Visual Anthropology

           

“The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

--John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972:7)

INTRODUCTION

        Seeing might be believing, but how does it relate to knowing? What is the relation between ways of seeing and ways of knowing in anthropology? These are the questions that frame the following analysis of theories of the visual in anthropology. The introduction situates the visual and the anthropological in a socio-historical context and outlines the basis of some of the theoretical concerns explored throughout the paper. The second section explores experiments in ethnographic filmmaking and the use of visual material in constructions of anthropological knowledge by several important practitioners, including Margaret Mead, Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, and David and Judith MacDougall. The intent is to elucidate theoretical understandings of visual material in the practice of these ethnographic filmmakers. The third section looks at the domains of television, indigenous media, non-realist ‘ethnographic’ films, and hypermedia.

The Visual and the Anthropological

The development of photography, motion pictures, and anthropology are parallel in time and in socio-historical contexts. In “Photography and Visual Anthropology”, John Collier, Jr. (1995 [1974]) outlines photography’s and cinema’s contributions to anthropology, pointing specifically to Edward T. Hall’s “proxemics”, Alan Lomax’s “chronometric”, and Ray Birdwhistell’s “kinesics”. The development of “frame-by-frame” analysis allows for micro-level analysis in measuring, counting, and comparing detailed elements of behaviour. Photographs can also be used as stimuli in the interviewing of subjects. Aerial photographs assist archaeologists in locating and mapping sites. Ethnographers also use photographs to map village areas, architecture, and other cultural and personal spaces.

Collier (1995[1974]) himself used a photographic inventory to analyze the dynamics of adjustment for relocated American Indians newly migrated into the San Francisco Bay Area in urban settings. Sociometric analyses can be applied to such inventory records. Collier suggests that the use of photography in ethnographic interviewing helps speed the process of understanding what is going on in the field by clarifying native reference points. “Photo-interviewing” helps identify people, places, boundaries, ownership of property, agricultural patterns, ecological elements, and historical happenings. Motion pictures add an additional dimension to the ethnographic research process, allowing the measurement of time in an unbroken flow, showing the relative pace of activity, qualifying behaviour movements, and showing emotional or psychological considerations invisible to photographs.

In “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography”, Christopher Pinney (1992) investigates the basis of photography’s and anthropology’s representational power using two possible histories to interpret the semiotic procedures by which the anthropological monograph and the photograph are similarly produced. The first history emphasizes the persuasiveness and certainty of the photograph: “To photograph people is to violate them”. Pinney equates the emergence of the fieldworker as the validator of anthropological knowledge with the “ritual of photography”. The primacy of the visual sense as a metaphor for Western knowledge (the occularcentrism of “I see” vs “I heard”) lends itself to the use of photography in the presentation of evidence, and in this sense, offers “proof” of the fieldwork. Pinney’s second history stresses that “certainty” is the effect of non-photographic structures and is always very fragile. And so, as John Berger (1972) also notes, photographs without captions are always interpretable in multiple ways, and the caption of a photograph limits potential meanings or conversely orients the possible meanings in different ways. With the caption comes the structure by which a reader is encouraged to begin interpretation. In this sense, anthropology discovers its rhetorical visualism while photography discovers its language-based grammar.

In her survey of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s photograph collection, Roslyn Poignant (1992) examines the role of photographs in establishing anthropology as a discipline in late 19th Century Victorian and early 20th Century Europe. The notion of photographs as isolated facts—complete in and of themselves—served to assist in developing anthropology with the subject matter. The photographic emphasis of this period in anthropology was on the human body. The pervasive fear that the diversity of the world’s cultures would soon disappear coincided with photography to “capture” the natives before they became extinct. Photographs, collected and compiled to check generalizations about race and racial types, were arranged, implying a hierarchy of race beginning with the ‘German & Teutonic type’ and ending with the Australian Aborigines. In most cases, efforts were made to photograph the “natives” in traditional dress and environment, even if it meant re-creating the environment in a studio setting. Charles Darwin used photographs in a controlled manner for his research on emotions in humans and animals. The early anthropological collection of photographs was driven by assumptions regarding the reality of a physiognomic code being read in physical form and that this code operated in an evolutionary paradigm. Efforts were made to systematically examine human physical diversity and to publish photographs of “typical races”. Galton (1877) went so far as to produce a composite portrait of the “criminal type.” based on a selection of eight photographs.

By the 1880s, photography was considered a necessary part of all anthropological work. The turn of the twentieth century brought a shift in direction for British anthropology, and Radcliffe-Brown’s structure-functionalism was embraced as a means to bring more thoroughness to anthropological research. Radcliffe-Brown’s focus led him to use diagrams rather than photographs in his presentation of research. Malinowski later recognized the importance of photographs in understanding his fieldnotes. However, insofar as the photographs he took himself seemed to expose the anthropologist’s privileged field of view and served to articulate colonial power structures, they were omitted by and large from Malinowski’s monographs.

In the post-World War II years, anthropology experienced a crisis of ethnographic authority. The rise of what would later be called “postmodernist critiques” on epistemological grounds coincided with technological advances in cinema that made the sync-sound film possible. In this context, both the Direct Cinema and Cinema-Verite schools of ethnographic film developed. In “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription”, Brian Winston (1993) discusses the history of documentary film as an instrument of science. The Direct Cinema school is compared and contrasted with the Cinema-Verite school. The Direct Cinema experiments, striving for objectivity and authority by presenting only raw observations, in some cases without editing, eventually ran into problems with handling subjectivity. One response to the criticism was that Direct Cinema was objective yet selective. Then, Frederick Wiseman, after dismissing objectivity altogether, insisted that the point of view evident in his documentary film work encourages the viewer to think about what is happening, and in so doing is a fair reflection of the experience of making the film. And, Jean Rouch of the Cinema-Verite school took self-reflexivity to an extreme, making documentary films about the process of making documentary films. Winston (1993) claims that documentaries must “escape from science” to move in a creative direction. This may be done by returning to a slight privileging of art over science by utilizing analogy to the pre-existent signified subject of the film without total fictionalization, such as Karen McCarthy Brown has done in Mama Lola (1991) and as the films of Robert Gardner (discussed below) demonstrate. This issue inspires heated debate among anthropologists. My inclination is to agree with Winston on this point since I privilege the holistic communication of indigenous or native aesthetics over science for its own sake.

In “Ethnographic Photography in Anthropological Research”, Joanna Cohan Scherer (1995 [1974]) encourages anthropologists to utilize ethnographic photographs as research material, and outlines some useful methodological considerations. Anthropologists should consider the purpose of the photograph, the relationship of the photographer to the subject, the subject’s view of photography, the subject’s emotional state, and what must be learned through research into supporting documents such as written text from the author or photographic conventions of the time.

A more sophisticated extension of the anthropological analysis of photographs as cultural documents was conducted by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins (1993). In “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic”, the authors analyze photographs from National Geographic magazine as “cultural artefacts from a changing twentieth-century American scene”, specifically investigating the intersection of multiple “gazes”, perspectives or viewpoints evident in these photographs. Different types of gazes analyzed include the photographer’s gaze, the institutional (magazine) gaze, the readers’ gaze, the non-Western subjects’ gaze, the Western gaze, the gaze returned by mirrors or cameras, and the academic gaze. Lutz and Collins’ essay sees photographs as cultural artefacts leading to deeper analysis of the wider social world of which the photographs are a part. If the ethnographic filmmaker conscientiously accounts for these “gazes” while shooting, the meaning of the shots can be enriched, and the final film can more clearly express the intentions of the filmmaker, the goal of cinematography.

The practice of making an ethnographic or documentary film activates substantial ethical issues, all of which arise from the implicit claims of representing reality, whether objectively or subjectively. Emile de Brigard (1995[1973]:35) sees the goals of visual attractiveness and intellectual substance as competing forces at work in ethnographic film. The filmmaker must render a visual image according to aesthetic principles, either of his own culture or of the subject culture, and also bring those images into the form of an argument, even if it is merely to state that “this is how things are.” Bill Nichols (1991) considers the ethics of ethnographic film practice to involve: the relationship between knowledge and pleasure, the use of interview material, the handling of claims to objectivity, the arrangement of “facts”, the handling of voices of authentication, interpretive procedures, considerations of audience, and accounting for the presence of the filmmaker. The ethnographic filmmaker operates within the ideological domain of anthropology and the human sciences, and that means in terms of realism—whether historical, imaginary, psychological, or empirical. This is the challenge of contemporary ethnographic film: how to adequately represent the open-ended and dialogic nature of social reality in a linear time-based format?

