From Vérité to Virtual: Conversations on the Frontier of Film and Anthropology
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Lucien Taylor Anthropology can no longer claim to have particular monopoly on ethnography.
Roderick Coover For ethnography to move forward from its past, we also need to look for way to bring that past into the present.
Jayasinhji Jhala No longer are we in the world where films are made about people, they are made by people for themselves.
Whom these films are being made, communities about whom these films are being made as co-equal collaborators leaves us with more to gain however awkward it might be.
Michel Brault Ethnography expands with the complexities of contemporary socio-cultural livings.
Rebecca Baron Nonetheless interesting work I think in the history of ethnographic film is these moments where technology shifted so radically and it had a very profound impact on the aesthetics of the work.
From Vérité to Virtual: Conversations on the Frontier of Film and Anthropology
Roderick Coover ' African Art, African Voices' was an exhibition that was held at the Philadelphia Art Museum; it had come here from the Seattle Art Museum. It was a touring exhibit that tried to use multiple voices to tell the stories of African objects. The show was based on a good theory, that it's good to have many people explaining the lives of objects, and yet the show failed, for a number of reasons I believe, and one of the reasons is that each set of materials was only in the end explained by one person and that that person was still explaining, speaking at us, telling us what these objects were, but we weren't engaging in any kind of conversation. And I asked the curator what was going on you know. There is potential for conversation, a potential for an exchange that was not happening and curator said well, you know we have the illusion down here of exchange but in the end everything has to get decided upstairs in the director's office and really these relationships…your, that..that.. people we have established, not of people to the object but to person talking to the director who is collecting the interview and then putting them in an order. So we have the illusion of many voices but we actually have one structure and it occurred to me that something in film has a same problem. We collect interviews, we gather people and record what they say and then we put them in a line, in the linear sequence of a film and by doing that we inevitably put a single order and we cut out the chance for exchange and there is something else that happens, whenever group of people in space, it could be in this conference room, it could be with all of you, that is fluid, that can go into any direction and the reality that is created from that changes with each coming together of the people, or each coming together of the materials and so one of the things that I look to is a film practice that maintains that vitality, that maintains that fluidity, that speaks to life not as a structured linear event but poses the problem of reality as something that lacks that structure that is spontaneous and fluid. The question I think before us is how ethnography can give us these tools to pose the problem of reality?, what is it we see?, what is it we experience? and how out of these experiences do we construct ourselves as being part of one group or another? and I think for ethnography to move forward from its past, we also need to look for a way to bring that past into the present in someway that's dynamic, it could be through the re-showing themselves and discussion those generate but it may also be through other form of re-edits or re-mediation of you taking old works and remaking them into something new, based on what you see now and what you were told about then.
Lucien Taylor Anthropology can no longer claim to have particular monopoly on ethnography perhaps, so ethnographic film is now situated within a much larger spectrum of cognate, culturally inflected media practices. This is not actually nothing new if you think of Cavalcante in the 30s , people like Victor Masayesva , Triman Hagh (ph), Tracey Moffatt , Kidlat Tahimik Filipino filmmaker and many, many others is inflected by anthropology and in dialog often very oppositionally with the anthropology. The most interesting work of this kind is not really inflected by an ethnographic sensibility which is very different from saying that it is in dialog with or informed by anthropology in a sense that it does not really display an ethnographic sensibility, does not have same investment in ethnography.
Cinema Vérité
Michel Brault reading text by Edgar Morin There are two ways of looking at the Cinema of reality. The first is to pretend to show reality. The second is to pose the problem of reality. Thus, there have been two concepts of cinema vérité. First, it pretended to show the truth. Second, it posed the problem of truth. Well, we have reason to know by now, that fiction film is, in principle, much less illusionary and less mendacious than so-called documentary because the author and the audience know it is fiction. In other words, its truth is in its make-believe. In contrast, documentary hides its truth behind the image, a mere reflection of reality. Now we have even better reason to know that social reality camouflaged and dramatized itself for onlookers, and to even greater effect for the camera. Roles express social reality and in politics, contrivance is more real than reality. That is why so-called cinema of reality has presented, proposed, even imposed the most incredible illusions in those marvelous regions from which fleeting images were brought back the social reality was staged and occluded by the political system in place and transfigured in the dazzled eyes of the filmmaker. In other words, that aspect of cinema, most troubled by illusion, irreality and fiction is that same cinema of reality whose mission is to confront the most difficult philosophic problem of the last 2000 years - the nature of reality itself.
Lucien Taylor Cinema vérité as much as we might talk but is being the vérité of cinema rather than cinema of vérité, nonetheless has a certain stake or had a certain stake in giving us return to reality that had not been possible since the invention of talkies. Vérité has spawned this, this, this amorphous mass of reality TV but I don't watch lot of it so I don't wanna claim any real understanding of it or knowledge of it, but it obviously it is linked to some kind of tendency to spectacularize ahh…ahh and to thematize the abject, especially paying anything that is taboo or transgressive and even vérité itself remember for of all its claim, for all of its legitimating itself on redeeming the everyday on giving us everyday experience and some sense of the dailiness of..of..human existence concentrated for the most part of eccentrics or celebrities, it also had narrative forms and narrative logics that again were borrowed from fiction.
Rebecca Baron I think I learned my fundamental filmmaking questions in a cinema vérité editing room. I was an editor for Penny Baker and it struck me as young editor that here I was working in this forum that gave the greatest sense of being there, and it, yet it was the most highly constructed form of editing I'd ever done. There's all this pressure on the image to be true to reality, but it...it's a representation, and so how do we shape..the..our films to be truest to experience with them through or truest to the actual material of reality of being there and those aren't always the same things.
Jayasinhji Jhala Perhaps the assertion and conviction that you are telling something, telling a truth might be altered by offering an opinion. I think ahh...that allows there to be both kind of fragility in (inaudible ) as well as you carry it with your own conviction.
Roderick Coover But also camera person is always active and always present. The camera is a catalyst and I think the boom in documentary film is that now all the more wide spectrum of people can take cameras out and be catalysts, and be active in the scene and that what you documenting is what is happening before you might be making happen or might be different culture there, you can't help that but that the role is active in the making side not passive and same for an ethnographer, same for an activist, same across the board in documentary film except for streaming of observational material from, ahh… hidden cameras. In almost all other circumstances our roles are active.
LANGUAGE OF WINE Roderick Coover
I'm Oliver (inaudible ), assistant professor in the English department and I just want to raise the question, that I think it comes out of all of the comments so far, and this is the question of you know for documenting cultural practices and if in a certain sense to follow (inaudible ) that contrivance is more real than a certain mode of reality filmmaking, then I wonder how it accounts for, situates itself or imagines its relationship to fictional films. You know, with a sort of increased exaggeration of our culture with the history of cinema. Is there a way in which something that's kind of missing from the panel is someone who is an ethnographer of popular entertainment, so I just wonder if you don't have to think about that borderline between fiction, nonfiction, and few films Hollywood and, you know, how to do this.
Kelly Askew I can respond to that, because I was involved in two feature films both of which were fictional and in a recent essay I wrote, I talked about the liberating field of working in fiction which maybe Paul can also speak to, in that we are not bound to idea of documentary value in the same way, you can do instead of as you opposed it doing ethnography of popular entrainment. I would say that one strategy that some of us are not involved in this doing ethnographies through popular entertainment, employing popular entertainment is way of showcasing a culture providing knowledge about a culture, gaining access to that culture by getting drawn into a narrative style, so in a way that documentary film doesn't necessary always succeed as well and it can ask people to engage with the culture in a very personal phenomenological way that documentary can't sometimes always achieve. So, yes, for me it also the essay side about the truth of fiction is also the fiction of truth where you know there is…hmm…, you think you are always going after the document, you are gonna go after accuracy, reality and of course you always fall short, because there is always the staging, there is always the framing, there is always reenactment bit to it and so always feeling like falling short for the goal makes that sometimes very trying, challenging experience that you freed of when you enter in fiction.
Paul Stoller I think the reasons in my case writing fiction or writing ethnography depend on number of factors. One is there is no one way to represent reality, for me the kinds of things I have written have varied over, over time. The styles that I have adopted, the genres I have adopted and my rule of thumb has been to let the material speak to me and the materials indicates that… ah…ah… memoir is appropriate or an ethnography is appropriate or a set of experiences that would indicate that may be I want to have fictionalized and so fiction is well suited to certain kind of subjects that ethnography is not. So, I think the key because of this sort of fluidity of situations. The key is to be flexible and not to say I am going to do just this or that or just that, ahh…but to let the wondrousness of the world sort of…ahh… penetrate you and sort of indicate the representational strategies that you want to take.
Lucien Taylor Kelly you said earlier that you know with fiction, with good fiction you have this kind of phenomenological intensity or plenitude or intimacy that is so hard to achieve in nonfiction. I mean it's incredibly hard and cinema vérité, the technological innovations in 1960s were you know were, perhaps necessary condition but they are not sufficient condition to approximate anything like the degree of intimacy and psychological and subjective complexity that you can get with fiction…ahh… and I mean if my producer say I am really invested not imposing problems about reality, I am certainly interested in watching them and addressing them and maybe, I am trying to ask them occasionally but I am really interested in evoking reality and representing reality and trying to throw up a mirror to reality in all of that (inaudible ) that is what I mean to say, I am interested in producing works that have excess that exceeds my intentionality.
HELL ROARING CREEK Lucien Taylor and Ilisa Barbash
Lucien Taylor I don't identify myself as a documentarian, maybe that (inaudible .
Why?
Lucien Taylor Because the word documentary seem to very reductive to me, because if all I producing is a mere document and the negative definition and I, I'm also reticent about engaging negative definitions for (inaudible ) but nonfiction seems to me to stake out of terrain that I am more comfortable with than documentary. Documentary implies is very less interpretations by artistic engagement, aesthetic engagement, all of which (inaudible ).
