Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the dynamics of a sensory historiography material culture ethnography expressed through making the film Cottonopolis (2012). It addresses questions and ethics of sensory representation, consequences of affect, mobility and performativity in the field, and reflexivity in research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the dynamics of a sensory historiography material culture ethnography expressed through filmmaking. The filmmaker/ethnographer's link to her own cotton worker ancestors influenced Cottonopolis (2012), a reflexive feature documentary. Transference of memory through cloth and old mill buildings affects inhabitants of former major cotton textile cities Manchester and Ahmedabad, long after industrial decline. Recall of conditions of work; noise and movement inside mills, cotton diseases, weather and pollution, talk and songs, cooperatives and unions, inventive engineering attitudes, and an eye for fashion; all remain in living memory. The film's structure weaves tales of mill memories with cotton production in India's contemporary handloom and powerloom sectors. Expressing these tales required texturing a cinematic and sound chronotope, and an aesthetic mirroring affective relations with processes like ginning, weaving, dyeing or recycling cotton. Cotton touches environment and population, global economics and politics, the nature of time and work, wealth and health, culture and consciousness. Points of encounter with the materiality of cotton, and the immersive filming experience, invoked a particular aesthetic and a redefinition of the filmmaker's working practice evolved. This paper addresses questions and ethics of sensory representation, consequences of affect and performativity in the field, and reflexivity in research. Implications of film fabrication and contemporary technology on ethnographic discovery and construction are aligned with notions from film/art documentary, (Marks, 2000; Pearce and McLaughlin, 2009) organization (Strati, 1999), ecology (Abram, 1996), and anthropology /material culture theory (Edensor, 2005; Ingold, 2011, Ruby, 1980); amplified by using short extracts from the film.