Paper short abstract:

The pioneering practice of Observational Filming by anthropologists has been misappropriated and made near travesty by the populist televisual. The mass audience-generating TV series ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ is a case study of the ethnocentric challenge to grounded, ethnographic knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology pioneered 'Observational' filming. Manchester university MA students of Visual Anthropology, in the 1990s, ideally avoided all 'voice over'. 'Showing' took precedent over 'Telling', as noted by this external examiner. Subsequently, populist visual media has appropriated the 'Observational'. Televisual 'reality' has transformed an original ideal of documenting extended sequences, including the inconsequential, with minimum director intervention and no outsider commentary. Instead, participants were free to speak in their own voice, with translated subtitles, if required. The specialist, off screen anthropologist facilitated but never orchestrated events.

Here 'My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding' is confronted. The TV series exemplifies the misappropriation of anthropology's innovations. Initially faced with multiple complaints, the producers of MBFGW defended their pastiche as 'merely observational'. Thus the term is skillfully appropriated.

Many individuals have approached this anthropologist, who lived with the Gypsies, for her judgement of the series. Some viewers had absorbed the defamatory assertions, all dependent on sensationalist editing and authoritative 'voice-overs' fabricating the very opposite to published ethnographies. Consistent with populist stereotypes, participants were encouraged to enact invented 'traditions'. Individuals were directed, if not paid, to perform for a melodrama-seeking, lucrative, mass audience. Shock and awe was guaranteed.

The global term 'Gypsy' was cynically appropriated, although the majority of 'performers' were Catholic Irish Travellers, never called Gypsies. The latter are secular or Protestant English Romanies, rarely appearing in the series.

Presenting misleading insights for multiple viewers, MBFGW made millions, though not for the participants. With very different aims, anthropological films provide grounded knowledge, countering ethnocentric misconstructions.