Ethno-Hollywood

Linear Story
Every film has a beginning, a development and an end, one of my anthropology colleagues here in Portugal once explained me. (For the sake of the storytelling and to respect his intimacy, I will call him Franz.) A film without a beginning, a development and an end is not a film, and that applies to any type of film including ethnographic film, Franz further stressed. Franz works in the Amazon in Brazil where he does video films involving the participation of communities. Some time after our initial conversation, I saw one of his productions during a workshop at one of the Lisbon universities. There were wide shots of beaches and tourist infrastructures. The voice was given mainly to young people dressed up in American-Indian costumes who interviewed tourists about their ideas about American Indians. It was a funny, at times polemic film about the naivety of tourists and also about the transformations American Indians underwent in the eye of tourists and tourism. In these processes, these American Indians, hitherto socially marginalised in the context of Brazilian nation building, seemed to become beautiful, socially valorised and proud to be so. After the film screening, I asked whether the montage of the film, eventually done by Franz on his own, and the story it told was not reinforcing the symbolic fabrication of American-Indians as radically different. In a way, I questioned, whether through this film and other media, American-Indians became elevated as a symbolic hinterland of the Brazilian nation allowing to tell and authenticate a national story rooted in the realms of an Amazonian ancestral society, that can still be visited (and that therefore needs to be kept alive).

Community Participation
My question which aimed to generate debate was taken badly, as a critique of the movie whose dialogically framed plot the mainly-student audience seemed to like and thus defended against my comments. Participant ethnographic video and filmmaking usually claim to empower local communities to tell their own stories and thus to emancipate and valorise new forms of identity. Such filmmaking has become very fashionable in recent years, witnessed by the springing up of ethnographic film festivals, and visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking courses in universities worldwide. Yet, these films are rarely edited by community members and where they are, their authors, trained in universities or field film workshops usually adapt plots, narrative frameworks and characters that configure “community” in a way that conforms to outside conceptions. They all have a beginning, a development and an end. And they usually formulate local community in terms of an ontologically separate realm placed in a distinguished locale that, like the Hollywood hero, has to overcome obstacles to eventually achieve a specific aim (or to fail). This would be called the plot. And this precisely was what I was taking issue with. If we approach subjects not as humans, but as members of a specific group, which is made a specific group by the very plots associated with it - say Amazonian Indians struggle for land - we discursively reaffirm social patterns that express a certain order of the world, and that give these subjects little leverage to construe alternative realities. This still unresolved ethical issue about the specific value of being human that we implicitly defend with regard to, or through, our work has been pinpointed in earlier comments, maybe most famously by Marcus and Clifford in their Writing Culture.

Indigenous as Modern Plot
In our initial conversation, Franz had told me that he was teaching community members to film, and that his students usually adopted his storytelling and editing style. Through their productions, one could see that they were his students, he explained. In most community-participative films I have seen, community is represented as intrinsically bound through historical filiations to ancestors and land (and nature). At the same time, in the wider social contact zones of, for example, tourism, it is extrinsically idealised as a model to think about time and the human community at large. The act of telling the story of indigenous and autochthon communities and engaging them through tourism, journalism, ethnographic film, political rhetoric, world art or corporate social responsibility programmes seems to become a fundamental element of global modernity, a consensual trope allowing moderns of all sorts to reaffirm a story of universal history and humanity. From this perspective, these intimately strange communities are within modernity, and not outside; they evoke a somehow mythical reality and thus supply a means to think about forms of the human and how these evolve in time.

Aesthetic Transfigurations in the Global Modern World
Most anthropologists would agree that community is nothing authentic in itself (in the sense as to relate to an original condition or ur-humanity whatever that would be), but an outcome of historical fabrication and formation. It is a category to classify people and their identity that through the repetition of performances becomes reified, normalised and ‘naturalized’. As part of this ‘system’, the plots underlying much participative filmmaking seem transpired by a form of postcolonial sentimentalism, effectively empowering indigenous and autochthon populations to appropriate precisely those tropes and identities reserved for them within the wider order of global modernity. In a process of transfiguration (in the sense given by Nietzsche, but also, why not by classical Greek theatre: the actor is transfigured by the Gods they had invoked and the Gods shine through them), they become inhabited by initially external, imported notions of being beautiful, wise, in close contact with nature, family-oriented, spiritual and spirited, pacific. They shine as indigenous as a form of  modern. Modernity is the God that provides power, pride and identity as indigenous.