Ever since the beginnings of ethnographic filmmaking, there have been experiments in different ways of representation, including the styles ofcinema verite, direct cinema, poetic expressionism, observational cinema, indigenous media, and interactive media. And, no matter the style, each ethnographic film incorporates the following four tendencies: to record, to persuade, to analyze, and to express (following Renov 1993). Much of the debate among ethnographic filmmakers and critics involve the prioritization of these tendencies.

My own prioritization of these tendencies shifts, of course, depending on the particular film and subject matter. While recording is always important, it is consistently the least pressing of my concerns when making ethnographic films. Instead, I find myself drawn to a subject out of intellectual (and not usually emotional) interest. In my work, I only recognize the tendency to persuade in hindsight. However, it is always evident as my films make claims about reality and history (such as An Enigma in Taiwan, 2002). Most often, I find myself driven by the tendencies to analyze and express, especially to express. For example, three of my short films shot in Los Angeles—Heels and Soul (1998) about the meaning of square dancing in my grandmother’s life, Asylum (1997) about the meaning of life for a homeless man in Santa Monica, and Alone Together (1997) about the subjective experience of a sister and brother trapped in an urban zoo—all emphasize the expression of subjective experience and make subtle analytical claims that critique the values of contemporary popular American cultural “values”, or lack thereof.

 

ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM IN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

 The ethnographic filmmakers discussed in this section all addressed anthropology's theoretical

concerns and were well ahead of their time. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson initiated efforts at using visual material to construct theoretical arguments. Jean Rouch used the presence of the filmmaker and camera to provoke the audience and address issues of colonialism. John Marshall began his career in the direct cinema tradition and eventually took an advocacy approach siding with his subjects’ pressing concerns. Robert Gardner explored the extremes of aesthetic expressionism to make philosophical claims. Timothy Asch pioneered ethnographic film as a pedagogical tool and experimented with representing dialogism. David and Judith MacDougall practised observational cinema and struggled with issues of subjectivity.

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s Visual Inscription

The visual anthropology of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson offers a case study of the use of photographs and motion pictures as evidence to support theoretical claims. As Nancy Lutkehaus (1995) notes, Mead not only consciously experimented with various forms of visual ethnography, but also pursued a public image in popular talk-shows and magazines (as a curator and scientist), prefiguring much of what is now identified as “cultural critique”. By employing an innovative rhetorical style that engages readers of divergent audiences, inspiring dialogue and criticism, Mead contributed to alternate visions of what women’s lives could be in the future, and synthesizing contradictions that lay at the heart of the American dialogue, such as art/science and man/woman. Most significantly, Margaret Mead actually went ‘on camera’ herself, and her image has become part of the American cultural consciousness.

In Balinese Character (1942), Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead present a photographic analysis. Mead provides a comprehensive introduction to Balinese culture with attention to themes of silence/festivity, private/public space, bodily closeness, trance and “awayness”, time orientation and the calendar, formal/informal language use, social status, punishment, humor, birth customs, and the metaphor of the body in Balinese culture. Bateson then recounts the technical and methodological procedure, mentioning the use of zoom lens and that they rarely asked for subjects’ consent, nor did they make a monetary payment for some of the “contexts” of the pictures and timing. The project’s goal was to visually document Balinese culture. Yet, as Andrew Lakoff (1996) points out, Mead’s narrative text and voice overpower the photos of the Balinese that seems to be displayed as merely supporting material. Mead’s project was ostensibly to describe rather than interpret, yet the result is interpretation couched in terms of description. The topical agenda was to analyze the development of the Balinese “schizoid” character in child-rearing practices. Even though the Balinese belief system did not share American and Western notions of time, Mead and Bateson located various “stages” based upon a rigid notion of time progression and presented the Balinese not as a lesson for the American parent who wished to raise a non-aggressive child (as Balinese children were found to be) but as an insight into the formation of the “schizoid personality”.

Mead’s Growth and Culture (1951) outlines a formula for deriving personality structure from still photographs. There are two main points: (a) that a culture’s psychic structure can be arrived at by the analysis of its members’ bodies, and (b) that this analysis can be performed on photographs without actually being there. One of Mead’s main theoretical influences was Arnold Gesell, a developmental psychologist who conceived of mental growth as a physical phenomenon. Gesell used a method called “cinemanalysis”, a technique for producing the narrative of a child’s behavioural development in spatial terms. Gesell’s method utilized so-called unobtrusive observation where researchers hid behind one-way mirrors with cameras, which is essentially the practice of surveillance.

Throughout her career, Margaret Mead insisted on the use of visual material in the research process. Nowhere is her stance more clearly stated than in “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words” (1995[1974]). Here Mead argues that even if a visual document is overtly culture-bound, it is still better than having none at all since film records can be re-analyzed later. Mead claims that as finer analysis tools developed in the future, the re-analysis of film material will provide further insights. Ideally, however, the filmmaker or photographer should work with the subjects of the film in such a way as to produce an agreeable product that will be useful both to the people and the community of anthropologists. The work of David Blundell (1994) has achieved this ideal in his visual anthropology of the Sinhalese, and the work of Sol Worth and John Adair is also notable in this regard.

Sol Worth and John Adair set out, in 1966, to see what would happen “if someone with a culture that makes and uses motion pictures taught a people who had never made or used motion pictures to do so for the first time”. Worth and Adair (1997) used this method to present the “truest reflections of Navajo perceptions of reality”. The Navajo were, of course, not professional filmmakers at the time. So it is difficult to sort out which aspects of the film result from inexperience with the medium of film and which come from a “Navajo appropriation” of the film medium. The apparatus of the camera itself is an artifact of Western cultural processes. When the camera is viewed as a scientific instrument, all cultural associations are easily lost, unless one grounds science in Navajo culture. One of the Navajo asked, “Will making movies do the sheep good? Then why make movies?”

According to Sol Worth (1980), Margaret Mead’s career represents a shift from “visual anthropology” to the “anthropology of visual communication”. In his article, Sol Worth takes the issue with three popular understandings of visual representation: first, that photographs are mirrors of people, objects, and events; second, that the the photographic image could be, should be, and most often is called “real”, “reality”, or “truth”; and third, that people’s lives are not affected by their participation as subjects of a film. Worth claims we should distinguish between the image as a record about culture—such as Mead’s use of photographs in her Balinese study—and the image as a record of culture, using a medium and studying how a medium is used—such as his work among the Navajo. This difference parallels the shift from visual anthropology to the anthropology of visual communication.

Jean Rouch’s Cinema Verite

A generation before the ‘experimental moment’ in anthropology, scores of filmmakers, artists and poets evoked many of the themes that define the condition of postmodernity: the the pathos of social fragmentation, the recognition of the impact of expanding global economies, the cultural construction of racism, the legacy of academic imperialism, the quandaries of self-referentiality, the rewards of implicated participation, the acknowledgement of heteroglossia, the permeability of categorical boundaries (fact/fiction//objectivity/subjectivity)

[Stoller 1994:96] 

 

Jean Rouch was certainly one of them. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jean Rouch pioneered three major innovations in the ethnographic film: filming conversations as they happen with synchronous sound, using ‘jump-cut editing from one part of a shot to a later part, and the recognition of the filmmaker as agent and producer of the reality being filmed, treating the film as an investigative process or provocation without any attempts of concealment (Loizos 1993:59-60). Rouch downplays conceptual understanding in favour of experience, making his films primarily for his subjects, secondarily for himself, and for anthropologists only after that (Loizos 1993:64). Paul Stoller (1992), one of Rouch’s students, argues that Rouch should be seen as a radical empiricist, not privileging theory over description thought over feeling, or sight over the other senses.

Jean Rouch studied ethnology under the tutelage of Marcel Griaule in France and Africa. Rouch thought of the camera as an active agent of investigation and the filmmaker as an interrogator of the world, always flouting the camera's presence. Rouch attempted to make Europeans face the limits of their scientific understanding of other cultures. The purpose of his films is not to explain but to describe or provoke, using a deeply sympathetic “insider’s view”. 

