Paper short abstract:

Based on a participatory visual ethnographic survey conducted between 2009 and 2013 in an Afro-Caribbean fieldwork, this paper aims to question image "co-construction" and visual study as an interdependent approach to explore identity dynamics in cross-cultural context.

Paper long abstract:

Visual representation is certainly one of the major contemporary vehicle of cultural exchange. Historically, colonial representations and some ethnographer's works offer a singular example on how exogenous representation can interact with endogenous ones. With modern audiovisual technologies the process between "observation", "interpretation" and "restitution" is drastically shorten, so we can use image co-construction to acquire advanced experiments on representations process such as identity constructions directly from fieldwork. The paper aims to examine participatory audiovisual post-production as an extension of ethnographic fieldwork and a tool for a shared form of restitution once the subjects observed in the field are returned to the filmed images and then we proceed to cross between data from that confrontation, visual culture data and ethnographic data from the field. The "image" in this context becomes primarily a support for a dialogic investigation. Following this methodology, the investigation with religious community raised the representation that the subjects have of their practice and of their religious and social identity in the foreground. This by enlarging the fieldwork temporally, spatially and symbolically to visual representation they produce "in" and "out" of the direct observation field and temporality. Working in such a dialogic circle between ethnographic filmed fieldworks, analyses of visual culture, inquiry with subjects based on recorded image viewings, and participatory constructions of audiovisual representations, we reach three audiovisual restitution's who reflects three steps of the survey pursuing the goal of an understanding and a shared audiovisual representation of what is the "field".