Paper short abstract:

The paper proposes participatory video as an anthropological praxis to mix up the relation between "authors", "objects" and "consumers" of scientific and folk knowledge, through a collaborative and creative engagement, drawing on recent field in with minority groups in Brazil in Portugal.

Paper long abstract:

Film has been used in anthropology mainly in two ways: as a tool for data gathering, and as a medium for representation, in the so-called "ethnographic film". While visual anthropologist always appreciated the instant playback capabilities of digital imaging devices as a chance for getting direct feedback from the people in the field, visual anthropology, which proposed itself as one possible answer to anthropology's "representational crisis", hasn't changed the relation between the researcher and the "researched". The eye of the ethnographic film camera often ends up being simply the extension of the eye of the researcher, leaving the subject-object relationship untouched. The paper proposes participatory video as an anthropological praxis to mix up and confuse the relation between "authors", "objects" and "consumers" of scientific and folk knowledge, through a collaborative and creative engagement, drawing on recent fieldwork with minority groups in Brazil in Portugal.