Moi, Un Noir (1957), a film presented in an ‘as if’ or ‘fantasy’ framework, exemplifies two innovative ideas: (a) the use of projective improvisation, and (b) the use of the subject’s voice directly addressing the audience (instead of impersonal commentary). The subjects speak of who they are and who they want to be. The the story is passed from the narrator to a ‘character’. Peter Loizos (1993) identifies Moi as playing at being fiction to reveal facts: “men who are actual labour migrants are playing at being labour migrants, creating characters taken from a street-life they have lived themselves” (p. 53).

La Pyramide humaine (1958-59), about race relations between French and African students, suggests that it does not matter if a film’s story is true or not, or even if it is plausible. The process of improvisation affects all the players. To get at the real feelings of the students, Rouch encouraged them to portray how things actually are. This way, he avoids an ‘actuality’ film that may end up displaying only the ‘official views’ rather than the real feelings of the actors.

Chronique d’un ete (1960), about the preoccupations of a group of Parisians in the summer of 1960, is one of Rouch’s best-known films. Edgar Morin (co-director of the film) uses the liberating power of ‘socio-drama’ to reveal realities below surface appearances, a characteristically optimistic left-wing, neo-realist agenda (Loizos 1993:57). The film includes segments of the filmmakers discussing the making of the film (meta-film), and of the participants watching parts of the film and reacting to their representations.

        While Rouch considers himself anti-theoretical; his films clearly address postcolonial theoretical dilemmas in anthropology. Paul Stoller (1994) suggests Rouch achieves this through a “cinema of cruelty” that aims to force his European audience to confront the realities of colonialism and post-colonialism. One of the themes of Rouch’s films is that European decolonization must begin with individual decolonization.

Rouch calls his films “ethno-fiction” because they fuse the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and narrative, observation and participation, and objectivity and subjectivity (Stoller 1994:93). They challenge the viewer to confront the “ugliness” of the self—the goal of a cinema of cruelty—and expose the power relations at work in everyday dreams, thoughts, and actions. 

        Jean Rouch challenged Europeans and made a series of films whose aim was to preserve the African Dogon culture and heritage. Paul Stoller, in his portrait of Jean Rouch, The Cinematic Griot (1992), notes that Rouch was considered a “griot” according to the Dogon/Songhay sense of the custodian of a tradition or one who maintains and reinforces the links between the past and the present. In 2027, the Dogon will use Rouch’s Sigui films to ensure that the ceremonies of the next Sigui cycle are staged correctly. Rouch’s work is significant because it is more than only a complement to ethnographic writing but a form of presentation in itself.

John Marshall’s Direct Cinema

“Death mocks me... Do not look at my face!” [N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman]

John Marshall became involved with the!Kung/San in the early 1950s. From his more than 250 hours of footage shot, he has made The Hunters, Bitter Melons, N/um Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen, and several short event films such as A Curing Ceremony, all in the direct cinema style. Marshall used synch sound to shoot Joking Relationship, The Meat Fight, and Argument about a Marriage in 1957 and 1958 (Loizos 1993:21-23). For his first film The Hunters (1958), Marshall dramatized the !Kung/San and turned an aspect of their lives into an epic struggle with the forces of nature (similar to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North). The footage is edited from multiple hunts into a single epic story.

        In N!ai: the story of a !Kung woman (1980) Marshall incorporates footage shot between 1953 and 1978 to depict a life account of a !Kung woman. While N!ai is the narrator of her own story, Marshall uses his voice in a contextualizing meta-narrative role. However, the last word in the film is N!ai’s poignant, “Death mocks me... Do not look at my face!” N!ai’s lively and engaging account suggests that the attention the filmmakers have paid her has led to jealousy within her group, showing Marshall’s development of a self-reflexive orientation.

        Marshall’s more recent film series A Kalahari Family has been criticized for his alleged suppressing of alternative voices. In his response to the critique, Marshall claims that his film is based on a comprehensive film record of what people did and said in real events. Marshall’s stance is that the!Kung are well enough informed to interpret events and can speak for themselves. Marshall stresses his “insider’s point-of-view” and his concern to break the myth that Nyae Nyae (!Kung/San) people cannot make their own decisions which has lead in the past to the outside control of their destiny. Marshall is less concerned with presenting multiple perspectives than he is in showing breaking this myth and advancing the perspective of the Nyae Nyae people through his own “insider’s” perspective. He has recently embraced the role of advocate for the Nyae Nyae people. For John Marshall, a concern to record and persuade is dominant, and this is done by allowing his subjects to express their own views.

Robert Gardner’s Poetic Expressionism

Debates on Robert Gardner’s films bring up the following issues: the place of “non-realist” films (and by extension, methods) in anthropology and ethnographic film-making, the intentions of the ethnographic film (universal human issues or context and particulars), and the grounds of knowledge about claims and modes of representation. Peter Loizos (1993) suggests Gardner continually distanced himself from realism and attempted to transcend it as did the “Symbolists” (of French painting). Gardner approaches his film projects from a global worldview, in the sense of a poet or philosopher. He is not concerned, as anthropologists usually are, with representing the ethnographic experience as such; rather his mission is to probe to a “more general human level”.  Loizos (1993) describes Gardner’s films as “highly crafted personal visual essays on the enigmas of life, death and the self, in varied cultural settings.” (167).  Four of Gardner’s films are, however, popular in undergraduate anthropology teaching. Dead Birds (1963), shot among the Dani of Western Irian, provides a context to essay war and the human condition. Rivers of Sand (1974), shot among the Hamar of southern Ethiopia exemplifies gender and the human condition. Deep Hearts (1979) depicts the Wodaabe Fulani of Niger dance and celebration of the gendered body.Forest of Bliss (1985) shot in Benares, India, provides a meditative reflection on life, time, death, body, and soul. In all of his films, Gardner asks the question, “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” in a non-realist and non-descriptive way. For Robert Gardner, the first intention is to express the human condition and make philosophical statements about human nature. Loizos calls Gardner a “poet, painter, provocateur, certainly not a social scientist, but a filmmaker who can set a roomful of scholars arguing heatedly” (1993: 323-324).

Are the films of Robert Gardner merely indulgences in prejudiced visions that have little to do with The people who are characters in his films, or do they represent legitimate intellectual inquiry? Parray’s (1988) comments on Forest of Bliss, informed by 18 months of fieldwork experience in Benares, make the point that “with all this expertise to hand [knowledgeable researchers of Benares], it is clear that Gardner’s decision to dispense with all explanation must have been carefully and deliberately calculated; and I can only assume that he believes that the images speak for themselves” (7). Parray claims the film is likely to convey to many Western audiences that “India is an ineffable world apart which must elude our comprehension. No explanation is possible, and all we can do is stand and stare. So let the camera roll” (7). I think Parray largely misses the point of Gardner’s film.

Chopra (1989), however, gives a favourable review to Forest of Bliss. He finds the film to address the central aesthetic of Hinduism: the interlocking of oppositions. “The film is a textual analysis of Banaras but one which does not impose a single meaning frame upon the viewer; rather, it leaves open the levels of interpretation to which the city is subject. The silence in this context is a triumph for it is true to the nature of the society which does not quarantine one interpretation from another, nor give precedence to any single level of cognition” (3). Following Chopra (1989), I take Forest of Bliss as an aesthetic representation of Hindu beliefs and symbols. On my first viewing, I was concerned with the lack of interpretation in other ethnographic films, yet to experience the images and sounds as a visual essay brings an overall feeling of the aesthetic. Gardner’s ostensible abandonment of realism points to his aligning more with the artistic than the scientific.

The debate between the artistic and scientific elements of ethnographic work (both film and writing) seems to be unnecessarily inflated. Why should Gardner’s Forest of Bliss be termed “ethnographic film”? What does labelling it as “not ethnographic” do for its power as a work? Isn’t their room for films of all kinds that powerfully speak to interesting and pressing issues of humanity? The underlying issue seems to be the “authority” of ethnographic film. The debate is not so much about ethnographic film as it is about the epistemological basis of anthropology in general. It is still unclear whether Gardner believes his films to be ethnographic. And, in a sense, it doesn’t matter. But, it is clear that Gardner does not care about constructing his own “ethnographic authority”. Gardner’s work is powerful and valuable as art, but not really as an ethnographic film. However, I would hope that just because one makes an “art” film, one is not distanced and condemned by the anthropological community if one can make or has made (having the credentials, experience, and desire) an ethnographic film. The exclusive opposition of art and science is no longer tenable in any field or discipline. There is always some of each in ethnographic work, whether visual or written. Neither can survive without the other, which coincidentally (or perhaps not) is one of the themes I gleam from Gardner’s work.

