Visual Anthropology最新文献

{"title":"Ethnography in Contemporary Thai Cinematic Practices: A Case Study","authors":"Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063672","url":null,"abstract":"Expanding on the nexus of art and ethnography in contemporary Thailand, I take a case study approach in this paper to apprehend the film Din Rai Dan (Soil Without Land) through an ethnographic framework. Completed in 2019 by Nontawat Numbenchapol, Din Rai Dan was shot at the Shan State Army camp, at the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Straddling compelling visual aesthetics and thorough, on-site research, I regard ethnography in Din Rai Dan as the enabling factor in enacting artistic and interventive agency on the relation of the object-subject of inquiry, that is, the Shan State Army community. To do so, this study approaches Din Rai Dan from the perspectives of filmmaker and film subject, as well as filmmaker and film viewer. Together, these two viewpoints mutually reinforce the film’s ethnographic framework at the time of its making and deliverance to the public. Also known as Soil Without Land, the film’s original Thai title ดินไร้แดน Din Rai Dan hints to the dearth of identity to a place that is the land on which we tread but do not belong. The word ดิน (din) is commonly combined with other words to denote earth, ground, or country. Used alone, din refers to the soil that plants need to grow and thrive, or the loam that sustains nature. Din is fundamental; it is what our planet is made of. ไร้ (rai) indicates something that is missing or lacking. แดน (dan) implies land or estate. Together, ไร้ แดน rai dan means borderless; while ดิน แดน din dan refers to manmade territory. Conjoined with the interlocutory rai, the title ดินไร้แดน Din Rai Dan literally means “no land,” evoking the absence, or lack, of the essence of society. Din Rai Dan is a figure of speech, a concept, that relays the condition of inclusion or exclusion to a nation or state—any state but in this case the Shan State.","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"138 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42981728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Hole","authors":"J. Colleyn","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063677","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"207 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42804611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Are Exhibitions For?","authors":"M. Lange","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063680","url":null,"abstract":"This book is topical at a time when visitors, especially youth, are seeking immersive experiences. More importantly museums, particularly in the United Kingdom, are seeking ways to shift the colonial gaze that objectifies, and the top-down power that comes with it. The CEO of Culture, Dr. Errol Francis, highlighted how the racially spurred violence perpetrated by police in 2020 in the U.S. and the UK emphasized the need to reexamine colonial violence within heritage spaces, including museums. What are exhibitions for? challenges perceptions of contemporary exhibitions by a reversal of power from the curator to the visitor, thus looking at what exhibitions could be—“technologies of the imagination.” Although Inge Daniels does not refer to the term “decolonization” of museum spaces, there are statements to be discovered within the dense text of the book that are in alignment with this thinking. What is also of relevance is Daniels’s acknowledgement of different ways of knowing, or what she refers to as “mixed knowledge making.” Knowing through your feet is a strong theme throughout the book, as is reflected in the cover which includes a plan of the movement of visitors’ feet through an exhibition. Daniels’s attempts to address and transform essentialist stereotyping of Japanese life. She steps away from the inclusion of museum artifacts as singular objects of worth that are stuck behind glass, to consumable collections from the domestic space within which visitors may engage in a performative or tactile manner. Daniels, who had conducted ongoing research in Japan for over 20 years— including in 30 homes in the Kansai region—writes the book in the first person. She implements an anthropological approach, including interviews and participant observation, to an experimental exhibition entitled “At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House.” She co-curated that exhibition, along with the photographer and lecturer, Susan Andrews, who provided life-size trompe l’œil photographs to heighten visitors’ immersive experiences. This exhibition occurred from March to August 2011 at the Geffrye Museum in London. The anthropological approach of the book includes ethnographic studies of the multi-sensory immersive reception of the exhibition, as well as the journey of objects from the exhibition which Daniels surprisingly raffled off to","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"219 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43501449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cinemas of Isolation, Histories of Collectivity: Crip Camp and Disability Coalition","authors":"Emma Ben Ayoun","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063675","url":null,"abstract":"Disability and documentary have a complex, intertwined history; the cinematic apparatus itself developed in tandem with Western contemporary medicine, with medical instruments whose function was to surveil, regulate, and ultimately transform the body (Cartwright 1995; Brylla and Hughes 2017). On a representational level, as myriad scholars have argued (e.g. Norden 1994; Snyder and Mitchell 2006; Riley 2005), disability is not so much cinematically underrepresented as it is chronically and dangerously mis-represented: in narrative film, disabilities are everywhere, as markers of irrevocable difference, as grotesque externalizations of characters’ personal failings, as strategies to invoke pathos, terror or grief. Martin Norden’s description of disability media as “the cinema of isolation” reveals accurately the extent to which disability on screen has been depicted as a solitary and somehow “extreme” identity, a kind of permanent outside against which the normative affirms itself. In documentary cinema, while the burden of metaphor placed on disabled people is perhaps not as immediately visible, there are nevertheless a number of tropes that continue to extend a dehumanizing and ableist gaze. In part this phenomenon results from a number of institutional, financial and cultural barriers to access (in terms of production and distribution) for disabled filmmakers; it is also the heir to a long tradition, one that predates the cinema, that posits physical anomaly as a semiotic problem, one to be solved, always, from without. