Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063672
Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani
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.
为了扩展当代泰国艺术与民族志的关系，我在本文中采用案例研究的方法，通过民族志的框架来理解电影《无地之土》。由Nontawat Numbenchapol于2019年完成的Din Rai Dan在泰国和缅甸边境的掸邦军营中被枪杀。跨越引人注目的视觉美学和彻底的现场研究，我认为丁莱丹的民族志是在调查的客体-主体关系上制定艺术和干预机构的促成因素，即掸邦军队社区。为此，本研究从电影人与电影主体、电影人与电影观众的角度来探讨《丁莱丹》。总之，这两种观点在电影制作和公映时相互强化了电影的民族志框架。这部电影也被称为《无土之土》(Soil Without Land)，原泰语片名《丁莱丹》(Din Rai Dan)暗示了一个地方缺乏身份认同，这个地方是我们踩在上面却不属于的地方。(din)这个词通常与其他单词组合在一起表示地球、地面或国家。单独使用时，“丁”指的是植物生长和茁壮成长所需的土壤，或维持自然的壤土。Din是最基本的;我们的星球是由水构成的。(拉伊)表示缺少或缺少的东西。(dan)指土地或地产。在一起，“拉伊丹”的意思是无国界的;而“din Dan”指的是人造领土。中间的拉伊结合在一起,标题ดินไร้แดนDin rai丹的字面意思是“没有土地,”唤起缺席,或缺乏,社会的本质。Din Rai Dan是一种修辞，一种概念，传达了一个民族或国家的包容或排斥条件-任何国家，但在这里是掸邦。
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063680
M. Lange
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
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063675
Emma Ben Ayoun
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,
残疾和纪录片有着复杂而交织的历史;电影装置本身与西方当代医学同步发展，医疗器械的功能是监视、调节并最终改变身体(Cartwright 1995;Brylla and Hughes 2017)。在表征层面上，正如无数学者所争论的那样(例如Norden 1994;Snyder and Mitchell 2006;Riley 2005)，残疾在电影中并没有得到充分的表现，而是长期而危险地被错误地呈现:在叙事电影中，残疾无处不在，作为不可挽回的差异的标志，作为人物个人失败的怪诞外化，作为唤起同情、恐惧或悲伤的策略。马丁·诺登(Martin Norden)将残疾媒体描述为“孤立的电影”，准确地揭示了屏幕上的残疾在多大程度上被描绘成一种孤独的、某种程度上“极端”的身份，一种永久的外在，规范以此来肯定自己。在纪录片电影中，虽然残疾人身上的隐喻负担可能不那么明显，但仍然有一些比喻继续延伸出一种非人性化和残疾主义的目光。在某种程度上，这一现象是由于残疾电影人在获得(在制作和发行方面)方面的一些体制、财政和文化障碍造成的;它也是一个悠久传统的继承者，这个传统早于电影，它将身体异常视为一个符号学问题，一个永远需要从外部解决的问题。正如罗斯玛丽·加兰·汤姆森(Rosemarie Garland Thomson)所写，“特殊的机构似乎迫使解释，激发代表，并煽动监管……(Garland Thomson 1996, 1)。Jeffrey a . Weinstock在其颇具影响力的文集《Freakery》中指出，身体残疾最普遍的文化符号之一——“怪胎”的健康主义文化修辞，最好被理解为“由19世纪科学和人类学话语的融合所定义的一个位点”(Weinstock 1996, 329)。围绕残疾的视觉语言本质上仍然是边缘化的，与此同时，它能够将自己隐藏在医学知识的“客观性”背后。对于纪录片的学者和教师，
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063682
M. Lamrani
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
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063673
Joshua Sterlin
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063670
Nataliya Tchermalykh
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.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063671
A. Grimshaw
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?
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063679
A. Mututa
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
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2022.2063678
Leonard Kamerling
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.
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