scholarly journals The context of presenting “others”: the construction of meaning and the potential of communication in ethnographic film

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xun Xiong ◽  
Jing Li
Keyword(s):  
Visual Communication ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Meaning Construction ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Visual Patterns ◽  
Communication Context ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
Ethnographic Films ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

AbstractHow can images be used as an expressive, yet clearly limited, tool to represent “the other” in ethnographic films? Based on the objectives of visual anthropology and visual communication, this article analyzes the four presentational traditions of meaning construction. These traditions have been incorporated into the audio-visual communication context to illustrate the similarities or differences between ethnographic films and ethnographic texts in terms of traditions, structures, features, and limitations. Through the analysis of the four traditions, the relationships between visual presentation and text writing, visual patterns and communication concepts, and visual potentials and ethnographic films have been fully examined. In the context of Chinese ethnographic films, the four presentational traditions have been well showcased and developed. These works, in their different contexts, have constituted a meaningful visual text system of contemporary Chinese anthropology.

scholarly journals Contributos para análise e avaliação de filmes etnográficos

Visualidades ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Da Silva Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Academic Work ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Ethnographic Films ◽  
Scientific Associations

ResumoVárias associações científicas nacionais e internacionais e antropólogos cineastas abordaram questões relacionadascom a análise de filmes etnográficos, sua avaliação eintegração no trabalho acadêmico. Destes, destacamos aSociedade Francesa de Antropologia Visual, a AmericanAnthropological Association e os antropólogos Bob White,Colette Piault e David MacDougall, todos cineastas eprofessores de antropologia visual / filme etnográfico. Tendo feito durante algumas décadas pesquisa em antropologiavisual e tendo sido convidado a falar sobre a integração defilmes etnográficos em trabalhos acadêmicos e sobre a revisãoe avaliação de filmes em festivais de cinema e de filmesetnográficos, é meu dever contribuir para a sistematização deinformações e para o pensamento dessas questões. É este oobjetivo deste trabalho. AbstractSeveral international scientific associations and filmmakersanthropologists have addressed issues related tothe analysis of ethnographic films, their evaluation andintegration in academic work. Of these we highlight theFVAS-French Visual Anthropology Society, the AmericanAnthropological Association and anthropologistsBob White, Colette Piault and David MacDougall, allfilm-makers and professors of visual anthropologyand ethnographic film. Having done for a few decadesresearch in visual anthropology and having been askedto speak about the integration of ethnographic films inacademic work and about the review of films in film andethnographic film festivals, it is my duty to contribute forthe systematization of information and in the thinking ofthese issues. ResumenDiversas asociaciones científicas nacionales einternacionales y antropólogos cineastas se ocuparon de cuestiones relacionadas con el análisis de películasetnográficas, su evaluación e integración en el trabajoacadémico. De estos, destacamos la Sociedad Francesade Antropología Visual, la American AnthropologicalAssociation y los antropólogos Bob White, Colette Piaulty David MacDougall, todos cineastas y profesores deantropología visual/ película etnográfica. Como me hededicado durante algunas décadas a la investigación enantropología visual y, además de eso, he sido invitado parahablar sobre la integración de películas etnográficas entrabajos académicos y sobre la revisión y evaluación depelículas en festivales de cine y de películas etnográficas,es mi deber contribuir para la sistematización deinformaciones y el pensamiento de esas cuestiones. Es esteel objetivo de este trabajo.

