Ibáñez Martín, R.

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UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)Roundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology?Ibáñez Martín, R.Publication date2015Document VersionFinal published versionLink to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Ibáñez Martín, R. (Author). (2015). Roundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology?.Web publication or website, Cultural Anthropology. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropologyGeneral rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s)and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an opencontent license (like Creative Commons).Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, pleaselet the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the materialinaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letterto: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Youwill be contacted as soon as possible.Download date:08 Mar 2023Roundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]Log In|Contact Us|Join SCACineblend: 25 Years of Beeld voorBeeld. Who Needs Visual Anthropology?De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam, February 15, 2015Lotte Haase, "Amsterdam Cineblend"On Sunday, February 15, a seminar on visual anthropology tookplace in the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam. The occasion: honoringtwenty-fve years of Beeld voor Beeld, the internationalethnographic flm festival based in the Netherlands. The seminar,titled ‘Who Needs Visual Anthropology?’,was the colophon of theweek of Beeld voor Beeld screenings at the EYE flm museum. Iwas deeply struck by the title, since its emphasis on theneed forvisual anthropology suggested that it has been marginal in thepractice of anthropology as a discipline. To discuss this need, aPUBLISHED ONCITE ASCONVERSATIONCREATED BYSHAREJune 16, 2015Ibáñez Martín, Rebeca."Roundtable Report: WhoNeeds Visual Anthropology? ."Visual and New Media Review,Cultural Anthropology website,June 16, 2015.https://culanth.org/feldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropologyVisual and New Media ReviewJenna Grant  CommentsPost a CommentPleaselog in or registerto commentRoundtable Report: Who NeedsVisual Anthropology?by Rebeca Ibáñez MartínThe Journal The Society Fieldsights Site Guide© 2016 American Anthropological AssociationRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]panelof international flmmakers and visual anthropologistsgathered for a lively conversation on a freezing, bright afternoon. The discussion was moderated by Janine Prins, visualanthropologist, flmmaker, and lecturer at Leiden University. Hertalent for navigating the wide bandwidth of different positionsduring the debate was striking. The panelists were:Joshua Cogan, an anthropologist who aims tounderstand social issues through photography and newmedia; Cristina Grasseni, who teaches visual and media anthropologyat Utrecht University; Adriaan Gerbrands, who has been teaching visualanthropological methods since the 1970s; Laurent van Lancker, a Brussels-based flmmaker andanthropologist who lectures documentary and video art atINSAS and IAD; Steef Meyknecht, Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at LeidenUniversity; Dirk Nijland, considered the founder of the school ofethnographic flmmaking at Leiden University; Idikó Plájás studied anthropology and cultural studies inRomania and Hungary, later graduating in Visual Ethnographyat Leiden University; Metje Postma, Lecturer in Visual Ethnography at CA-OSLeiden; Luc Schadeler, a visual anthropologist, has been engagedin projects that combine scientifc research with visual meanssince 1996;Sanderien Verstappen, a cultural and visual anthropologist-flmmaker. She is a Lecturer and PhD candidate at theUniversity of Amsterdam. Who Needs Visual Anthropology? As I mentioned, I was deeply struck by the question chosen as titleof the event. The question of the need for visual anthropologyraises the subsequent question, For whom is it a need? Is itanthropology as a feld, which fnally discoveres that flm cancontribute to its methods?Or is it those who typically are theRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]objects of anthropological inquiry, who may fnd that visualanthropology can give them something different from feldworkthan a written text? The discussion revolved around thisdichotomy, with the implication that visual anthropology isgaining in popularity amongst students and acknowledgementthat ethnography in particular has been a subject of growingfascination among artists. Thus, the discussion revolved not somuch around the pastof the discipline but around its future. Perhaps the focus could have been framed differently, around thequestion of what drives visual anthropology. This is at the heart ofMark Cousin’s (2011) The Story of Film: An Odyssey.In theintroduction to each episode of this 915 minute documentary, sixyears in the making, Cousin’s enthralling voice asks the viewer,“What drives them [movies]?” His answer: “It isn’t box offces orshowbiz, but passion and innovation. So let’s travel the world tofnd this innovation for ourselves.” Passion and innovation. Mysense was that this crucialquestion would have been moreproductive than a discussion of needs. But the question of whatdrives visual anthropology—ambitions, motivations, desires,theoretical interventions—was unaddressed with just a fewexceptions. The seminar was set up in a way that made me uncomfortable,and, I amguessing, made some of the flmmakers uncomfortable,too. Every flmmaker was asked to show a scene from his or herown