Well I think for a lot of us documentary doesn't imply that.
Lucien Taylor Right, but that's the principle.
(crosstalk)(inaudible) documentary, documentary is the point of view, the statement on the development of the idea.
Lucien Taylor Lets go technologically since you are,
I know, yeah.
Lucien Taylor But I understand that, and this also allows the documentary as well as nonfiction film to be completed with broadcast journalism which has very narrow topic of interest, and very, very circumscribed aesthetic possibilities, you know it's expository, you have talking heads, you have actuality footage, it's very non-experimental. The art world today is showing this pronounced ahh… gravitation towards reality, towards non-fiction and many of the most accomplished artists that I know work internationally, artists whose work has been consecrated, you know who are at the summit of the art world, and they are these people whose work is infused by cinema vérité and they are these people, I mean after making you know (inaudible ) of six $85,000 kind of thing um but they are receiving acknowledgment or recognition within the art world that isn't necessarily happening within the caliber, a lot of people who really feel it's remarkable (inaudible ) know this by seeing some extraordinary artists, they are not really pushing us to take control at all they are (inaudible ) continue, and I think incredibly exciting and film schools for most part because they are oriented towards industry, towards mainstream. I am not talking onto say (inaudible ).
Speaking as anthropologist, all anthropologists do visualize anthropology, as they just quite often don't do it very well, you know
Not all documentary.
Well exactly.
I am not all documentary.
But you know, how many anthropology text books have photos on it.
(cross talk)(inaudible)
Sure Photographs and why that there, you know lot of times, it's you know like (inaudible ) just to illustrate some point in the text, they are not important and yet they are in document. I should not have to argue that these are important things that they can be incredibly powerful tools to aid understanding and to, to, to work, to evoke ideas and all these stuff and there is starriness kind of did want to mention kind of way.
Lucien Taylor And I think visual anthropology is in separate aspects of (inaudible ) with the main stream of anthropology. Visual anthropology attends to particularities of personal experience, subjectivity and left experience along the forward does to the abstractions of culture that's all, I think that is particular power. But in terms of (inaudible ) a visual anthropology, we are also trying to something that isn't supported by the market, that isn't supported by the capitalism, you know, to provide, other stories, and other voices and other visions that are being heard and contribute to public spirits in this way. And I think anthropologist, the one thing anthropologists can't contribute (inaudible ) but it is also true and it is not just black box, because if you hear anthropologist who come out with Ph.D.s and suddenly you have ability to ethnography (inaudible ) everything has but it is there is huge investment of time, you know and it says like what's the big deal going to longer, longer for year, longer, longer for 2 years. But it's phenomenal, if you compare that to the amount of time, regular filmmaker (inaudible ) people who engagement with the subjects form(ph) it's an amazing luxury and as a result, the year is not in that much of a time (inaudible ) but to build(ph) have that exposure to a some extent and it provides real opportunity if those students have prior training in film making and if you go to field being media literate as well as you know academician and things.
SINGING STONES AND SPEAKING STONES Jayasinhji Jhala
Collaboration
Kelly Askew The question that I was thinking to persuade concerns the issue of collaboration. In my experience, and I know my experience is not necessarily typical because not having gone through film program, per se. I am not a student who has had to go out and make my own film. So I am looking at it as a member of multiple teams of filmmaker and I know that's not the only model but there is still lone film makers who has a higher level of control over the product they create and can be true to a given vision because it's a singular vision, but in lot of film work, there is more than one person involved and as a result have to deal with often times conflicting artistic visions but I think involving the local communities about whom these films are being made as coequal collaborators leave us with more to gain from that, however, awkward it might be and difficult to processing producing that and challenge comes from having to differ to cultural authority of the people with whom you are working with on a given film, often times the people about whom the film is made…ahmm…, it means abrogating your authority as a narrator as an author as a film maker and subsuming your own personal narrative desires, expressive desires, aesthetic desires are even documentary desires to those of the people with whom you work.
Jayasinhji Jhala This is a tremendous potential, no longer are we in the world where films are made about the people, they are made by people for themselves and I think again this needs to be shouted from streets and from all pulpits, that in fact there is, it's a not question of quality, it's not question of orientation, but of the immense diversity that people want to say what they are saying and many of us who are in the business of promoting the production of this especially in fourth world norms, have to understand what we mean by our role in it.
Paul Stoller It's also not just making one trip, it's going back, because when you go back second time, people see that your commitment is not something that is verbal, it is something that is, you know…you are doing..you are displacing yourself and if you do it over period of years, really creates deep set of relationships that are and people entrust information to you and that gives you a sense of great obligation and responsibility as well.
Lucien Taylor I have worked in west Africa and in the Franco-Creole Caribbean and this is the first time, I am working (inaudible ) American , am working in US and with a group of native English speakers with sheep herders of Norwich and then Irish descend in Mount Ana (ph) and I am not an anonymously give gifted linguist into working in a community which will differences, with which I am unable to relate so easily with such facility as being incredibly enriching and enormously enabling to a and I think that as much as ethnography is invested in local knowledge, in really having particular purchase on culture differences, not big experiments that other methodologies don't give us, it is very easy for anthropologist to hide the shallowness of their knowledge behind these kinds of (inaudible ), when looking into community, I had luxury and you also have, you know you have years and years and years if you are experienced that you can build on, you can invest, in numerous ethical and (inaudible ) complications that we have addressed here.
Paul Stoller Ethnographers need to practice themselves and spend lots of time doing ethnographic field work honing their skills, honing their observation skills, honing their skills of interpretations, learning languages, learning how to interpret social reality that they confront and it takes a long period of time to understand sufficiently enough a group of people to represent them with a degree of sensitivity and fidelity and I think that it takes while for ethnographers to become practitioners, that is to say people that have really learned the bits and pieces of what it takes to be an ethnographer in the field and to be someone who can represent the field experience the ethnographic situation in wherever media they choose, ethnography is an incredibly flexible genre of representations, meaning that it can be stretched to fit all different kinds of subjects, it can diverse array of media can be used to do ethnographic representation and most importantly I think for today is that given its flexibility as a genre, ethnography is something which fits the complexities of contemporary life. In another words it's not reductive, it expands with the complexities of contemporary social culture living and so it is a device that many people can use to try to make sense of what goes on in contemporary social worlds, be there here in Philadelphia , New York city , West Africa , or wherever. The big issue I think in doing ethnography at home is the issue of accountability. If you are an African-American working in African-American community, your subject position will be ethnographer but members of the community is going to multi-layered and you know a series of negotiations that you probably have to engage in if you are going to do that kind of research.
SINGING STONES AND SPEAKING STONES Jayasinhji Jhala
Kelly Askew I guess one thing that in posing our same question that well it said which, I wish I said, such an obvious points that one cannot do ethnography without collaborating, it's impossible, and this is something we have been talking about in my department a bit about not as much self-censorship, but how and when is our constantly negotiate between private and public forms of knowledge and then when we create our products, via the monograph, written text, or a film, it becomes public and so you're constantly having to make decisions about what is public and what is private knowledge, what is sharable? what is not?, that becomes ever more obvious in films, which have the potential to reach greater audience than ethnographic monographs that we wish that one could read them. And in my original discussion about questions, it was in my mind, start debating with permanent member of this program is not, not (inaudible ) for whom anthropological cinema should be made primarily oriented towards anthropologists which doesn't speak to that premier public questions much in order to protect integrity this kind of the (inaudible ) and I guess see filmiest having such potential for breaking those barriers that I like to employ collaboration to the best possible degrees so that our films going to be as possible audiences, I see no problem with that personally. So collaboration as a tool towards that end and I am in all favor of but it is awfully difficult and that is what she said fraught the difficulties, all time frustration, and it's not easy, it's constant compromising, (inaudible ) in the marriage, I think I mean when you said you had worked successfully with your partner having negotiated you know those things without compromise a lot that's what working in collaborative relationship in a film-making endeavor requires as it does with ethnography.
Jayasinhji Jhala I know, one thing that you said right now which is that films have larger exposure. One criteria there is, not only do they perhaps get larger exposure, may be not, but one section of audience that films include that our writing excludes our the people who are not literate in our way, so well before this came, the whole re-flexibility discussion in anthropology for means in anthropology, it was already something that we were seized with when we were dealing with our texts and the people whom we met, because immediately they have, it had have impact and meaning sometimes they violently uh (inaudible ) appropriation of a very violent kind, of which we learned but which we despite our clearing calls for others to pay attention to if the people didn't pay attention to that in fact until somebody, broken that and so I think that, that one of the problem that we might want to seek is that so that we don't end up repeating when we talking about collaboration and the consequence of collaborators, how do we not only teach it in this way but how we then make it up, make the others aware of it, the product sharing. Because there is a kind of in worst situation, our work, the written work we share, very easily. Our film making work we share very poorly amongst ourselves. Whereas in terms of the project people supposed to be that our collaborators and few they share the visual product and not the written one.
Just when Kelly was talking about, once it is in a public domain, you know that there is multiple levels of communication and I have found at least in my work, dealing with African-American theater, Afro-Caribbean theater with the actual(ph) ritual but there is obviously going to be public transcript and then there is embedded in the public transcripts, there is hidden transcripts, that only like members of the particular group will get all the new answers and sometimes informants can give the researchers some understanding of the some with other new answers and I am assuming that kind of collaboration is the same in film. I am always mindful of the members of the community and what they want known versus what as an anthropologist I need to tell and I don't know, I don't know if I will get that correct ways, sometime, I think I get too much information.
