Social Aesthetics and Embodied Cinema

During anthropological fieldwork at the Doon School in northern India, my research interests shifted from studying diversity within the school to what I termed its social aesthetics—that is, the distinctive configuration of sensory, social, and material elements that produce a particular experiential environment. Social aesthetics, I came to think, might have as profound an influence on community life as such forces as ideology, economics, and politics. The challenge of how to film this at the school led to several strategies, including focusing on specific themes and physical objects and on the experiences of new students. In exploring the latter, I took advantage of film's capacity to evoke in the viewer a range of sensations beyond sight and sound. This raises the question of whether film can also evoke a film subject's sense of his or her own body—what Charles Sherrington called proprioception. My own experiences of film-viewing, supported by recent discoveries in neuroscience, suggest that it can, both through the film viewer's vicarious identification with those filmed and through the camera's close-range vision within what Aloïs Riegl called "tactile space"

Offshore Seismic and Fisheries and Environmental Issues - How Can They be Reconciled?: A Case Study on the Public Review on the Effects of Potential Oil and Gas Exploration Offshore Cape Breton

The author describes the review process preceding the 2003 CNSOPB decision which permitted seismic activities offshore of Cape Breton. The process included a public review conducted by Commissioner Dr. Teresa MacNeil and the subsequent establishment of an Ad Hoc Working Group (part of the CNSOPB\u27s existing Fisheries and Environment Advisory Committee (FEAC)) and a Science Working Group reporting to the Ad Hoc Working Group. In the author\u27s view, the Ad Hoc Working Group arrived at the anticipated result; that is, continued disagreement among the opposing parties on the fundamental issues. Consequently CNSOPB was left with the decision on how to proceed. The author briefly examines the CNSOPB\u27s decision. He concludes that the opposing parties did not move closer together during the review process despite the fact that it was by far the widest ranging review in Canada up to that date. The process did, however highlight the sensitivity of conducting oil and gas exploration in the near-shore environment, the importance of having input into the decision-making process and the need for governments and regulators to provide clear guidelines to all participants in the regulatory review process

Social Aesthetics and Embodied Cinema

During anthropological fieldwork at the Doon School in northern India, my research interests shifted from studying diversity within the school to what I termed its social aesthetics—that is, the distinctive configuration of sensory, social, and material elements that produce a particular experiential environment. Social aesthetics, I came to think, might have as profound an influence on community life as such forces as ideology, economics, and politics. The challenge of how to film this at the school led to several strategies, including focusing on specific themes and physical objects and on the experiences of new students. In exploring the latter, I took advantage of film's capacity to evoke in the viewer a range of sensations beyond sight and sound. This raises the question of whether film can also evoke a film subject's sense of his or her own body—what Charles Sherrington called proprioception. My own experiences of film-viewing, supported by recent discoveries in neuroscience, suggest that it can, both through the film viewer's vicarious identification with those filmed and through the camera's close-range vision within what Aloïs Riegl called "tactile space"

The Age of Reason - The Doon School Quintet (Part 5)

THE AGE OF REASON was made in parallel with THE NEW BOYS and intersects with it at several points. However, instead of looking at the group, it explores the thoughts and feelings of Abhishek, a 12-year-old from Nepal, during his first days and weeks as a Doon student. This is at once the story of the encounter between a filmmaker and his subject and a glimpse of the mind of a child at 'the age of reason'. "It was a remarkable decision to end the Doon School series with this portrait of one child, after having moved progressively closer to it in the earlier, more collective and group-oriented films. The Age of Reason demonstrates once again how respectful MacDougall is of his young subjects in all of these films. This peculiar tact is rare in representations of children's lives and can teach other filmmakers much about ethical concerns and awareness. Here Abhishek, the 12-year-old from Nepal, seems in fact to invite MacDougall to share the actual moments of his emerging self-awareness, as a child becoming a responsible adult. We follow the formation of his patterns of sociability, his emerging agency as a growing adolescent encountering new rituals and social constraints, his personal discoveries, and the processes by which he learns. Never seen simply as an "assimilated" subject, Abhishek shares with the filmmaker, and with an attentive audience, the building up of a particular way of 'reasoning' in the world - as it occurs, and in context." - Rossella Ragazzi, director of the film La Mémoire Dure. "I loved it... elegantly shot, understated, nudging the boundaries between observation and authorial engagement." - Michael Renov, Professor of Critical Studies, University of Southern California; editor of Theorizing Documentary and author of The Subject of Documentary. "Without doubt the Doon Project will provide plentiful material for discussion of such matters as the place of such a school in a democratic society; the acculturation of children; identity in its old sense versus 'identity' in its new sense of national or cultural conformism; how an elite perpetuates its values; or, at a more experiential level, how we may each position ourselves in relation to the machineries of social constraint. Nevertheless, simply to call these anthropological films would, while true, be a little like calling [Chinua Achebe's] Things Fall Apart an anthropological novel. They are major contributions to our screen culture, and deserve to be seen well beyond the confines of the discipline." - Dai Vaughan, Visual Anthropology. ALSO AVAILABLE FROM RONIN FILMS IN THE DOON SCHOOL QUINTET PART 1 - DOON SCHOOL CHRONICLES PART 2 - WITH MORNING HEARTS PART 3 - KARAM IN JAIPUR PART 4 - THE NEW BOY

Evaluation of Community Renewal's Area Focus Projects in Edinburgh

No abstract available

Seasonal change in the avian hippocampus.

The hippocampus plays an important role in cognitive processes, including memory and spatial orientation, in birds. The hippocampus undergoes seasonal change in food-storing birds and brood parasites, there are changes in the hippocampus during breeding, and further changes occur in some species in association with migration. In food-storing birds, seasonal change in the hippocampus occurs in fall and winter when the cognitively demanding behaviour of caching and retrieving food occurs. The timing of annual change in the hippocampus of food-storing birds is quite variable, however, and appears not to be under photoperiod control. A variety of factors, including cognitive performance, exercise, and stress may all influence seasonal change in the avian hippocampus. The causal processes underlying seasonal change in the avian hippocampus have not been extensively examined and the more fully described hormonal influences on the mammalian hippocampus may provide hypotheses for investigating the control of hippocampal seasonality in birds

L’anthropologie visuelle et les chemins du savoir

Aujourd’hui, il faudrait réagir à l’expression « Ce n’est pas de l’anthropologie » comme on le ferait à un présage de mort intellectuelle.Dell Hymes Culture visible et discours visuel Il existe aujourd’hui un intérêt croissant pour l’anthropologie visuelle, même si personne ne sait très bien ce que c’est. Son nom même est un acte de foi, comme un costume qui a été acheté un petit peu trop grand dans l’espoir de grandir avec. En fait, ce terme recouvre un certain nombre d’intérêts fort différe..

Evaluation of Community Renewal's Area Focus Projects in Edinburgh

No abstract available