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TWENTIETH ANNUAL VISUAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS Peter Biella and Kate Hennessy - San Francisco State University and University of British Columbia Dissemination of Interactive Visual Anthropology: CD-ROM and Web Versions of Visual Anthropology Review Time-based and text-based media have had an uneasy partnership in Visual Anthropology. Bateson and Mead (1942) could not include motion picture material in their final publication. Heider (1972) broke ground when he published shot-by-shot comments in his printed ethnographic companion to "Dead Birds." With the development of multimedia, copresentation on a single computer screen of print and motion-pictures has become commonplace on the web but technically-daunting and underutilized in anthropology. With interactive media, however, anthropologists can create frame-specific descriptions of moving images and include frame-accurate links to them on screen. Biella, Chagnon and Seaman (1997) took advantage of the power of such linkage in their analysis of "The Ax Fight" film. Visual Anthropologists' capacity to analyze their own films leaves unanswered the problem of copyright and quoting the films of others. Access by scholars to many films in anthropology is still extremely hard to achieve. The inclusion of quoted film clips in Visual Anthropological writings is a possible solution to the problem, but the cooperation of copyright-holding filmmakers and distributors is necessary for interactive anthropology to meet its potential. In this presentation, we show the latest issue of "Visual Anthropology Review" (Vol. 19, no. 1-2) in which ten essays include frame-accurate digital linkage, use print to analyze the moving images, and offer a solution to the problem of copyright. This issue contains articles on two series of films produced in Southern Africa. Through an accompanying CD-ROM, the essays quote fifty different films and a hundred and forty individual film clips. The attachment of a CD-ROM to the back cover of each copy of the journal, at a cost per customer of about $1.25, poses a viable first solution to the problem of linkage. The CD can easily be placed on the web, and thus solve problems of distribution and lack of access to films. The editors' proofing, laying out, designing and writing html code for the print and interactive versions of the volume required about four months. ---------------- Fadwa El Guindi - Georgetown University The Story Behind Visual Anthropology This presentation will take us on a journey from chimps in Monkey Jungle to Arab scientists to Jean Rouch to Margaret Mead, all the way to The Visual Research Conference of Tom Blakely. It covers methodological issues, colonial influences, theoretical controversies and new visions -- in other words, everything that is anthropology in visual anthropology. ---------------- Bethe Hagens - Union Institute and University Program in Interdisciplinary Studies (focus anthropology) Geometric Visualization of the Cosmos - Ancient and Modern This highly visual presentation summarizes the current status of my now twenty-year collaboration (as a generalist cultural anthropologist) with a geometer-designer (William S. Becker) and, more recently, an astrophysicist (Thomas Weaver) to compare our discoveries in geometric visualization. We use small and large scale models of "cosmos" (from virus and molecular DNA construction, to hand-held artifacts from the world art tradition, planetary topographical features, and the visible "celestial sphere"). The seed structure for our work is the hexakis icosahedron (first formally described in Plato's Timaeus). We use it to generate a mutually stimula ting interdisciplinary language as well as a framework for the understanding of problems in our specific research traditions. ---------------- Lisa Jane Hardy - Temple University Dog This video presentation incorporates ethnographic research I conducted at the Orianna Hill dog park in Philadelphia in 2003-2004, depicting patterns of American culture and how they come into play within a single park in a single neighborhood. I explore question of how neighborhood residents perform larger contextual narratives of gender and class through interaction, and how space and place become central to the performance of similarity, difference and community. Data collected for this project included spatial mapping and social network analysis combined with participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Through this presentation I illustrate visual research methods and demonstrate possible means for the visual presentation of these data for both public and intra-disciplinary audiences. ---------------- Amanda Holmes - University of Florida The Role of Embodied Communication in Transmitting Ways of Knowing Nature: Yoruba Diaspora in Matanzas, Cuba and Oyatunji Village, South Carolina All natural phenomena originated from the Supreme Being Oludumare; all of nature is sacred. The Yoruba work with the spirits of nature such as the trees, plants, rain, river water, animals and the orisha (deities that personify natural elements and that help humans communicate between the physical and spiritual worlds). This presentation begins with a brief historical and conceptual understanding of the concept of 'traditional' ways of knowing nature. The presentation will then highlight the ideoscapes of the Yoruba traditional religious knowledge system, particularly as it informs the concepts and the interactions of god(s), humans and natures along with specific oral and performative examples in narrative and visual form based on ethnographic fieldwork with Yoruba practitioners in Matanzas, Cuba and Oyatunji, South Carolina (U.S.A). Yoruba practitioners on the African continent and the Yoruba diaspora abroad acquire and pass on knowledge about nature through embodied communication. Thus, I will overview my intended process of accessing and representing the transmission of ecological knowledge through the embodied communication of oral tradition (e.g., stories, chants, songs, poetry and myths) and artistic expression (e.g., dance, sculpture, music, painting and performance), focusing on the elements of water and el monte (the sacred forest) and the respective orisha Oshun and Osain. ---------------- Andrea Heckman - University