Language of wine Roderick Coover
Aesthetics
Rebecca Baron My question today rose out of the meeting I had with a student where she showed me working progress and the work struck me as too beautiful and ahhm…I was surprised that my own criticism of the work ahhm… but she seems so preoccupied with this kind of ahhm formal aesthetics ah…emphasis that I felt like it was distracting attention away from the subject of her film. The piece was about three families that have been evicted from a housing project and subjects in her film is quite striking (inaudible ) quite stylized and it was actually less that it bothered me than the way the environment was photographed, but it really did not serve her purpose which was you to…you know follow these three families and what happened to them after they have been evicted, so my question is ahhm… how do we, what is the criteria for our aesthetic choices and sometimes they are determined by technology as minimalist interesting work I think in the history of ethnographic film is these moments where technology shifted so radically that sync sound was available or the camera was mobile, and it had a very profound impact on the aesthetic of the work. Now we have a lot of tools at our disposal and now that we have more choices available to us, what criteria do we use to determine our aesthetics.
Philip Alperson Yeah, are there any comments? I suppose.
Michel Brault I don't see much room for aesthetics except some things like respect for the natural lighting for instance, but this is not the aesthetic, it's fidelity or something and the other aesthetics that could happen would be at the editing…
Rebecca Baron Sure
Michel Brault Then, that…because that is very important advice, the essence of making out and recording thing, you can record in any way but the way you handle the material, you you have taken from other people in time, and form and shape, if you manipulate the material.
Rebecca Baron I think it's complicated, because aesthetics of direct cinema have been adopted by reality television in lots of other contexts and I think it appears more as a style to audiences now than it did that has previously I feel there is like no real neutral aesthetics but in fact I was asking for this kind of what appears more as neutral aesthetics film but it really when we think about you know which lens do you choose, where do you put the camera, if you have a low angle, it looks very different then if you have high angle, you know, do you always use a normal lens, and she decided not to and she really started to use the physical space very creatively and it bothered me and it really when I think about am I still looking to this aesthetic that cinéma vérité has produced but that aesthetics has become as much as style as any other aesthetics.
Kathy Brew Even in vérité aren't you making aesthetic choices, how you frame your shot, and I mean, maybe what you're raising is that's bringing up some interplay between practices, and there is experimental film making practices that are coming to documentary film making and vice versa and I think we are seeing more expanded forms coming out of it and authenticity to the subject is one thing and then its authenticity to the makers vision as well.
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW OF OUR NEIGHBORS Rebecca Baron
Rebecca Baron In the late '30s in Britain , a surrealist poet, an ornithologist who was sort of a self-created anthropologist and Humphrey Jennings , who you probably know, created this thing called the Mass Observation, and their idea was I think, if they can create an accurate portrait of society, society could look at itself and then make informed decisions. So the way the press represented public opinion, the way the government presented public opinion. In fact, it did not reflect what it really was, so there we are going to find what it really was and they recruited volunteers to go all over England to observe people's behavior in public space and do surreptitious observation and photograph things surreptitiously and that is part of it and then there was some whole other practice, people writing into Mass Observation about their experiences, newer polls and questionnaires but they did not really do very good job at synthesizing the material. They published a book about behavior in a pub, and so literally got things connect(ph) in a movie that, film about like how many spits on the floor versus in the spittoon, and how long does it take one to drink a pint alone versus with other people.
So the worse kind of possibilities.
It's the spit on the ground versus in the spittoon, you know like of course on some level it is significant, but it's also utterly kind of useless on another level, because you know, so what, like what is the argument about that? It's the idea that everything is important.
Rebecca Baron Now, I think at distance what is interesting it's that practice of doing that all, they thought to gathering all the stuff was useful and that methodology is interesting and it conceptualize life (inaudible ).
And which has it champion in film theory and when you think about Krakauer and is interesting in precisely that kind of a film, that can document, you know the flow of life.
But Krakauer is very different because Krakauer is exactly where should you use the mechanisms of cinema creatively. It did not favor something like, go back for wider shot, that includes the most. Ahh… had the idea actually had to using these things, you have to edit, you have do, I mean, he did believe, there may people don't believe that you know, he did believe that it could actually as he would point of penetrate reality but he did not (inaudible ) a shot as any kind of techniques this would have helped, I think, that kind of film.
Rebecca Baron It's very often that filmmakers limit produce film in some fashion that is closest possible to experiences of being there and is not necessarily nomadic in any kind of objective sense, so you know writing that does too and I am interested in that.
I do some work in dance, dance films. And those, and one thing that happens in dance film is that, ahh…in fact if you were to set up a camera, the ideal distance from the stage, where you there's flash, with wings of the stage, and film, you wouldn't actually get an impression of what was like to be there. What you have to do get an impression of what is like to be there, is cut it and edit it, I mean that would give you the impression of the life from vitality of the dance, that is where you are going to closer approximation towards the performances, you're going to have to build up a certain kind of rhythm in your shots and you're going to have to exploit certain, exploit certain psychological tendency and use to complete actions and whatever, if you put the camera back, it's going to be living, so that you could take the greatest performance of the New York City Ballet and, and try to be authentic by making true even if you have and what you create would be exactly opposite impression of what needs to be there.
Let me just say something that you were talking about at various points Rod , with the idea of video blog right, like how did you account for that as a practice and it sounds like you were really trying to emphasize popping of this, this paradigm, this model of you know, space where there is just of bunch of things that are from different people and there is no way the film can account for because it's linear, it's just film) always demands, you know one frame proceed and then another.
Roderick Coover One who agony of thinking of is that the long film is dead, that the works at work in streaming on a new media of short-works. The works accompanied by text. The works from different people contributing to a common space. They are fragmented, they are multiply linked. They are not the linear one hour or two hour film and on the other hand that one film, the long film with the long work, we hold (inaudible ) accountable for it, the researcher, and the ethnographer. If they did not do the research well, they lie, we hold that accountable in these kind of spaces, accountability is almost isn't an issue, you know how to be what you begin, because it's a conversation where you may try and pull out this or that contributed even name them, but we have a tremendous form of reliability.
The shift in visual anthropology is to the sort of ethnography of ourselves in way where is the culture, with you know in the U.S. and that there is sort of documentary of what is going on right now in terms of video blog and there is all question of truth and you know and may be this is moving outside of ethnography, because it's more about kind of news and media documentation but that's where the video blog or the blogging whatever comes in sort of effort to like to document now and hearing what is happening and, and the idea of documentary as communication and that document itself is nothing, it's just above how it feeds into a conversation, you know a sort of moving, sort of moving target of like what is real.
It does not have to be single report, but certainly fair to be visual anthropology rather than just life that that happens to be recorded as it might be by bank surveillance camera, and it would not count about the bank surveillance camera recording all that activity in the bank as visual anthropology. There still has to be a figure of what you call visual anthropologist or a group of people who are visual anthropologists, does not seem to me as I understand the way you picturing the bloggers sort of an ongoing conversation like we have an anthropologist.
Roderick Coover Well I think of say there is very successful models and there is model of perhaps that is way can work is Fred Ripton's model, with pixel press in which you have many contributors in the field sending in blogs gathered around a theme of an online journal and you send out people to..to.. retrieve that stuff and that journal still has, is accountable for what is there to some degree and it facilitates some kinds of work, bringing together, clustering work on a theme and but does it work as a, couldn't it works in that way as journalism sounds, does it work for broader, ethnographic practice, where we want, instead of just brief snippets like news stories, we actually want to learn something over. When we learn something in an hour movie to learn something.
It sounds like mass observations, how did it started, is that you correspond it on the field, bringing back little chunks.
People often think that work would be ideal, the ideal history would be, If we could have something like, you know camera set up, record the idea, record them. We have camera setup so that everything that happens in human history is recorded as it happens. But you know that would never count this history, it's inadequate. Even if you have a perfect replica (inaudible ) and the reason is pretty simple. For example, a historian is a person who can tell you that let's say, you know when the Da Vinci was born the Renaissance begin the, but Da Vinci's father couldn't have said that. Because, you have to be in the future to actually be able to know what's important about..about..about..the past, I mean they could not said at Stalingrad that was the beginning and end of the Third Reich. You have to be at 1946 to know that and that is why people should be careful, as Oscar Wilde said. People should be careful about what they wish for, we don't want the document, a photograph, a cell snap shot of our own time. That's kind of useless, we won't know as otherwise supposedly realize about the war in Iraq . We won't know what's going until 15 years from now.
No, I mean, in this, like this sort of notion of the necessity of selectivity of things being erased. You know, I mean you are kind of opposing as questionnaire, you know what are sort of potential negative things but think about like end of good hours of histories of cinema where he re-creates the end and he says only the hand that erases can write, write a second. In order to write, you know the preconditioning of writing is the ability to erase.
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW OF OUR NEIGHBORS Rebecca Baron
Future of visual anthropology
Roderick Coover Anthropology in its film making practices, one of its agendas was to hold and grasp and pass on in the face of erasure and I think one of the problems that we have to face is our ability to move forward, because what we saw in the earlier days of visual anthropology was attempt to grasp culture as there being reconfigured by the global spread of communication technologies, by the global spread of western wealth. In terms of industrialization, colonization, post colonial imperial development. Now we find that we are in a different game. Those cultures are changed. There the initial agendas are trying to grasp and pass on the stories of ahh… cultures that had not encountered the West before, no longer exists very commonly. Now we find ourselves sharing global ahh… ahh ahhh deluge of visual information and with that we all share I think around the world a practice or a process of erasure of each new tide of material in raising what has come before. So is ethnography now, this thing that we grasping is it of our world, is it of other worlds or can we even make those distinctions.
