Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film

Anthropology of Media ANTH 2301 Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Film Since the early 20th century, anthropologists have been utilising media technology into their research methodologies and ethnographic depiction, even if the area of media anthropology is relatively young. As part of her first fieldwork trip in Samoa, Margaret Mead, an early pioneer of visual techniques, took over 200 images (Tiffany 2005). Mead and Gregory Bateson collaborated on fieldwork in Bali and New Guinea in the 1930s, using both film and photography. Mead and Bateson studied children, public rituals, and dance using images and video, viewing visual media as an inventive way to learn about social life. As part of their collaborative investigation, they recorded over 32,600 feet of film and shot roughly 33,000 pictures collectively (Jacknis 2020). They created two photographic ethnographies and seven short films with these visual elements, focusing on dance and child development. Either the study of visual media as a research topic or as a research method is known as visual anthropology. Most anthropologists, whether they identify as visual or not, take pictures of the people and locations they come across while conducting fieldwork. Visual anthropologists go one step farther and record significant occurrences using photos and video for further in-depth examination in the future. Photographs are moments captured in time that lend themselves to critical thought and group discussion. Film can be accelerated or decelerated to highlight specific elements of group dynamics or individual activity that might otherwise be missed. Images may be enlarged to show minuscule details. It is possible to compare pictures by arranging them side by side in both film and photography. The process by which members of the cultures they study create their own visual representations through painting, photography, and video is of interest to visual anthropologists as well. Popular art, movies, photography, advertising, and graffiti all pique the curiosity of visual anthropologists. Cultural anthropologists realised early on that sharing the experiences gained from anthropological study with peers, students, and the public might be facilitated by visual media. Mead wrote and narrated the 1951 film Trance and Dance in Bali, which showcases the Balinese dance known as the kris. This is only one example among many. The kris dance tells the tale of a witch whose daughter is turned down by the monarch to be his wife. The witch plans to unleash mayhem and plague on the nation as payback. The witch transforms the ambassador into a dragon when the king sent him to thwart the evil scheme with a caravan of servants. She then induces a trance among the dragon's adherents. The dragon-messenger awakens his troops, who emerge in a dazed state and stab themselves but do not wound anyone. The dancers are awakened from their trance by using holy water and incense after performing the kris dance. This amazing early use of video in anthropology is part of the US Library of Congress and is available to see on YouTube via the Library of Congress website. The use of film in ethnographic representation as a technique, a documentation, or a way to report on anthropological research is known as ethnographic filmmaking. Similar to documentaries, ethnographies are factual films that use live-action footage that has been edited and moulded into the main storyline. Though it can be difficult to distinguish between the two types of films, ethnographic cinema is typically connected with the work of professional anthropologists and focuses explicitly on portrayals of sociocultural processes. Several amateur ethnographic films portraying elements of nonWestern civilizations had been produced by filmmakers prior to Mead and Bateson's use of film in their professional capacity. An Inuit family is followed in the very successful film Nanook of the North (1922), directed by explorer Robert Flaherty and based on a 16-month stay with the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic. The film centres on the bravery of husband Nanook and wife Nyla as they battle the inclement weather to provide for their family and nurture their kids. The movie shows how the Inuit people live, including how they hunt walruses, create igloos out of glacier ice, and travel by dogsled and kayak. In a contentious scene, the family goes to a trade fort in Canada and shows surprise at contemporary devices like a phonograph. While some have applauded the movie for showing Indigenous peoples as brave and industrious, Flaherty has come under fire for fabricating parts of the story and even casting his own common-law wife as Nanook's wife. Nanook of the North is currently regarded by the Library of Congress as one of the most important instances of early documentary filmmaking, along with Mead and Bateson's film. Because of Flaherty's use of staging and fabrication, anthropologist Franz Boas rejected Nanook as entirely unrelated to anthropology, despite the fact that others view it as a predecessor to ethnographic film (Schäuble 2018). You may watch the movie on YouTube or the Internet Archive. Throughout the 20th century, ethnographic film—which has its roots in both amateur and professional filmmaking—became a more significant teaching and popularising instrument for anthropological study. In an effort to steer clear of Western storytelling and exoticization, John Marshall and Timothy Asch pioneered a more objective, naturalist form of ethnographic cinema in the 1950s. The 1960s saw the advent of simultaneous sound recording, which allowed the voices and commentary of the people shown in ethnographic films to be heard—even though subtitles were still used to translate the content. Now, subjects may speak directly to the camera. At about the same time, anthropologists started to think about the power dynamics that are inherent in the making of ethnographic films, namely the moral dilemmas that arise when White Western scholars dictate how non-Western people are portrayed. In response to these moral dilemmas, a growing number of ethnographic filmmakers are moving away from the meticulously constructed narrative techniques of films like Nanook and towards a more minimalist aesthetic that focuses on capturing unfolding activity with little editing. Novel approaches to representation have surfaced, shedding light on the process of filmmaking and emphasising the dynamic between the people being recorded and the filmmakers. Some experimental filmmakers view cinema as the construction of a completely new sociocultural experience, as opposed to utilising it to teach anthropology to the general public and students. For example, the 2013 experimental ethnographic film Manakamana, which was codirected by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, features eleven extended images of Nepalese pilgrims travelling by cable car to a temple perched on a mountainside. Manakamana offers live-action pictures of individuals and their interactions against the backdrop of the untamed nature that passes below them, as opposed to instructing the audience on an anthropological subject. Spray and Velez work together on the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, an initiative devoted to exploring the creative applications of multisensory techniques to produce ethnographic media. A trailer for the movie is available on YouTube.