By definition, anthropology is simply the study of humans. By practice it is not so simple. Anthropology was born and developed in the colonial context. Its mission was to record and document "the other" - "primitive" or "original" cultures in danger of vanishing, unfamiliar to Western civilization.
"[Ethnography has a] goal, of which an Ethnographer should never lose sight. This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold life has on him."
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronislaw Malinowski.
Anthropology looks at human culture, studies the cultural in humans. It looks at meaningful phenomena.
Anthropology is founded on ethnographic study: first-hand observation and recording by the researcher. Thus it also entails practices of travel, issues of objectivity and colonial relations of power, ethical dilemmas. And all these dilemmas and issues are carried over and take new forms in visual anthropology.
According to David MacDougall "anthropology has had no lack of interest in the visual; its problem has always been what to do with it". Drawings, photographs, live examples and very early also films were used to gather data and present it. The problem stands as Eliot Weinberger states:
"There is a tribe, known as ethnographic filmmakers, who believe they are invisible. They enter a room where a feast is being celebrated, or the sick cured, or the dead mourned, and, though weighed down with odd machines entailed with wires, imagine they are unnoticed - ….
They worship a terrible deity known as Reality, whose eternal enemy is its evil twin, Art.
…
Ethnographic film is film which endeavors to interpret the behavior of people of one culture to persons of another culture by using shots of people doing precisely what they would have been doing is the camera were not there. The ideal, then, is either a dream of invisibility, or, worse, the practice of the surveillance camera."
Weinberger and MacDougall both discuss the paradox of ostensibly objectively documenting reality yet failing to convey its reality. As Weinberger points out, old films of fiction offer rich documents of cultural habits and values of their times, whereas old documentary and educational films become outdated. Also, fiction or "artistic" films manage to convey a much richer image of cultures they present than strictly objective ethnographic films.
Weinberger makes some interesting points concerning details and translation. A film can never present a general image of say pottery-making - it will always be a unique exemplary instance. The strength of the visual - film, photograph, drawing, performance - is that it can include a richness of detail while still presenting a comprehensible whole. The "intellectual act of seeing" in a film that does not pretend to objectively record reality is also "an act of translation". "The Nuer, like any film, is a metaphor for the Nuer. Its difference is that it does not pretend to be a mirror."
Some important concepts and perspectives for anthropological study (Liisa):
Making things/ culture/ beliefs/ habits visible: anthropology looks at everyday culture to make visible things that we take for granted. This being an argument both for looking for research objects at a distance, and for looking at the small and seemingly insignificant and revealing the general and structural in those details and through them.
The other: anthropological research chooses as its subject an "other". This is however a controversial point as well - to what extent anthropology creates "otherness"? Liisa stressed the need to be humble, not to expect to be the one who immediately can see things people living in a culture and a community themselves have not seen.
Detail: looking at the small and insignificant, paying attention to details of cultural habits and beliefs.
Rituals: a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to set sequence. Anthropologists see rituals also in secularized cultures and communities. Rituals are a way of making sense of the world and life, giving and establishing meaning.
Liminal space, liminality: "early anthropological approaches refer to liminal space as a means of managing the dynamic relationship with the norm in a social structure. In more recent analyses, liminality is used to demonstrate the way in which situations of otherness develop, in a complex interplay of power, place, and social and spatial norms."
DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Kastom Twelve,
Jari Kupiainen
Musiikin
muisti, Mirja Metsola
My Urban
Kalakukko Museum, Ilkka Ruohonen
Suomalainen
päiväkirja, Heimo Lappalainen
ANTHROPOLOGICAL FILM CLASSICS
Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner
Man of Aran, Robert J. Flaherty
Mies ja elokuvakamera/ Man With The Moviecamera, Dziga Vertov
Nanook, pakkasen poika/ Nanook of The North, Robert J. Flaherty
Ranskalainen
päiväkirja/ Chronique d´un été, Jean Rouch
Sons of Shiva, Robert Gardner
FESTIVALS
VisCult, Joensuu
Etnosoi!, Helsinki
ANTHROPOLOGICAL BOOK CLASSICS
Anderson, Benedict: Kuvitellut yhteisöt. Nationalismin leviäminen ja
alkuperä/Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Douglas, Mary: Puhtaus ja vaara/
Purity and danger
Durkheim, Émile: Uskontoelämän alkeismuodot/ The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland: Small Places, Large Issues: An
Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
Evans-Pritchard,
E.E.: The Nuer: A
Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic
People
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Tropiikin kasvot/ Tristes Tropiques
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Myth and Meaning
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Savage Mind
Mauss, Marcel: Lahja/ The Gift
Mead, Margaret: Coming
of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western
Civilisation
Turner, Victor: The
Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure
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