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- Convenors:
-
Camilla Morelli
(University of Bristol)
Michael Atkins (University of Manchester)
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- Track:
- General
- Location:
- Alan Turing Building G209
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the use of creative approaches to ethnography and conference-presentation that emerge in response to imaginary, ambiguous and multi-vocal aspects of people's lives
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to explore sensuous forms of storytelling (both written and otherwise) that investigate different aspects and possibilities of human life. Our aim is to stimulate creative methods of conference-presentation that emerge in response to experiences of the imaginary, ambiguous and multi-vocal aspects of people's everyday lives.
The role that storytelling plays in anthropology has been widely recognized. However, despite the variety of contexts and realms of life they explore, anthropologists are often required to produce ethnography that conforms to certain academic standards of knowledge production. This panel encourages authors from various disciplines (anthropology, drama, arts, and so forth) to present their work by using experimental, creative and non-conventional methods of presentation (including performing, drawing, filming). We suggest that the conference itself offers a moment for dynamic expression and mutual exchanges through which meanings are made and ideas transformed.
In so doing, we seek to explore the contributions of such creative methods of presentation to anthropological knowledge and suggest a view of anthropology itself as a dynamic discipline in which meanings emerge through mutual interactions and dynamic exchanges.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 August, 2013, -Paper short abstract:
Analysis of Brazilian and North American popular songs dealing with emotions and suffering
Paper long abstract:
Popular music is a key instance for looking at the imaginary of different societies. It reflects day-to-day life, cultural values, and above all expression of emotions. As in other countries, in Brazil and the United States, the majority of composers are men, and they tend to use music as one of the few public spheres in which they allow themselves to speak more freely about their private feelings. They will sing about their weaknesses, their fear of loss, and their sentiments toward women. Suffering, related to love, abandonment, and lack of money is a central element both in Brazilian and North American popular music of the 20th Century and my paper will compare how it is expressed in different songs.
Paper short abstract:
Documentary film presentation and discussion: A drama therapist and seven teenagers with behavioural difficulties created an ethnotheatre during seven months. Letting the masks fall, the students revealed their thoughts, feelings and experiences about their journey in the school system.
Paper long abstract:
The session will consist of the screening of a documentary film chronicling the development of an ethnotheatre piece with a group of high school students. Following the documentary, the presenter will explain her process and answer questions. The audience will then be invited to discuss the combined use of ethnography, theatre and therapy with adolescents in schools. This project was conducted as part of the presenter's final master's research project in drama therapy at Concordia University in Montreal, with the funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The MA student worked in a high school with seven students with various social and behavioural difficulties. These difficulties lead them to be part of special education classes, drop out of or change schools, and, invariably, fall behind on the required curriculum during their turbulent time in the education system. Over the course of seven months, the researcher and her participants created, wrote, and produced an ethnotheatre piece that was presented to fellow students, teachers, school workers, family members and friends. Post-performance discussions were conducted in order to create a dialogue between the public and the participants. The documentary film was made alongside this process in order to archive the progression of the research, disseminate the results and share the experience in different conferences and educational contexts. Please come and see how ethnography, theatre and drama therapy can be used with teens to help them voice their experience of educational challenges in a positive, constructive and therapeutic way!
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will make use of combinations of drawings and text designed to ethnographically represent the simultaneous and often contradictory stories given to me by informants during my research into commercial and non-commercial public sexual encounters between men. In addition to showing the usefulness of the versatility of forms like graphic novella in ethnography, I hope to make use of these collages to explore the role of ambiguous relationships in the exchanges of intimacy and money between two of my informants.
Paper long abstract:
During my fieldwork into commercial and non-commercial public sexual encounters between men along a stretch of canal in Manchester, I was often offered differing explanations and opinions about the people, events and relationships I observed. In this presentation I will present a series of extracts, of combinations of writing and drawing in the form of multi-media slide-shows that aim to simultaneously show the way two informants explained their relationship to me.
