Paper short abstract:

How have ethnographic film-makers contributed to anthropological knowledge and what methods do they use? I will look specifically at digital image-making and ask how much the use of this new technology represents a change in ethnographic film-making practice and the knowledge it produces.

Paper long abstract:

My work has been specifically concerned with childbirth and death and the wisdom traditions that surround this. More generally I have been interested in the life course that flows between these momentous events. I have worked predominantly in the UK and India on these subjects but I have had made films in many other parts of the world using digital technology, and I have taught post graduate researchers how to use digital technology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in the UK for the past ten years. I came to see my film work as 101 circles and 2 straight lines, the lines either side of the circle representing the boundaries to our knowledge and the circle representing the strategies with which we fill our lives. This led me to look at how these strategies change and how knowledge of the 'line' can effect 'the circle' of our lives. Specifically it led me to transformation and transformative practice associated with childbirth and death and how knowledge of this is mediated? I looked at the role of an English midwife in guiding a woman through a time of momentous change, and the way Indian Aghori seekers use death as a means for personal transformation. In this paper I want to look at some of the things that have changed when we talk about 'screening India' and some that may have not. I will use clips from my latest film, The Lover and The Beloved: A Journey Into Tantra to illustrate this. The film will also be screened in its full 70 minutes during the conference.

Undoubtedly, much has changed recently in the tools we use to make our films and the platforms we use to transport them to a global audience. But there is also much that hasn't. We can't digitally enhance our point of engagement in the field, the relationships we have with our subjects. We can't digitally increase the speed of the process by which we understand our material, where the 'stuff of anthropology' is slowly revealed to us. And we can't use an 'App' to digitally assist us in the construction of a story. In light of this it would seem that nothing truly significant has changed with the advent of digital technology in the field of ethnographic film-making, yet it is true that everything appears different. Are we then labouring under an illusion?