Timothy Asch’s Pedagogical Films and Dialogism

In the late 1960s, Napolean Chagnon teamed up with Timothy Asch to make a series of ethnographic films on the Yanomamo using synch sound in what John Marshall had termed “sequences”, or event films. The most famous of these films is The Ax Fight, which demonstrates the inevitable manipulation that takes place while filming and in the interpretation of the visual record, and the degree to which an ethnographic film viewer is forced to take the interpretations of the filmmaker on faith. There is no way to know what “really” happened, but merely multiple interpretations.

        Early in his career, Timothy Asch (Asch & Asch 1995) oriented his work as providing “film records” (unedited footage plus synchronized sound) (336) for anthropological research. According to Asch, a “film text”, however, is understood as being potentially “closer to observation, in a spatial and, if continuous, temporal sense, than most other forms of recording information.” (1995:336-7). It is an indexical sign of reality having multiple, or even infinite, possible interpretations. Issues of selection in filming and the relationship of film to reality as they relate to the selection of a research and filming methodology are prominent in Asch’s work. Showing the film to the film's subjects can be a useful research tool as it enables a deeper understanding of what was going on. While few anthropologists work with people who can read their ethnographic writings, films can be experienced by the subjects, and as such, are a valuable medium for communication (1995:349). 

        There is much written on Asch’s Ax Fight (Marks 1995, Ruby 1995, Moore 1995), yet the most interesting is Wilton Martinez’ analysis of Asch’s work as “contributing to rewriting, recreating, and subverting colonial stereotypes” (1995:53). Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s (1983) critique of the colonial stereotype as fetish serves as an overriding theoretical tool to analyze the Yanomami films and undergraduate student responses in terms of self/other oppositions. Martinez notes that while multivocal texts aim to decenter the authority of the author and point to the construction of interpretation, the author’s interests inevitably orchestrate the representation. While Asch’s attempts with the Yanomamo films (and Martinez’ in this article) did much to advance a critical perspective of stereotype (re)production, there is also the plausible (and de facto) effect of maintaining the very stereotypes under scrutiny. Intentions count for little other than personal satisfaction.

        Martinez’ argument, however, hinges on the superiority of the democratic. As a result, he theorizes himself into the same predicament of which he wishes to rid us all—his wishful “fantasy” of the “other”. The problem itself is constructed as a “Western” problem that must be “solved” by the “West”. Any “solution” as such, in my view, will come not from the “hegemonic power/knowledge” structure but as the outcome of genuine relations between equally but differentially situated “others” as Sampson (1993) suggests. That the “Western Self” wants the problem to be solved does nothing toward the solving of the “problem. Only when the “self” is consciously “other”, and the constructions of each are conscious to each, and there are not predetermined conclusions, would I expect to find instances of “decentering” or Martinez’ “true democracy”. A school (or university) is an institution, part of a cultural “hegemonic” structure. That students reproduce stereotypical images of “others” is not surprising. In fact, “education” in many ways is a process of producing the “(politically) correct.” stereotypical images of “others”. Martinez is on to something when he calls for self-critical attention to the construction of stereotypes because it is only through conscious awareness of such construction that purposeful change is possible. However, Martinez does not speak to the complex problem of how to ensure that the “other” is “equally” concerned with purposeful change; and, further, to the subsequent problem of demanding that his “other”, the students, instigate such awareness and change which removes any sense of democracy.

        In many ways, Timothy Asch’s collaborative Jero Tapakan project is his response to problems encountered in his work with Napoleon Chagnon (Loizos 1993). Asch responds to Martinez’s critique and strives to eliminate the potential for colonialist interpretation of his work. Asch wanted individuals to show the inner thoughts of his subjects through dialogical conversation, so he approached the next project as a collaboration. Similar in many ways to the approach of David Blundell’s (1994) practice of an “anthropology of sharing”, Asch showed and discussed his product with the subject of the film, Jero Tapakan, and recorded the participants' reaction (as Jean Rouch had also done some years earlier).

        Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism as ”a plurality of subjects’ voices interacting creatively to negotiate meaning in everyday life, or in a text” (Asch & Connor 1994:14) informed the Jero Tapakan project in Bali. According to Bakhtin (1981), dialogism (the double voicedness of the novel) is contrasted with monologism (single voicedness as in the epic or poetry). Dialogism allows the representation of heteroglossia of alterity (shorthand for simultaneous multivocal expression and interpretation of reality). The ethnographic film always produces at least two sets of voices—the subjects and the filmmakers. Usually, the filmmaker’s voice is afforded an advantageous yet distanced perspective. At other times multiple voices are allowed a more balanced “alterity”. This latter formulation is exemplified in the film Jero on Jero. Some of the dialogue is transcribed from the monograph by Asch, Connor, & Asch (1996).

        Bakhtin (1981) pointed out that “direct address” to an unspecified, generic person (“undialogized language”) tends to obscure the dialogical nature of its construction and appear as “natural” or “truth” in a direct sense. Trinh T. Minh-ha has commented that “multivocality is not necessarily a solution to the problem of centralized and hierarchical knowledge if practised accumulatively—by juxtaposing voices that continue to speak within identical boundaries... [M]ultivocality here could also lead to the bland ‘melting pot’ type of attitude, in which ‘multi’ means ‘no’—no voice—or is used only to better mark The Voice—that very place from where meaning is put together” (cited in Chen, 1992:85, quoted in Asch & Connor, 1994:25). The stylistic conventions of documentary film work to centralize authority in a single voice, the narrator or protagonist. The subtle yet influential implicit orientations of (usually, and in this case, Western) viewers towards chronological time, interesting subjects, and complexity pose a problem if the goal is a decentralized (dialogic) authority.

The act of translation is always an act of (sometimes violent) centralization.  However, there is no approach practised as yet that does not use a centralizing authorial voice, although Worth and Adair’s project with the Navajo may be one attempt. Toward the goal of achieving “the expression of heteroglossic diversity,... [a] dialogic approach, which attempts to represent conversations as the situation specific events involving persons with particular purposes at the time allows diverse voices to be heard [while also furthering] the more radical decentering of the verbal-ideological world... which is a major concern of contemporary anthropology” (Asch & Connor 1994:26). Asch understood the challenge of the the project as attempting to “enable Jero, in talking about the central concerns of her work and life, to speak for herself” (Asch, Connor, & Asch 1996:43). Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, while the project involved dialogical collaboration with Jero Tapakan, her name is left out of the book as an author and instead placed as the title. There may be a “Balinese” reason for this, but the issue is not addressed. Why not call the project “Balinese Dialogues.” instead?

David and Judith MacDougall’s Observational Cinema

If I am to analyse this film properly, I must not mistake it for reality; but if I do not mistake it for real, I cannot analyse it properly. [Bill Nichols, quoted in MacDougall 1995a:217]

How can any representation approximate the self that every self knows itself to be? [David MacDougall, 1995a:220]

 

David MacDougall (1995b[1974]) suggests that it is not only possible to film in an unobtrusive manner, but that he has done so while filming To Live With Herds (1972). He used a brace to hold the camera on his shoulder for over twelve hours each day. Soon the locals assumed that he was always filming and just concerned themselves with daily life activities (1995b[1974]:119). The goal of observational filming is to capture events that would have happened had the filmmaker not been present.

        The logic behind observational cinema is that viewers observe the people in a film without being seen. The people of the film can make no claims on the viewer, and the viewer cannot affect the lives of the people of the film. The observational filmmaker becomes, in a sense, a representative of the future audience. The film image is constructed to show completeness because it represents a continuum of reality extending beyond the edges of the frame and paradoxically seems not to be excluded. Yet, selectivity is inevitable. Although observational films strive to present a record of a culture, no film is only a record of another society. Each film is a record of a meeting between a filmmaker and that society. After acknowledging the encounter, the ethnographic films should strive to deal with it in a filmic way. The main achievement of observational cinema is that it has “taught the camera how to watch” while the main failings are found in the attitude of watching (MacDougall 1995b[1974]:125). Some filmmakers feel they are agents of universal truth; others hide behind their “sequences”. In both cases, the relationship between the observer and the observed is downplayed.