Paul Stoller For me this ahhh… I see each successive level as a kind of foundation, a form which we built. Rather than a Eurasia(ph). The elements of the sort of traditional societies if you want call them that, in sort of contemporary reconfigurations. And so I look at it sort of the way ahhh as sort of influence by Jean Rouch's notion, and that is that ahhh…you ahhh..you build on, you stand on the shoulders of people who came before you and you continue this process and it's you know all part of this sort of process of ahh sort of slow building up where we ahhh continuously refining what has come before. And I think that challenge is that yes we have ahhh you know just complexly reconfigure worlds and but I think that ahhh you know that the foundations are there to build on and I think that the people have come before us have made a you know tremendous contribution. And ahhh… things are different but I think that we can, we can use that as our strength rather than see it as something that deserve pass into the, into the ether.
Lucien Taylor In terms of the future of cross-cultural media practice ahhhm… ahhh it doesn't seem to me that cross-cultural makes sense as a category. Ahhm ahhh… and is not just the culture is now ultra-porous and ultra-fragmented, of course they have always been more porous and fragmented then we would like to have believed, but that is a factor too. Ahhh…I think it's also that image making practices that negotiate inter-cultural differences are not essentially different to the problems that they have to engage with and not essentially different to my mind than imaging making practices. But don't deal with those differences, but deal with other kinds of differences or intra-cultural differences or just personal and political differences. Ahhm I think there is a danger here in not recognizing in terms of what you talked about this problem of erasure, the fact that visual anthropology has never been institutionalized and whether should or not be I don't know. Between of 1895 and 1920 there were huge hopes that there would be a visual anthropology a truly constituted visual anthropology. Ahh… people like Felix-Louis Regnault , Alfred Haddon or Spencer all believe that a camera motion picture camera was a crucial piece of anthropological operators ahhm… that has never really been followed up on. Visual anthropology came of age when one generation with one-and-a-half generations after the war. But various efforts before the war Mead and Bateson came (inaudible ) because we had a kind of pumped-in positivistic ideal of Margaret Mead butting up against Gregory Bateson's much more interesting engagement aesthetics, but they ahhh…when nowhere ahhm and the one other amazing possibility would have been Maya Deren who ahh… you know spent four…well ahh many months between 1947 and 1951 in Haiti and lost confidence in herself as an artist and felt that as an artist she having shot always footage she would only be manipulative of her subject, so was there was no aesthetics that was adequate to the authenticity of her experience. She became an adoptive Voudoun in Haiti and she ended up writing a book I think in 1961 or something called ahh… "Divine Horsemen" ahh… that was a very, very, very conventional book that was nothing exceptional by anthropological standards of that time. But it came of age in the 50's with Jean Rouch in France , with Robert Gardner and ahh… ahhh… John Marshall in Boston and with David and Judith McDougall I think above all half-a-generation later at UCLA and then at Rice and ahh… ahh… Australian National University most recently. We might you know on the face of it ahh… I think of this is some kind of utopian moment for visual anthropology to come off age or media anthropology not the anthropology of the media done by default through written expository pros but and the anthropology that was conducted through media in some sense ahh… that is… that the… the media (inaudible ) signify not simply the signified here. Ahh… there is an ethno-racialism programs, journals, festivals, conferences ahhh… UCLA Temple, Santa Fe USC and I have joined by NYU, Howard, Manchester, Oxford, Kent, Goldsmith, Lobra, UCL University College of London and Quining(ph) now in China , Cone(ph) in Germany Tromso in Norway that gives out PhD's in visual anthropology and DIT the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland . But this picture seems to me at least to be misleading. Ahhm these programs have had really short half-lives in general and most to and various degrees of dysfunctionality. Temple I doubt you can say secret has been in the doldrums ahhh… for number of years. Ahhh..UCLA is no more and has been no more. USC is basically morovan(ph), Colorado I think is no more, Santa Fe is no more. Ahhm they often tie to one or two charismatic individuals and are insufficiently instituted ahhh… institutionalized within the university. Ahhm honestly and this is, is again perhaps speaks only to my own (inaudible ) I haven't seen more than four or five interesting works ahhh ahhh media works to have come out of visual anthropology programs in my life where as I can think of hundreds of works to have come out of Callogs(ph), or film schools and art programs. In terms of the social reproduction of the field that has been no passing of the baton as we know, no generation that succeed of them been all dead, some of them are still practicing and practicing really well, but it is staggering that the most interesting were that is self identified in some senses of visual anthropology is coming out of people who were in their 60s or their 70's.
Jayasinhji Jhala I think some of this might be tied to how we reward visual anthropologist in ahh…programs such as ahh…visual anthropology where the visual text and many forms of visual text or expressions do not carry the same way, even in departments that celebrate and study the visual. And this may be true ahh… we are we are still award driven ahhh… discipline. And I think it's important we periodically have discussions about how this might be done, but I think more systematic approach ahhh… is in fact required. How do you celebrate the contribution of people who are engaged in this product.
POETRY IN MOTION Kelly Askew
Michel Brault He said that visual anthropology was first used in, go ahead
Lucien Taylor Ahhmm it's this all you know it's all anthropology in well the lateral history always describe the (inaudible ) late 19th century and ahhh…ahhh… anthropologist like a Felix-Louis Regnault in France and Alfred Haddon in Britain and Spencer Australia have all have loved to invested in visual anthropology and (inaudible ) anthropology visual at that time. Ahhm.. In between about 1895 until the 1920s anthropologist have lot invested in the visual. But that is the pathway they went apply to the consent of meaning that it may manifest in material culture and surface this in appearances and then when culture in particular to some degree social too, but when the culture became eternalized there came something that was symbolic, it wasn't for anybody evident when this in the visual invisible appearances and they engage with the visual went out off the window only to be resuscitated (inaudible ).
I was wondering whether you followed up on something Lucien said in the first session, his…his idea that ahh… anthropology has to be reinvigorate by art and not by the academy if you wanted to explain about that.
Lucien Taylor Yeah…I mean you know, I am not a theorist of film or author I think about exposure to other people's work is quite limited. (inaudible ) work in Japan , Brazil , Mexico , (inaudible ) ahhm Steven Machlin , ahhh David all these artists. Ahhhm ahhh engaging with reality and with a certain kind of reinvigoration of cinema vérité in ways that incredibly instincts effecting their work. That has received recognition with the (inaudible ) and whether worth it is equally adventurous and that is equally concerned once with (inaudible ) vérité makes up with the media with often interesting what is lacks in appearance and what is lacks in aesthetics. But here we are happy about this artistic vision is very, very ahhh…compelling, very controlled, very pronounced, also very interested in that reality in that degree of excess.
Rebecca Baron Is that of own interest, after that reminded(ph) that the I think this came up in our discussion that the criteria's really different in different context, so that in anthropology in, in discipline that anthropology I will be surprised if Sharon Lokhards (ph) could be considered in the ethnography because she engages with ethnography but the work is directed and people have told her you kindly cannot do it, that's not visible in the work. It's not for granted in the work and certainly appears that this is people's natural behavior, but in fact she is limiting what they are allowed to do which is crucial to the work and so this kind of very precise, beautiful, form of pieces that sort of have a investment in looking at other cultures. In fact she is the director of their behavior to a large extents. So I think ahhm it's very interesting in terms of what ethnography is but I would find it hard to believe that it would be acceptable as ethnography per se unless she is part of it.
Lucien Taylor Like with, (inaudible ) about how school girls, basketball practice in Japan is a extraordinary work. It was all choreographed by her and a choreographer. But she has spent I think 6 months or 9 months there with her internship and going to that gymnasium every day. So she remakes these these methodologies like (inaudible ) she was able do on her budget with her and (inaudible ) incredible film where ahhm… you have seen it, must have seen it
Rebecca Baron Yeah, of course.
Lucien Taylor Again you know she went to every neighborhood in this town in Brazil and had it demographically representative ahhm… ahhh audience constituted from the sociological survey of this town if you know that.
Rebecca Baron But she hasn't told the things that were ethnological, (inaudible ).
Lucien Taylor Right
Rebecca Baron I was listening to this very very difficult musical piece, the camera was just on the audience they are not allowed to applaud, they are not allowed to speak, they are not allowed to getup. Hahaha…so it almost doesn't matter who is sitting there if they are being interactive.
HOW LITTLE WE NOW OF OUR NEIGHBORS Rebecca Baron
Philip Alperson (Moderator) Some of the things that we have heard about today is the.. the question of the nature of culture and changing cultures in a way that culture is ahhh.. are experiencing a rasher(ph) and some traditional anthropological question, issues that are philosophical about the distinction between truth and ahh… fiction and non-fiction and episteme, some of the epistemological questions that Lucien eluded to as well, the nature of objectivity we have heard about the influence of the ahh ahhh of the transformation of communicative technologies and the way in which that that has changed the worlds in which we lived and also the practices that we used to try to understand the worlds in which we live. I mean I really have enjoyed this session because I have heard so much ahhh…so many different perspectives and ahhm… it seems to me that if it shows any one thing, it shows the importance of understanding the multidisciplinary, unitary disciplinary dimensions of visual anthropology and other ahh… ahh… mediating practices so I would like to thank you all for your patience. It has been a long session, but I think our productive in rewarding one it would. I would appreciated if you join me and thanking our panelists.
[sil.]
Panelists Michel Brault Paul Stoller Kelly Askew Jayasinhji Jhala Kathy Brew Rebecca Baron Roderick Coover Lucien Taylor Moderator Philip Alperson Participants Concetta Stewart Gordon Gray Oliver Gaycken Sarah Drury Noel Carroll Suzanne Gauch Warren Bass Tom Jacobson Priya Joshi Jeff Rush Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon Fabienne Darling-Wolf Charles Weitz Conference Organizers Roderick Coover Jayasinhji Jhala Paul Stoller Funders Temple University School of Communications and Theater, The Graduate School, The College of Liberal Arts Directed and Produced by Roderick Coover Production Crew Phally Chroy Laska Jimsen Ben Kalina Audio Technician Ian Markiewicz Editor Vedran Residbegovic Music Anabelle Rodriguez Transcriptions Hülya Sakarya Brooke Bocast © Roderick Coover 2007
www.der.org
Documentary Educational Resources
Lucien Taylor Anthropology can no longer claim to have particular monopoly on ethnography.