of New Mexico Ausangate,Peru and the Pilgrimage of Qoyllur RitI: From still photography to documentary film making as Visual Communication In this presentation still photography and ethnographic film will be discussed as communication of indigenous perspectives within the scope of the Anthropology of Art and as valuable visual tools for fieldwork. Clues to the meanings of visual signs are often recorded in photos and film as in Ausangate, Peru, where research and filmmaking shows how worldview is transmitted through the creation and active use of textiles in festivals, pilgrimage, rites of passage and daily life. Ausangate is considered a mountain spirit or local god to the indigenous Quechua who maintain their lives by ritually feeding it and in return receiving the mountain's blessings. Qoyllur Riti is one of Peru's most sacred annual pilgrimages and it takes place in the shadows of 20,800 foot Ausangate. This presentation explores the perspectives of weavers and ritualists in their relationships to the sacred mountain through ethnographic photos and a ten-minute DVD documentary and sound track. ---------------- Anita Kumar - University of Southern California Dancing with Shakti: Performing nation and gender in the South Asian diaspora I would like to present selected excerpts from my video documentary, each of which will serve as a springboard for discussion and feedback on the issues and themes that I explore. The project I will be presenting at the conference is a cultural biography of a South Asian woman, Viji Prakash. Viji migrated from Bombay to Los Angeles in 1976, and soon established a Bharata Natyam (South Indian classical dance) school and company. In the past twenty-five years, Viji has been remarkably successful in the production and circulation of the dance form within as well as outside the South Asian diasporic community. The student body is comprised of a wide range of ethnicities, from South Asian to Latina, including a Filipino male. Consequently, how is the discourse around nation and homeland rewritten as a performative field? How does the very movement of Bharata Natyam contribute to the corporeal crafting of 'Indianness' and gender, real and imagined? These are the kinds of questions I hope to raise during the presentation discussions. i chose a person-centered ethnography to get at the particulars, to evoke the lived experiences of the larger theories examined. I follow several of Viji's students in order to examine more effectively these questions of performativity and cultural hybridity. Secondly, I employ a reflexive strategy. How does my own position as a South Asian female born and raised in Los Angeles, actively construct this narrative and lend itself to the construction of nationhood and gender? How does the continually developing relationship between Viji and me inform the analysis? In dialogue with Viji's life history is an autoethnography where I explore and describe the historical, social and psychological forces that shaped my own learning of Bharata Natyam, and my strong resistance to it, my Indian heritage and the South Asian diasporic community. Through my research, and in producing and editing this visual project, I hope to promote what I believe to be the necessary need to look for other means of expressing cultural narratives (particularly the visual), in blurring disciplinary boundaries. Adopting a humanistic and reflexive approach, I also problematize the notion of a transparent account of reality. ---------------- Steve Luber - New York University "Your Attention Please": Media, Spectacle, and The Complex Famed director Robert Wilson has said that the rock concert is "the great opera of our time." The Blue Man Group, taking a cue from Wilson, developed The Complex, a multi-media rock show that stimulates and challenges the spectators' visual capacity and attention by examining how technology affects the gaze in viewing events such as the singular spectacle, as well everyday life. By positioning themselves as a technologically informed "Other," the Blue Man Group uses an "Everyman" perspective to invert the ethnographic experiment so that it is the object that engages the subject. Focusing on Bergson's ruminations on duration, Foucault's concept of "heterotopias," the Situationists' work on the spectacle, and a close "reading" of one particular piece from The Complex, a piece appropriately entitled "Your Attention Please," I intend to posit a new ethnography of the gaze for contemporary society-one governed by technology, capitalist culture, and mass media-in order to examine the paradigmatic shift in the way we experience "attention." This presentation will be thoroughly interactive and performative, using a DVD document of the performance, and audience experiences to investigate and complement the argument, placing them in the role as spectators (mediated and informed, but spectators nonetheless). And marshmallows - there will be marshmallows. ---------------- Garrett Alexandrea McDowell - Temple University A Hermeneutic Approach to Anthropological Photography through Web Media: First Comes Love, Then Comes.... In this presentation, I will introduce a new model for anthropological photography in the form of a website. This hermeneutic analysis is inspired by a choose-your-own adventure approach to ethnographic information. As a discipline, anthropology has been deficient in the application of photography. This is partially due to problems with the presentation of words and images in the photograph with caption, linear format of books. New media alternatives such as websites and digital hypermedia offer formats where viewer-interactivity is integral in a contextualized and multi-layered framework. These new options elucidate, displace and contest the problematic power relationship between subject, photographer and viewer. I will examine these larger issues of power inherent to the visual representation of ethnographic work, particularly in regards to photography. My analysis and website model is based on research of weddings in the United States, which I have conducted over the past two years The website I will introduce in this presentation, offers a way of understanding wedding rituals that is impossible through traditional, linear and caption-based work. ---------------- |
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