        MacDougall calls for a “participatory cinema” which bears witness to the event of the film and makes a strength out of what most films have tried to hide. By revealing the role of the filmmaker, the value of the material as evidence is made possible.

The ethnographic film has been criticized (by Nichols 1991, Renov 1995, and others) as merely extending anthropology’s appropriation of the voice of colonized peoples and of making claims of scientific authority. MacDougall points out that ethnographic film’s visual intimacy with the person merely exposes more directly a problem shared with ethnographic writing as well: “that although the raw unit of anthropological study remains the individual, the individual must be left by the wayside on the road to the general principle” (1995a:220). However, the subjective

voice is a point of access to different frames of reference within and between cultures, bridging what is otherwise paradoxical and ambiguous. And, in a strict sense of the term, the only ‘subjective voice’ in a film or text is that of the author, as interpreted by the subjectivity of the viewer (MacDougall 1995a:222). MacDougall’s concern is to show how ethnographic film has attempted to bring insight into the subjective experience of people’s lives in cultures unfamiliar to the filmmaker and viewer. He considers ethnographic film as a cultural artefact that necessarily retains “the grain of the materials from which it was made” (1995a:222). From MacDougall’s perspective, ethnographic films are taken as a broader cultural category than films made within, and for, the discipline of anthropology.

        Subjective identification with a character in a film can result from an “alliance” with the character without the necessity of uniting with the character in actual point-of-view, counter to Hollywood’s assumptions. The epistemology of nonfiction film requires that viewers undergo a double interpretation: the usual interpretation of the exteriors of social actors as in daily life, along with the interpretation of those actions as presented through the narrative apparatus of the filmmaker.

MacDougall sees three ways of communicating a subjective voice in film: testimony, implication, and exposition. Testimony is the first-person perspective, or the mode of interior monologue, confession, and interview. The implication is the mode of “allying” the viewer with the subject in Hollywood films or creating identification (as in Nanook of the North). Exposition is the third person narrative, describing the frames of mind of actors and creating empathy but not necessarily identical with the subject. So, there are actually multiple ways of communicating multiple subjectivities.

For MacDougall, striving to transcend the exotification of the person/subject coincides with the goal of representing the experience of existing as the person/subject. The contemporary move towards a dialogical understanding that comes out of the interplay of voices rather than merely their co-presentation are historically situated along the lines of such a concern with subjectivity. As MacDougall notes, “the dangers for ethnographic film lie in over-correction, of exchanging one reductionism for another” (1995a:249). By crossing the trajectories of the historical, narrative, and mythic it is possible to overcome the closure of past structures of containment. As it becomes untenable to maintain firm distinctions between self and other, East and West, and North and South, it also becomes ungrounded to uphold linear representations that separate sign from signified, an observer from the object, and analysis from experience. So, the strivings of ethnographic filmmakers and anthropologists to present subjectivity in their work rises not out of a Western perspective that celebrates the self, but a dialogical perspective that celebrates intersubjectivities and is oriented toward a more complex and relational understanding of cultural consciousness (MacDougall 1995a:250).

        In MacDougall’s (1994[1991]) discussion of his film Familiar Places, made in Australia with an anthropologist Peter Sutton about a couple, the Namponans, who apparently caught between two worlds and uncertain about their own culture, he claims that viewing the film requires recognizing that although Sutton, the anthropologist, is the voice “in the film”. He is not necessarily the voice “of the film”. He is only one of a set of players in a complex cultural drama. The film attempts to reveal certain aspects of this drama and Sutton’s role in it. There are “more than a dozen” separate voices or directions of discourse represented in the film. Sutton writes

when filming is ‘permitted’, it is a mistake to see this permission as a passive acquiescence out of mere politeness, cooperativeness or desire for money. In a great many cases, the film is being actively used. [cited in MacDougall 1994/1991:35] 

In these cases, the film is no longer “outside” the situation it describes, nor has it merely been expanded through self-reflexivity or acknowledgement of its fuller meanings. It is inside someone else’s story. Film (and written ethnography) should make complex statements by embodying the cultural encounter in the act of self-discovery, liberation in the crossing of boundaries, expression of the constant testing and reinvention of culture, and representation of the emergence of historical consciousness. This kind of film can only exist when filmmakers regard their work as more than just a transmission of prior knowledge but as a way of creating the circumstances in which new knowledge can emerge.

        MacDougall’s the approach reflects in many ways my own approach to making an ethnographic film (Anderson 2002). In An Enigma in Taiwan, I brought many different voices together in a dialogue that sometimes represented actual dialogues and sometimes was the product of my own construction of dialogues that I had identified more as “discourses” at the fieldwork time. The many subjectivities expressed in the film, from anthropologist to cultural activist, to farmer, to music composer, to record company producer, all coalesced into dialogues that represent the issues I saw as salient. My role as cinematographer and editor represent only one of the many subject positions embodied in the film itself. Although the relative weight of my own subjectivity is admittedly stronger than some ‘other’ subjectivities, still it does not dominate or usurp the others. And, as MacDougall notes, the film's story is not the filmmaker’s own, yet belongs to the subjects who actually lived the story.

OTHER DOMAINS OF VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Television

Over the past thirty years, some ethnographic and anthropological films have been made specifically for television broadcast, some for educational telecourses such as the Faces of Culture series, and others in terms of “edutainment” aired on cable television stations, such as the Discovery Channel (for instance, Millenium, Disappearing World Series, etc.). Yet, the main purpose of television is entertainment (Singer 1995), so ethnographic films produced for television face an additional challenge, and tend to show a more explicit concern with a general audience reception.

In the context of pedagogy, Wilton Martinez (1992) notes that "[w]hile seeing conventional ethnographic film as the 'raw' or 'amateur' version of non-fiction texts, most students prefer the professionalism of made-for-TV documentaries addressed to a more 'general viewer' and encompassing a broader contextualization and general overview of cultures" (143). Martinez further notes that students (as spectators) often embody the popular mythologies and stereotypes of the 'primitive.' perpetuated and disseminated through an increasingly sophisticated 'culture industry'. Without a frame of reference for identifying 'others' as anything else but ultimately different and probably 'backwards' or 'inferior', the stereotypes are perpetuated. Because of this, a necessary pedagogical task is to critically analyze "the politics of representation by which our preconceptions are naturalised and reproduced through different forms of intertextuality" (146). The popular notion of the ‘primitive retains much of its colonialist and racist signification, as “subaltern ‘other’ to the West.” (146). The current style of integrating represented cultures for a general the audience includes documentaries that employ the narrative of unanalyzed ‘reality’ along with a form of domesticated exoticism to inform and entertain large television audiences (such as Odyssey, Millenium, and Disappearing World). In these series, the filmmaker has been incorporated more consciously into the films, not in the style of Jean Rouch’s provocation and ‘reflexivity’, but sometimes as an over-powering voice narrator (Dissapearing Worlds, Faces of Culture) or even on-screen narrator (Millenium).

Considering theoretical problems of ethnographic films made for television, Faye Ginsburg (1995a) points out several important aspects:  (1) the role of the ethnographer/producer in the film is more overt and problematic, (2) the need to sustain the interest of a broad audience demands some sort of ‘transport mechanism,’ (3) ethnographic film made for television is potentially available to its subjects from production through distribution, (4) the possibility for audience response can be a check on accountability, and (5) the production and distribution of film and television provide a means to dramatize and win empathy and political support for oppressed or neglected groups with whom we work.

        Barbara Myerhoff’s visual ethnography, Number Our Days (1978), about Yiddish-speaking Jews who were members of the Israel Levin Senior Citizen Center in Venice, California, although made for KCET public television, integrates reflexive, narrative, dialogic, processual, and interpretative approaches. Myerhoff’s pioneering work also gained the attention of the popular press. Her film won an Academy Award in 1977, and her book charted on the NY Times Top Ten Non-Fiction list in 1978 (Frank 1995: 208). The central theme of Myerhoff’s popular and professional contribution was the importance of symbols, stories, and rituals in establishing and maintaining Jewish community and transform disorder into meaningful identity.

