2001 Abstracts

My purpose is to discuss the prospect of combining long term anthropological research with reflexive writing and ethnographic video making. The fourteen months I spent doing fieldwork with Brazilian middle class migrants in Lisbon showed me just how effective the filming process is as a source of knowledge. The final 36-minute video is the product of more than 50 hours of footage and endeavours to incorporate the theoretical issues of my research with visual images. My Ph.D. thesis, which I am currently writing, also attempts to explore the methodological and theoretical implications of integrating paper and film, while maintaining each as an independent element of the same research.

Looking at graffiti is necessary to make an epistemologically rigorous interpretation of it. Lacking explicit reference to images of graffiti constrains an interpretation to talking about graffiti by using metaphors or constructing analogies to link graffiti to various social science theories. When limited to text, interpretations tend to essentialize graffiti via the etic antimony of art and crime. Our short ethnographic film structures and features recorded images of graffiti to provide audiences with the visual experience that is necessary to comprehend graffiti as a distinct phenomenon. Graffiti writers' voices are coordinated with the flow of images in order to elucidate the emic categories currently used by San Francisco graffiti writers.

This paper, based on critical media analysis and preliminary ethnography, addresses how bodies are visually constructed and gendered within the Euro-American fashion modeling industry and how these constructions affect male and female fashion models' bodily perceptions and consumption habits. This presentation will focus on constructions of fashion models' bodies through fashion magazine images, industry representations, and popular media. By utilizing cultural studies methodology in conjunction with ethnography, this paper seeks to understand fashion models as both "image-commodities" and social actors and ultimately seeks to address some of the gendered, phenomenological repercussions of increasingly "image-oriented" elite, Western cultural milieus.

Gambian photographers measure changes since colonialism by an increase in the number of props used to "complete" depicted persons by making their "edges" ("kemmej") clear. This increase, associated the progress of Independence, renders the task of portraying the inner person ("jiko") more difficult -a task considered to have been possible in the past, and almost impossible today. This paper discusses a popular genre of Gambian photography, "Xool Sa Bopp" ("to see oneself"), in an analysis of how Gambians consider the problematic implications of being in "focus" ("ler"). As such, I examine how the techniques of African photographic practice encompass accounts of the everyday experience of postcoloniality.

Anti-aging medicine is a relatively recent, controversial, and burgeoning professionalization of physicians, scientists, and health professionals who believe that aging is a disease in and of itself treatable, curable, reversible. This paper explores anti-aging medicineõs strong presence on the Internet gaining momentum in constructing the "impending paradigm shift" that challenges mainstream biomedicine to recast aging as the site of intervention. The Internet serves as a particularly important medium for anti-aging medicine as it both advertises the "visible effects" of anti-aging therapies as well as links people with vast volumes of scientific data. With the Internet as a backbone, this movement challenges the natural and the technological images of what it means to become old.

This experiment operates from the assumption that the ways in which we experience the visual and symbolic world (Worth, Goffman, Barthes) is anchored within our own understandings and construction of culture. But how this operates has been difficult if not impossible to prove. We propose an ethnographic experiment that involves three anthropological filmmakers. Two of the filmmakers come from different backgrounds, American and German, and recorded the events of the World Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. The experiences of the two individuals are necessarily distinct based on their cultural background, one a native anthropologists, and the other an outsider (or I guess, a regular anthropologist). Both are making a video of the experience in the tradition of visual anthropology in order to convey their experiences and to convey the Expo to an American audience. What are the differences between the native anthropologist's depiction and the non-native? Can the audience make a distinction? Is one more successful? Why? It would seem that each as an advantage and disadvantage. The native may have a better perspective, but the American might better convey a message to an American audience. The third filmmaker involved has neither been to the Expo nor discussed this experience with either one who has. The third person will make a film based on the footage to convey the Expo to the audience. Is it possible that this third person will be successful without the background? This person will have the same background knowledge as the audience, and therefore will not be making a film for an "intended" or "ideal" audience (Eco), but exactly for themselves. All three participants will have the exact same footage to begin with. How do we construct, understand and convey knowledge in visual media?

To the degree that African Americans males successfully participate in American culture and institutions, they subvert essentializing depictions of them. The truth is that large numbers of African American male successfully participate in US cultural institutions. Documentary filmmakers for a number of reasons have largely failed to capture this truth, as their films have either represented African American males in stereotypical fashion or as the exception. The failure of filmmakers to acknowledge their biases coupled with the limitations of the documentary format itself, are among the reasons for this problem. This film attempts to escape those limitations through an experimental use of form. It takes as its aim that all social reality is constructed, and that in the process of creating meaning for themselves, African American males manipulate those realities. It focuses on the relationship African American males have with language, education and place in order to make a connection with the social construction of experience. The city of Los Angeles will play a major role in this film. Montage and special effects will be used to reveal a hypperreal Los Angeles that is excessive, overdeveloped, uninteresting, but at the same time irresistible. The film will include archival footage key to understanding African Americans, including media coverage of Rodney King and OJ Simpson. Acting as a counterpoint to this overt form of repression will be interviews of mainstreamed African American males, shots of urban and suburban schools, commentary on the differences in expenditure schools, and expert interviews.

