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- Convenors:
-
Peter Ian Crawford
(UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)
Petia Mankova (UIT The Arctic University of Norway)
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- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 4
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
Since 1989, visual anthropology has undergone extensive institutionalisation, been affected by new technologies, and has access to new teaching methods, eg internet-based packages. What are the implications for a growing sub-discipline?
Long Abstract:
In 1989, Paolo Chiozzi edited a book called 'Teaching Visual Anthropology', the first publication dealing specifically with an assessment of teaching a rapidly growing sub-discipline. Since then, the sub-discipline has undergone extensive institutionalisation, been affected by the advent of first analogue and then digital video technology, and increasingly has access to completely new teaching and learning methods through, for example, internet-based visual ethnography packages. What have the implications of all this been for visual anthropology? Has it radically changed our notion of the sub-discipline, including its theoretical foundations? Are there major differences (or similarities) between the ways in which visual anthropology is taught at the growing number of programmes across Europe and on other continents? How can the internet and other web-based platforms open up new ways of teaching and learning and what are the characteristics of current projects in this field? Finally, how has this period enabled us to re-think the whole sub-discipline? While there was, initially, a strong focus on ethnographic film, there may be other forms of audio-visual expression emerging, which may force us to reconsider the subject, while one form older than the medium of cinema, the still photograph, now in its digital form, may be entering a stage of renaissance.
The workshop invites both theorists and practitioners of teaching visual anthropology to submit proposals for papers and presentations while in particular looking for new and innovative ways of teaching.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 August, 2008, -Elhum Shakerifar (Goldsmiths) Ed Owles
Paper short abstract:
Our paper will focus on the ‘new generation' of visual anthropologists and the methods we need to develop in order to engage young people in anthropology's concerns. How does this new media-savvy but media saturated generation deal with the relationship between responsibility and representation?
Paper long abstract:
In our paper we will focus on the 'new generation' of visual anthropologists and the methods we need to develop in order to engage young people in anthropology's concerns.
We will also explore the empowerment offered by digital media to this generation, as well as its proliferation (through the internet for instance) and how this can impact upon the production of visual anthropology.
Participatory methods have continued to develop steadily since the Kayapo started employing their cameras as political tools - today, cameras are ubiquitous and lie in the hands of an already media-savvy group. How does this impact upon a new generation of filmmakers' assumptions? And what is the understanding amongst young people of auto-ethnography in an urban environment?
Indeed, ours is also a media saturated generation where the relationship between responsibility and representation is increasingly fractured, with a concomitant widespread failure to grasp that visual media is a representation of reality, rather than reality itself.
We will use our recent 'South East Ethnography' project, a six week-long series of theoretical and practical visual anthropology workshops (conducted with 15-19 year olds from Greenwich Community College, in association with the Royal Anthropological Institute) to explore these issues, including a screening of the films to motivate discussion.
Finally, we will discuss the effects and outcomes of the project on the community they were centred around, and how the relationship between the participants, filmmakers and audience conspired around the films to create an enduring expression of cultural collision.
Judith Aston (University of the West of England)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation draws on an archive of audiovisual recordings from the Sudan Ethiopian borderlands to illustrate new possibilities for conveying mutuality and diversity on film using interactive multimedia to privilege spatial montage techniques over those of sequential montage.
Paper long abstract:
The proposition here is that computers afford new possibilities for ethnographic film-making, enabling non-linear associational works to be created which generate a different relationship between authors and viewers. The experience created is more akin to reading a book, in that it is one-to-one, enabling viewers to interact with the materials presented at their own pace. With reference to Vertov's concept of Kino-Pravda and Manovich's work on database narrative, this presentation will discuss work produced to date through an ongoing collaboration between the author and the anthropologist, Wendy James. The aim of this collaboration is to explore ways in which audiovisual recordings spanning over four decades of ethnographic fieldwork among the Uduk-speaking peoples of the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands can be incorporated into an interactive multimedia presentation to convey ideas about mutuality and diversity. The presentational techniques being developed privilege spatial montage over sequential montage, enabling viewers to interact with on-screen juxtapositions. At the heart of this work is the idea that the medium offers new possibilities for the creation of polyphonic narratives, in which the narrator's voice begins to merge with the multiplicity of voices and points of view of those being represented. It is this very multiplicity that offers such rich possibilities for engaging with complex relationships between mutuality and diversity. Whilst not replacing books or films, the argument will be made that the potential is here for an equally valid form of communication to co-exist alongside other forms, thereby extending the narrative possibilities of ethnographic film.
Peter Ian Crawford (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway) Petia Mankova (UIT The Arctic University of Norway)
Paper short abstract:
Visual Ethnography Basics (VEBweb) is a web-based teaching package being developed by Visual Cultural Studies at the University of Tromsø. This presentation will take you through the ideas behind it and discuss some of the compromises one must accept in developing it.
Paper long abstract:
Visual Ethnography Basics (VEBweb) is a web-based teaching package being developed by Visual Cultural Studies at the University of Tromsø. Combining a database with text, film clips, films, photos and a history of ethnographic film timeline, the package attempts to provide access to ways of understanding and analysing ethnographic films. The systaem is ready for testing in the Autumn term 2008 and the EASA workshop will be an opportunity to present a kind of pilot test. This presentation will thus take you through the ideas behind, and the structurethe and design of, the teaching package and discuss some of the compromises one has had to accept in developing it.
Humberto Martins (CRIA-UMinho)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on a 4-year experience of teaching visual anthropology as an non-compulsory subject in an undergraduate course of Anthropology at a Portuguese University, stating the structural difficulty presented by the students to switch into a different knowledge/learning relation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will reflect on a 4-year experience of teaching visual anthropology as an "non-compulsory" subject in an undergraduate course of Anthropology at a Portuguese University. It gives particular attention to a structural difficulty presented by students switching into a different knowledge/learning relation. Basically, not all students are available to agree with forms of knowledge and "evaluation" not exclusively based on texts and the conventional ways of evaluating. Along with this main argument I also want to reflect on the dialoguing borders in which anthropology may (now or ever) relay in order to grasp more complex understandings of its conventional subjects (humans). Haptic forms of knowledge are made possible in an inevitable conjunction of science, art, common sense and other (former) competitive discourses. Is it possible to create a film as a single Phd final product in an anthropological course? Is it possible to have (in anthropology) a full professional artist as a supervisor of a masterpiece of an artistic work that may also be submitted as a "scientific" representation?
Andrew Irving (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
The paper suggests that if different sensory experiences embody different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new practices, methods and forms of representation that are not simply based in image, text, writing or correspondence theories of truth but creatively combine their properties.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses a series of questions, currently being explored in the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, concerning the relationship between current anthropological understandings of the world, visual and sensory perception, art and aesthetics. It suggests that if different sensory experiences embody different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new practices, methods and forms of representation that are not simply based in image, text, writing or correspondence theories of truth but creatively combine their properties. Visual Anthropology has always been a misnomer insofar as sound and other properties have long been recognized as fundamental to the films that have defined the Granada Centre since its inception in 1987. With the formation of a new research centre EIDOS, dedicated to research based around ethnography, images, documentary, objects and the senses, the Granada Centre seeks to usher in a critical development in our ways of knowing , that we argue must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. By employing such an approach, contemporary theoretical, critical and philosophical questions might usefully be transformed into anthropological questions and developed ethnographically. How might, for example, we combine image and sound, object and text, body and voice, during fieldwork and representation to better understand the corporeal dimensions of social life or explore the relationship between the interiority of a person's experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make it 'open' to anthropological documentation, theorisation and representation?