Ethnographic Film

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Media ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Media Anthropology ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Indigenous Media ◽  
Ethnographic Films ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between visual media and anthropology has a long history growing out of the imperializing impulses of the 19th century, and anthropologists—as well as others such as cultural explorers, scientists, geographers, journalists, and travel writers—have long used forms of visual media to document their impressions of and perspectives about what we might call the cultural “Other”: cultures that have seemed different, exotic, or fascinating to us. Until the 1980s, in fact, anthropologists traditionally studied small, isolated, and traditional communities, and these small-scale societies dominated the subfield of ethnographic film and visual anthropology. Today, the field of visual anthropology contains several distinct subfields, ranging from ethnographic film to indigenous media and media anthropology, and intersects as well with museum studies. In an effort to complement the Oxford Bibliographies article on Visual Anthropology by Marcus Bank, this bibliography charts the predecessors of ethnographic film as well as emerging fields most related to ethnographic film. It begins with the evolution from the early usage of visuals (photography, film, museum exhibits, and other forms of visual culture) to support and enhance traditional written ethnographic monographs, long considered the most valid form of expressing anthropological and imperial knowledge of the cultural Other. Then it moves quickly into the ethnographic film movement, peaking in the 1970s and 1980s, when anthropological filmmakers (or anthropologists in partnership with documentary filmmakers) created filmic records or documents of the cultures they were studying. Along the way, some intersections between ethnographic and experimental filmmaking are examined. Beginning in the late 1980s, the approach by which the anthropologists placed the cameras in the hands of their cultural subjects and encouraged them to create their own auto-ethnographic films blossomed out of the “postmodern” turn in anthropological thought, leading to a subfield of visual anthropology called “Indigenous Media,” which is introduced here. Also during this period, a spate of scholarly literature and documentary media was sparked by the feminist and postcolonial paradigms. Issues raised by ethnographic film and the scholarship surrounding it have invited a larger discourse, both scholarly and artistic, about broader forms of representation that represent what might be called the “ethnographic gaze” (such as Coco Fusco’s and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s critical performance piece “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West”), but these are unfortunately beyond the scope of this bibliography.

scholarly journals Film as shared ethnography: in the field, in the editing suite, on the air

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Caffé ◽  
Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Information Production ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Image Production ◽  
Ethnographic Films

This article discusses an anthropological project centred on the production of audiovisual and hypermedia works, begun in 2009 with the Cidade Tiradentes Arts Map and completed in 2011 with the release of the ethnographic film Art and the Street. The project's guiding premise was Jean Rouch's concept of shared anthropology, but with its own particularities reflecting the contemporary world, including the intensification of image production and sharing, as well as the emergence of various collaborative forms of information production based around the popularization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). We discuss three distinct moments of this shared visual anthropology project: fieldwork, editing and screenings of the ethnographic films.

Looking at Science through Water

2012 ◽  
pp. 161-206
Author(s):  
Anna Ursyn
Keyword(s):  
Visual Communication ◽  
Visual Literacy ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Visual Responses ◽  
Umberto Eco ◽  
Interactive Reading ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Visual Tool ◽  
Visual Approach ◽  
Ice Water

This chapter is focused on creating the visual approach to natural processes, concepts, and events, rather than their description for learning. It has been designed as an active, involving, action-based exercise in visual communication. Interactive reading is a visual tool aimed at communication, activation, and expansion of one’s visual literacy. It addresses the interests of professionals who would like to further their developments in their domains. The reader is encouraged to read this chapter interactively by developing visual responses to the inspiring issues. This experience will be thus generated cooperatively with the readers who will construct interactively many different, meaningful pictorial interpretations. “How to produce texts by reading them,” asks a philosopher, semiotician, and writer Umberto Eco, (1984, 2). The chapter comprises two projects about water-related themes; each project invites the reader to create visual presentation of this theme. Selected themes involve: (1) States of matter exemplified by ice, water, and steam, and (2) Water habitats: lake, river, and swamp.

Visual Anthropology

Anthropology ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Banks
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Biological Anthropology ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Quality Video ◽  
Anthropology Of Art ◽  
Digital Processes

