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- Convenors:
-
Igor Karim
(Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Sophia Thubauville (Frobenius Institute)
Steffen Köhn (Aarhus University)
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- Discussants:
-
Debora Lanzeni
(Monash University)
Karen Waltorp (University of Copenhagen)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel explores collaborations between anthropologists and subaltern actors to summon forth new futures through speculative storytelling. We will focus on films and performances as scenarios that frame and produce shifting affective experiences towards the future to create empowered discourses.
Long Abstract:
Ethnographic narratives are contingent on notions of truth and authenticity. Although Clifford and Marcus's contributions to 'the reflexive turn' are on the table for some decades, the primary praxis within anthropology is still bound into the creation of realist texts. However, realist storytelling may reify the exact power structures that create subalterns within societal power imbalances, leaving little room for fantasy and speculation, usually relegated to fiction. Accordingly, realist narratives disallow what Deleuze (1975) called 'minor people' to actively forge a new collectivity, one that moves toward the border of the dominant discourse. Is it on fiction that lies the power of minorities to dream a better future by protesting the tyranny of representation belonging to the majoritarian perspective? Should anthropologists move away from ethnography and together with these collectivities engage in political art through fabulation? Yes, we should. This panel thus explores collaborations in which anthropologists and subaltern actors summoned forth new futures through speculative storytelling using audio-visual media and performance. We will discuss processes within film production and performances as scenarios that frame and produce shifting affective experiences towards the future and create a line of flight on which an empowered minority discourse can be constituted. We join Ingold (2019) in his conviction that both, art and anthropology, are future-oriented disciplines that have the 'common task of fashioning a world fit for coming generations to inhabit.' As an interdisciplinary team of conveners, we invite papers that transcend the boundaries between anthropology, art, performance, and film studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the forthcoming of the new digital technology of EMHs into the world of beekeeping. Part of the research is an art piece that hacks standard EMHs in order to invert their embedded politics enabling beekeepers to develop sonic fabulation with bees.
Paper long abstract:
This ongoing polymorphous ethnography investigates the forthcoming of EMHs into the world of beekeeping. An EMH is not a new type of hive but the process of filling a beehive with various types of digital sensors in order to monitor bee colonies and develop a less time-consuming practice, ultimately benefiting honeybees as it's less disturbing. As this technology is at its dawn, the ethnography often turned into a speculative investigation made in collaboration with the interviewees. While unveiling a certain type of enhancement of this relationship, the research shows that EMHs have clearly defined embedded politics: the aim of which is to render the practice of beekeeping more rational and ultimately lower the human component. What results is an alienating process, potentially depriving beekeepers of the ontological dance they have conducted with bees for thousands years. It extends a new form of biopower over non-humans, disentangling two worlds previously intertwined. A part of this research is an art piece that takes a political statement by inverting the politics of this technology; it hacks EMH's data with the intention of transforming its quantitative status (colony management) into qualitative aesthetic sonic data. It results in a new prototype of EMH that enables beekeepers to develop sonic speculation with bees in order to strengthen and develop a new type of interspecies relationship that subverts traditional narratives. The sonic data is mixed with visual data harvested from various universities, resulting in experimental films combining music and interviews which delves into the Umwelt of bees.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents how I collaborate with young afghan refugees in Denmark in forum theatre workshops. Within the potentiality of the theatre space the participants can express longings for change and self-determination and act out glimpses of alternative futures for themselves and society.