flms. The fact that clips were shown withoutcontextualization beforehand—where, when, how (although, to befair, most of the flmmakers gave some brief context information aposteriori)—left me with the uncomfortable sensation that imagesare considered to be self-explanatory, leaving themoving image tospeak for itself in a foating, decontextualized environment.Or, as Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1991, 54) brilliantly puts it, "Contrary towhat many writers on documentary flms have said, the strivingfor verisimilitude and for that ‘authentic’ contact with ‘lived’ realityis precisely that which links ‘factual’ (‘direct’ and ‘concrete’according to another classifcation) flms to studio-made flms andblurs their line of distinction. Both types perpetuate the myth ofcinematic ‘naturalness,’ even though one tries its best to imitateRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]life while the other claims to duplicate it. THIS IS HOW IT IS. Orwas." The hypnotic capacity of the moving image shows its poweras anassumed objective carrier of reality. Would we, as socialscientists, allow a piece of our texts to be shown like that, withoutcontext and introduction? Dirk Nijland started making anthropological flms in the late1950s. For Nijland, the purpose of ethnographic flm was toaccompany ethnographical monographs, showing activities,objects, rituals, and patches and tokens of the culture under study.In that sense, the visualtext was always in relation to a written text,which explains the signifcance of the flmed activities. Film hadthe capacity to show objects and people “in action” while theaccompanying monograph shows their “signifcance." Thusshowing, rather than interpreting or explaining, was the objectiveof his flms. Metje Postmashares a similar approach, in that shewants to convey through her flms what she calls the “ethnographicencounter.” She doesn’t focus on flm as an end product but aswhat the camera canoffer, therefore her interest lies not so muchin telling a story but in showing a situation. The intervention of Sanderien Verstappen was particularlyinterestingbecause she could connect how certain methods ofvisual anthropology clashed with her own wishes as ananthropologist to “tell stories to people.” When she was a student,she was taught to focus on showing rituals, showing every day life.At the time, she felt uncomfortable with some of these methodsand wanted instead to reach a wider audience. What is more, shewanted to make flms that could stand on their own, without theneed for a text to explain the rituals depicted. Even so, like Nijland,she still writes accompanying texts to contextualize the flm.The question of presenting or not presenting an auxiliary textalong with the flm emerged often during the debate. As it is now,most visualanthropology programs require a complementarywritten text with the flm, indicating that flm is still considered an“auxiliary method” to anthropology. Cristina Grasseni has workedin both flmand text for a long time. She was the frst one to receivea PhD in Visual Anthropology at Manchester University’s GranadaCentre for Visual Anthropology and ended up writing a muchRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]longer dissertation thanwas the norm, engaging a wide range ofscholarly debates. Was this because she felt she needed to proveherself as an anthropologist to theanthropology department, Iwondered? Luc Schadeler did not have this issue when he handed in hismaster's thesis. He made a flm in Hong Kong, in which he told thestory of an English migrant arriving in 1997. The flm was taken asthe main text for his master’s degree, the frst time this hadhappened at the University of Zurich. Schadeler adamantly wishesto intervene in debatesabout the legitimacy of visual texts. Hefercely defended the positionthat flm has to be accepted at thesame level as a written text. Both intervene theoretically andshould be on equal footing. For Schadeler, flm’s theoreticalintervention is done through editing. What are the criteria tosupervise and to judge the theoretical soundness of flm? Schadelersaid it is important to have more flmmakers and flm theoristsevaluating visual anthropological works. During this discussion, Iwondered what, then, would happen with visual anthropology?Will it become media studies? The question of disciplinary boundaries emerged at this point. Arecriteria for judging the theoretical soundness of flm derived fromflmtheory or from anthropology? This question was recurring andunresolvedduring the conversation. To my surprise, however, thisquestion was framed as a question of disciplinary boundaries andnot as a question oftheoretical sensibilities. More on this later. Visual Anthropology, A More CollaborativeAnthropological Text?What is collaboration? What has visual anthropology to offer tothose with whom we work?Laurent van Lancker mixes textures and materialities in his flmto “convey different types of sensation.” He has a clear visionofvisual anthropology as being a “triangle between flmmaker,audience, and the collaborators.” But I kept wondering, What doyour collaborators get from you, and, more to the point, who andhow arethose terms of collaboration established? Van Lanckerwants to make hiscollaborators active in his flms. I personally fndRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]this view quite problematic, since I believe it tends to producewhat Verstappen called a“false dichotomy between collaborationand observation.” Wondering about this concept of collaborationin visual anthropology andthe way collaboration is achieved, Ifound this idea perhaps a naive romanticization of the