ANTHROPOLOGICAL FILM

SEE -- THINK -- EDIT -- SHOW -- LEARN -- WRITE

November  2010

     From the field of anthropology, additional ‘lenses’ of methodology-and-method are drawn into my Cultural Farming research.   As outlined throughout anthropological film, my videos are also forms of ‘the theory and practice of show and tell’.  And while much has been written of anthropological film elsewhere, this section sketches several of anthropological film’s specific predicaments.  These ‘problematics’ for Cultural Farming, however, are recognized as trail markers, and utilized as guideposts, when attempting to civically respond to media-mongerings. 

      Luckily for all of us, these guides for ‘documentary practice’ are already well situated within an established field, with established practices (Elkins, 2003, p.30).  I’m not re-inventing the wheel; I’m releasing some air-pressure out the tires for better traction through the sand, mud and snow of media practice.

      But in today’s camera-screen worlds, even established fields of visual practices carry with them their own fractious controversies.  Every practice, then, becomes a strong candidate for re-examination, for public scrutiny.  When cameras are guns and screens are liars, which tools of resistance are best, and what methods do we use?

SETTING THE SCENE:

Transcultural Montage Conference, Institute of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark.  2009

Screening:  Stranger Danger: Infantilization and the Production of Childhood”

Plenary:  “Cultural Farming: Talking Back to Television”

      This was a terrific conference, and focused specifically around notions of montage (Catherine Russell keynoted).  I learned a lot.  Both my screening and plenary talk were well received.  But then I’m different, and I’m tall; so I am used to getting noticed.  Still, this felt good.  It felt like I might be able to hold my own with this crowd.  Later that day, this ‘inner-circle’ (about 20 attendees) was invited to gather for dinner and an evening of casual socializing at a nearby corner bistro.

      Geroge Marcus walked in, eyeballed the room, and chose to sit down right next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, for the entire meal plus cocktails.  Yet he never once spoke a word to me the entire evening.  For over three hours, he never once looked my way.  I know this to be true, because I witnessed it.  I closely observed, because I also wanted to catch his attention.  I don’t get to Denmark very often, and I had some things I wanted to say, too.

      All night, although George and I almost touched kneecaps under our small cafe table, he barely shifted his gaze.  His eyes were elsewhere.  He preferred instead to focus upon the gushy attentions of a lusty, captivating dreadlocked-blonde expounding across the table from us.  She sought ‘promotion’, he held ‘authority’.  Almost directly caught between the two of them, I wasn’t exactly sure who was mesmerizing whom?  Oh well, who could blame George, I suppose.  She was cute. 

      The next morning, George and I crossed paths once gain at the conference courtesy shuttle-bus.  He opened the door and motioned toward the rear seat, for me to enter the van first.  I’m 6’-5” tall, I would have to contort into a pretzel-shape, but he obviously wanted the front seat.  As I genuflected in front of him, I mentioned that, back home in my neighborhood, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy had just passed away that morning from cancer.  George was nodding to the driver, he mumbled something in my direction, which I’m not sure I completely caught, “Well, that’s not much of a loss.”  This was the last exchange George and I ever had.

THE CHALLENGE OF CHALLENGING:

      Everything, all of media, is ripe for civic challenging.  Cultural Farming remains firmly committed to a brand of dialogic and didactic “Showing Seeing” for encouraging citizens to help reinvigorate, recuperate, and innervate ethical TV/media production and presentation (journalism) through emancipating -- yet re-limiting -- constructs of 'civic' production.  That’s a fussy way of saying that I think all media should be available --encouraged-- for intellectual public challenging.  As W.J.T. Mitchell writes:

      “Merleau-Ponty's abstruse discussions of the dialectics of seeing, the ‘chiasmus’ of the eye and the gaze, and the entangling of vision with the “flesh of the world” become much more down to earth when the spectator/spectacle has been visibly embodied and performed in the classroom. 

      “A more ambitious aim of Showing Seeing is its potential as a reflection on theory and method in themselves.  As should be evident, the approach is informed by a kind of pragmatism, but not (one hopes) of a kind that is closed off to speculation, experiment, and even metaphysics.  At the most fundamental level, it is an invitation to rethink what theorizing is, to “picture theory” and “perform theory” as a visible, embodied, communal practice, not as the solitary introspection of disembodied intelligence. 