Paper long abstract:
Since refugees are constantly at the center of public discussion, performative workshops can offer Afghan refugees a platform to experiment and challenge the stereotypes they are faced with. In this paper I present how I work with participatory theatre with young Afghans in Denmark and discuss how anthropologists in collaboration with interlocutors can challenge homogenous representations of refugees and venture beyond the boundaries of realism thus questioning the given. The principal method used in these workshops is forum theater. Forum theater was developed by the Brazilian theater practitioner and activist Augusto Boal (1979). As an ethnographic method, forum theater aims to engage participants in sharing stories of conflict and oppression through performance. I argue that participatory theater enables boldness of ethnographic voice for disenfranchised interlocutors. Within the potentiality of the theatre space afghan refugees can challenge existing structures of power and act out glimpses of alternative futures. By questioning dominant discourses pertaining to the Danish majority as well as to the fragmented Afghan diaspora (Khosravi 2018) the participants express and negotiate longings for change, inclusion and self-determination. When the participants act out important moral values on stage, they not only manifest themselves in new ways but try to show other afghans that change is possible. Experimenting with different societal roles in the potentiality of the theatre space illuminates how future-making is happening in a temporal friction shaped by ideas of self-determination and obligations towards the family and the Danish welfare state.
Paper short abstract:
In my presentation I discuss how protagonists may use fictional elements to destabilize conventional roles and hierarchies in Ethnographic Filmmaking and within their wider social worlds.
Paper long abstract:
Inspired by the films of Jean Rouch, I have been experimenting with fictional elements in the documentaries I produced within different research and development projects. In this presentation I will discuss how the protagonists used the ambiguous space between fiction and realist documentary storytelling to challenge conventional roles and hierarchies within the filming team and beyond.
Based on improvisation and play, ethnofictional filmmaking may serve as an alternative to complement more conventional methods of ethnographic filmmaking and research (Sjöberg 2009). During my own filmmaking, I realised that fictional improvisations also change the dynamics within the filming team considerably. The participants of film workshops I organized, used a range of tactics in order to negotiate and enhance their position, both within the social arena constituted by the filmmaking, and within their wider social worlds. Explicit or implicit references to imagined futures thereby played an important role.
Paper short abstract:
This study focuses on how the constructed feminist narratives in literary film reviews reveal the complicated relationships between popular feminist awareness/narratives and state power. It challenges the simplistic framing of overwhelmingly decisive state power and downgrading popular narratives.
Paper long abstract:
Artistic story-telling in literary film reviews have revealed much needed and nuanced understandings about the relationship between popular feminist awareness/narratives and state power in China. The #MeToo movement has gathered considerable steam in China since early 2018, with dozens of prominent political and media personalities publicly accused of sexual assault or sexual misconduct. Chinese Millennials set out to push the limits of the movement and struggle to gain footing in the face of nationalist ideologies, patriarchal culture and censorship. This research looks into how a new nationalist identity is narrated and advocated by Chinese Millennials intellectuals, through the construction of feminist narratives. In a country where state power is tightly mingled with patriarchal tradition, feminist narratives is a national issue. It is not only a self-conscious parameter of civil order and social change, but also the re-conceptualisation of state power by Chinese Millennials.
In this research textual studies are applied on movie reviews on Douban, one of the biggest interest-oriented Chinese online social networks where users are able to disseminate their opinions on a wide range of international films, and to make recommendations to their followers and friends. In this re-search Douban film reviews of international movies released in year 2018 and 2019 are examined, and analyzed with linguistic anthropology methods. I argue that Chinese Millennials intellectuals endeavor to build up and spread a new nationalist identity — one that compromises traditional patriarchal and mainstream nationalist values, yet marches towards a more cosmopolitan self recognition.
Paper short abstract:
A Team of collaborators created a fiction film in the Penan forest of Sarawak, Malaysia. In 'our age of emergency,' the exploration of speculative fiction in climate futures offers a unique insight into spatial time as an ecological epistemology named 'hope'. A response ( prophesy )
Paper long abstract:
What are the visuals that you can't un-see?
What are the sounds that you can't un-hear?
What are the stories that you can't forget, that will make you stop cutting down the forests?
In 2016 in the post-logged secondary forests of Sarawak, Malaysia, a team of over 200 hundred collaborators (indigenous & outsiders) created a fiction film of a virus outbreak that takes over the world, and the search for the medicine plant to save humanity.