Militant Filmmaking
It may well be that within the wider world system and similar to other noble savage projections before, the thus elevated Amazonian Indians are to compensate for the discontents of the modernist project, which did not fulfil its promises of progress, enlightenment, and happiness (but which led us being governed by banks and rating agencies, instead of politicians we elected). It is part of the plot of this global Ethno-Hollywood societal theatre play, that they, and their authentic way of life, must therefore be defended against the aggressions by the anthropologist’s current favourite anti-hero, global neo-liberalism. This leads me to a second reflection. I understand the dilemmas many anthropologists face when in the field. Over the past 10 years, many of us have observed forms of massive land grab, land privatisation and the political and economic disempowerment of populations we work and empathize with. Many of us observe a feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness, when our informants ask us for help. Often scientific articles in academic journals and postings to anthropology forums - so basically communication to and among ourselves - are the “best” we do. Filmmaking represents here a more powerful tool and medium able to reach a far wider audience and have more concrete impact. As we talk, the Mursi of South Ethiopia and fishing populations in South Western Madagascar are expropriated and progressively excluded from the land that represents their resource base and social centres of society. Most of us know that, but there is no movement. Could filmmaking change this? Or would we only get yet another salvage paradigm plot, the “poor being excluded from their land by the rich”, say, collectively, “how terrible”, and then move on with our lives? I watched Inside Story and Tous au Larzak, and both films had an effect, though in different arenas. Maybe because we feel more affected by the bank-credit-euro crisis, or the rural-nostalgia-crisis than with the story of people whose destiny, according to the modernist plot, is “doomed” anyway. We could push this further and say that these people eventually fulfil expectations within a narrative framework we have difficulties to liberate ourselves of.

Endnote 

The people in Madagascar I work with do, for various reasons, not wish to work with a lawyer and go to court or involve public security agencies such as the police, but wish to solve the problems “peacefully”. Pragmatically this has meant so far to accept relatively small sums gained in exchange for signatures on documents they could not read, but that stipulated the large-scale sale of communal land (which is an all important category at the local scale, but not recognized in the national land law system). Most wish their kids went to school and found work in town. Of all the kids interviewed in various schools, not one wants to become a fisher. So there is change to happen here in the next 10 year that goes beyond, or against the romantic modernist plot of the poor, but happy fisher by the sea. But we already have a plot to think about this new situation prepared. The poor economize and send one of their children to town to get educated and an office job. Another adventure story. I feel a bit lost. Any suggestions on how we could effectively help the Gasy fishers or the Mursi in Ethiopia? And if there is no one asking for help, should we help anyway? Is help yet another plot we inhabit?