Roderick Coover For ethnography to move forward from its past, we also need to look for way to bring that past into the present.
Jayasinhji Jhala No longer are we in the world where films are made about people, they are made by people for themselves.
Whom these films are being made, communities about whom these films are being made as co-equal collaborators leaves us with more to gain however awkward it might be.
Michel Brault Ethnography expands with the complexities of contemporary socio-cultural livings.
Rebecca Baron Nonetheless interesting work I think in the history of ethnographic film is these moments where technology shifted so radically and it had a very profound impact on the aesthetics of the work.
From Vérité to Virtual: Conversations on the Frontier of Film and Anthropology
Roderick Coover ' African Art, African Voices' was an exhibition that was held at the Philadelphia Art Museum; it had come here from the Seattle Art Museum. It was a touring exhibit that tried to use multiple voices to tell the stories of African objects. The show was based on a good theory, that it's good to have many people explaining the lives of objects, and yet the show failed, for a number of reasons I believe, and one of the reasons is that each set of materials was only in the end explained by one person and that that person was still explaining, speaking at us, telling us what these objects were, but we weren't engaging in any kind of conversation. And I asked the curator what was going on you know. There is potential for conversation, a potential for an exchange that was not happening and curator said well, you know we have the illusion down here of exchange but in the end everything has to get decided upstairs in the director's office and really these relationships…your, that..that.. people we have established, not of people to the object but to person talking to the director who is collecting the interview and then putting them in an order. So we have the illusion of many voices but we actually have one structure and it occurred to me that something in film has a same problem. We collect interviews, we gather people and record what they say and then we put them in a line, in the linear sequence of a film and by doing that we inevitably put a single order and we cut out the chance for exchange and there is something else that happens, whenever group of people in space, it could be in this conference room, it could be with all of you, that is fluid, that can go into any direction and the reality that is created from that changes with each coming together of the people, or each coming together of the materials and so one of the things that I look to is a film practice that maintains that vitality, that maintains that fluidity, that speaks to life not as a structured linear event but poses the problem of reality as something that lacks that structure that is spontaneous and fluid. The question I think before us is how ethnography can give us these tools to pose the problem of reality?, what is it we see?, what is it we experience? and how out of these experiences do we construct ourselves as being part of one group or another? and I think for ethnography to move forward from its past, we also need to look for a way to bring that past into the present in someway that's dynamic, it could be through the re-showing themselves and discussion those generate but it may also be through other form of re-edits or re-mediation of you taking old works and remaking them into something new, based on what you see now and what you were told about then.
Lucien Taylor Anthropology can no longer claim to have particular monopoly on ethnography perhaps, so ethnographic film is now situated within a much larger spectrum of cognate, culturally inflected media practices. This is not actually nothing new if you think of Cavalcante in the 30s , people like Victor Masayesva , Triman Hagh (ph), Tracey Moffatt , Kidlat Tahimik Filipino filmmaker and many, many others is inflected by anthropology and in dialog often very oppositionally with the anthropology. The most interesting work of this kind is not really inflected by an ethnographic sensibility which is very different from saying that it is in dialog with or informed by anthropology in a sense that it does not really display an ethnographic sensibility, does not have same investment in ethnography.
Cinema Vérité
Michel Brault reading text by Edgar Morin There are two ways of looking at the Cinema of reality. The first is to pretend to show reality. The second is to pose the problem of reality. Thus, there have been two concepts of cinema vérité. First, it pretended to show the truth. Second, it posed the problem of truth. Well, we have reason to know by now, that fiction film is, in principle, much less illusionary and less mendacious than so-called documentary because the author and the audience know it is fiction. In other words, its truth is in its make-believe. In contrast, documentary hides its truth behind the image, a mere reflection of reality. Now we have even better reason to know that social reality camouflaged and dramatized itself for onlookers, and to even greater effect for the camera. Roles express social reality and in politics, contrivance is more real than reality. That is why so-called cinema of reality has presented, proposed, even imposed the most incredible illusions in those marvelous regions from which fleeting images were brought back the social reality was staged and occluded by the political system in place and transfigured in the dazzled eyes of the filmmaker. In other words, that aspect of cinema, most troubled by illusion, irreality and fiction is that same cinema of reality whose mission is to confront the most difficult philosophic problem of the last 2000 years - the nature of reality itself.
Lucien Taylor Cinema vérité as much as we might talk but is being the vérité of cinema rather than cinema of vérité, nonetheless has a certain stake or had a certain stake in giving us return to reality that had not been possible since the invention of talkies. Vérité has spawned this, this, this amorphous mass of reality TV but I don't watch lot of it so I don't wanna claim any real understanding of it or knowledge of it, but it obviously it is linked to some kind of tendency to spectacularize ahh…ahh and to thematize the abject, especially paying anything that is taboo or transgressive and even vérité itself remember for of all its claim, for all of its legitimating itself on redeeming the everyday on giving us everyday experience and some sense of the dailiness of..of..human existence concentrated for the most part of eccentrics or celebrities, it also had narrative forms and narrative logics that again were borrowed from fiction.
Rebecca Baron I think I learned my fundamental filmmaking questions in a cinema vérité editing room. I was an editor for Penny Baker and it struck me as young editor that here I was working in this forum that gave the greatest sense of being there, and it, yet it was the most highly constructed form of editing I'd ever done. There's all this pressure on the image to be true to reality, but it...it's a representation, and so how do we shape..the..our films to be truest to experience with them through or truest to the actual material of reality of being there and those aren't always the same things.
Jayasinhji Jhala Perhaps the assertion and conviction that you are telling something, telling a truth might be altered by offering an opinion. I think ahh...that allows there to be both kind of fragility in (inaudible ) as well as you carry it with your own conviction.
Roderick Coover But also camera person is always active and always present. The camera is a catalyst and I think the boom in documentary film is that now all the more wide spectrum of people can take cameras out and be catalysts, and be active in the scene and that what you documenting is what is happening before you might be making happen or might be different culture there, you can't help that but that the role is active in the making side not passive and same for an ethnographer, same for an activist, same across the board in documentary film except for streaming of observational material from, ahh… hidden cameras. In almost all other circumstances our roles are active.
LANGUAGE OF WINE Roderick Coover
I'm Oliver (inaudible ), assistant professor in the English department and I just want to raise the question, that I think it comes out of all of the comments so far, and this is the question of you know for documenting cultural practices and if in a certain sense to follow (inaudible ) that contrivance is more real than a certain mode of reality filmmaking, then I wonder how it accounts for, situates itself or imagines its relationship to fictional films. You know, with a sort of increased exaggeration of our culture with the history of cinema. Is there a way in which something that's kind of missing from the panel is someone who is an ethnographer of popular entertainment, so I just wonder if you don't have to think about that borderline between fiction, nonfiction, and few films Hollywood and, you know, how to do this.
Kelly Askew I can respond to that, because I was involved in two feature films both of which were fictional and in a recent essay I wrote, I talked about the liberating field of working in fiction which maybe Paul can also speak to, in that we are not bound to idea of documentary value in the same way, you can do instead of as you opposed it doing ethnography of popular entrainment. I would say that one strategy that some of us are not involved in this doing ethnographies through popular entertainment, employing popular entertainment is way of showcasing a culture providing knowledge about a culture, gaining access to that culture by getting drawn into a narrative style, so in a way that documentary film doesn't necessary always succeed as well and it can ask people to engage with the culture in a very personal phenomenological way that documentary can't sometimes always achieve. So, yes, for me it also the essay side about the truth of fiction is also the fiction of truth where you know there is…hmm…, you think you are always going after the document, you are gonna go after accuracy, reality and of course you always fall short, because there is always the staging, there is always the framing, there is always reenactment bit to it and so always feeling like falling short for the goal makes that sometimes very trying, challenging experience that you freed of when you enter in fiction.
Paul Stoller I think the reasons in my case writing fiction or writing ethnography depend on number of factors. One is there is no one way to represent reality, for me the kinds of things I have written have varied over, over time. The styles that I have adopted, the genres I have adopted and my rule of thumb has been to let the material speak to me and the materials indicates that… ah…ah… memoir is appropriate or an ethnography is appropriate or a set of experiences that would indicate that may be I want to have fictionalized and so fiction is well suited to certain kind of subjects that ethnography is not. So, I think the key because of this sort of fluidity of situations. The key is to be flexible and not to say I am going to do just this or that or just that, ahh…but to let the wondrousness of the world sort of…ahh… penetrate you and sort of indicate the representational strategies that you want to take.
Lucien Taylor Kelly you said earlier that you know with fiction, with good fiction you have this kind of phenomenological intensity or plenitude or intimacy that is so hard to achieve in nonfiction. I mean it's incredibly hard and cinema vérité, the technological innovations in 1960s were you know were, perhaps necessary condition but they are not sufficient condition to approximate anything like the degree of intimacy and psychological and subjective complexity that you can get with fiction…ahh… and I mean if my producer say I am really invested not imposing problems about reality, I am certainly interested in watching them and addressing them and maybe, I am trying to ask them occasionally but I am really interested in evoking reality and representing reality and trying to throw up a mirror to reality in all of that (inaudible ) that is what I mean to say, I am interested in producing works that have excess that exceeds my intentionality.
HELL ROARING CREEK Lucien Taylor and Ilisa Barbash
Lucien Taylor I don't identify myself as a documentarian, maybe that (inaudible .
Why?
Lucien Taylor Because the word documentary seem to very reductive to me, because if all I producing is a mere document and the negative definition and I, I'm also reticent about engaging negative definitions for (inaudible ) but nonfiction seems to me to stake out of terrain that I am more comfortable with than documentary. Documentary implies is very less interpretations by artistic engagement, aesthetic engagement, all of which (inaudible ).
