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- Convenors:
-
Angela Torresan
(University of Manchester)
Carlos Flores (Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, México)
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- Track:
- Visual Anthropology
- Location:
- Chemistry G.51
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 7 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel offers a forum for Latin American social scientists and other scholars working in the region to discuss how and whether the use of audio-visual media in their research has elicited new forms of ethnographic connections, political engagement, and regional aesthetics.
Long Abstract:
We bring together Latin American anthropologists working on the region who have been actively using, and reflecting on the use, of audio-visual media in their research: be it as a probing tool, a catalyst of knowledge and relationships in the field, a means of increasing collaboration with interlocutors and political engagement, or to present research findings. The specific themes of research are open, for our interest is to discuss, from a Latin American perspective, how and whether the use of audio-visual technologies can provoke the development of new regional aesthetics, subject matters, political activism, narratives, and theoretical approaches. The papers explore the diverse ways in which images can trigger new connections and rearticulate old ones in order to capitalise on the creative power of different social phenomena in Latin America. In this respect, explore how images are helping social scientists to engage with alternative understandings of reality that are currently flourishing in Latin America.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 7 August, 2013, -Leandro Pinheiro (UFRGS)
Paper short abstract:
This research aims to understand how trash pickers, female workers in solidarity economy, and Hip Hop youths use photography in the characterization of their everyday lives. Thus, we have been considering the image production as an ethnographic tool and a social educative process.
Paper long abstract:
This research presents some analyses related to the production and use of photographic images and highlights some of their contributions to the ethnographic approach and educational practices in poor communities. Emerging from long dialogues with trash pickers, female workers in solidarity economy, and Hip Hop youngsters, this paper aims to evince how the subjects use photographic images in the characterization of their everyday lives and as identity reflexive narratives. Looking at the trajectories and the sociability/solidarity networks, which make up the act of narrating, we invited different people from poor neighborhoods in Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil, to make some photographic sessions. Then, conversations about the photographs taken by them were established. The discussion about the photographical authorships, in collective and individual meetings, has shown us that the images evoke distinct information from the traditional interviews, when we discuss what "should" be registered and censured, what is beautiful and important in their daily activities, or rather, the relation between the image verisimilitude and the reality construction. Also, this reflexive process has been contributing for the subjects that reorganize their social memories and rethink their community relations. A formation practice which considers the relationship among social education, research and production of images is glimpsed by the subjects' recognition of the cultural specificities of their photographs. In public exhibitions, we have been trying to value this people's experiences and their discourse regarding different issues: work, music, urban life, etc.
Carlos Flores (Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, México)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on indigenous video, legal pluralism, intertextuality and collaborative anthropology. It presents the results of a shared anthropological project with indigenous mayors in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on indigenous video, legal pluralism, intertextuality and collaborative anthropology. It presents the results of a shared anthropological project with indigenous mayors in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala. The project arose following the discovery of an archive of videos documenting dispute procedures within "Mayan law" which was filmed by indigenous actors themselves; this later formed the basis of two documentaries elaborated with the input of the anthropologist. The material presented here refers to the possibilities and difficulties involved in the collaborative project which extended from the negotiation in the field of community and academic interests to the production of hybrid visual texts and their varied reception by different audiences.
Alejandra Navarro-Smith (ITESO)
Paper short abstract:
In 1993, fishing camps in Cocopah territory were included in the core zone of a Biosphere Reserve, therefore making them illegal. Legal arguments are used both by indigenous to defend their right to fish and by authorities to prohibit it. This paper explores the role of cameras in the hands of Cocopah and the anthropologist within a collaborative research.