David Picard

What is anthropology? - David Picard

Anthropology is being there and being detached from there at the same time. It is a modern absurdity whose sense I will try to grasp here. I believe it is essentially related to the function of bad eyesight among humans, and its future survival will depend on whether or not laser eye treatments will become more accessible. When I was in my mid 20s, my eyesight started to worsen. After two or so years, I accepted that I would need to see an eye doctor. I had to have glasses. That changed everything in my life until last year. I had been doing professional photography and then studied for a degree in economics. University revealed itself to me as the essence of socially instituted boredom and mass-organised life outside life. I had moved to an Indian Ocean island to be close to the beach and explore my limits. I met French anthropology students there dressed up in funny Indian, African and South American batik cloth, playing African drums at their parties and dancing in strange manners. They smoked a lot of pot and talked about social exclusion and all the bad that came from the ‘Americans’ (les américains). I found them terribly sectarian. They made me think about German sociology students with their asymmetrical I-am-different haircuts. During a conversation with the only professor of anthropology at the university there, who was actually a philosopher, I shared my fascination about the big moral concepts of beauty and innocence. He encouraged me to graduate in anthropology (called ethnologie in France). In the classroom, I met the batik people again. It was at that period that I had started to wear glasses. It was terrible. I was no longer free to see the world as a whole, but through two little frames. I had to move my head if I wanted to see beyond these frames. They remained there. I was no longer entirely in the world. Luckily the graduate program did not involve too much classroom teaching and I could avoid the funnily dressed people. I investigated beauty which led me to study what people thought about nature, their own nature, and eventually their own death. The study was in itself uncanny and self-revealing to me. I realised that I used other people’s experience and emotions essentially to study my own fears and understandings of the world. The glasses played here a crucial role. They separated me from the world and allowed me to analyze what happened out there, through the scopic vision provided by my little frames. At the same time, my body was evidently still in the world.  The only suspension of this anthropological mode of schizophrenic existence occurred when I took my glasses off - in the shower, in the lagoon, during sex, when I slept. My girlfriend started to comment on the act of taking off my glasses with loud ironic exclamations about the possible fully unframed bodily involvement to come. I went on to do a PhD. Most of the batik folks left or took off their exotic attires. I am bemused by my own sarcasm here, as we all were there to test our boundaries and play with possible identities - while claiming that our study work was really important to understand society. Later, when I worked at a university in England, I met contemporary artists. It was hard to understand what they were doing, and why some of their works became publicly considered as important, while others not. Through the frames of my now professionally trained eyes, I could see parallels with anthropology. I started to frame the actual frame through which I critically framed reality. I saw how my students tested the limits of the ontological and moral order that described their worlds. Like generations of former students, including my self and the batik people in the Indian Ocean, they went to see what happened in the margins of their worlds. They studied gypsies, fishermen, farmers, merchants, prostitutes, scientists, migrants, tourists. After their fieldwork they usually returned as different persons. Most were wearing eyeglasses (some already before).  The results of their research, like my own, often stated the obvious. Migrants have worse health conditions, prostitutes feel socially excluded, the rich dominate the poor, the poor fascinate the rich, scientists claim truth, gypsy life is a lot about music and dancing, but not only, tourists go on holiday to recharge their ‘batteries’. The knowledge thus created was published in articles and books, usually with an extremely limited circulation. It was mainly about recognition among peers and getting a permanent job. Like with contemporary art, it was not really clear why and how anthropology managed to perpetuate itself as a social institution. Contemporary art at least is carried into the public, creating debates and emotions among newspaper critics, art folks and the mundane visitors who silently work their way through museums and galleries. But anthropology remains invisible. It is not practical for the development of policies or to sell stuff (as is sociology) because it uses emic categories to explain social reality ‘from within’. Furthermore, ideologically, many of the former batik people who are now professors pursue political agendas far off from the pragmatism and mainstream of current policy.  After the Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy and ensuing banking crisis two years ago, for instance, I saw many declaring, with enthusiastic eyes, that ‘finally!’, the end of capitalism had arrived, a new era - of what? - to come. Following discussions at the Open Anthropology Cooperative, I got more and more convinced that anthropology is above all about anthropology. It has not much to do with the world out there, yet remains intimately inside this world out there. It has become a sacred realm hidden from, yet within the world, only liminally surfacing in times of crisis, through messianic messages about the end of whatever, propagating its ‘secret’ knowledge about common knowledge (that usually remains badly understood by the public), its moral position above public moral. I came to the conclusion that anthropology is like a nun who stays inside the cloister to experiment (with) God.  The process of becoming an anthropologist requires years of self-decentring and social hermitage. It is not astonishing that the discipline provides aura to its graduates. They know something about life most others do not know. There is even a sacrificial aspect involved here. Through the social isolation that is part of their training (to become self-aware), anthropologists suffer (joyfully I do hope) a form of social Zöllibat. However, unlike priests or nuns, they don’t embrace God, but they marry their fieldwork subjects (sometimes quite literally). They create links - symbolical, carnal, and magical ones - between the here and now, and the worlds out, or in, there. Through their knowledge and also through their bodies, they keep the fragments of the world together. Beautiful. I got my eyes laser-corrected last year and no longer need glasses. It was one of the greatest reliefs I've experienced in my life. I no longer need to take off my glasses before jumping in the sea or having sex. I can freely move my eyes to see all that, which had remained previously outside the frame. I do no longer have to move my head to follow a bird in the sky. My neck pain also got better, while I started to have stiff fingers when I wake up in the morning. But that may have different reasons. I am back in the world and wonder if I still need anthropology. I guess I cannot get rid of it anymore.

David Picard
Lisbon, Portugal.