Well I think for a lot of us documentary doesn't imply that.
Lucien Taylor Right, but that's the principle.
(crosstalk)(inaudible) documentary, documentary is the point of view, the statement on the development of the idea.
Lucien Taylor Lets go technologically since you are,
I know, yeah.
Lucien Taylor But I understand that, and this also allows the documentary as well as nonfiction film to be completed with broadcast journalism which has very narrow topic of interest, and very, very circumscribed aesthetic possibilities, you know it's expository, you have talking heads, you have actuality footage, it's very non-experimental. The art world today is showing this pronounced ahh… gravitation towards reality, towards non-fiction and many of the most accomplished artists that I know work internationally, artists whose work has been consecrated, you know who are at the summit of the art world, and they are these people whose work is infused by cinema vérité and they are these people, I mean after making you know (inaudible ) of six $85,000 kind of thing um but they are receiving acknowledgment or recognition within the art world that isn't necessarily happening within the caliber, a lot of people who really feel it's remarkable (inaudible ) know this by seeing some extraordinary artists, they are not really pushing us to take control at all they are (inaudible ) continue, and I think incredibly exciting and film schools for most part because they are oriented towards industry, towards mainstream. I am not talking onto say (inaudible ).
Speaking as anthropologist, all anthropologists do visualize anthropology, as they just quite often don't do it very well, you know
Not all documentary.
Well exactly.
I am not all documentary.
But you know, how many anthropology text books have photos on it.
(cross talk)(inaudible)
Sure Photographs and why that there, you know lot of times, it's you know like (inaudible ) just to illustrate some point in the text, they are not important and yet they are in document. I should not have to argue that these are important things that they can be incredibly powerful tools to aid understanding and to, to, to work, to evoke ideas and all these stuff and there is starriness kind of did want to mention kind of way.
Lucien Taylor And I think visual anthropology is in separate aspects of (inaudible ) with the main stream of anthropology. Visual anthropology attends to particularities of personal experience, subjectivity and left experience along the forward does to the abstractions of culture that's all, I think that is particular power. But in terms of (inaudible ) a visual anthropology, we are also trying to something that isn't supported by the market, that isn't supported by the capitalism, you know, to provide, other stories, and other voices and other visions that are being heard and contribute to public spirits in this way. And I think anthropologist, the one thing anthropologists can't contribute (inaudible ) but it is also true and it is not just black box, because if you hear anthropologist who come out with Ph.D.s and suddenly you have ability to ethnography (inaudible ) everything has but it is there is huge investment of time, you know and it says like what's the big deal going to longer, longer for year, longer, longer for 2 years. But it's phenomenal, if you compare that to the amount of time, regular filmmaker (inaudible ) people who engagement with the subjects form(ph) it's an amazing luxury and as a result, the year is not in that much of a time (inaudible ) but to build(ph) have that exposure to a some extent and it provides real opportunity if those students have prior training in film making and if you go to field being media literate as well as you know academician and things.
SINGING STONES AND SPEAKING STONES Jayasinhji Jhala
Collaboration
Kelly Askew The question that I was thinking to persuade concerns the issue of collaboration. In my experience, and I know my experience is not necessarily typical because not having gone through film program, per se. I am not a student who has had to go out and make my own film. So I am looking at it as a member of multiple teams of filmmaker and I know that's not the only model but there is still lone film makers who has a higher level of control over the product they create and can be true to a given vision because it's a singular vision, but in lot of film work, there is more than one person involved and as a result have to deal with often times conflicting artistic visions but I think involving the local communities about whom these films are being made as coequal collaborators leave us with more to gain from that, however, awkward it might be and difficult to processing producing that and challenge comes from having to differ to cultural authority of the people with whom you are working with on a given film, often times the people about whom the film is made…ahmm…, it means abrogating your authority as a narrator as an author as a film maker and subsuming your own personal narrative desires, expressive desires, aesthetic desires are even documentary desires to those of the people with whom you work.
Jayasinhji Jhala This is a tremendous potential, no longer are we in the world where films are made about the people, they are made by people for themselves and I think again this needs to be shouted from streets and from all pulpits, that in fact there is, it's a not question of quality, it's not question of orientation, but of the immense diversity that people want to say what they are saying and many of us who are in the business of promoting the production of this especially in fourth world norms, have to understand what we mean by our role in it.
Paul Stoller It's also not just making one trip, it's going back, because when you go back second time, people see that your commitment is not something that is verbal, it is something that is, you know…you are doing..you are displacing yourself and if you do it over period of years, really creates deep set of relationships that are and people entrust information to you and that gives you a sense of great obligation and responsibility as well.
Lucien Taylor I have worked in west Africa and in the Franco-Creole Caribbean and this is the first time, I am working (inaudible ) American , am working in US and with a group of native English speakers with sheep herders of Norwich and then Irish descend in Mount Ana (ph) and I am not an anonymously give gifted linguist into working in a community which will differences, with which I am unable to relate so easily with such facility as being incredibly enriching and enormously enabling to a and I think that as much as ethnography is invested in local knowledge, in really having particular purchase on culture differences, not big experiments that other methodologies don't give us, it is very easy for anthropologist to hide the shallowness of their knowledge behind these kinds of (inaudible ), when looking into community, I had luxury and you also have, you know you have years and years and years if you are experienced that you can build on, you can invest, in numerous ethical and (inaudible ) complications that we have addressed here.
Paul Stoller Ethnographers need to practice themselves and spend lots of time doing ethnographic field work honing their skills, honing their observation skills, honing their skills of interpretations, learning languages, learning how to interpret social reality that they confront and it takes a long period of time to understand sufficiently enough a group of people to represent them with a degree of sensitivity and fidelity and I think that it takes while for ethnographers to become practitioners, that is to say people that have really learned the bits and pieces of what it takes to be an ethnographer in the field and to be someone who can represent the field experience the ethnographic situation in wherever media they choose, ethnography is an incredibly flexible genre of representations, meaning that it can be stretched to fit all different kinds of subjects, it can diverse array of media can be used to do ethnographic representation and most importantly I think for today is that given its flexibility as a genre, ethnography is something which fits the complexities of contemporary life. In another words it's not reductive, it expands with the complexities of contemporary social culture living and so it is a device that many people can use to try to make sense of what goes on in contemporary social worlds, be there here in Philadelphia , New York city , West Africa , or wherever. The big issue I think in doing ethnography at home is the issue of accountability. If you are an African-American working in African-American community, your subject position will be ethnographer but members of the community is going to multi-layered and you know a series of negotiations that you probably have to engage in if you are going to do that kind of research.
SINGING STONES AND SPEAKING STONES Jayasinhji Jhala
Kelly Askew I guess one thing that in posing our same question that well it said which, I wish I said, such an obvious points that one cannot do ethnography without collaborating, it's impossible, and this is something we have been talking about in my department a bit about not as much self-censorship, but how and when is our constantly negotiate between private and public forms of knowledge and then when we create our products, via the monograph, written text, or a film, it becomes public and so you're constantly having to make decisions about what is public and what is private knowledge, what is sharable? what is not?, that becomes ever more obvious in films, which have the potential to reach greater audience than ethnographic monographs that we wish that one could read them. And in my original discussion about questions, it was in my mind, start debating with permanent member of this program is not, not (inaudible ) for whom anthropological cinema should be made primarily oriented towards anthropologists which doesn't speak to that premier public questions much in order to protect integrity this kind of the (inaudible ) and I guess see filmiest having such potential for breaking those barriers that I like to employ collaboration to the best possible degrees so that our films going to be as possible audiences, I see no problem with that personally. So collaboration as a tool towards that end and I am in all favor of but it is awfully difficult and that is what she said fraught the difficulties, all time frustration, and it's not easy, it's constant compromising, (inaudible ) in the marriage, I think I mean when you said you had worked successfully with your partner having negotiated you know those things without compromise a lot that's what working in collaborative relationship in a film-making endeavor requires as it does with ethnography.
Jayasinhji Jhala I know, one thing that you said right now which is that films have larger exposure. One criteria there is, not only do they perhaps get larger exposure, may be not, but one section of audience that films include that our writing excludes our the people who are not literate in our way, so well before this came, the whole re-flexibility discussion in anthropology for means in anthropology, it was already something that we were seized with when we were dealing with our texts and the people whom we met, because immediately they have, it had have impact and meaning sometimes they violently uh (inaudible ) appropriation of a very violent kind, of which we learned but which we despite our clearing calls for others to pay attention to if the people didn't pay attention to that in fact until somebody, broken that and so I think that, that one of the problem that we might want to seek is that so that we don't end up repeating when we talking about collaboration and the consequence of collaborators, how do we not only teach it in this way but how we then make it up, make the others aware of it, the product sharing. Because there is a kind of in worst situation, our work, the written work we share, very easily. Our film making work we share very poorly amongst ourselves. Whereas in terms of the project people supposed to be that our collaborators and few they share the visual product and not the written one.
Just when Kelly was talking about, once it is in a public domain, you know that there is multiple levels of communication and I have found at least in my work, dealing with African-American theater, Afro-Caribbean theater with the actual(ph) ritual but there is obviously going to be public transcript and then there is embedded in the public transcripts, there is hidden transcripts, that only like members of the particular group will get all the new answers and sometimes informants can give the researchers some understanding of the some with other new answers and I am assuming that kind of collaboration is the same in film. I am always mindful of the members of the community and what they want known versus what as an anthropologist I need to tell and I don't know, I don't know if I will get that correct ways, sometime, I think I get too much information.
