Imaging the ‘Same’ and ‘Other’: Visual Anthropology/ Documentary Film
VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY / DOCUMENTARY FILM
Prof. KG Tomaselli and contributors
The course aims to provide advanced investigations of visual
representations of the social through anthropological and documentary
film. The theory deals with moving images like film, television and
video made in the context of ethnographic research; and the analyses of
anthropological, ethnographic and documentary film. It also involves
theories of African Philosophy, cultural tourism and development. In
response to a broader paradigm-shift toward reflexivity in critical
anthropology and media studies, this module addresses and relocates
questions of representation and re-construction in the context of
reflexive explanations of films about people (documentary, ethnographic,
anthropological) – images used to document patterns of culture, usually
within discourses of ‘othering’. The epistemological foundations
of media and media studies are critically examined, in this specific
instance ethnographic film and the construction of the ‘Other’.
The module offers a critical overview of
concepts of visual anthropology, ethnographic film-making and visual
representation. It examines questions of power and power relations, the
anthropological and media construction of the ‘Other’; trends in visual
anthropology and their relationship to documentary, ethics, recording
strategies and approaches to visual documentation.
The module draws on what can be seen as
human experience of the last explicitly colonial environment, that of
apartheid South Africa, in order to raise topical criticisms of
ethnographic and documentary film in terms of how these genres raise
their subjects to the epistemological status of ‘Other’. However, the
relevance of this selection to a wider context is connected explicitly
throughout.
Semiotics studies how thought, knowledge
and behaviour relate to constructions of meaning. This relation is used
to examine the way in which meaning is subject to mediation via the
technological practices of film, TV and video, photography and
computers.
The module is made up of ten seminars:
1) The Other in Film: Rethinking Indigeneity
2) Historical Precedents: Documentary
3) Theories of representation in Cinema
4) Visual Anthropology: Pluralist Views
5) The Ethnographic Presence and Reflexivity
6) Ethnographic Surrealism and the Scientifically Unthinkable
7) Auto-ethnography, Participatory Research and Ethnographic Fieldwork Techniques
8) Nature of Encounters, Ethics and Power
9) Cultural tourism and lodge-community partnerships
10) Structured Absences: A Case Study of the Kalahari !Kung
This module is embedded in an international
research and video project entitled “Rethinking Indigeneity” (research
partners include anthropologists, film makers and literary scholars
from Leeds, Leiden, Free University of Amsterdam, Towson and
Queensland).
