Nati,” a quasi-Argentine and capable of “passing” in their society. Success!
It’s true that my months in Argentina were not spent doing anthropological fieldwork. Or with indigenous peoples. Or in the Amazonian jungle. Or recording genealogical data on the ancestors of my informant-friends.
However, it occurred to me while reading the first chapter to Chagnon’s Yanomamo: The Fierce People, that you don’t need to be a trained anthropologist to know things ain’t gonna be the same way there as they are here, wherever that “here” and “there” might be. Chagnon’s naiveté, writing “I had visions of entering the village and seeing 125 social facts running about calling each other kinship terms and sharing food, each waiting and anxious to have me collect his genealogy,” is imbecilic, and frankly made me concerned for anthropology as a discipline (10). Chagnon is famous and considered an expert in his field; if this is the field workers’ attitude, then we have far larger things to worry about than whether or not Chagnon is getting to eat his honey and saltines in peace.
To be fair, we must contextualize Chagnon and Fierce People. Chagnon was one of the first to write on the Yanomamo, and his ethnography comes well enough before many of the influential anti-oppression movements of the late 60’s and 70’s that changed our cultural standpoint on difference. But I don’t want to cut him too much slack; by 1968, it was post-colonial world, and we can expect more from someone in such a privileged, academic location than musings on the disappoints of “discovering that primitive man is not always as noble as you originally thought” (8).
I don’t doubt that Chagnon learned much about the Yanomamo, and it’s likely that anyone who sustained so many years of research on a single subject would come to have a great passion, appreciation, and respect for the subject (i.e. people) he studied. [It would be interesting to hear Chagnon speak or read more of his work.] But this first chapter is a terrific overview of the many problematics of the anthropological project in general. We learn that even the expert, who spends the time and talks the talk, can still be (or at least come off as) an ethnocentric buffoon.
What concerns me is the qualification of further anthropological study; the other approaches. Jacques Lizot’s work with the Yanomamo is supposedly more objective and his voice is not central to the accounts. On the other hand, Lizot was accused of giving goods in exchange for sexual favors from Yanomamo boys in John Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado . So we reach this pivotal, critical question: Is it really at all possible to be an anthropologist not implicated in some way of objectifying those you are studying?
Maybe we can explore this question through ethnographic film, through visual anthropology. Or maybe we can just admit that no, it’s not at all possible to make an objective portrait of a culture or people that is not one’s own, and more forward with this knowledge. I look forward to viewing more examples of specifically ethnographic film that I feel more positive about; that make me believe film makers have a good intention at heart when they expose a subject to a large viewing audience. One example I can think of that could be considered “ethnographic” is Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documentary about black youth in inner-city Baltimore, “The Boys of Baraka.” I felt sympathetic to the kids featured in this movie. Check it out: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/boysofbaraka/
Sunday, September 23, 2007
wen chieh.
Here is one of my roomates, Wen Chieh. She has been working on a photo project about hiding, which I think is also autobiographical. I think sometimes she feels alone because she lives very far from Taipei and the people she loves. I am just beginning to know her; I like her because she is mysterious.
M.I.A. Boyz
Here she does it again. This time her dancing crew hails from Kingston, Jamaica. More thoughts?
MIA BIRDFLU
Here is one of M.I.A.'s latest videos, in which people from an Indian village dance around to her song "Bird Flu" while wearing M.I.A. spirit gear and a splattering of other Williamsburg-style acessories. Like the Mead video, we have folks dancing and prancing. But what justifies M.I.A.'s use of these people in her video? Why don't we find it problematic? Or de we? M.I.A. is not an anthropologist but I think the ethnographic value of this clip is very high. Profit/access/visibility/and the concept of participant-observer are some ideas that come to mind while watching this clip.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
What Are We Looking For?
Clifford, "On Ethnographic Authority"
Grimshaw, Introduction "The Ethnographer's Eye"
David and Judith McDougall, "Notes on Turkana Marriage"
Mead/Bateson, "Trance and Dance in Bali"
For me, the single most evident difference between the McDougall and Mead/Bateson pieces is the way authority is constructed. Clifford lies out four major “modes” of authority as experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic. These different modes correspond to particular moments in the development of visual anthropology, and today’s ethnographers have the opportunity to utilize all four, or combinations thereof. Clifford writes, “none is obsolete, non pure; there is room for invention within each paradigm” (54). I find this exemplified in both the McDougalls’ and Mead/Bateson’s use of authoritative modes.
The mythology around Margaret Mead positions her as prototypical fieldworker-ethnographer who justifies her claims based on her experience and “feel” for the culture in question. However this seems to contrast with Mead’s role in “Trance and Dance in Bali.” Interestingly, the film we do not recognize her as an active participant-observer; instead we hear her voice-over narration and feel her as the omniscient, unseen expert. This disconnect actually lead me to question her authority. I could easily disassociate her voice from the visual footage. Therefore I was able to invest more in my own interpretations of what I saw. Because it was only Mead clarifying the performance, I began to think, “What is she not telling me, what is being omitted, and what is the value of the images Mead has chosen to highlight?” Overall, “Dance and Trance in Bali” lacks a contextual background; it left me feeling that I had not learned much at all.