     “…This Showing Seeing exercise is one way to accomplish the first step in the formation of any new field, and that is to rend the veil of familiarity and awaken the senses of wonder, so that many of the things that are taken for granted about the visual arts and media (and perhaps verbal ones as well) are put into question (Mitchell, 2005, pp.355-356).

      As with other writings like Mitchell’s (Barbash & Taylor, 1997; Brown & Dobrin, 2004; Heider, 2006; Hockings, 2003; Russell, 1999), these methodologies sound reminiscent of anthropology’s historical provocative and seductive call to visual discovery.  Yet all carry scarce mention of exactly how we should “critically do” these things.  Why not SHOW us too, eh?  Cultural Farming attempts to bracket, elevate, widen, deepen, and materialize these omissions-of-method as a way to investigate any troublesome aspect of TV/media of our choosing.

      And luckily there is a bright spot: TV/media tools for critical ethnography are widely available today to most North American citizens.  Read another way, excellent means-of-resistance are everywhere.  Indeed, within the outward greed of unbridled capitalism we find occasional moments in history, like ours today, when technologically hegemonic fluctuations seemingly err on the side of citizens.  The contagions of media bring with them their own practical means of resistance.  Camera against camera, screen against screen.  ‘Fighting fire with fire’.  And back-fires like these, when done correctly, clean away brush, help rebuild habitat, and protect against more devastating events.  Good Fire is nature-cleansing.

      In our lust to fulfill increasingly manufactured consumer-demands for communication, an assembly line of dangers appear.  But, with intellectual craftsmanship, much of this can potentially be inverted into various means of emancipation.  An array of ‘weapons’ are introduced to the public almost daily.  Why not re-functioned our “tools”, as a means to remedy, harmonize, and put right?  Skillfully using the same technologies to help rectify all our technologies.  It’s up to consumers to invert their own media for civic response. 

      Video cameras are now cheap enough to slack-jaw any Sol Worth Navajo (Worth, 1981).  Non-linear editing tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars only a few years ago are now freely downloadable.  User-friendly distribution venues for global dissemination abound with the advent of broadband, which now penetrates a majority of North American homes. 

      Every person (in essence, however not yet in theory or practice) can be his or her own 'TV station' at the drop of a hat.  Indeed, many people are attempting to do something like this to the tune of about 175,000 (2010) new blogs created every day -- and of course, most involve informational visualization, with much of that being appropriated content.  The breathtaking speed of the introduction of these new media tools makes Cultural Farming methodologies accessible to most anyone -- particularly from a visual socio-anthropological perspective, by re-employing these technologies for new fecund means for writing culture. 

EXPERIMENT:  VISUAL TWO-WAY DIALOGUE

      Thus, these technologies leverage new citizen methods of possibility and responsibility for not only openly ‘talking-back’ to each other but to our media as well; at least, that is, while we still can before counter-hegemonic forces close these opportunities to most citizens through pending industry pressured legislation like al la carte pricing, anti net-neutrality legislation, and rulings curtailing fair use-dealings.  These prod fundamental questions, which remain central to my research premise:  What will citizens do --what should citizens do-- with today’s unique media opportunity.  And how?

Time for new rules: Cameras should never be pointed at your head!

      If citizen-users need not create their civic TV/media in the mirror-image of big media production, what will be made, and from what principles?  Here again, anthropological film adds resonance and purpose to Cultural Farming.  My theoretical and methodological underpinnings fall within the shadow of many visual anthropologists like Richard Leacock, Tim Asch, David MacDougall, Marcus Banks, Jay Ruby, and particularly Jean Rouch --ethnographic filmmakers all-- for purposefully capturing, constructing and employing moving images as observational scholarship. 

      Anthropology’s visual/filmic/video approach both extends and expands longstanding notions of logocentric observational writing to an art of looking sideways by reciprocally exploring (provoking) all aspects of TV/media without stunting translation (Coover, 2003; Fletcher, 2001; Harper, 2003, Glasgow University Media Group, (2005); Goodall, 2000; Virillio, 2003). 