Rooted in a selection of key ethnographic films, this presentation questions the presupposed visual purity characteristic of filmic evaluation. By designating film as a strictly visual medium, those evaluating films frequently overlook the complex layers of sensory information that the image holds. In doing so, many critics overlook important nuances and resonances latent within the image. They understate the image's inherent complexity, restricting the channels through which the image is understood to communicate. A reductive framework of intellectual thought and vocabulary is thus imposed on filmic material, reducing the communicative potential and diversity of the image. In conclusion, this presentation points to new levels of visual, sonic and tactile experience which are latent within the 'visual medium' of ethnographic film.

The various critiques of representation emanating from the 1980s sounded the S.O.S. to save anthropology. Tired of the critique, the overwhelming response of late has been to read the S.O.S as the Same Old Sh!%. Nonetheless, the critique has proven productive, as multiple ethnographies have attempted to formulate successful strategies to represent global/local processes through challenging classic holism of culture and text. Surprisingly silent in this conversation have been the possibilities of on-line ethnography. This paper argues that through the use of multiple forms of media (audio, video, photo, text) and hyperlinks that challenge the linearity of the text, on-line ethnography offers enriching forms of representing the blooming, buzzing complexities of everyday life in the glocalized world.

Participants:

Seth Robert Babb [San Francisco State]

Seth Robert Babb is an experimental documentary filmmaker. He earned his B.A in Cinema from San Francisco State University and now attends the San Francisco Art Institute.

Jochen Becker [Hamburg]

I am studying cultural anthro, media studies, and political science at the University of Hamburg. During 1999/2000, I spent a one year fellowship term in the graduate department of the anthropology of visual communication at Temple University, studying with Jay Ruby. My main interests lie in media representation- and signifying practices. At the moment I am preparing fieldwork among journalists that centers around the question of “distinction” and the producers’ role/position within sociocultural processes. I will be presenting some of that work this fall at the AAA conferences in Washington.Other interests include architecture and the built environment. There is a vibrant and in many ways revealing discussion in Germany about the new governmental and corporate architecture in Berlin, rising in midst of the legislature of the four earlier political systems that ambitiously manifested themselves in Berlin’s urban scape.I am also interested in the possibilities of ethnographic film, and currently working on a video project with a group of homeless men in Hamburg. Contact: jo@medienethnologie.de

Liam Buckley [Virginia]

Liam Buckley is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, with research interests in West Africa, Visual Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory and Material Culture Studies. He is currently writing his dissertation "Colonial Negatives: Photography in The Gambia, West Africa, since Independence (1965)," focusing on how photographic practice in The Gambia substantiates local experiences of historical change and of being "in fashion" and living emphatically in the present.

Kathryn Kluegel [Rutgers]

Kathryn Kluegel is a fourth-year graduate student in the Ph.D. program in socio-cultural anthropology at Rutgers University. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a fashion model for approximately four years in the U.S. and Europe. She then moved to San Francisco, worked on a film festival and in an advertising agency, and began to pursue painting. She has continued to explore a longstanding interest in visuality by focusing on its imbrications with culture and subjectivity. Her proposed dissertation work involves an ethnographic study of fashion models and the fashion modeling industry in Milan, Italy.

Tom Rice [Manchester]

As an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, Tom Rice developed a special interest in the anthropology of the senses, and wrote his dissertation on the ethnographic study of sound. He is currently persuing an M.A. course in Ethnographic Filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester University. There he has written on the multisensory appeal and appreciation of the filmic text, with particular emphasis on the synaesthetic relationship which exists in film between the sonic and visual layers.

Marc Tizoc Gonzales [San Francisco State]

Marc Tizoc Gonzalez struggles to comprehend and articulate contemporary youth practices. He earned his B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis in1996. Currently, he is finishing his M.A. program in Social Science (Interdisciplinary Studies) at San Francisco State University. Last November, he presented an interactive media project, "The Art of Graffiti," at the Visual Research Conference of the Society for Visual Anthropology.

Stephanie Takaragawa [Temple]

Stephanie Takaragawa is a fourth year graduate student in the anthropology of visual communication program at Temple University. She received her MA in art history and is currently exploring the construction and maintenance of group identity through art among Japanese Americans. She is also interested in photography and the art market, theme parks and world fairs, and ethnographic surrealism.

Mike Wesch [Virginia]

I'm into the blooming buzzing complexity of everyday life. How to transform that complexity into a communicable medium (be it words, pictures, or otherwise) is what I spend most of my time thinking about. I think "culture" can be a nice tool to help us get at some of this blooming buzzing complexity, but used in the wrong ways it can do all those bad things everybody's been screaming about lately like objectify, other, and forge artificial boundedness. I still believe in culture, just so long as it is taken to be "that which cannot be spoken, but whereby all is spoken."

I work in a small village in Papua New Guinea not because I'm seeking the primitive, but because it provides me with a blooming buzzing complexity that blows my mind in ways my mind has never been blown before.

In seeking new ways to represent the blooming buzzing complexity I have been working on a hypermedia ethnography you can find at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mlw5k

The Smithsonian

Room 3031 - S. Dillon Ripley Ctr

Smithsonian Quadrangle - Jefferson Drive

Kiosk entrance between the SI Castle and the Freer Gallery.