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- Convenors:
-
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
(SOAS)
Beate Engelbrecht (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The world is changing, perspectives are changing, ways to look, collaborate and present findings are becoming much more variable, much more creative, much more demanding. Working with visuals offers numerous prospects to analyse and display challenges that people are confronted with worldwide.
Long Abstract:
The world is on the move. It is changing rapidly. Media confront us with images of incidents all over the globe. How can anthropologists working with visuals gain and offer new and more profound insights and analyses?
Since the the first EASA conference at Coimbra, visual anthropology has constantly sought out new forms and methods of working with visuals. Nowadays a wide range of collaboration and expression are feasible. But visual practices and methodologies still raise many questions. What kinds of insights are provided by new forms of creativity? What new ways are there for us to work collaboratively with visuals, and with what analytical impact? What are the consequences of more widespread dissemination of our research? And how do we cope with ethical questions, given the increasing distance between the public use and abuse of visual images and academic constraints on them?
This panel also invites papers on projects of different types looking for new horizons in and beyond both Europe and academia. How can we use our skills, methods, and insights to understand and explain situations that different societies are struggling with? What practical applications are thinkable, what new insights are imaginable, and for whom? How can public audiences benefit from the insights that visual practices and methods have to offer?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Shirley van der Maarel (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Based on research with refugees in remote Italy, this paper considers how audio-visual and collaborative methods are a way to engage with a topic that is from the outset tainted by political discourse.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout Europe, refugees are placed in remote areas to address issues around rural depopulation and shortages of urban accommodation. Such villages often combine cultural homogeneity, high unemployment and limited public transportation, which lead to physical, social, economic and cultural isolation. Where refugees are located has an enormous impact on their chances to prosper, yet their everyday experiences have remained under the radar of policy makers, academic researchers. Terra Incognita is an ethnographic research project that uses collaborative and audio-visual methods to both explore and express the ways in which refugees in remote Italy experience and create a sense of belonging. Studies on refugees have to deal with the idea that everything we know, including what we know we don't know, is tainted by popular rhetoric and political discourse. In such a context, the challenge is to find a way beyond the known unknowns - towards unknown unknowns. This paper has a dual purpose. Based on the Terra Incognita research project, it argues for the use of audio-visual and collaborative methods as a way to 'control the arbitrary' and 'invite in' the unknown. The research project resulted in a triptych of academic text, a documentary short film and an audio-visual essay. The paper offers reflections on the epistemological challenges and formal choices when communicating to a wider non-academic audience about a topic that is shaped by political discourse and preconceived ideas.
Manca Filak (Research center of the slovenian academy of sciences and arts, Institute for Slovenian Ethnology)
Paper short abstract:
Self-reflexivity in visual ethnography is important in order to elaborate on the work process and its contingencies as well as to consider epistemological and methodological questions in the production of anthropological knowledge. The paper critically engages and questions some of its limitations.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper I will critically elaborate on the concept of reflexivity in the research and analysis processes, taking into account anthropology's engagement with the subjectivity of the research encounter and the nature of ethnographic writing as a way of producing knowledge or ways of knowing about other worlds (Pink e.t.al. 2015: 12). Self-reflexivity in visual ethnography is important in order to explain and elaborate on the work process and its contingencies. The mutually constitutive reflexivity or exploration of one's research topic and the employment of various visual media can reveal connections, sensorial dimensions and worldviews that otherwise perhaps would not be apparent. Through a reflexive analysis of the filming process as well as our field research, we can consider these important epistemological as well as methodological questions in the production of anthropological knowledge. Despite these advantages and the necessity of the reflexivity in the context of visual anthropology I would like to question its contribution to the production of knowledge or ways of knowing about other worlds and focus on some of its limitations, through (or with) the analysis of various anthropological papers (articles, Master and PhD projects, etc.) that reflect on the process of visual ethnography as well as through personal experience in doing fieldwork with a camera.
Amaya Sumpsi (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
As a filmmaker that found anthropology later on her way,I would like to question the opposite:What insights are provided to my films by the contact with anthropology?How can filmmakers do to work collaboratively with anthropology?What are the consequences of an academic dissemination of our films?
Paper long abstract:
Based in my own professional path, as a filmmaker that found anthropology later on her way, I would like to put the questions of the Convernors in the opposite direction:
What kinds of insights are provided to my films by the contact with the methodology and corpus of anthropology? What new ways are there for us -filmmakers- to work collaboratively with anthropology, and with what analytical impact? What are the consequences of a more specific and/or restricted dissemination of our films, into the academic world?
Considering the work I have been doing since 2010, in which ethnography and filmmaking are activities that are developed simultaneously, I would like to discuss different forms of interaction between these two types of writing, using images and words, feelings and theories. The works I will bring to the discussion will be: O fisherman my old man- film and Master Thesis in Anthropology, 2012-, My world was another- film and PHD Thesis in Anthropology, Work in progress- and Staying at a Petrol Station*- film, Post Doctoral Thesis?, future project.
*based in the text by the researcher Daniel Normark Tending to Mobility: Intensities of Staying at the Petrol Station.
