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- Convenor:
-
Susanne Hammacher
(Übersee-Museum Bremen)
- Discussant:
-
Hugh Brody
(University of Cambridge)
- Formats:
- Films
- Location:
- Stevenson Lecture Theatre
- Start time:
- 9 June, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Paper: "John Marshall and the Ju/wa people of Nyae Nyae: a life's commitment" by Andrés Barrera-González. Film: abstracts from A Kalahari Family, a lifetime of documentation, research, and personal contact with the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen by filmmaker John Marshall, 1951-2001. Film: Tracks Across Sand. The Khomani San of the southern Kalahari (2012, 38 mins) directed by Hugh Brody. From 1996 to 2008, Hugh Brody worked with the =Khomani San of the southern Kalahari on their land claim. This included filming all aspects of the research behind the claim, and then the results of the claim going through. This work generated over 130 hours of footage. A DVD with segments of this footage is now in the final stages of editing. This film is the first of the DVD segments, and sets out an overview of how the claim in southern Kalahari originated and what it has meant to the Bushman communities at its centre.
Long Abstract:
Background:
It is an interesting time for the world of film and anthropology. New technologies permit ever broader uptake and production of high quality screen work combined with a myriad of potential distribution platforms. A growing number of films reflect a passion for using visual media to explore, research, and communicate anthropological topics. Communities are enthusiastically using digital media to document their own lives, cultures and sub-cultures.
Anthropologists from all corners of the world are adopting digital media as part of their research practice. At the same time, non-anthropologists are using film to explore topics with anthropological themes.
This short film programme explores the possible roles of screen media in a public anthropology, drawing together recent work from the last RAI Film Festival and showcasing a range of different sources - cinema, television, community media- with styles ranging from ethnofiction, to reportage documentary, observational narrative, archival salvage and participatory collaborative media.
Accepted paper:
Session 1Andrés Barrera-González (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Paper short abstract:
The paper takes account of the highly personal engagement of John Marshall with a small group of people in the Kalahari. The focus is on discussing the development, grass roots organization, and advocacy (including land claims) initiatives that he pursued on behalf of the Ju/wasi over the course of his life, more intensely after his 1978 return to SWA/Namibia.
Paper long abstract:
Laurence Marshall took his 17 years old son John to Africa in 1950, as part of an exploratory expedition in search of the Lost City of the Kalahari. Following this trip, and with the academic backing and formal sponsorship of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, Mr. Marshall organized and funded a series of seven additional expeditions into the Kalahari during the 1950s, aiming to study and document the way of life of hunter gatherers in the area. In this atypical set of expeditions he would take along members of his family and parties of up to twenty people (academics from Harvard and elsewhere, colonial administrators, interpreters, driver-mechanics and cooks). An endeavor that radically changed the lives of this unconventional American family, as well as contributing to change the lives of the families and people they encountered in the remote Kalahari, in unintended yet dramatic ways. For John it was the beginning of a lifelong engagement with the peoples of the Kalahari, both as a documentary filmmaker and devoted friend and advocate of the Ju/wa people.
This paper aims to take account of the highly personal and professional engagement of John Marshall with a small group of people whom he considered his friends, and whose plight he felt deeply concerned about. The paper will focus on the development, grass roots organization, and advocacy (including land claims) initiatives that he pursued over the course of his life, more intensely after his 1978 return to South West Africa/Namibia.