      I suggest with Cultural Farming: Why not simply re-employ everyday TV/media to critically examine TV/media?  Indeed, this premise extends the overarching yet unfulfilled promise of three generations of visual anthropology scholars (Banks & Morphy, 1997; Clifford, 1988; Feld, 2003, Heider, 2006; Hockings, 2003; MacDougall, 2006; Marcus& Fischer, 1986; Ruby, 2000; Taylor, 1994).  That is to say, media ethnography is anathema to constructing research entirely of words as Cultural Farming clearly illustrates. 

      However, while this continues to be a point of controversy both within the discipline of anthropology and the practice of ethnography, ignoring camera/screen tools for observing contemporary camera/screen worlds should seem absurdly cross-purposed since undoubtedly all images conjure words and words inevitably invoke images.  As George Marcus and Michael Fischer emphasize:

      (C)ontemporary practitioners of ethnographic film are well aware that it (film) is as much a constructed text as are written books.  Ethnographic film making thus poses challenges similar to that of ethnographic writing: problems of narrative and focus, of editing and reflexivity.  Perhaps the ethnographic film cannot replace the ethnographic text, but it may indeed have certain advantages over it in a society where visual media are strongly competing with written forms for attention of mass users, including intellectuals and scholars (Marcus& Fischer, 1986, p.75).

      But is anthropologic or ethnographic film’s significance for Cultural Farming simply the use of video; can that alone be instructional?  At the onset, the answers to these questions are yes because mere participation does beg a kind of civic interaction as elicited from Lucian Taylor’s (Feld, 2003, p.141) fleeting exchange with arguably the most influential and surreal filmmaker in anthropology. “All your films in a sense provoke, rather than 'record’”; to which renowned anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch replied, “Yes. I prefer not to be the scientist but to participate.” 

      As provocatively glib as Rouch’s comment might seem, Sarah Pink extends Rouch and provides necessary fulsome specificity to the practice of anthropological filmmaking, as guidance to Cultural Farming:

      “The future… should be a two-way process through which mainstream anthropology comes to accommodate visual knowledge and ethnographic film comes to accommodate anthropological concerns.  …I suggest we need to create a visual anthropology that no longer simply defends itself against the mainstream… One way this is already achieved is by accommodating theoretical developments in anthropology within visual projects… Another is to develop new forms of visual representation that can communicate theoretically…

      “This might involve producing not only new forms of ethnographic film, but hypemedia texts that combine word and image.  …This may provide important directions for a future in which visual anthropology has a more prominent public profile and engages with what some have argued is our responsibility to promote a public anthropology that comments on and intervenes in issues of public concern (Pink, 2006, p.19, emphasis added).

      Cultural Farming is calling for exactly this kind of usage of specific experimentation in the production of TV/media production.  Catherine Russell adds:

      “One of the things that experimental film brings to ethnography is what (Bill) Nichols describes as the ability to see film as cultural representation - as opposed to seeing through film.  It is a difference between discourse analysis and content analysis, and it requires a selection of texts that are exemplary of particular configurations of culture and representation.  …If we can understand film and video as a means by which 'culture' is translated into technologies of representation, we can potentially see, in Rey Chow's words, how a culture is 'originally' put together, in all its cruelty (Russell, 1999, p.22-23).

      Thus, while the tenets of visual anthropology and the surreal/provocative approach of Cultural Farming’s project may at first blush appear to be strange bedfellows, both have long-standing traditions and serve very similar functions:

      Certainly anthropology itself is embedded in representational processes that may reflect political interests and which are an integral part of a particular system of knowledge, affecting what is known and how it is interpreted and understood by others.  One agenda of visual anthropology is to analyse the properties of visual systems, to determine the properties of visual systems and the conditions of their interpretation and to relate the particular systems to the complexities of the social and political processes of which they are a part.  A second agenda is to analyse the visual means of disseminating anthropological knowledge itself.  As reflexivity becomes a central component of anthropological method then visual anthropology with its history of reflexivity, with its element of reportage and its potential to monitor action and process has become an increasingly central field (Banks & Morphy, 1997, p.2).