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes, “the exceptional body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation ... it is always an interpretive occasion” (Garland Thomson 1996, 1). Jeffrey A. Weinstock, in the influential anthology Freakery, suggests that the ableist cultural trope of the “freak,” one of the most pervasive cultural signifiers of physical disability, can best be understood as “a locus defined by the convergence of nineteenth-century scientific and anthropological discourse” (Weinstock 1996, 329). The visual language around disability remains inherently marginalizing, at the same time that it is capable of shielding itself behind the “objectivity” of medical knowledge. For scholars and teachers of documentary,","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"196 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48519875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tradition in the Frame","authors":"M. Lamrani","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063682","url":null,"abstract":"Tall and proud, his black shirt and leather boots on, his bearded face turned toward the White Mountains, the proud Sfakian embodies fierce Greek masculinity. What happens when Cretan manhood embodies tradition is what Konstantinos Kalantzis explores in his first monograph. The book presents Sfakian performance of manhood as a central representation of Greek tradition. In doing so it unveils the region of Sfakia—a hiding place during the uprising against the Venetian and Ottoman rulers and under the German Occupation during World War II—and how Sfakian men stand as national symbols of Cretan nativism, resistance, and indigenous Greekness. Carefully documented through a rich ethnography, this work paints a fascinating portrait of how tradition is nested in images that manifest the past itself. Kalantzis’ overarching argument could be summarized as follows: The frame of tradition—where local stereotypes are imposed by the “centers to dominate their peripheries” —is a terrain where exoticism is co-imagined (here between Sfakians, Greek urbanites, and foreign tourists). Looking at visual representations of Sfakian rugged manhood the frame of nativism—and that indeed of photographs— reveals tradition and conflicted versions of the same. The book is structured as a triptych with the first part exploring the rugged, almost lunar landscape of the White Mountains (in western Crete), the Sfakian stereotype, and the national context in which this myth unfolds within the Greek nation-state. The second part focuses on power and imagination. This section unpacks the visual and political economies of traditional masculinity in Crete—notably through the lens of commercial photography and picturepostcards representing these men, but also through artworks, films, road signs, and clothing. It shows how these representations are embedded both in the personal and national spheres. In the last part, Kalantzis discusses the threats and tensions that modernity poses to tradition. This discussion examines visual “montages” where modern elements and material objects threaten an unadulterated version of Sfakian tradition. The book ends with considerations on tourism and austerity as forces feeding on tradition, threatening its very existence. Here temporality is key, since tradition is a moving force that can only be understood in particular historical contexts. The paradoxes of framing tradition come out of Kalantzis’ masterful theorization of very sophisticated ethnographic material. With concepts such as","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"222 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45704388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shadow Animism and Ontological Xenophobia: An Anthropology of Horror","authors":"Joshua Sterlin","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063673","url":null,"abstract":"By examining the Western strain of the Horror genre, I explore the dynamics that define its central character as an ontological xenophobia that must be perpetually cleansed. Beyond a sociological account I suggest we take what it contains seriously as ontological explorations. With a focus on predation as case study, I analyze the genre as conforming to the gazing relation of the Naturalistic West regarding its reversal: Animism. I conclude with the possibilities that the Animist “bubbles” displayed in Horror fiction hold out for us to shift into a register in which we can build relational competence beyond our horror.","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"158 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41591624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“We Felt That the Country Was in the Stage of a Rough Cut…”: Vernacular Documentation, Political Affects and the Ideological Functions of Catharsis in Ukraine","authors":"Nataliya Tchermalykh","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063670","url":null,"abstract":"In March of 2014, I attended the first screening of Euromaidan: Rough Cut—a collective documentary chronicle of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution. Quite unexpectedly the event ended with an improvized mourning ritual for deceased Maidan protesters. Observed in the film, this ritual then transcended the screen and spread through the audience, stimulating an experience similar to a “collective catharsis.” What are the reasons for such a strong affective response to a visual document, capturing the fluidity of still unfolding revolutionary events? This article (written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) considers both the documentary and its screening as invaluable research sites, allowing us to study ethnographically the uncertainties preceding and accompanying the reification of (new) ideological narratives. By discussing the multifaceted understanding of cathartic experiences in the complex processes of group-building, truth-finding, and justice-making, this article considers new directions for the anthropological understanding of collective catharsis, as it has been experienced in post-industrial democratic societies.","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"95 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42336069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does