As a final-year student undertaking a four-year anthropology program, I can confidently say that I have been able to delve deeply into the discipline’s toolbox and experiment with diverse approaches to conducting social research. As my academic journey came to an end, there remained a facet of modern anthropology that I had yet to explore. A documentary enthusiast, I encountered several cutting-edge anthropological movies that blended art and social research to bring to life a new way of seeing and thinking about the world. Attuned to emotions and sensoriality and driven by notions of retribution and justice, the framework for comprehending others and the social realms they inhabit introduced by these visual pieces struck me as groundbreaking. Embarking on my final placement, I was determined to take advantage of this experience and found a place working alongside the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival through my university. ”Showcasing the best in groundbreaking and innovative anthropological documentary filmmaking from around the world,” the selection of films showcased at the festival was meticulously curated so that each creative piece seemed to add a layer, revealing an emerging form of complex anthropology, led by movements of decolonization in research methods and newfound conceptions of knowledge as plural and dialectic.
Reflecting on my past internships, summer jobs, and placements, I came to realize that my inability to find a balance between producing useful content and nurturing a sense of self-accomplishment had been a recurring theme. Whether I was blindly fulfilling required tasks without incorporating my perspective or impulsively diving into my interpretations of how things should be done, my previous approach to work had hindered my ability to strike that equilibrium between delivering valuable output and cultivating a sense of personal fulfillment. Taking lessons from these experiences, I approached my placement at the RAI with a firm intention of crafting a role for myself that would benefit the festival as well as satisfy my curiosity and push me to develop new capabilities. One of the available openings was for an editorial content creator position and involved providing viewers with contextual information about the films while infusing a sense of enthusiasm. Being a French student accustomed to academic writing in English, the prospect of embracing a more creative style enthralled me. Additionally, I found the task of adding meaning to the films by highlighting anthropological ideas and making them relatable to viewers quite fascinating. It was especially interesting as we were encouraged to explore our viewpoints and connections to the creative pieces.
While I acquainted myself with the program, I observed a consistent motif of self-awareness. Across numerous works, there was a clear tendency for the filmmaker’s introspection, revealing their preoccupation with their own perspective, filming approaches, and how they portrayed their subjects. At the extreme of this motif were filmmakers such as Karen Boswall in Sing My Sister, who fully surrendered their authorship, discarding voice-over narratives and encouraging subjects to guide the cameras themselves. Affected by their dedication to learning to speak alongside rather than speak for, I struggled with my own positioning as an author and the choice between self-effacement (objective tone) versus a subjective and self-aware standpoint. This issue was accentuated by the medium I was tackling, as I had to decide whether to evoke the topics of the documentaries as objective realities (e.g., a film about transgender issues in Colombia) or present them as the filmmaker’s own interpretation, an “act of personal witness.”
Exploring literature around the topic of subjectivity to guide my approach led me to Devreux’s relentless subjectivity principle: ”The subjectivity of the observer, he noted, influences the course of the observed even as radically as ‘inspection’ influences (‘disturbs’) the behavior of an electron.” This observation led him to conclude that doing social research more subjectively will increase its objectivity. This relentless subjectivity principle requires that one is aware of their own subjectivity and its influence on the research undertaken and requires the ability to ”bring in our own experiences and perspectives to bear on the questions we ask and the answers we find” without ”rejecting ”all analytical standards or scholarly rigor” to ”engage in a dialogue in which we not only learn from our subjects but also from ourselves” as cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo articulates. This second requirement reveals a need for the ability to include oneself in the research, one’s own perspective, experience, and emotions in relation to what is observed, and addressing this dialogue between the self and the observed with scholarly rigor.
I set my focal point to be that of an ethnographic writer, considering each film as a singular universe created by the encounter between the filmmaker’s perspective, the observed subject, and the audio-visual medium. This led me to learn how to harness my immediate experience of a film, with my knowledge of documentary filmmaking and anthropological frameworks to add to the viewers’ understanding of the creative piece. For instance, working on ”Sing My Sister” by Karen Boswall I aimed to highlight the complexity of this research piece, which draws on both ethnomusicology and visual anthropology to seamlessly stitch together a layered approach to the emancipation and empowerment of Mozambican women in a trilogy format. The ingenious underlying structure of the documentary and specific stylistic choices made by the filmmakers risked going unnoticed, affecting the overall appreciation of their work.
As an ethnomusicology documentary, I felt a large part of the ‘message’ conveyed by the film was in its rhythm although I was initially reluctant to expand on this. As I reflected and furthered my reading into subjectivities, I crossed paths with Ruth Behar’s eulogy to vulnerable ethnography and Clifford Geertz’s reflections on aesthetic forms of communication and their central role in the ways people construct and communicate meaning:
‘‘Grasping other people’s inner lives like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke, (..) reading a poem”; ‘‘You don’t exactly penetrate another culture, as the masculinist image would have it. You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you.”
Encountering literature that legitimizes and extols a more sensitive understanding of cultural research gave me the freedom to give into a more lyrical tone to my writing (when of use in communicating meaning both theoretically and aesthetically). For example, while working on La Nave by Carlos Maria Romero (aka Atabey Mamasita) I relied heavily on the use of lyrical accents and a segmented structure to prepare the viewer for a documentary that functions as a collage of interviews and clips, weaving a portrait of segmented hybrid identities and they’re piecing together during the carnival of Barranquilla (Columbia).
Warned by Daphne Patai’s critique of the genre she defines as ”nouveau solipsism,” previous reflection on self-awareness came into play as I noted my writing was becoming excessively sensationalist. An evident downfall of including emotions and experiences is the risk of falling into ‘‘miniature bubbles of navel-gazing” or suffocating cultural research by choosing to focus solely on our own experience of otherness menacing to reduce social research and especially ethnography to a consumption of cultural experience. Self-reflection is not an end in itself. We have to ask ourselves: How do you write subjectively into ethnography in such a way that you can continue to call what you are doing ethnography?
In consonance with philosopher Roland Barthes‘ perspective, I believe anthropology, or any scientific research or artistic approach to the world in that matter, has never been about describing reality but rather adding or removing layers to evidence new possibilities for understanding the world. Poetry and literature through their inherent ability to convey subjectivity and disrupt established ways of thinking can set solid grounds for the discovery of ”new meaning and a higher order of relations” and can therefore be an impactful tool in the bridging of worlds. To me the act of bridging subjectivities is fundamentally anthropological whether that is between a fictional world contained in a moving image and an individual, between two cultures or two languages, anthropology is about ”finding commonalities and connections between different ways of understanding the world,” holding space for the appreciation of ”multivocality” and the ”reimagination of our shared social worlds.”
Author
Lilas Privateer is a recent master’s graduate in Anthropology with Innovation. Her interest lies in looking at how art as a space can become a research tool in Anthropology.