Language of wine Roderick Coover
Aesthetics
Rebecca Baron My question today rose out of the meeting I had with a student where she showed me working progress and the work struck me as too beautiful and ahhm…I was surprised that my own criticism of the work ahhm… but she seems so preoccupied with this kind of ahhm formal aesthetics ah…emphasis that I felt like it was distracting attention away from the subject of her film. The piece was about three families that have been evicted from a housing project and subjects in her film is quite striking (inaudible ) quite stylized and it was actually less that it bothered me than the way the environment was photographed, but it really did not serve her purpose which was you to…you know follow these three families and what happened to them after they have been evicted, so my question is ahhm… how do we, what is the criteria for our aesthetic choices and sometimes they are determined by technology as minimalist interesting work I think in the history of ethnographic film is these moments where technology shifted so radically that sync sound was available or the camera was mobile, and it had a very profound impact on the aesthetic of the work. Now we have a lot of tools at our disposal and now that we have more choices available to us, what criteria do we use to determine our aesthetics.
Philip Alperson Yeah, are there any comments? I suppose.
Michel Brault I don't see much room for aesthetics except some things like respect for the natural lighting for instance, but this is not the aesthetic, it's fidelity or something and the other aesthetics that could happen would be at the editing…
Rebecca Baron Sure
Michel Brault Then, that…because that is very important advice, the essence of making out and recording thing, you can record in any way but the way you handle the material, you you have taken from other people in time, and form and shape, if you manipulate the material.
Rebecca Baron I think it's complicated, because aesthetics of direct cinema have been adopted by reality television in lots of other contexts and I think it appears more as a style to audiences now than it did that has previously I feel there is like no real neutral aesthetics but in fact I was asking for this kind of what appears more as neutral aesthetics film but it really when we think about you know which lens do you choose, where do you put the camera, if you have a low angle, it looks very different then if you have high angle, you know, do you always use a normal lens, and she decided not to and she really started to use the physical space very creatively and it bothered me and it really when I think about am I still looking to this aesthetic that cinéma vérité has produced but that aesthetics has become as much as style as any other aesthetics.
Kathy Brew Even in vérité aren't you making aesthetic choices, how you frame your shot, and I mean, maybe what you're raising is that's bringing up some interplay between practices, and there is experimental film making practices that are coming to documentary film making and vice versa and I think we are seeing more expanded forms coming out of it and authenticity to the subject is one thing and then its authenticity to the makers vision as well.
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW OF OUR NEIGHBORS Rebecca Baron
Rebecca Baron In the late '30s in Britain , a surrealist poet, an ornithologist who was sort of a self-created anthropologist and Humphrey Jennings , who you probably know, created this thing called the Mass Observation, and their idea was I think, if they can create an accurate portrait of society, society could look at itself and then make informed decisions. So the way the press represented public opinion, the way the government presented public opinion. In fact, it did not reflect what it really was, so there we are going to find what it really was and they recruited volunteers to go all over England to observe people's behavior in public space and do surreptitious observation and photograph things surreptitiously and that is part of it and then there was some whole other practice, people writing into Mass Observation about their experiences, newer polls and questionnaires but they did not really do very good job at synthesizing the material. They published a book about behavior in a pub, and so literally got things connect(ph) in a movie that, film about like how many spits on the floor versus in the spittoon, and how long does it take one to drink a pint alone versus with other people.
So the worse kind of possibilities.
It's the spit on the ground versus in the spittoon, you know like of course on some level it is significant, but it's also utterly kind of useless on another level, because you know, so what, like what is the argument about that? It's the idea that everything is important.
Rebecca Baron Now, I think at distance what is interesting it's that practice of doing that all, they thought to gathering all the stuff was useful and that methodology is interesting and it conceptualize life (inaudible ).
And which has it champion in film theory and when you think about Krakauer and is interesting in precisely that kind of a film, that can document, you know the flow of life.
But Krakauer is very different because Krakauer is exactly where should you use the mechanisms of cinema creatively. It did not favor something like, go back for wider shot, that includes the most. Ahh… had the idea actually had to using these things, you have to edit, you have do, I mean, he did believe, there may people don't believe that you know, he did believe that it could actually as he would point of penetrate reality but he did not (inaudible ) a shot as any kind of techniques this would have helped, I think, that kind of film.
Rebecca Baron It's very often that filmmakers limit produce film in some fashion that is closest possible to experiences of being there and is not necessarily nomadic in any kind of objective sense, so you know writing that does too and I am interested in that.
I do some work in dance, dance films. And those, and one thing that happens in dance film is that, ahh…in fact if you were to set up a camera, the ideal distance from the stage, where you there's flash, with wings of the stage, and film, you wouldn't actually get an impression of what was like to be there. What you have to do get an impression of what is like to be there, is cut it and edit it, I mean that would give you the impression of the life from vitality of the dance, that is where you are going to closer approximation towards the performances, you're going to have to build up a certain kind of rhythm in your shots and you're going to have to exploit certain, exploit certain psychological tendency and use to complete actions and whatever, if you put the camera back, it's going to be living, so that you could take the greatest performance of the New York City Ballet and, and try to be authentic by making true even if you have and what you create would be exactly opposite impression of what needs to be there.
Let me just say something that you were talking about at various points Rod , with the idea of video blog right, like how did you account for that as a practice and it sounds like you were really trying to emphasize popping of this, this paradigm, this model of you know, space where there is just of bunch of things that are from different people and there is no way the film can account for because it's linear, it's just film) always demands, you know one frame proceed and then another.
Roderick Coover One who agony of thinking of is that the long film is dead, that the works at work in streaming on a new media of short-works. The works accompanied by text. The works from different people contributing to a common space. They are fragmented, they are multiply linked. They are not the linear one hour or two hour film and on the other hand that one film, the long film with the long work, we hold (inaudible ) accountable for it, the researcher, and the ethnographer. If they did not do the research well, they lie, we hold that accountable in these kind of spaces, accountability is almost isn't an issue, you know how to be what you begin, because it's a conversation where you may try and pull out this or that contributed even name them, but we have a tremendous form of reliability.
The shift in visual anthropology is to the sort of ethnography of ourselves in way where is the culture, with you know in the U.S. and that there is sort of documentary of what is going on right now in terms of video blog and there is all question of truth and you know and may be this is moving outside of ethnography, because it's more about kind of news and media documentation but that's where the video blog or the blogging whatever comes in sort of effort to like to document now and hearing what is happening and, and the idea of documentary as communication and that document itself is nothing, it's just above how it feeds into a conversation, you know a sort of moving, sort of moving target of like what is real.
It does not have to be single report, but certainly fair to be visual anthropology rather than just life that that happens to be recorded as it might be by bank surveillance camera, and it would not count about the bank surveillance camera recording all that activity in the bank as visual anthropology. There still has to be a figure of what you call visual anthropologist or a group of people who are visual anthropologists, does not seem to me as I understand the way you picturing the bloggers sort of an ongoing conversation like we have an anthropologist.
Roderick Coover Well I think of say there is very successful models and there is model of perhaps that is way can work is Fred Ripton's model, with pixel press in which you have many contributors in the field sending in blogs gathered around a theme of an online journal and you send out people to..to.. retrieve that stuff and that journal still has, is accountable for what is there to some degree and it facilitates some kinds of work, bringing together, clustering work on a theme and but does it work as a, couldn't it works in that way as journalism sounds, does it work for broader, ethnographic practice, where we want, instead of just brief snippets like news stories, we actually want to learn something over. When we learn something in an hour movie to learn something.
It sounds like mass observations, how did it started, is that you correspond it on the field, bringing back little chunks.
People often think that work would be ideal, the ideal history would be, If we could have something like, you know camera set up, record the idea, record them. We have camera setup so that everything that happens in human history is recorded as it happens. But you know that would never count this history, it's inadequate. Even if you have a perfect replica (inaudible ) and the reason is pretty simple. For example, a historian is a person who can tell you that let's say, you know when the Da Vinci was born the Renaissance begin the, but Da Vinci's father couldn't have said that. Because, you have to be in the future to actually be able to know what's important about..about..about..the past, I mean they could not said at Stalingrad that was the beginning and end of the Third Reich. You have to be at 1946 to know that and that is why people should be careful, as Oscar Wilde said. People should be careful about what they wish for, we don't want the document, a photograph, a cell snap shot of our own time. That's kind of useless, we won't know as otherwise supposedly realize about the war in Iraq . We won't know what's going until 15 years from now.
No, I mean, in this, like this sort of notion of the necessity of selectivity of things being erased. You know, I mean you are kind of opposing as questionnaire, you know what are sort of potential negative things but think about like end of good hours of histories of cinema where he re-creates the end and he says only the hand that erases can write, write a second. In order to write, you know the preconditioning of writing is the ability to erase.
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW OF OUR NEIGHBORS Rebecca Baron
Future of visual anthropology
Roderick Coover Anthropology in its film making practices, one of its agendas was to hold and grasp and pass on in the face of erasure and I think one of the problems that we have to face is our ability to move forward, because what we saw in the earlier days of visual anthropology was attempt to grasp culture as there being reconfigured by the global spread of communication technologies, by the global spread of western wealth. In terms of industrialization, colonization, post colonial imperial development. Now we find that we are in a different game. Those cultures are changed. There the initial agendas are trying to grasp and pass on the stories of ahh… cultures that had not encountered the West before, no longer exists very commonly. Now we find ourselves sharing global ahh… ahh ahhh deluge of visual information and with that we all share I think around the world a practice or a process of erasure of each new tide of material in raising what has come before. So is ethnography now, this thing that we grasping is it of our world, is it of other worlds or can we even make those distinctions.
Paul Stoller For me this ahhh… I see each successive level as a kind of foundation, a form which we built. Rather than a Eurasia(ph). The elements of the sort of traditional societies if you want call them that, in sort of contemporary reconfigurations. And so I look at it sort of the way ahhh as sort of influence by Jean Rouch's notion, and that is that ahhh…you ahhh..you build on, you stand on the shoulders of people who came before you and you continue this process and it's you know all part of this sort of process of ahh sort of slow building up where we ahhh continuously refining what has come before. And I think that challenge is that yes we have ahhh you know just complexly reconfigure worlds and but I think that ahhh you know that the foundations are there to build on and I think that the people have come before us have made a you know tremendous contribution. And ahhh… things are different but I think that we can, we can use that as our strength rather than see it as something that deserve pass into the, into the ether.