The film sensorially explores the relationship between the 'stories we tell' and the everyday realities of climate-changed lives, through the adaptation of a discarded film script from Universal Studios, developed as a tool in attempt to halt the deforestation. However what transpired were the more reflexive questions of 'making a fiction film' as an ethnographic method — scrutinising practises of speculative fiction and contingent futures in conflict with a Penan epistemology, characterised with a 'spatial time'.
This paper reflexively posits the production and the modes of collaboration within the context of Climate Futures, and in doing so reveals intrinsic insights of non-linear & non-cyclical 'Penan sense of time', further contextualised for its ecological comprehension.
Highlighting the aspects that were ethically precarious, this paper attempts to situate the film production in the years that followed, and in doing so gestures to the haunting nature of future fictions and/as 'prophesy'.
A response.
Paper short abstract:
As a set-ethnographer, I accompanied the making of an experimental documentary in Brazil. "Cinéma Popular"-filmmakers were asked to restage the novella "Schimmelreiter". Conversely, we - the foreign film team - were involved as actors. What is the decolonizing power of this collaboration?
Paper long abstract:
As a "set-ethnographer", I accompanied the filmmakers Philipp Hartmann and Danilo Carvalho in 2014 and 2017 to the desert-like landscape of northeastern Brazil, where they shot the experimental documentary VIRAR MAR (2020) about the "metaphorical potential of water that resonates in everyday life". Their experimental set-up for this was deliberately open to improvisation and detours. They made appointments with local actors, spent time with them, engaged in conversation and finally developed short scenes in the landscapes and architecture, at the reservoirs, water sources and canals of their surroundings.
For the presentation, I will focus on the encounter with brazilian filmmakers working with Josafá Ferreira Duarte, an important figure in the "Cinéma Popular" and a supporter of the "Movimento dos Sem Terra". Hartmann and Carvalho asked him to restage a Brazilian adaptation of the "Schimmelreiter" (Theodor Fontane). Conversely, they were involved as actors in two films by Duarte; as a 19th century water researcher and a corrupt padre.
For the panel I intend to explore this collaboration with the help of short video clips. The material should offer a cinematic resonance space for questions: Can concentrating on something foreign third, namely film, blur the post-colonial arrangment? To what extent are the conditions of film work, the spatial order of a film set, constitutive? What happens at its margins? What strength lies in joint narration and constant role reversal?
Paper short abstract:
Taking the form of a speculative memoir of the author's involvement in the Orkney-based Papay Gyro Nights art festival this presentation considers what role an engagement with the past might continue to play for an anthropology oriented toward the imagining and enacting of alternative futures.
Paper long abstract:
Taking the form of a speculative memoir of my involvement in the Orkney-based Papay Gyro Nights art festival this presentation considers what role an engagement with the past might continue to play for an anthropology oriented toward the imagining and enacting of alternative (more just, livable, sustainable) futures. It does so via a reappraisal of Edward Tylor's concept of "survivals" ("processes, customs, opinions . . .which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home"). Like other recent re-readers of Tylor (e.g. art historian Georges Didi-Huberman) I emphasize not his stadial vision of social evolution but rather the unsettling and untimely character of survivals, their capacity to cast doubt on the seeming self-evidence of the present by being in it but not fully of it. Survivals thus open a space for dissident and minoritarian forms of creativity and offer a potentially powerful challenge to atavistic and exclusionary appeals to the past by contemporary right-wing ethno-nationalisms (in Europe and elsewhere). Founded by two émigré artist-curators (from Hong Kong and Kyrgyzstan) and featuring contemporary artworks in a variety of media, Gyro Nights invoked conventionally folkloric elements from North Atlantic storytelling and performance traditions to explore alternative modes of collectivity, premised not on readymade criteria of inclusion and belonging, but on an open-ended and experimental
engagement between humans and other than humans. The past featured not as a guarantee of sameness but as an active power of difference.