Paper long abstract:
Cocopah indigenous people are defending their right to fish in their historic territory. In 1993, fishing camps within Cocopah territory were included in the core zone of the Biosphere Reserve of the Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta. Authorities of the reserve argue for the conservation of endemic species that contemporary fisheries may be overexploiting. In this complex scenario, legal arguments are generated both by indigenous peoples to defend their right to fish and by authorities to make their fishery illegal. A collaborative research project using filmmaking was developed to produce ethnographic, legal and biological knowledge about Cocopah fishing practices, currently used by Cocopah people against governmental policies affecting their everyday life. This paper explores the role of videocameras in the hands of Cocopah people and the anthropologist, and also in the development of their collaborative relationships.
Francisco Fernandez-Repetto (Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan)
Paper short abstract:
Cultural policies, narratives and aesthetics are part of a new scenario when promoting the production of videos among mayan people of the Yucatan. We analyze this scenario and the implications of a collaborative research when producing the videos,
Paper long abstract:
In recent years in Yucatán, Mexico there has been an important number of audiovisual productions, promoted by state policies in order to maintain and disseminate a particular representation of the Maya and the Mayans. These include not only Mayan language as a key element to assume that the videos are of and about Mayan peoples but also, that these videos are a Mayan perspective of their socioeconomic problems and identity.
Here we analyze how Mayan peoples' narratives, representations and identities are negotiated in a number of videos that are part of this audiovisual offer produced under the technical guidance of the National Council for the Development of the Indigenous Communities (CDI). We also take into account how this analysis is affected when dealing in a collaborative research.
Henrike Neuhaus (Goldsmiths University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how young female wastepickers generate an alternative narrative and topics of what is focused in the popular media.
Paper long abstract:
Due to the economic crisis in Argentina increased the figure of people who are collecting informally recyclable material in Buenos Aires. This growing phenomenon in the beginning of the millennium elicited the formation of groups pushing forward negotiations with the government to formalize waste picking. Specially the groups travelling from the Suburbs in the "white train" to the centre of the capital were focussed by the media. Being disappointed that their situation of poverty was exposed and used by the journalists from just one perspective, most members of the cooperatives distrust now film projects. During my fieldwork with a group I noticed a lot of young women working regularly. In the moment of giving the camera out of my hands, they began to record the environment from their perspective focusing on their children. Analysing the material it gives clues on the identity as mother and wastepickers. This film project shows an alternative aesthetic to the image build up by the popular media in Argentina in the framework of shared and collaborative Anthropology.
Sofia Gonzalez-Ayala
Paper short abstract:
I will discuss possible aesthetic relationships between the set-up and design of a travelling exhibition about Afro-Colombians' spirituality, and the audiovisual materials produced and used by its organizers, in a context of both form and content (desired) widening in museums.
Paper long abstract:
The exhibition Velorios y santos vivos. Comunidades negras, afrocolombianas, raizales y palenqueras (Wakes and living saints. Black, Afrocolombian, Maroon and Islander communities), open to the public in the National Museum of Colombia from August to November in 2008, showed how a lot of Afro-Colombians celebrate their mourning rituals and vigils to patron saints. It displayed videos and photographs collected during fieldwork and from archives in television screens and walls, next to several objects and seven altars designed by members of those communities. Later on and to the present, a travelling version began to go around Colombia in the form of 21 panels with photographs and texts, some objects, videos and printed materials, most of the times including new altars designed and constructed on site. Furthermore, local coordinators of the exhibition continuously and independently use audiovisual tools to document its development.
Amidst these politics of representation (Kratz, 2002), what possibilities arise from productions which may many times be perceived as inappropriate or ad hoc (Deger, 2006)—both the local exhibition versions and the audiovisual materials Afro-Colombians involved produce to document Velorios y santos vivos? What do they have to offer to the use of audiovisual material in museum exhibitions and to the participation of previously absent groups, particularly in the National Museum of Colombia? What alternatives do these appropriations (Schneider, 2006)or idiosyncratic practices (Geismar and Tilley, 2003), offer if, following Bennett (2006), museums help shape ways of seeing, as well as understanding what is seen, and who knows what and how to see?