Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses ethnographic animation films as a genre of “visual evidence” which, although arguably visually “fictitious” (by being animated, illustrated, drawn), present a meaningful mode of presencing the real otherwise; through poiesis.

Paper Abstract:

This paper discusses ethnographic animation films as a genre of “visual evidence” which, although arguably visually “fictitious” (by being animated, illustrated, drawn), present a meaningful mode of presencing the real (Heidegger 1977) otherwise. Rather than being built upon the capture and imprisonment of ocular fragments of what normally appears as the “real”, such cinematographic works, it is argued, make the world “present” to their viewers through poiesis; through a materialization and an artistic bringing into being of pieces of reality that might exist beyond the tangible. This burgeoning filmic genre is hence presented as an epistemological and phenomenological inquiry into the real that moves beyond an ocular notion of visual evidence to encompass mystical, subjective, and imaginative folds of humans’ experience of the real (Taussig 2009). Visual poietics in ethnographic animations, it is thus proposed, can touch and caress the real in a manner that might be truer than what has been proposed by an epistemologically-controlling Occidental modernist thought (Largier 2009), hence undoing a kindred classical anthropological habit of equating “visual evidence” with reality. Furthermore, this paper suggests that the use of visual poietics in ethnographic animation films allows for an embodied filmic transparency with regards to the mediatic object’s subjective framing of reality: while a “filmed” ethnographic film might conceal its subjective framing of reality through its seemingly objective capture of what is ocularly real (Taylor 1996, Carta 2015), an animated ethnographic film is mediatically candid about its subjective constructedness and poietic mode of presencing the real.