The Art of Doing Ethnography with a Camera An Audiovisual Study on Contemporary Art Practices and Aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique (original) (raw)
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Visual Ethnography , 2013
The following paper deals with the production of a short ethnographic video on the Royal Museum of Central Africa from Tervuren, Belgium. The scope is to deploy the organization of the ethnographic team that participated in the articulation of the project, unravel the context in which the project emerged and unfolded, as well as engaging with the elaboration of the audio-visual approach taken within the ethnographic research. Focusing particularly on the latter aspect, this paper will portray the relation between art and ethnography as being characterized by experimentations with aesthetics. Taking a look back at certain artistic movements that explored the limits and possibilities of film aesthetics, the entries will pinpoint the relevance of lettrist cinema, institutional critique and structural film to the construction of an ethnographic video on the museum practices of the RMCA.
2020
Following Independence in Mozambique in 1975, the newly formed National Film Institute conducted a study into the reception of the audio-visual material being produced and distributed throughout the country by the new generation of Mozambican film-makers. The study, published in 1984, concluded that, for a country with 46 different languages, and high levels of illiteracy, one of the most effective cinematic languages their new generation of local film-makers could use was one drawing extensively on the language of music. Films based on images and music could transcend the cultural and linguistic barriers of the colonially divided nation. Soon after this study was published a civil war brought the training of young Mozambican film-makers to a grinding halt and the report on effective cinematic language for social change was all but forgotten. Only now, as peace and economic growth are bringing relative stability to the country, the next generation of Mozambican filmmakers have retur...
Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2008
Whilst the Writing culture critique since the mid-1980s has led to a number of experiments with ethnographic writing, the visual side has been neglected. Thus this article argues that by looking at the work of Oppitz, Downey, and Lockhart, which has not been considered in the canon of visual and general anthropology, anthropologists can develop new strategies of visual representation and research in regard to (1) conceptualizing closeness to and distance from the ethnographic subject, (2) the multiple positioning of the participant observer, and (3) developing new formal possibilities of visual representation. In doing so, anthropologists can start to address the unfulfilled potential of visual experimentation inherent in the Writing culture critique. This article then discusses three examples of experimentation with art and ethnography, that is, Shamans of the Blind Country, by anthropologist and film director Michael Oppitz (part-narrated by the writer William S. Burroughs), the video-and installation work of pioneer video artist Juan Downey among the Yanomamö, and the experimental film and photographic work Teatro Amazonas by contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart in Brazil, based on a collaboration with anthropologists. Prelude In this article I shall discuss three examples of experimentation with art and ethnography. By 'art' , I mean the visual arts in the widest sense (including film, video, photography, installation), and by 'ethnography' that method of fieldwork and participant observation which continues to define a core of social and cultural anthropology. Two of my examples are works by artists, Juan Downey (a pioneer of video art) and Sharon Lockhart (a contemporary photographer and film-maker), and one is by an anthropologist (and, on this occasion, film-maker), Michael Oppitz. Discussing work usually classified as belonging to different historical periods and genres of contemporary art and anthropology bears a certain risk, and at the same time offers the potential for exploration, precisely because it allows us to challenge previous borders and categorizations across the two disciplines. To my knowledge, Downey's and Lockhart's work have not been considered by anthropologists, 1 and the anthropological side of their work does not receive central treatment by art writers. 2 There are rather few artists and visual anthropologists who would be familiar with Oppitz's film. 3 He is more widely known (especially among German-speaking anthropologists) for a substantial written oeuvre in anthropological theory, that is, the interpretation of French structuralism (which also informs his film) and, among area specialists, for the ethnography of Nepal
Perspectives on Ethnographic Film edited by Natasha Fijn and Philippa Deveson
2012
In 2011, The Australian National University celebrated sixty years of anthropology with a conference and exhibition that included panels and displays on the use of film within anthropology as a discipline. In the same year, the Centre for Visual Anthropology was set up at The Australian National University to highlight the work of internationally renowned ethnographic filmmakers and anthropologists across the university. The idea for this volume was inspired both by these milestones and by the presentations of those filmmakers and other practitioners in a Master of Liberal Arts program course, ‘Masterclasses in Ethnographic Film’. In short, it is intended to mark the special place of ethnographic film at The Australian National University.