Visual anthropology can be broadly understood as the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological. However, for much of its history, the term has been associated almost exclusively with ethnographic film (see Ethnographic Film) and it is only recently that a broader consideration of other visual forms and visuality itself have come under the subdiscipline’s purview. In the last decade, the boundaries have expanded further, partly through changes in technology (expensive celluloid film technology giving way to cheap high-quality video and digital processes, the rise of the Internet) but more through changes in theory and the opening up of new lines of intellectual inquiry. As with many other subdisciplines within the field of anthropology, many visual anthropologists would claim that they are simply anthropologists—with the same interests in kinship, politics, the economy, aesthetics, materiality, religion, and so forth as their colleagues—but with special attention paid to the visual and visible manifestations of those areas of human activity and creativity. The subdiscipline overlaps strongly with the anthropology of art and with the anthropology of material culture as well as with other disciplines such as media studies, film studies, and photographic history; in recent years, the field has also overlapped with action anthropology and other applied work coming out of development studies, and the rise of the Internet has given a new forum for the storage, study, and dissemination of images. There is no equivalent subdiscipline in the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology and primatology, though scholars in these fields do of course use photography and film or video for purposes of documentation (archaeology, forensic anthropology) and recording observations (primatology); interpretative approaches in archaeology, for example in the study of rock art, may draw upon approaches from visual anthropology as well as from the anthropology of art and the anthropology of material culture.

Ethnographic Documentary Production

Anthropology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harjant S. Gill
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
Scholarly Output ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Ethnographic Cinema ◽  
Definition Of

The term “documentary production” within anthropology characterizes the making and circulation of ethnographic research and scholarship which includes film and video as the primary medium of storytelling and communicating cultural knowledge. These categories evolve frequently and what constitutes a film as “ethnographic” cinema is a topic of lengthy ongoing debates. In his Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology entry “Ethnographic Film,” Matthew Durington provides an overview of some of these debates in attempting to narrow down theoretical frameworks and parameters of filmic ethnography. Ginsburg’s 1998 essay “Institutionalizing the Unruly: Charting a Future for Visual Anthropology” (cited under Foundations) charts the lineage of visual anthropology on the development of the subfield as “born of a union between anthropology and documentary film” (p. 173). From its earliest application within ethnographic research, some scholars have approached filmmaking as a methodological and analytical tool that privileges scientific rigor while others regard it primarily as a medium for storytelling and scholarly output. Early adopters of using film within anthropological research, including Mead and Bateson in their 1977 article “On the Use of Camera in Anthropology” (cited under Foundations), have openly quibbled about the role of the camera and the filmmaker in capturing culture on film. These disagreements have been useful in broadening the boundaries of ethnographic cinema, inspiring filmmakers to experiment with different ways of making meaning, as it has been customary from the genre’s inception led by pioneering figures like Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. For a threshold for what constitutes “ethnographic film and media productions,” we can turn to Jean Rouch, who in his essay “The Camera and Man” (cited under Foundations) insists that ethnographic filmmakers must apply the same anthropological rigor—“spend a long time in the field before beginning to shoot (at least a year),” and thereby possessing an intimate understanding of the communities among whom they work while mastering essential “film and sound recording skills” (p. 40). Building on insights offered by Rouch and by drawing on scholarship from documentary and media studies, the goal of this entry is to outline the fundamentals of non-fiction filmmaking geared toward anthropologists who are already trained in ethnographic research. This entry also insists upon a more inclusive definition of ethnographic cinema, one that does not rely on the filmmaker’s academic pedigree as the primary criteria for inclusion into what has historically been a rather insular enterprise. Instead, a section of this entry is devoted to highlighting voices and perspectives from historically marginalized communities—queer, feminist, people of color, immigrants, indigenous filmmakers, who have been sidelined within the discipline of anthropology with its vestiges of colonialism. Another section of this entry highlights the need to decenter the hegemony of North American and European gaze when telling cross-cultural stories by focusing on transnational ethnographic and documentary production, specifically from countries in the Global South.

Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re-visioning

Anthropology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Shankar
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
The Past ◽  
Race And Racialization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Time Part ◽  
Ethnographic Films ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Cultural Alterity ◽  
Visual Technologies