Indigenous Media

        And tomorrow? … The dreams of Vertov and Flaherty will be combined into a         mechanical ‘cene-eye-ear’ which is such a ‘participant’ camera that it will pass         automatically into the hands of those who were, up to now, always in front of it. Then the anthropologist will no longer monopolize the observation of things.      [Jean Rouch, quoted in Ginsburg, 1995b:256]

 

The traditional subjects of ethnographic films have already taken on the roles of producers and directors in films about themselves and their ‘others.’ While Sol Worth and John Adair’s project Through Navajo Eyes (1966) could be seen as an early experiment in indigenous media, the idea was Worth’s and Adair’s and was not well-received by the potential indigenous filmmakers. In the 1980s, however, indigenous peoples began to produce their own images, spurned on in part by a desire to be in control of imagery made about them and coinciding with the availability of relatively inexpensive media technologies (video). In In this section, the focus is on non-western and indigenous ethnographic filmmakers who took up the camera themselves and, with their own initiative, made ethnographic films.

        Two dominant tropes have been useful as models for understanding indigenous media: the Faustian model, which regards traditional culture as something good and authentic, capable of being polluted by contact with exposure to technology; and the Global Village model, which suggests that new media can bring together different cultures from all over the world and recreate a local sense of community associated with village life through new technologies. An alternative model elaborated by Faye Ginsburg (1995b) is based on the metaphor of hybridity and self-conscious rejection of notions of authenticity and cultural purity, and conceives of identity as a production which is never complete, always negotiated, and always in the process (260).

In my experience among the Amis of Taiwan, indigenous media is based on projects of cultural heritage documentation and artistic expression rather than transformations in indigenous consciousness rooted in social movements for Aboriginal empowerment, cultural autonomy, and claims to land as Ginsburg (1995b) finds in Australia.

Rachel Moore (1994), in discussing the Kayapo Video Project notes that indigenous video enjoys “rock solid authenticity” (128) in anthropology. Moore provocatively argues that calls for “the native’s point of view” assume a positivist position that privileges indigenous subjectivities by objectifying them in order to free the outsider/anthropologist from the problem of representation (129).  Moore argues that since the Kayapo video project resulted from a long period of contact with media and anthropologists, it does not represent only handing over the camera, but rather is a result of the long-term interdependence between anthropological and indigenous interests (129).

        Culture is always in the process of negotiation and change. The particular Kayapo orientation toward conflict resolution was traditionally done through the “exit option”, which establishes a new community in times of internal conflict. Coinciding in time with the arrival of anthropologists (and video cameras) was the alternative “voice option”, which allows for expressing differences vocally as a rhetorical solution to the conflict. The Kayapo video project resulted from the Kayapo appropriation of this second option. Significantly, the “voice option” also fit into the larger social-political context of Brazilian cultural practices. So, the video camera became a tool of political power in the internal and external struggles of Kayapo cultural self-fashioning.

        Moore is ultimately critical of the indigenous video, seeing it as an easy escape from addressing theoretical concerns of ethnographic film: “[t]urning the camera over, just at the point when our own methods and theories appear to be exhausted, not only defer their critique (and thus assures their recycling), but far more importantly, it preempts the creativity, already up against enormous odds, required to change them” (1994:136).

        While I can understand if all ethnographic filmmakers decided to release ethnographic responsibility and take refuge in indigenous media as somehow ‘solving.’ theoretical dilemmas that would mean the dissolution of ethnographic film,; still I think Moore could be missing the point of indigenous media. Curiously, she understands indigenous media production as somehow replacing ethnographic film production. In my view, it is merely one kind of ethnographic film production. I find myself in agreement with Faye Ginsburg (1995c), who considers indigenous media in terms of the “parallax effect”—that is, a situation when a change in the position of the observer creates the illusion that an object has been displaced or moved (65). In other words, indigenous media is best understood as a change in the observer's position (from the anthropologist to the indigenous filmmaker) while still looking at the same object—the cultural process. Moreover, indigenous media and the ethnographic film should be considered within the same analytical framework. After all, ethnographic filmmakers are also members of particular societies and subject to currents of cultural dialogues.

        Applying a socio-historical interpretation of the Kayapo appropriation of video makes much more sense. Monica Frota (1996) comments on the Kayapo use of video:

That the Kayapo used video as an instrument of resistance is an interpretation based not on ahistorical idealism but rather on my observations of their experience of struggle and their understanding of the media’s power… The Kayapo’s use of videotape technology cannot be detached from their interaction with Brazilian society and must be framed as a political project of self-representation and empowerment. [1996:277]

The times call for indigenous people to make history by controlling the media representation of themselves.  Instead of having an ‘other’ paternalistically construct and manipulate their images, the Kayapo can now directly and effectively represent themselves to modern society as agents who speak and act for themselves. Other interesting projects by Frances Peters, an Aboriginal Australian who produced and directed Oceans Apart (1990) and Tent Embassy (1992) explicitly aim to destroy stereotypes of Aboriginal culture (Urla 1993). The necessity of an “us” and a “them” in this dialogue of real difference enables a transformative politics of representation.

New Challenges to Ethnographic Film

Although the three filmmakers discussed in this section—Dennis O’Rourke, Coco Fusco, and Trinh T. Minh-ha—do not consider themselves to be ‘ethnographic filmmakers’; their work nonetheless informs theoretical debates on indigenousness, modernization, tourism, Western hegemony, globalization, reflexivity, dialogical epistemology, and the politics of representation.

Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours (1987) represents two journeys: “The first is that depicted—rich and bourgeois tourists on a luxury cruise up the mysterious Sepik River… the packaged version of a ‘heart of darkness.’ The second journey is a metaphysical one. It is an attempt to discover the place of ‘the Other’ in the popular imagination” (O’Rourke, quoted in MacCannell 1990:100). O’Rourke’s point of view is that of the “old paternal analyst, steady, listening, silent, pretending to be non-judgemental” (MacCannell 1990:110). Methodologically, the camera’s gaze remains fixed on the subject after he or she has run out of things to say. In this context, the tourists begin to go into ‘free-association speech, while the ‘ex-primitives’ end their comments with “that is the end of my story,” or “that’s all I have to say”. O’Rourke visually shows the tourists are not capable of a conscious detachment from their values. Even as they ‘cannibalize’ the ‘ex-primitives’ with their ‘superior’ values, they are unable to notice their own expressed violence through their actions and words (e.g., “we must make them want to wear our clothes”, “I for one think it is too bad if they deviate from their traditions and work for tourism as such”, “We must enter their villages as the missionaries did, we must make them desire our values, our convictions, to teach them something, to do things for themselves, to teach them to desire our point of view”, etc.).

        Even though the theme and methods of his work can be called ‘ethnographic’, O’Rourke consciously avoids the label of ‘ethnographic filmmaker or his films as ‘ethnographic’ because he sees the concepts ‘ethnographic’ and ‘self-reflexive as troublesome. His experimentation with filmmaking, including his strong physical presence and ‘conversational’ epistemology, contributes to problems currently prevalent among ethnographic filmmakers. In an interview with Nancy Lutkehaus (1994), O’Rourke says of Cannibal Tours, “I don’t make any evaluation of whether tourism is bad or if it is good. Tourism exists. Why does it exist? The film is a meditation on the process, on the ‘shifting terminus.’” (428). He points out that tourists have a sense of the anomie of modernism. In the film, this is communicated in a scene of the tourists, dressed up as ‘savages,’ dancing in slow motion to the music of Mozart. In discussing the Western idea of ‘the primitive,’ O’Rourke comments that imagining the primitive allows people to momentarily transcend identification with the ‘modern,’ which entails the loss of tradition.

        On his filmic presence, O’Rourke comments, “I am a protagonist in all of my films—a powerful presence, I would hope, but I’m a strong presence like a good painter is a strong presence in his or her work” (in Lutkehaus 1994:429). As far as ‘self-reflexivity, O’Rourke says, “the power relations of a situation can be completely represented in showing a person’s gaze” (431).  Rather than ‘reflexivity’ O’Rourke suggests he practices ‘complicity’; he feels forced to admit his control over the images. He distances himself from the term ‘ethnographic’ since it means  an effort to unobtrusively observe and record reality, which he considers an impossible undertaking. In this definition, the only truly ‘ethnographic’ film is that taken by a security camera mounted on an ‘unobtrusive’ wall or ceiling. O’Rourke calls his films “factual feature films” or “visual essays” rather than documentaries or ethnographic films. As far as his outlook, he is a self-described “existential anarchist” (435). And, as far as his identity, he doesn’t belong to any country, only to time and space.