Recent works by Tim Ingold (2007, 2012), and others (Galman 2007, 2009,) have revitalised a discussion around the use of drawings and graphical material in Anthropology. Such forms are useful in conveying more sensuous and ambiguous aspects of life, whilst preserving anonymity and facilitating involvement in the ethnographic process. Unlike linear sequence of conventional ethnographic writing and prose, the graphic novella can simultaneously represent and describe the co-presence of ethnographic material in non-linear ways, for example contradictory utterances and arguments, discrepancies between a person's public speech and inner thought, or two or more people speaking together at the same time or over each other. The presentation will be based around Each of them framed their exchanges of intimacy and money differently. Rather than attempting to access an underlying 'truth' of this situation through a singular ethnographic flow, the use of a combination of different streams of text and image within the graphic novella, allow the situation they describe to exist ethnographically 'as is': a combination of different simultaneous, understandings or stories.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will use performance and audio-visual media to suggest ethno science-fiction as a new and alternative method in ethnographic research and filmmaking. In this case study the ethno-science fiction will be applied on the process of fear and imagination in the everyday life of Mancunians, in relation to environmental threats.
Paper long abstract:
Ethno science-fiction is a development of Jean Rouch's ethnofiction. While ethnofiction draws on projective improvisation as an ethnographic film method to explore past and present experiences of ethnographic significance though creative expression and reflexivity, ethno-science fiction is exclusively concerned with the uncertainty of the future. The film method refers to the popular film and literary genre to indicate the impact the process of imagining an uncertain future has on present experiences and how the imagined narratives of the ethno-science fiction influence the creation of strategies for the future.
The paper will draw on performance and film clips to suggest how participatory video in combination with applied theatre can be used as a method to explore the process of anticipation, worry and fear in relation to future environmental threats, in the everyday life of Mancunians. 'Science' has an additional meaning in this context since scientists for the first time in history are able to predict certain consequences of climate change in a long term perspective and with improved accuracy. The imagined narratives of the future scenarios are thus generated in the tension between the personal imagination of the participants and the predictions of the scientists.
Paper short abstract:
There are about one hundred Paraguayan people today in the Italian prisons, and most of them are women. By engaging in conversation with two of these women, we aim at understanding what it means to be inexpectedly and suddenly removed from "home".
Paper long abstract:
Due to the changes in the international traffic of cocaine, more and more women get caught every year in the Italian airports. Abruptly removed from their country of origin, these women are suddenly asked to stop being mothers, wives and citizens. This video, realized in collaboration between an anthropologist, an artist and a video-art editor, aims at giving a sense of what it means to be caught up into an interrupted journey.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on young Matses in Peruvian Amazonia, I explore how drawings and photographs produced by children can tell a story about Matses lifeworlds, short-term histories and future horizons
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on young Matses in Peruvian Amazonia, I explore how images produced by children can tell a story about Matses lifeworlds, short-term histories and future horizons.
I move from drawings and photographs taken by the children and illustrating aspects of life that young Matses are concerned with in their everydayness. By highlighting these aspects of concern, I elaborate ethno-graphic illustrations that suggest how such elements are entangled with a wider range of materials, tools, activities and types of environments in Matses world.
I argue that any object, action and element disclosed by the images does not make sense on its own terms, but only within a referential whole of other tools, places, materials and practices. I therefore suggest how these aspects, encountered in a present moment which is captured by the images, can tell a story about the world in which young Matses move. At the same time, these elements tell a story about past events in Matses history and future horizons that the children's concerns gesture towards.
Therefore, my ethno-graphics will move from the here-and-now of life to then expand the focus of attention and see how aspects perceived in the present can light up a referential whole within which these elements are entangled. Moving from the children's accounts and always referring to the experience we shared in the field, my aim is to bring out how young Matses directly perceive and experience the world but also to suggest how their experiences are always dynamic and caught in ongoing movement of life.