capabilitiesof anthropological documentary. Van Lancker sees collaborationoccurring during the process of flming, for example, in how, eventhough he elaborates the research topic, he leavespeople to stageand flm their own scenes. Afterwards, he does the editing. He alsomakes sure the people being flmed decide what they want to show,and what they want to share. Van Lancker is aware thatcollaboration between him and the subjects he is flming iscontroversial but what is important for him are intentions. He isopen to letting what happens in the feld infect his ideas and causethem to change.My reservations about the feasibility of such idealizedcollaborationwere shared by Idikó Plájás. She expressed the viewthat intersubjectivity is not unequivocally positive since, in theprocess of flmmaking, there are obvious power imbalances anddifferent access to resources. “We” are pointing the camera at“them,” our interlocutors. “It is someone’s project,” she said, toconvey the fact of ultimate ownership and responsibility. ForPlájás, what is more important is to refect on our own positionand our own bias.Do They Need Us?The question of giving back arose during the debate aboutcollaboration. Nijland wished to make images and feed them backto people so that they can share their comments and knowledgewith the anthropologist. There is a third player: the audience.Plájás considers that anthropological flms frst of all serve abroader audience, then academia, and fnally, in very few cases,itssubjects. Such cases may include video advocacy and participatoryprojects, for instance. Seeing and InterveningGrasseni pointed at another important debate. She asks, how dowe know if when we see something, we all see the same thing?Well, she says, we don’t! We see what we learn to see, or rather, itRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]is not aquestion of learning the symbols or semiotics of culture butthat we become skilled. She has developed her own term for that,"skilled vision." Drawing on the work of anthropologist TimIngold, Grasseni maintains that skilled vision is not somethinggained either through text or through the visual, but through theexperience of both. Van Lancker believes that what ethnography and flm have incommon isa capacity to transmit and produce knowledge. Is notabout form and content but the relation between the two. He isobviously a man who knows flm techniques. He believes that it isnot so important that visual anthropology takes anthropologymore seriously but rather that visual anthropology takes flm moreseriously. What mode of representation of reality do you choose?This is a crucial issue regarding the production of knowledge andthe intervention in knowledge,a concern that Plájás brought uprather masterfully. She showed a clip of her fawlessly flmed piece,part of her master’sproject. Plájás has a clear theoretical concernwhich shebrings out in her flm: her research focused on thediscursive creationof nature and the local response to it. Becauseher feld—the multiplicity of local responses to environmentalistdiscourse—proved to be very complex, she used cinematic tools toconvey this complexity in the flm, including conventions ofcontinuity editing to jump between characters and to merge theircontradictory voices while the course of everyday activities likefshing and housework is kept continuous. The theoreticalconcerns thus became explicit and shaped the decisions takenduring flming and editing. What Drives Visual Anthropology? I believe a productive debate would be one in which visualanthropology is discussed for its theoretical effects andpotentialities. Otherwise, visual anthropology will get lost again ina "reality debate": Are we representing reality or not? Are we fairand accurate in representing the reality of the other? Such debateends up in another even more complicated debate, that between usand them. The question of who is representing whom has beendiscussed in postcolonial studies of flm for many decades and insharp terms (i.e., Fanon 1952; Minh-ha 1989, 1991; de Lauretis,1984). Instead, I think it might be wise to discuss visualRoundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology? — Cultural Anthropologyhttps://culanth.org/fieldsights/686-roundtable-report-who-needs-visual-anthropology[2-9-2016 10:41:42]anthropology not in terms of needs but in terms of interventions,in theoretical terms. Into which debates can visual anthropologyintervene? Plájás contributes to environmental debates inanthropology by refecting on the complexity ofdifferent strategiesin the Danube Delta; the structure of the flm refects thesemultiple practices. Verstappen intervenes in the debate of multi-sited ethnography and migrant networks between England andIndia through a video in which she shows, in a non-linear way, thefractal nature of both issues, thus breaking with assumed ideas oflinear representation. What drives visual anthropology?ReferencesCousins, Mark. 2011. The Story of Film: An Odyssey. London:Hopscotch Films. 915 minutes. Digital Video.de Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated byCharles L. Markmann, Collections Esprit. New York: Grove Press.Trinh, T Minh-ha. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: WritingPostcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.Trinh, T Minh-ha. 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red:Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. London:Routledge.

Roundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology?

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Roundtable Report: Who Needs Visual Anthropology?

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