In 1993 performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena staged a world tour of their performance art called “The Last Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit...” (Fusco 1992, Fusco 1995), and recorded the interactions between performers and audience on video. The final product became The Couple in the Cage (1995). Dressed in mock Indian garb and painted in bright colours, Fusco and Gomez-Pena could be seen sitting in a cage, intermittently dancing to rap music blasting from a boom box, playing video games, and sewing voodoo dolls. The various impromptu audiences in urban museums around the world, to the artists’ surprise, largely believed the mockery of being actual fact, and entirely missed the point of the critique, recalling Edward Said’s critical distinction of the “fact” of Orientalism vs the innocent “representation” of “the oriental,” where the latter becomes an impossibility. The majority of audience questions and comments tended away from the colonization, appropriation, and ultimate destruction of indigenous culture, toward practical nit-picking of how the two “natives” were able to learn to use a computer, play video games, or had access to various Western products without Western cultural knowledge. While the artists hoped to activate the discussion on the appropriation and colonization of indigenousness, audiences’ responses addressed the subject only in a peripheral manner. For example, one woman was shocked and ashamed to see humans in a cage but conceded that it was probably the safest place for these “primitive people.” who would not be able to function in the wider society without the assistance of some kind? Of all the people interviewed in the film, only a Spanish man, an American woman and a Native American man saw the critique. Shaking his head in disbelief, a 60-year-old Native American man commented:

It startled me when I first came up to the exhibit… How distorted we have become! Through the Economics and through some of the philosophies of life, I could see my own grandchildren in that cage. It portrays and it really brings home to me exactly how our people were treated. And [weeping] I don’t know that we’re any better off today. [Fusco 1992]

The artists Fusco and Gomez-Pena, do not claim authority based on realist conventions but on ‘representational authenticity’. They are representing the fact of colonization in a fictional form. Yet, the impact of their work is just as strong, if not stronger, than can be made through appeals to realist conventions.

        A the central intention of the postmodern concern with dialogism, multivocality, heteroglossia and reflexivity is to avoid subscribing to, sustaining, and creating hierarchical relations while keeping hold of the power to frame questions, to interpret, to analyze, and to represent. How can hierarchies be deconstructed without being reaffirmed in a new guise?

        By drawing on the tradition of phenomenology, ethnomethodology, or symbolic interactionism, which considers the appearance of things in specific contexts, anthropology and ethnographic film maybe able a bridge between the two models in tension: scientific (positivist) and interpretive.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam directly challenges the conventional positivist claims of ethnographic film. In the film, Trinh uses a strategy of truncating personal narratives (which she also constructed) at moments of heightened drama, forcing the viewer to realize that the ‘factual narrative information, no matter how emotionally laden, it is also mediated by historical and representational forces. Trinh’s film raises unresolved issues itself in its reference to interviews as “outmoded” documentary conventions, while also using reconstructed interview segments to advance an argument against patriarchal values. In an interview with Nancy Chen, Trinh reflects on reflexivity and multivocality in general:

How is reflexivity understood and materialized? If it is reduced to a form of mere breast-beating or of self-criticism for further improvement, it certainly does not lead us very far… and … if the tools are dealt with only to further the production of anthropological knowledge, or to find a better solution for anthropology as a discipline, then what is achieved is either a refinement in the the pseudo-science of appropriating Otherness or a mere stir within the same frame. But if the project is carried out precisely at that limit where anthropology could be abolished in what it tries to institutionalize, then nobody here is on safe ground. Multivocality, for example, is not necessarily a solution to the problems of centralized and hierarchical knowledge when it is practised accumulatively—by juxtaposing voices that continue to speak within identified boundaries… multivocality here could also lead to the bland ‘melting-pot’ type of attitude, in which ‘multi’ means ‘no’—no voice—or is used only to better mask the Voice—that very place from where meaning is put together. On the other hand, multivocality can open up to a non-identifiable ground where boundaries are always undone, at the same time as they are accordingly assumed. [Trinh T. Minh-ha, quoted in Chen & Trinh 1994:440]

The films of these three artists challenge and respond to conventional modes of ethnographic representation by invoking them. They further highlight current tensions in anthropology and ethnographic film between scientific models of evaluation and literary models of interpretation. Most significantly, they offer experiments, though not fully successful ones, to destabilize master narratives that neither fall victim to other master narratives nor reinscribe them. 

Hypermedia and Hypertext

        Hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia are all concepts that denote the integration of different kinds of media in a single presentation format. That the opportunity now exists for an integrated hypertext presentation of visual, audio, and written modes of representation promise to have a significant effect on the way ethnography is presented in the future and the way critical literary studies maybe linked to a visual subject of discussion. Both in pursuit of research and pedagogy, hypertext promises to transform ethnography, anthropology, and the ethnographic film by making available an integrated means of presenting ethnographic information.

        Hypertext is a metaphor for presenting information in which text, still images, moving images and sounds become linked together in a complex, non-sequential web of associations that permit the user to navigate through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. Links are established both by the author of a hypertext document (called “hard” links) and by the user (called “soft.” links) depending on the intent of the author of the hypertext document. The term “hypertext” was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 to describe documents, as presented by a computer that express the nonlinear structure of ideas, as opposed to the linear format of film and recorded speech.

        Hypermedia is the integration of graphics, sound, and video into an associative system of information storage and retrieval. Hypermedia is structured around the idea of offering working and learning environments that parallel human thinking, an environment that allows the user to make associations between topics. Hypermedia topics are linked to allow the user to jump from subject to linked subject when searching for information.

        Nielsen sums up the history of hypertext as “conceived in 1945, born in the 1960s, slowly nurtured in the 1970s, and finally entering the real world in the 1980s with an especially rapid growth after 1985, culminating in a fully established the field in 1989” (1995:66). Today hypertext forms of presentation are demonstrated on videodisc, CD-ROM, and on the WWW.

        Internet publication promise more than low cost and rapid dissemination; entirely new literary forms are being introduced. Through the WWW’s hypertext capacity, texts can be complemented by additional multimedia material accessible through embedded links. Case studies, databases, tables, graphs, moving pictures, still, photographs, audio segments, and written documents can all be included for supplementary reference. Links to other works published on the WWW can be set up so that readers can directly view them from the original document. Readers can add comments and information to the original document, and ongoing discussion can be developed and maintained. The multimedia capabilities of the WWW allow for and encourage the inclusion of visual and audio documents along with the text.

        Advantages apparent in WWW-based publications are also being extended to instructional uses, both in off-site education and on-campus courses (Schwimmer 1996:562). The Internet and WWW are growing rapidly. In 1990, the Internet had 300,000 host computers with 3 million users. By 1995, it had 4 million host computers with 30 million users (Nielsen 1995:x). Information on the WWW is stored in host computers connected by telephone lines. Individual personal computers access the host computers through an Internet server modem connection. Thus, the Internet is the most expansive “hypertext” of all. Most importantly, the common coding of WWW documents allows for both “hard” and “soft” links to be explored by users.

By merging different media into a single presentation format, this convergence has the potential of enriching traditional publications like the monograph, enhancing the status of other publications, like film and sound recordings, as well as leading to the establishment of entirely new forms of ethnographic presentation. [Seaman & Williams 1993:144]

[However,] the introduction of hypermedia to the tools of critical anthropology leaves unchanged its basic theoretical questions and ethical dilemmas. [Biella 1993a:163]

As these two quotes demonstrate, there is a sense in which hypertext is believed to provide “new” frontiers for anthropology, and also a sense in which the same theoretical and ethical dilemmas will follow us into the media of hypertext.

        In order to come to terms with what the introduction of hypertext media means for ethnography, following Shweder (1996), I specify four contemporary conceptions of the practice of cultural anthropology: (1) a market for identity politics and a platform for moral and political activism in the struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, and colonialism; (2) an open forum for sceptical postmodern critiques of objective knowledge and ethnographic representation; (3) a “value-neutral and non-moralizing” science designed to develop general explanatory theories and test specific hypotheses about subjectively observable regularities in social and mental life; and (4) a rigorous scholarly pluralism dedicated to the ethnographic study of multiple cultural realities and alternative ways of life, intended to test the limits of pluralism—the idea that things can be different but equal—and to take the a reader from one “place” to a different “place,” each supportable by reason.