The Ethnographic film, new rules, new perspectives
This paper, presents audio visual ethnographic production rules, and its technological development among the years. Visual anthropology schools have their classic rules, to produce image and research. Nerveless those rules have changed along the years with the emergence of new visual and audio technologies, there is much to explore. Ethnography got into the modern world, and is there too stay, with competition, and value of esthetic means of production. I intent to abroad here the new values of the ethnographic film, and its new perspectives. How important is to realize that the using of new modern technologies, can be very useful as also important for scientific research in anthropology or any other social science.
Voss, Christiane , Lorenz Engell , and Tim Othold , ed. Anthropologies of Entanglements: Media and Modes of Existence. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Thinking Media. Thinking Media. Bloomsbury Collections., 2023
In order to develop a notion of media anthropology, I would like to revisit three scenes from the history of visual anthropology; sensory ethnography, cinéma vérité, and collaborative cinema. They are rooted in documentary traditions hailing from anthropological backgrounds and developed critical and reflexive ways of doing audiovisual research. Media anthropology focuses on the entanglement of humans and media (Voss 2019: 34). The notion of anthropomediality offers a conceptual frame for situational analyses of these assemblages in which neither humans nor media exist apart from each other. Viewed through the lenses of media anthropology, I describe three relationships between humans and media: first, the exploration of environments through experience in sensory ethnography; second, subjectivation and “fabulation” (Deleuze) in cinéma vérité; and third, the pragmatics of collaborative cinema and “shared anthropology” (Rouch 2003: 44). Finally, for each anthropomedia constellation there is also a relation between knowing and being, in which knowledge and modes of existence cannot be considered separately (Barad 2007; Simondon 2009: 13). That means anthropomediality itself is facilitated by forms and practices of media as an audiovisual form of knowledge. That includes the anthropological works of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the theatrical forms of film in cinéma vérité by Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault, and in shared forms of knowledge production in collaborative-produced films by Vídeo nas Aldeias and Instituto Catitu with anthropological and Indigenous documentary filmmakers from Brazil.
The Colliding Worlds of Anthropology and Film- Ethnography A Dynamic Continuum
2017
The article explores three consecutive periods in which the disciplines of anthropology and film ethnography collide. The first moment examines the common practice of Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. I argue that Flaherty’s film illustrates the general fieldwork schema proposed by Malinowski to document the world of the Other-native. The second period connects the writings of Marcel Mauss and his influence in Jean Rouch’s cinéma-vérité. I state that Mauss’ radical sense of doubt about scientific pretentions of objectivity sustained Rouch’s cinematography with the general principle that reality is accessible only in partial form. Finally, the third period compares the anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro with the Sensory Ethnographic Lab’s film Leviathan. I argue that it is in both cases where bodily practices are being supported to account for more sensorial perceptions of the environment.
2018
In this conference I will try to link audio visual anthropology and ethnomusicology with some discussions that have been raised in the last decade about the rhetoric's of documentation, the political place of ethnographic knowledge, and the ethics of collaboration. In this way, I will refer to some theoretical topics that can open up for discussion-not just about the inter connections between ethnomusicology, ethnographic film and the visual in social sciences but about the ways of doing, the practice of filmmaking and audiovisual recording. My discussion here comes from my own experience as a filmmaker. And as a filmmaker, I am always struggling to find how certain cinematographic procedures can be applied to certain epistemological questions. We all know how the social sciences have been trying to find ways, not just to present their audiovisual objects but also to integrate them in the academic practice. Furthermore, we all know how difficult is to convey, without being purely descriptive, different dimensions that come across when we are out there in the fieldwork with our camera and microphone, or back in the editing suite. The complex process involved in connecting the theoretical, practical and ethical discussions that come across in anthropology with the ways documentary or ethnographic cinema developed new languages is difficult to convey. In fact, sometimes it looks like documentary film is going through circles, recycling the old ways in new formulas whereas new themes emerge in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology. Other times, we have the impression that it's the opposite: that the cinematic language and their technologies are in a quicker change than the one we see in the social sciences. In the end, when we actually pick the camera and microphone, a lot of the decisions on how to represent others and ourselves, how to address invisible issues, where to cut in the editing, how to imagine a specific audience for our work, a lot of this sort of questions come across our mind. I think that it's in the actual praxis of ethnographic filmmaking that we can put into work our own truth-not the evident and objective truth, but the one that comes out inside our hearts when we take this decisions. *