Lucien Taylor In terms of the future of cross-cultural media practice ahhhm… ahhh it doesn't seem to me that cross-cultural makes sense as a category. Ahhm ahhh… and is not just the culture is now ultra-porous and ultra-fragmented, of course they have always been more porous and fragmented then we would like to have believed, but that is a factor too. Ahhh…I think it's also that image making practices that negotiate inter-cultural differences are not essentially different to the problems that they have to engage with and not essentially different to my mind than imaging making practices. But don't deal with those differences, but deal with other kinds of differences or intra-cultural differences or just personal and political differences. Ahhm I think there is a danger here in not recognizing in terms of what you talked about this problem of erasure, the fact that visual anthropology has never been institutionalized and whether should or not be I don't know. Between of 1895 and 1920 there were huge hopes that there would be a visual anthropology a truly constituted visual anthropology. Ahh… people like Felix-Louis Regnault , Alfred Haddon or Spencer all believe that a camera motion picture camera was a crucial piece of anthropological operators ahhm… that has never really been followed up on. Visual anthropology came of age when one generation with one-and-a-half generations after the war. But various efforts before the war Mead and Bateson came (inaudible ) because we had a kind of pumped-in positivistic ideal of Margaret Mead butting up against Gregory Bateson's much more interesting engagement aesthetics, but they ahhh…when nowhere ahhm and the one other amazing possibility would have been Maya Deren who ahh… you know spent four…well ahh many months between 1947 and 1951 in Haiti and lost confidence in herself as an artist and felt that as an artist she having shot always footage she would only be manipulative of her subject, so was there was no aesthetics that was adequate to the authenticity of her experience. She became an adoptive Voudoun in Haiti and she ended up writing a book I think in 1961 or something called ahh… "Divine Horsemen" ahh… that was a very, very, very conventional book that was nothing exceptional by anthropological standards of that time. But it came of age in the 50's with Jean Rouch in France , with Robert Gardner and ahh… ahhh… John Marshall in Boston and with David and Judith McDougall I think above all half-a-generation later at UCLA and then at Rice and ahh… ahh… Australian National University most recently. We might you know on the face of it ahh… I think of this is some kind of utopian moment for visual anthropology to come off age or media anthropology not the anthropology of the media done by default through written expository pros but and the anthropology that was conducted through media in some sense ahh… that is… that the… the media (inaudible ) signify not simply the signified here. Ahh… there is an ethno-racialism programs, journals, festivals, conferences ahhh… UCLA Temple, Santa Fe USC and I have joined by NYU, Howard, Manchester, Oxford, Kent, Goldsmith, Lobra, UCL University College of London and Quining(ph) now in China , Cone(ph) in Germany Tromso in Norway that gives out PhD's in visual anthropology and DIT the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland . But this picture seems to me at least to be misleading. Ahhm these programs have had really short half-lives in general and most to and various degrees of dysfunctionality. Temple I doubt you can say secret has been in the doldrums ahhh… for number of years. Ahhh..UCLA is no more and has been no more. USC is basically morovan(ph), Colorado I think is no more, Santa Fe is no more. Ahhm they often tie to one or two charismatic individuals and are insufficiently instituted ahhh… institutionalized within the university. Ahhm honestly and this is, is again perhaps speaks only to my own (inaudible ) I haven't seen more than four or five interesting works ahhh ahhh media works to have come out of visual anthropology programs in my life where as I can think of hundreds of works to have come out of Callogs(ph), or film schools and art programs. In terms of the social reproduction of the field that has been no passing of the baton as we know, no generation that succeed of them been all dead, some of them are still practicing and practicing really well, but it is staggering that the most interesting were that is self identified in some senses of visual anthropology is coming out of people who were in their 60s or their 70's.
Jayasinhji Jhala I think some of this might be tied to how we reward visual anthropologist in ahh…programs such as ahh…visual anthropology where the visual text and many forms of visual text or expressions do not carry the same way, even in departments that celebrate and study the visual. And this may be true ahh… we are we are still award driven ahhh… discipline. And I think it's important we periodically have discussions about how this might be done, but I think more systematic approach ahhh… is in fact required. How do you celebrate the contribution of people who are engaged in this product.
POETRY IN MOTION Kelly Askew
Michel Brault He said that visual anthropology was first used in, go ahead
Lucien Taylor Ahhmm it's this all you know it's all anthropology in well the lateral history always describe the (inaudible ) late 19th century and ahhh…ahhh… anthropologist like a Felix-Louis Regnault in France and Alfred Haddon in Britain and Spencer Australia have all have loved to invested in visual anthropology and (inaudible ) anthropology visual at that time. Ahhm.. In between about 1895 until the 1920s anthropologist have lot invested in the visual. But that is the pathway they went apply to the consent of meaning that it may manifest in material culture and surface this in appearances and then when culture in particular to some degree social too, but when the culture became eternalized there came something that was symbolic, it wasn't for anybody evident when this in the visual invisible appearances and they engage with the visual went out off the window only to be resuscitated (inaudible ).
I was wondering whether you followed up on something Lucien said in the first session, his…his idea that ahh… anthropology has to be reinvigorate by art and not by the academy if you wanted to explain about that.
Lucien Taylor Yeah…I mean you know, I am not a theorist of film or author I think about exposure to other people's work is quite limited. (inaudible ) work in Japan , Brazil , Mexico , (inaudible ) ahhm Steven Machlin , ahhh David all these artists. Ahhhm ahhh engaging with reality and with a certain kind of reinvigoration of cinema vérité in ways that incredibly instincts effecting their work. That has received recognition with the (inaudible ) and whether worth it is equally adventurous and that is equally concerned once with (inaudible ) vérité makes up with the media with often interesting what is lacks in appearance and what is lacks in aesthetics. But here we are happy about this artistic vision is very, very ahhh…compelling, very controlled, very pronounced, also very interested in that reality in that degree of excess.
Rebecca Baron Is that of own interest, after that reminded(ph) that the I think this came up in our discussion that the criteria's really different in different context, so that in anthropology in, in discipline that anthropology I will be surprised if Sharon Lokhards (ph) could be considered in the ethnography because she engages with ethnography but the work is directed and people have told her you kindly cannot do it, that's not visible in the work. It's not for granted in the work and certainly appears that this is people's natural behavior, but in fact she is limiting what they are allowed to do which is crucial to the work and so this kind of very precise, beautiful, form of pieces that sort of have a investment in looking at other cultures. In fact she is the director of their behavior to a large extents. So I think ahhm it's very interesting in terms of what ethnography is but I would find it hard to believe that it would be acceptable as ethnography per se unless she is part of it.
Lucien Taylor Like with, (inaudible ) about how school girls, basketball practice in Japan is a extraordinary work. It was all choreographed by her and a choreographer. But she has spent I think 6 months or 9 months there with her internship and going to that gymnasium every day. So she remakes these these methodologies like (inaudible ) she was able do on her budget with her and (inaudible ) incredible film where ahhm… you have seen it, must have seen it
Rebecca Baron Yeah, of course.
Lucien Taylor Again you know she went to every neighborhood in this town in Brazil and had it demographically representative ahhm… ahhh audience constituted from the sociological survey of this town if you know that.
Rebecca Baron But she hasn't told the things that were ethnological, (inaudible ).
Lucien Taylor Right
Rebecca Baron I was listening to this very very difficult musical piece, the camera was just on the audience they are not allowed to applaud, they are not allowed to speak, they are not allowed to getup. Hahaha…so it almost doesn't matter who is sitting there if they are being interactive.
HOW LITTLE WE NOW OF OUR NEIGHBORS Rebecca Baron
Philip Alperson (Moderator) Some of the things that we have heard about today is the.. the question of the nature of culture and changing cultures in a way that culture is ahhh.. are experiencing a rasher(ph) and some traditional anthropological question, issues that are philosophical about the distinction between truth and ahh… fiction and non-fiction and episteme, some of the epistemological questions that Lucien eluded to as well, the nature of objectivity we have heard about the influence of the ahh ahhh of the transformation of communicative technologies and the way in which that that has changed the worlds in which we lived and also the practices that we used to try to understand the worlds in which we live. I mean I really have enjoyed this session because I have heard so much ahhh…so many different perspectives and ahhm… it seems to me that if it shows any one thing, it shows the importance of understanding the multidisciplinary, unitary disciplinary dimensions of visual anthropology and other ahh… ahh… mediating practices so I would like to thank you all for your patience. It has been a long session, but I think our productive in rewarding one it would. I would appreciated if you join me and thanking our panelists.
[sil.]
Panelists Michel Brault Paul Stoller Kelly Askew Jayasinhji Jhala Kathy Brew Rebecca Baron Roderick Coover Lucien Taylor Moderator Philip Alperson Participants Concetta Stewart Gordon Gray Oliver Gaycken Sarah Drury Noel Carroll Suzanne Gauch Warren Bass Tom Jacobson Priya Joshi Jeff Rush Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon Fabienne Darling-Wolf Charles Weitz Conference Organizers Roderick Coover Jayasinhji Jhala Paul Stoller Funders Temple University School of Communications and Theater, The Graduate School, The College of Liberal Arts Directed and Produced by Roderick Coover Production Crew Phally Chroy Laska Jimsen Ben Kalina Audio Technician Ian Markiewicz Editor Vedran Residbegovic Music Anabelle Rodriguez Transcriptions Hülya Sakarya Brooke Bocast © Roderick Coover 2007
www.der.org