Ethnographic film, given its history as a vestige of colonial visual culture, has been defined by and constrained by the racist and imperial ideologies of those who were the earliest ethnographic filmmakers. Scientistic, distanced, observational film-making techniques continued the colonial quest for totalizing knowledge through the romantic ideal that film was “objective.” At the same time, the earliest ethnographic films relied on the perceived difference between white, Western, “civilized,” “modern” filmmakers and non-white, “primitive,” tribal, backwards peoples rendered mute on-screen. This ethnographic film history was predicated on observing and salvaging the histories of the “primitive,” soon-to-be-extinct peoples through visual documentation and, in so doing, these ethnographic films neatly mapped race onto culture, unabashedly fixing “primitive” practices onto bodies. Such films also differentially imposed sexist stereotypes on both men and women, pre-determining hierarchies of colonial heteronormative masculinity and femininity within which non-white Others were slotted. In the past thirty years, anthropologists realized the fallacy of essentialized biological racial difference and began reckoning with the role that visual technologies played in re-producing “culture-as-race” mythologies. And yet, ethnographic filmmakers have largely neglected the explicit conversation on race and racialization processes that their projects are inevitably a part of despite the fact that the subjects and objects of ethnographic filmmaking continue to be, for the large part, previously colonized peoples whose contemporary practices are still heavily impacted by the racialized values, institutions, and technologies of the colonial period. As a response, this entry provides a history of ethnographic film which focuses on processes of racialization and the production of “primitive” subjects over time. Part of the task in this entry is to begin to “re-read” or “re-see” some traditional and iconic ethnographic films through an attention to how decolonial visual anthropologists have theorized the ways that the film camera (and visual technologies more broadly) has been used to primitivize, facilitate racializing processes, and produce the expectation of radical cultural alterity. The entry will engage with content that has been produced by anthropologists while also engaging with films outside of the anthropological canon that disrupt, disturb, and unsettle anthropological ways of seeing. These disruptions have obviated the fact that anthropological filmmakers cannot revert our gaze, but instead must find new ways of acknowledging the complex and messy histories from which the discipline has emerged while carefully engaging with the emerging global hierarchies that rely on neocolonial ideologies and produce new racist ways of seeing for (still) largely white and white-adjacent audiences. Each section will include texts and films as examples of how various visual techniques have emerged in order to challenge earlier processes of visual primitivizing. Note: Words such as primitive, tribal, and backwards are used here to describe characterizations imposed on anthropological subjects by (neo)colonial ethnographic filmmakers and do not reflect the views of the author.

Ethnographic Films from Iran

Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
City Life ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
University Support ◽  
Tribal Cultures ◽  
Ethnographic Films ◽  
Educational Films

Iranian ethnographic films began with a focus on preserving Iran’s diverse traditions and indigenous cultures. Many of these films were salvage documentaries marked by nostalgia for disappearing traditions of rural and tribal life. The earliest film from this tradition is Grass (1924), which is about tribal migration and was made by American explorers before ethnographic films were recognized as a tradition. The impetus to preserve rural and tribal cultures first came from a group of filmmakers who were trained by a team of specialists from United States Information Service’s (USIS) film program and a team of filmmakers from Syracuse University, who came to Iran in the late 1940s and 1950s to help with development and modernization. They made propaganda and educational films that promoted industrialization, health, agriculture, and education in remote regions of Iran. They also trained Iranian filmmakers who later made actuality films, some of which could be considered ethnographic, with support from state institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Art and National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT). The notion of what constitutes ethnographic film has been debated by scholars and filmmakers since ethnographic film was first conceived. Ethnographic film has occupied a marginal space in the academic discipline of anthropology because many films that are considered ethnographic lack rigorous scientific research and are not made by anthropologists. Many of the films discussed here are documentaries that provide detailed documentation of daily life and customs of Iranian people but most are not films made by ethnographers. Meaningful university support for the production of academic ethnographic films was rarely available in Iran, except during the leadership of Nader Afshar Naderi at Tehran University’s Social Sciences division in the early 1960s. He introduced ethnographic film to Iranian academia and made several films with detailed attention to customs and traditions of Iranian tribes. Besides films about tribes and Iran’s cultural traditions that have continued into the present day, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, films of ethnographic value have been made about the Iran-Iraq War and more recently about urban life. Filmmakers documented the eight-year war in a long-running television series that observed soldiers on the front lines. Finally, since the early 2000s, some independent filmmakers have made films that focus on city life, particularly documenting lives of young Iranians, or have made personal and autobiographical films by turning the camera on their own lives.

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