Nadja Valentincic Furlan (Slovene Ethnographic Museum)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of film production on intangible cultural heritage for nominations to UNESCO lists. Heritage bearers' views, UNESCO instructions, state interests, and ethics of visual ethnography have been orchestrated as 'dialogical heritage'.
Paper long abstract:
Films that are sent to UNESCO as part of nominations to the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, can be labelled as 'Authorized Heritage Films' as they are officially monitored and approved by a body of politicians and humanistic profiles from the State Parties. The term is derived from 'Authorized Heritage Discourse' by Laurajane Smith (2006), claiming that social meanings, power relations and ideology are embedded in language and reproduced through it. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage requites: "each State Party shall endeavour to ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups and individuals that create, maintain and transmit heritage, and to involve them actively in its management" (UNESCO 2003, Article 15). However, the participation of heritage bearers in preparing the text of nomination and the film varies from merely consenting to what was conceived by professionals and politicians to actually cooperating in taking decisions in the process of defining the heritage (the name of nominated element, description, social aspects, data on bearers, safeguarding regimes) and visualising the heritage in nomination film.
A case study reveals a complex process of film production Traditions of Lipizzan Breeding (working title) of eight European countries to the Representative List. Collaborative film production with shared responsibility has been rethought through the concepts of 'dialogical heritage' (Harrison 2013) and 'perspectivism' (Castro de Viveiros 2013).
Christine Moderbacher (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle)
Paper short abstract:
Based on a Collaborative Anthropological Arts Project in a small Austrian village close to the Slovakian boarder, the presentation discusses how methods of anthropology combined with artistic approaches may help to come up with more nuanced, complicated, partial and local readings of people that challenge the anthropologists’ personal and political convictions.
Paper long abstract:
While mass media confronts us with polarizing images of the current political landscape, the question of how to do research with people who challenge our personal and political convictions has not yet received large attention within visual anthropology. The presentation asks how methods and forms of anthropology combined with artistic approaches can bring a new perspective to the topic and its challenges? How can collaborations with artists help establishing more nuanced, complicated, partial and local readings of people that challenge the anthropologists’ personal and political convictions, and where are its limitations? Based on a Collaborative Anthropological Arts Project in a small Austrian village close to the Slovakian boarder, I will propose answers to these conundrums while at the same time reflecting on how art and anthropology converge and diverge based on one concrete collaboration.
Daniel Lema Vidal (Department of Philosophy at IES Miralbueno)
Paper short abstract:
Disruptions in the experience of time seem nowadays ubiquitous. In order to analyse challenges regarding people's arrhythmical everyday lives, phenomenology may ethically encompass theoretical insights on 'time as lived', its research by means of observational cinema, and embodied spectatorship.
Paper long abstract:
In our fast-paced world, disruptions in the experience of time seem ubiquitous, putting temporalities remarkably at stake. In order to analyse challenges faced by people regarding the disrupted temporalities of their everyday life, observational film has the capacity not to merely (re)present temporalities but to allow us to 'live through' them and, equally important, to simultaneously address the emotive, embodied and material aspects of those arrhythmic disturbances. For that purpose, this communication not only foregrounds the role phenomenology has played in the development of visual/sensory anthropologies together with their specific set of visual and aural fieldwork methods. More significantly, this paper argues that the sedimentation of epistemologies and ontologies coming from phenomenology offers new insightful modes of understanding our rhythmical or arrhythmical being-in-the-world. Having gone unnoticed for long, this crucial dimension of Being, namely our temporalities, take place in my investigation in a unique locus: the irrigated desert of Monegros, North-West of Spain. Its singularity stems not only from being the largest irrigation ground in Western Europe but, also, because its landscape has been dwelled for centuries before the 'man-made' advent of water. The filmic examination of the everyday rhythms of water from a sensory, rhythmical and bodily perspective can provide the spectator access to the affective everyday relationship of Monegros people to water. In so doing, phenomenology may well be able to thread a structure encompassing theoretical insights on 'time as lived', the practice of observational cinema as a research method, and the embodied reception by the spectator.
Orly Orbach (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
Responding to school plays performed by children from migrant backgrounds in supplementary schools and at the Museum of London, this paper considers how visual research techniques used by the ethnographer move between modes of embodied engagement and retrospection.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the embodied ways in which children from migrant backgrounds acquire their cultural heritage through school plays rehearsed in supplementary schools and performed at the Museum of London, and visual techniques used by the ethnographer to research, document and inhabit heritage on the move.
In a cosmopolitan city as heterogeneous and diverse such as London, it is easy to overlook the works of supplementary schools and their visions. Supplementary school are typically set up by groups of migrant parents from the same country of origin in order to teach their children, raised in the UK, mother-tongue, art forms and cultural practices that connect them with their parents' home-countries. The schools help develop children's transcultural identities and understanding of their heritage.
My research observes how migrant histories are made tangible and felt though school plays that cross boundaries between past and present, the private spaces of supplementary schools and the public arena of the museum, linking London with transcultural aspects of their identities.
Ephemeral in nature, performances pose a challenge for the visual researcher of how to adequately observe, document and respond to transient visions. Using mixed visual techniques and modes of engagement, my visual ethnography tests ways of interacting, participating and understanding the embodied ways of acquiring cultural heritage in migration.