Paper short abstract:

The interactive documentary "Elderscapes. Ageing in Urban South Asia" offers an insight into everyday life of older people from the middle class in urban South Asia. Interweaving multiple media like text, video and sound this project contributes to contemporary visual anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

The interactive documentary "Elderscapes. Ageing in Urban South Asia" (www.uni-heidelberg.de/elderscapes) offers an insight into contemporary everyday life of older people from the middle class in urban South Asia. South Asia's cities are growing rapidly, and longevity is rising simultaneously leading to urban and social change. In this process, perspectives of older people, but also their needs and potentials have to be considered. The project focuses on the social commitment of older persons, their everyday life and social bonding, on their memories as well as perspectives on what it means to grow old in a city.

Multimedia story telling is a contemporary method in visual anthropology. It is an expedient tool to reveal the diversity of research material as it allows the productive interweaving of multiple media types like video, text, sound and images. Furthermore it enables the user to engage with these diverse materials either by following a protagonist in a non-linear way, by engaging with anthropological topics or by navigating across geographical locations (e.g. google maps). The process of knowledge production (and appropriation) is therefore at least partly regulated and controlled by the recipients themselves.

However, the usage of diverse media does not only serve as ethnographic description. An entanglement of textual and sensory visual media with anthropological findings also creates new connections between ethnography and anthropological theory. Besides describing the ethnographic field, it generates multi-linear, multi-vocal, interactive and reflexive 'texts' which concurrently take up theoretical anthropological discourses.