- Convenors:
-
Andy Lawrence
(University of Manchester)
Martha-Cecilia Dietrich (University of Amsterdam)
Angélica Cabezas-Pino (Universidad de La Frontera)
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- Chair:
-
Peter Ian Crawford
(UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 24 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel looks at the modes and impacts of ethnographic filmmaking across the disciplines. We seek to explore how methodological approaches and filmmaking techniques create interpretative spaces through which audiences actively contribute to re-imaginations of complex realities.
Long Abstract:
This panel looks at the modes and impacts of 'filmmaking for fieldwork' techniques across the disciplines. It takes ethnographic filmmaking to be an 'empirical art' that is informed by re-significations of sensory experience and good practice while mediating and exploring relationships between self and other. We consider the unique potential of filmmaking in creating interpretative spaces within the disciplines of social anthropology, politics, history, memory studies, development, international relations and psychology. The four critical areas of documentary practice we will address are: 1) politics and ethics of engagement, 2) negotiating ambiguity, controversy and conflict, 3) narrative approaches in between description and analysis, and 4) transformative potentials in the production and reception of a film. We seek to explore how methodological approaches and filmmaking techniques allow audiences to actively contribute to re-imaginations of complex realities. What balance can be struck between expression and analysis in an era of interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches to ethnography? And what can filmmaking contribute to the making and unmaking of contemporary lifeworlds in times of crisis? Invited practitioners will reflect on completed documentary film projects concerning one of the key areas mentioned above. Contributions will be considered for a forthcoming publication with Manchester University Press.
Session 2: Ethics of engagement
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The ethical dilemmas that arise out of long-term engagement with perpetrators for the purpose of understanding is the central theme of this paper. It reflects upon the morality of representation of a temporal collapse of self/other in collaborative filmmaking on skydiving in a post-conflict setting.
Paper long abstract:
When it comes to narrating the figure of the perpetrator, documentary film and literature tend to portray perpetrators as either monsters or victims of previous traumas or bureaucratic impositions, but most importantly as moral other. This practice of 'othering' provides little opportunity for a deeper engagement within the complicated grey zones of human existence. In my research on crimes against humanity during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), I often found myself complicit to my subjects' withdrawal from confronting the violence they incurred, which created a deep discomfort during fieldwork. In anthropology and (post)conflict studies, little attention has been given to the challenges in addressing the complicit silences and navigating intricate fieldwork relationships, not least for the methodological challenges in approaching the unspeakable. In this paper, I seek to explore how filmmaking has served as a suitable tool to reflect on the absence/presence of violence during my encounters with perpetrators. The film La caída traces the nostalgic memories of a paratrooper - who was part of the repressive state apparatus that tortured, killed and disappeared thousands of people, and critically reflects upon these ways of engagement and collaborative expression through a combined voice-over (his and mine). I argue that this dialogic editing strategy produces a temporal collapse of self and other through which the viewer can experience the complicated ethics of empathy and the morality of representation, and contemplate if looking away from violence merely circumvents accountability or serves other psychic purposes as well.
Paper short abstract:
Comics with underage characters in sexual situations are controversial, and their readers might be seen as creepy. Wanting to understand how shotacon is experienced, I explored both my research participants’ and my own desire. Filmmaking facilitated a new understanding of how sexual comics are used.
Paper long abstract:
The Japanese comic genre shotacon features young boys in sexual situations. This opens up for assumptions about fans of this genre. Does their desire for underage fictional characters translate to a desire for actual boys? A lingering suspicion that they are paedophiles seems to inform Western media reports on this kind of subculture, as well as European child pornography legislation, which often includes drawings.
Research on the adjoining genre lolicon, which features young girls in sexual situations, has established that the reader’s desire is directed towards fiction as such (Galbraith 2019). However, scattered findings suggested that this clearcut divide between fiction and actuality was blurred in the case of shotacon.
Using my own body and past as a research tool, I attempted an embodied understanding of my research participants’ experience. This demanded I challenged my (Western) preconceptions and dared to explore my own desire by drawing it. Filmmaking for fieldwork as a method accentuated ethical and legal considerations regarding both my research participants and myself.
The theme that emerged from this phenomenological approach was how shotacon fans who self-identified as gay used shotacon as a way to go back to their pasts and relive alternative versions of them by reading or drawing.
Shotacon as a self-help tool for LGBT youth contrasts to negative assumptions of the genre’s fans, including suspicions of paedophilia. The findings may thus have relevance for public policy.
Galbraith, Patrick W. 2019. Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.
Paper short abstract:
How to negotiate what story to tell in a film? How does this negotiation take place when working in a collaborative project? Through a close examination of my film ‘This is my Face’, I examine ethical borders –and porosity- of collaborative practice by working in 'critical proximity' (Haraway, 1988)
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I discuss from an ethical and political perspective my experiences of working on ‘This is my Face’, a film produced collaboratively with people living with HIV in Chile. I suggest that the relation involved in collaborative research is not satisfactorily described by using only the ‘I’ and ‘You’ of the intersubjective encounter. Rather, what emerged during my research was a ’We’.
As fieldwork progressed, my collaborators made clear their intention to ‘use’ our visual practice as a platform to communicate with others such as those who had marginalised them, their loved ones, others living with HIV and the general public.
This resonated with my own ethical approach as social scientist/filmmaker following a Participatory Action Research approach. During the making of “This is My Face”, my collaborators and I developed a sense of “We” around our common objective, to move beyond our encounter towards a wider contribution to social change.
In this presentation, I reflect on the tensions this created in contrast to stances that posit interventionism or activism as compromises to academic practice.
I draw from the concepts of ‘critical proximity’ (Haraway 1988) and ‘speaking nearby’ (Minh-Ha, 1992) to suggest that, even though the creation of a ‘We’ in the field is complex and subject to tensions, it is what makes possible the emergence of a creative availability/active receptivity that allows meaningful collaboration to emerge.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a collaborative anthropological arts project, the presentation discusses how methods of (visual) anthropology combined with artistic approaches may help to come up with more nuanced and complicated readings of people that challenge the anthropologists' personal and political convictions.
Paper long abstract:
While mass media confronts us more and more with polarizing images of the current political landscape and numerous international film festivals put portrayals of "political opponents" at center stage, 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 (visual) 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 and discusses its consequences for a widespread distribution of anthropological research while at the same time reflecting on how art and anthropology converge and diverge based on one concrete collaboration.