Ethnographic Film (Still) Matter? Reflections on the Genre in a World of Multimodality","authors":"A. Grimshaw","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063671","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063671","url":null,"abstract":"For almost a century ethnographic filmmakers liked to think of their work as the radical alternative to a hidebound textual anthropology. Such claims are now increasingly challenged. On the one hand, the rise of “experimental’ or “multimodal” scholarship has changed the existing terms of debate about alternative modes of anthropological practice. On the other hand, debates about the decolonization (or decanonization) of the discipline have served to underline long-standing problems in conventional narratives of the tradition of ethnographic film. What is the future for ethnographic film? Is it now an obsolete form, superseded or absorbed into the broader and more diverse category of multimodal anthropology? Or is there a case to be made for retaining its distinctiveness as a mode of inquiry?","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"120 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44969439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Filming Real People","authors":"A. Mututa","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063679","url":null,"abstract":"Filming Real People: Ethnographies of “On Demand” Films is an edited book bringing together authors of ethnographic video working in diverse regions of the world. It attends to the practices of visual ethnography in family, individual, group, and place videos. The book’s subject matter touches on productions of weddings, music, football, festival, activism, and ritual videos. In general the book’s concern is to criticize the optimal position of the visual ethnographer in the production of these videos; which the book posits as dynamic and flexible. From the discussions which inform the volume’s three-part structure, one notes an effort to theorize, or at least interrogate, the still controversial frontiers of ethnographic cinema. Notably, the book entreats various canonical discussions in the field of visual ethnography; for instance the discussion by Hockings et al. (2014), all of whom criticize the theoretical underpinnings of visual anthropology. Some of the ideas borrowed from these scholars include Hockings’ idea of visual anthropology as an encounter of media studies and sociocultural anthropology or vice versa (436), and the conjunction of emic and etic imagery in visual anthropology (437). Vailati and Villarreal’s book explores these dimensions of images by presenting the visual ethnographer in various meaning-searching roles—which I discuss below. Further, the methodological approaches within their book can be understood through Tomaselli’s theory of production of images and image analyses; and the visual ethnographer’s role as a decoder (textual analysis) and encoder (441). This is most apparent in the elaborate textual analysis and descriptive reportage used by various authors in Vailati and Villarreal’s book. Similarly, MacDougall’s theory of ontology of images, co-existing methodology, and epistemology of anthropological images gathered from “sensory, emotional, kinesic, performative, aesthetic, interpersonal, and subjective perspectives” (445), is reflected in the methodological approaches deployed by various authors in Filming Real People. For this reason, it is prudent to approach this book as an implementation of various existing theories in visual anthropology to the on-demand video genre. The theories noted above are useful in understanding both the essence and frontiers of Vailati and Villarreal’s 1","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"213 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43199760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Maasai Speak Back","authors":"Leonard Kamerling","doi":"10.1080/08949468.2022.2063678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2022.2063678","url":null,"abstract":"The growing body of anthropological research on the economic and social realities of Western tourism in Maasai communities focuses largely on cultural heritage tourism, in which visitors are taken to Maasai bomas where they can interact with local people, observe cultural performances, take photographs, and purchase crafts. The advertisements created by tour companies often feature quite dramatic images of Maasai men and women in full traditional dress, and promise tourists adventure, hospitality, and most importantly an authentic inter-cultural experience. The existing research tells us much about the real-world and theoretical issues of the anthropology of tourism in East Africa, but what it does not (and perhaps cannot) provide is a measure of how the cultural assumptions, expectations and misinterpretations of both tourists and Maasai hosts determine the nature of the cross-cultural moment as they attempt to reach across the interpersonal divide. Researchers are not mind-readers and therefore the inner dialog of the cross-cultural exchange is largely unobservable and unknown, as is the ongoing subjective resonance of the experience and how it continues to influence each group’s perception of the other. The anthropologist and filmmaker Vanessa Wijngaarden’s remarkable new film, Maasai Speak Back, mines the emotional landscape of the cross-cultural moment between Western tourists and Maasai hosts, and brings the previously unobservable or unknowable to the surface. During her fieldwork in Tanzanian Maasai communities, Wijngaarden filmed the interaction of several groups of Dutch tourists with local Maasai. These visitors were brought to established bomas where Maasai work and live, not to specially designed “cultural” bomas, places where they were invited to observe people at their work, interact, take photos and buy hand-made crafts. It is here that the misunderstandings unfold, as visitors and hosts negotiate the buying and selling process. The Maasai women, who are at the bottom of the hierarchy below the tour companies, the local guides and interpreters, hope for a fair price and a small profit. The visitors, trapped in the orbit of the tourist bubble, are concerned with bargaining a “good price.” This exchange is tense and uncomfortable, the Westerners feeling that they are being taken advantage of, the Maasai that their work is being devalued.","PeriodicalId":44055,"journal":{"name":"Visual Anthropology","volume":"35 1","pages":"210 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}