        Since hypertext ethnography can juxtapose different media within the same format, a a wider range of evidence can be presented: segments of films, audio recordings, other written texts or photographs can be linked and integrated in unconventional ways. Hypertext allows for the analysis of visual media at both a comparative macro-level and also provides opportunities to scrutinize at a micro-level. Ethnographic films can be linked to written theoretical discussions.

        Comparative perspectives designed to develop general theories can incorporate audio and video rather than only written text. Similarly, anthropological pluralism intended to advance the idea that explanations and theoretical formulations can be different but equal can advance itself in sequential, but nonlinear, presentation of different explanations for the same event or behaviour.

        Peter Biella writes, “Fundamental questions of the relationship between observation and construct will take on unprecedented significance” (1993a:162). Supporting or refuting documentation for theoretical musings will be merely a “click” away. Conversely, theoretical discussions of audio recordings or images can be linked to the images as well.

Interactive media provides an intimate communication between empirical records and theoretical explanations. Its most useful lessons for anthropology may occur when alternative and even contradictory explanations are applied to the same document. [Biella 1996: 596]

        Hypertext formats lend written documentation to ethnographic films in the form of monographs, theoretical discussions, and the ability to stop the images and instantly review them. Much of the reason for the marginalization of ethnographic film stemmed from its “non-textual” basis (Mead 1995[1974]). In hypertext formats, this will not be a concern. Hypertext “has the patience of print: it attends the user, forgives fatigue, is fresh when needed again” (Biella 1993a:162). Peter Biella writes of the importance of hypertext for the ethnographic film:

The development of multimedia computer technology and software in the last decade will presently bring an end to the marginalization of ethnographic film in the discipline of anthropology. … The full apparatus of textual scholarship can now be brought to bear. … A multitude of texts may have reason to access a single piece of film. A single image may require the creation of many buttons to call up different texts. Users interactively click on and follow these electronic links, either at the lead of the ethnographic media designer or on the basis of their own search techniques, and research goals. [Biella 1993a: 160]

        However, aloser look at how links are constructed through coding of information, emonstrates the limits of hypertext media. It is in the coding of information that the limits of links are articulated. The construction of hard links (that is, set up and connected directly between two “nodes”) clearly invokes the constructor’s goals. Even soft links (those that are accessed by “searching” data) are made possible by the author’s coding of information, requiring the application of the author’s, or the coder’s, way of understanding the relevance of information in the first instance.

Film frames, shots and sequences are all identified numerically and may be coded for content so that they are easily searched and linked to text in multiple ways. [Biella 1993a: 162]

[However,] in the moment of linkage [between form and ideology], the form would seize and direct ideological substance, transform it into power over the subject-audience; it would turn our ideology, in both senses [as culture and as lived experience] over to a disciplinary intention… The aesthetic moment of linkage then is the the manipulative moment at which the subject-audience is submitted to the productive force of ideology. [Frank Lentricchia, quoted in Nichols 1991: 262]

        Hyperlinks do not rescue us from the dilemmas of power and ideology in ethnographic representation. The way that information is coded determines the possibility for future recall. So-called “soft” links are also underwritten by coding systems; the only way to access a “soft” link is through the application of the written model originally employed in the coding of the hypertext. It is in the coding and indexing of information that ideological power comes into play.

        Seaman and Williams (1993) emphasize that the central task in creating links between text and audiovisual data is “the ability to index visual data in order to rapidly and more or less automatically access the referenced visuals according to principles of association that the user can make transparent and explicit” (1993:145). Yet, these “principles of association” are to be theorized and investigated. Furthermore, it is doubtful that acceptable and enduring principles can be satisfactorily theorized. Since the coding of audiovisual data in hypertext necessitates a written representation of the audiovisual, even if it is reduced to a series of numbers, the construction of a link, “hard” or “soft” is always underwritten by text, which is in turn underwritten by politically charged motivations, however slight or admirable.

        When coding data in writing, the theoretical orientation of the individual doing the code work to limit the possible retrieval of the coded item in the future. Coding of digitized images, sounds, and written text will be retrievable only if the potential link is recognizable from the hypertext location of the user in a manner the user can activate. And, of course, there is no way to code images visually. Writing must be employed. The measurement of adequate indexing remains a central concern in hypertext, just as in print-based written texts and ethnographic films.

        Marcus Banks, in a hypertext document posted on the WWW (see references for URL address) notes that the social context of hypertext prevents navigation beyond the already existing paths and diversions, and the slicker the hypertext, the more it bolsters its claims to completeness and wholeness. In extreme cases, it can call on the rhetoric of freedom and choice to disguise its control and command of authority.

        This issue of coding information does not detract from the potential gains to be made with hypertext. It only points out that hypertext is not a panacea in itself. A more immediate juxtaposition of audiovisual and written materials, the “field notes” of anthropology, even when the possible juxtapositions are limited and necessarily constructed by the ideological vantage point of the author, does provide for new ways of presenting and consuming information compared to written or filmic works alone. “Whatever the indexing systems employed by a scholar, the effectiveness of the index and the speed of automatic access to a given visual will determine the quality of the control and the utility of the system” (Seaman & Williams 1993:145). Seaman and Williams (1993) also point out that written coding of information, if done in the field while the audiovisual data is gathered, can be more rich and multifaceted than if done back home by the author or by another anthropologist not familiar with the context in which the data was recorded. Also, the potential for multiple coding in hypertext format is one way to disseminate power from the hands of a few. Allowing for additional coding to be placed alongside old ones is part of the allure of hypertext format. The “text” is potentially always under construction.

        These technological innovations have made possible the integrated presentation of various kinds of media. Hypertext documents allow all of the traditional readings and writings of texts while making possible integration of visual and audio material as well. Non-linear readings of texts were always possible and practised by anthropologists. We use indexes and look to footnotes and citations with personal research-oriented goals in mind, or in reading one text become reminded of another one. With the advent of hypertext technology, our non-linear readings will more easily include non-textual (visual and audio) media along with the traditional written text.

        Opportunities for teaching and research are also expanded with hypertext. As teachers, we will assign integrated “readings” of text, motion pictures, still images, and audio recordings to our students. As researchers, we will have increased access to these media in an integrated format.

        Several professional journals now maintain WWW pages, some with published articles available online, others with tables of contents for current or past issues. It is now possible for journals to post articles and abstracts in hypertext format on the WWW, enabling researchers to have instant access to information from their home or office computers. Also, journals can be released on CD-ROM. (The whole contents of National Geographic magazine from 1909 to the present is currently available on CD-ROM for around $150US.)

        As we have learned in using ethnographic films, an occularcentric notion that privileges visual representation is misleading and potentially dangerous. Moreover, the representation of reality, or seeing people in moving pictures does not necessarily involve the inclusion of the observer into the social reality of the represented moment—the dialogical situation that is the epistemological basis of ethnographic writing. What hypertext offers ethnographers are the potential for including a wider variety of sensory experience in the representation of the fieldwork situation – issues of representation applies no less and should receive heightened critical attention.

        Marcus Banks has noted that multimedia packages will fall victim to the same problem that has plagued ethnographic film if they are narrowly focused on the medium itself as somehow liberatory in its nature. Many of Barthes’ (Sontag 1982), Nelson’s (1987), and Landow’s (1992) points which praise hypertext as a panacea for dilemmas of power and subjectivity overstate the effects hypertext as media can have in the presentation of information. While hypertext will not work by its very nature resolve these issues, the medium does create a space that, if approached creatively with attention to theoretical concerns of representation, subjectivity and reflexivity has the potential to be used and constructed in innovative ways which are, indeed, unprecedented in written or visual ethnographic representations.

        Hypertext as a method of representation raises as many questions as it resolves. As anthropologists, we are concerned with power, subjectivity, representation, and methods of undermining and decentering hegemonic structures and stereotypes. These questions and goals are as aptly pursued in hypertext media as in print-based writing or ethnographic film. That we now have a format available to integrate the traditional media (writing) and other forms is a powerful tool for the full variety of ethnographic intentions. Rather than approaching this “new” format with fear or shunning, as was the case with ethnographic film, or as somehow essentially liberating, we have the opportunity to use this media to further our goals as scholars. One can only hope that anthropologists will realize and utilize the creative potential of the hypertext format.

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