The McDougall’s excerpt, on the other hand, utilizes more forms of authority, and this I believe constructs a richer and more in-depth understanding of the subject matter. We hear and see the filmmakers’ field notes, giving us insight into their motives. We learn that the filmmakers are living in a certain area because it’s near to the Turkana people that they know. This concept of knowing, or being personally familiar with the subjects of the film, seems to positions the McDougalls as “participant-observers,” or at least gets us closer to defining this slippery concept. They construct a more multi-layered sense of authority, contrasting with Mead’ “Dance and Trance.”
For example, the camera, although sometimes fixed on a talking Turkana person, is also given over to the people being filmed, and we “see” for a few moments “through their eyes.” Clifford, referencing Malinowski’s introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, identifies “the dominant mode of modern fieldwork authority” sigaled as “You are there…because I was there” (22). So even this little camera play is enticing, gives the subjects agency; shortens the distance between those being filmed, and those watching. It says instead, “I, who you are seeing, am here.”
We also get many shots of the physical location and surroundings of the Turkana camp. This helps us contextualize. Many shots in this excerpt go without narration, and this seems to invite a sort of interpretive authority, on our own accord. Without explanation, we are forced to interpret for ourselves. All of the different ways of presenting information gives the viewer a selection of patches, which we are then able to put together and deduce meaning.
The differences between the construction of authority in these excerpts is absolutely linked to the degree of technological development in the moment each film was made. With omni-directional mics, or even just sturdier and more plentiful equipment, “Trance and Dance in Bali” might have taken on a different form. Current filmmakers have the ability to generate content from multiple voices, and multiple authors. I am curious to view more films, to see if multiple authorship does help to make a more satisfying ethnographic film.
As a viewer, I have to ask myself, “What am I looking for?” Why does the McDougall’s style feeling more appealing, more truthful? Grimshaw quotes Herbert Read, noting, “We see what we want to see, and what we want to see is determined, not by the inevitable law of optics or even (as may be the case in wild animals) by an instinct for survival, but by the desire to discover or construct a credible world” (8). I wonder if it’s even possible to see with an innocent eye.
Grimshaw, Introduction "The Ethnographer's Eye"
David and Judith McDougall, "Notes on Turkana Marriage"
Mead/Bateson, "Trance and Dance in Bali"
For me, the single most evident difference between the McDougall and Mead/Bateson pieces is the way authority is constructed. Clifford lies out four major “modes” of authority as experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic. These different modes correspond to particular moments in the development of visual anthropology, and today’s ethnographers have the opportunity to utilize all four, or combinations thereof. Clifford writes, “none is obsolete, non pure; there is room for invention within each paradigm” (54). I find this exemplified in both the McDougalls’ and Mead/Bateson’s use of authoritative modes.
The mythology around Margaret Mead positions her as prototypical fieldworker-ethnographer who justifies her claims based on her experience and “feel” for the culture in question. However this seems to contrast with Mead’s role in “Trance and Dance in Bali.” Interestingly, the film we do not recognize her as an active participant-observer; instead we hear her voice-over narration and feel her as the omniscient, unseen expert. This disconnect actually lead me to question her authority. I could easily disassociate her voice from the visual footage. Therefore I was able to invest more in my own interpretations of what I saw. Because it was only Mead clarifying the performance, I began to think, “What is she not telling me, what is being omitted, and what is the value of the images Mead has chosen to highlight?” Overall, “Dance and Trance in Bali” lacks a contextual background; it left me feeling that I had not learned much at all.
The McDougall’s excerpt, on the other hand, utilizes more forms of authority, and this I believe constructs a richer and more in-depth understanding of the subject matter. We hear and see the filmmakers’ field notes, giving us insight into their motives. We learn that the filmmakers are living in a certain area because it’s near to the Turkana people that they know. This concept of knowing, or being personally familiar with the subjects of the film, seems to positions the McDougalls as “participant-observers,” or at least gets us closer to defining this slippery concept. They construct a more multi-layered sense of authority, contrasting with Mead’ “Dance and Trance.”
For example, the camera, although sometimes fixed on a talking Turkana person, is also given over to the people being filmed, and we “see” for a few moments “through their eyes.” Clifford, referencing Malinowski’s introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, identifies “the dominant mode of modern fieldwork authority” sigaled as “You are there…because I was there” (22). So even this little camera play is enticing, gives the subjects agency; shortens the distance between those being filmed, and those watching. It says instead, “I, who you are seeing, am here.”
We also get many shots of the physical location and surroundings of the Turkana camp. This helps us contextualize. Many shots in this excerpt go without narration, and this seems to invite a sort of interpretive authority, on our own accord. Without explanation, we are forced to interpret for ourselves. All of the different ways of presenting information gives the viewer a selection of patches, which we are then able to put together and deduce meaning.
The differences between the construction of authority in these excerpts is absolutely linked to the degree of technological development in the moment each film was made. With omni-directional mics, or even just sturdier and more plentiful equipment, “Trance and Dance in Bali” might have taken on a different form. Current filmmakers have the ability to generate content from multiple voices, and multiple authors. I am curious to view more films, to see if multiple authorship does help to make a more satisfying ethnographic film.
As a viewer, I have to ask myself, “What am I looking for?” Why does the McDougall’s style feeling more appealing, more truthful? Grimshaw quotes Herbert Read, noting, “We see what we want to see, and what we want to see is determined, not by the inevitable law of optics or even (as may be the case in wild animals) by an instinct for survival, but by the desire to discover or construct a credible world” (8). I wonder if it’s even possible to see with an innocent eye.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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