Anthropological Film Fragments from Early Twentieth-Century Mexico: A Curatorial Problem (original) (raw)
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Circulation and distribution of ethnographic films in Latin America
Universitas UPS, Journal of Social and Human Sciences of the Salesian Polytechnic University of Ecuador, 2017
While visual anthropology, as the roof under which is usually wrapped this films, enjoys good health in the region and new educational and research projects are generated every year, It has not been the same with the diffusion, distribution and exhibition despite the long tradition of documentary film linked to the anthropological view in countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. In the last decade, in parallel, they have significantly changed the logic of consumption and circulation of films. This scene presents new opportunities. The purpose is twofold, on one side analyzes the importance of building spaces for the formation of audiences such as festivals and exhibitions, starting from the premise that the future of every film depends on how it can reach the people. By the other side seeks to provide material for consultation and guidance for those interested in distributing audiovisual works of ethnographic cutting in Latin America.
Visualizing Indigenous Women in Oaxaca, Mexico at the End of the Twentieth Century
Historical Geography, 2012
M argarita Ortiz Garcia speaks to the camera in the final scene of Mujeres del Mismo Valor (Women of Equal Worth), a video recorded in 1999. Earlier the video identified Ortiz as the President of a women's group in the Mixteca Alta region of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. She had observed that her husband was not around, and her children complained when her organizational activities delayed her arrival home. In the final scene, however, Ortiz shares a more upbeat observation: "Already we're leaving behind fear, timidity; it's getting a little better. But now that I'm participating, my legs…" Here she starts laughing, and finishes her thought rather breathless from laughter, "…my legs are trembling. And that's all I can say. Gracias." 1 Afterward, the video's credits begin to roll over an image of a man and a woman standing together behind large bags of coffee beans. Ortiz's final comments hint at both the pain and pleasure she and other women living in rural Mexico might experience through new forms of political and economic participation. Together her words and actions suggest how awkward Ortiz finds participating, although it's not clear if she's referring to her experience of participating in the video interview, organizational activities, and/or home. What Ortiz says and the ways she communicates with the camera also can be seen as evidence that someone asked Ortiz questions; someone (else?) recorded her response and (others?) later edited this scene together with other footage. Out of these technology-mediated engagements emerged Mujeres del Mismo Valor, a 27-minute video about women's organized participation in a statewide coffee cooperative comprised of mostly Indigenous farmers. In this article, I examine Mujeres del Mismo Valor as an archive. Recent research on archives demonstrates that they are not only sources of historical documents and artifacts. They also embody efforts to impose order, dictate action, and enhance or abrogate agency through the creation of material sites and performance of knowledge systems. Archives emerge out of a process of organization that consists of, and is constitutive of, collection and collation. 2 Historically "Indigenous peoples were the subjects of the record and not the owners." More recently Indigenous movements for self-determination have seen colonial archives as valuable sources "for the reassertion of cultural identities and rights through the renegotiation of histories." 3 In addition to reclaiming archival knowledge, Indigenous cultural activists have used relatively new visual technologies, such as video, to decolonize archival documentation. But videos are not only collected in archives; they also constitute archives. Video-mediated documentation entails an organizational geography of production distinguished by particular representational practices. For instance, in 1977 Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI-the National Institute for Indigenous Affairs) created an Archivo Etnográfico Audiovisual (Ethnographic
My Thirty Years in Mexican Anthropology
Anthropology and Humanism, 2011
This article chronicles more than 30 years experience conducting fieldwork among Nahuatl Indians and teaching anthropology in Mexican institutions. The text documents four processes over time: the development of the author's theoretical interests and analysis of field date; change in the villages under study; transformations in Mexico's political and economic policies; and the changing role of anthropology in that context. [ethnography, Nahuatl Indians, Mexico, ethnic economy, anthropological theory]
The Indigenous "Contact Film" and Its Afterlives in Latin American Cinema
A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, 2022
Just as the exploration of resources in the vast interior spaces of Latin America has been economically extractive, an extractive logic has informed ethnographic image production from its inception. Starting in the early twentieth century, documentarians have traveled to remote regions of the continent to produce records of isolated indigenous people that fulfill the interests of metropolitan publics and furnish their museums, libraries, and archives—often leaving indigenous subjects themselves diminished by the experience of contact. Explorers, anthropologists, and filmmakers have continued to record indigenous images throughout the 20th century, producing a vast and diffuse archive of contact films that are informed by colonialist Western ideologies of primitivism but also constitute invaluable audiovisual records of underrepresented peoples who have undergone intensive historical transformations. This chapter reflects on the history and characteristics of the contact film and on its continuing significance for contemporary cinema and filmmaking practices that deal with indigenous subjects. One the one hand, the chapter considers the ways in which works by non-indigenous filmmakers evoke and repurpose contact films. In so doing, these works position themselves uneasily within the contact film tradition while attempting to negotiate the challenges posed by postcolonial theory, the rise of indigenous movements, and “the crisis of ethnographic authority,” to quote James Clifford. On the other hand, the chapter considers recent filmmaking projects made in collaboration with indigenous communities or directed by rising indigenous filmmakers. Here the extractive logic of the contact film is inverted through the return of ethnographic images to indigenous communities and the attempt to place filmmaking in the service of indigenous goals and cultural memory. Discussing a wide array of strategies deployed in recent documentary and fiction films, the chapter gives especial attention to the manner in which selected works by Juan Carlos Valdivia (Bolivia), Andrea Tonacci (Brazil), Fernando Valdivia Gómez (Peru), and Zezinho Yube (Huni Kuin, Brazil) dialogue with and reflect on the contact film and its troubled legacy.
The Indigenist discourse in post-revolutionary Mexico massively revaluated regional handicrafts as allegedly authentic relics and expressions of a ‘pure indigenous sense of art’. Both within and outside Mexico, artesanía became a highly demanded collectible. Exhibited in museums and fairs, it also became a fashionable home accessory for the urban elites. Especially the modernist bohème in Mexico City used artesanía as an anachronistic source, allowing them to establish the collecting and semi-private exhibiting of handicrafts as an Indigenist art practice. From the 1930s onwards, mainly North-American tourists visited Mexico in great numbers, bought artesanía objects as touristic souvenirs and popularized them internationally. The paper seeks to problematize the relationship between the cultural reevaluation of the rural and indigenous with modernist art practices. The goal is to critically review the appropriation practices and authentication strategies of modernist artists involved in a nationalist discourse.