Jeffrey Himpele, October 7, 2020
Post-productionLessons about media and culture from our discussions and reading presentations of media ethnography.
- media making entails imagining and producing the audience as a discrete “thing”
- media producers are also media audiences
- media ethnography “de-massifies” mass media/global media; audiences are not passive recipients of media
- top-down imperial or colonial interpretations of media texts and technologies don’t make sense from an ethnographic stance of particular social contexts
- in a global context, culture and difference emerge in hybrid forms
- media making can entail a self-conscious awareness of culture
- media analysis must look beyond the text as a discrete isolable object
- media has material dimensions: both as sensory experience and as an assemblage of different material signifying systems (language, visuals, sound)
- media technologies are not inherently “Western” – but can be incorporated into cultural systems
- “authenticity” is culturally relative
- representation is a social fact.
- Please feel free to comment and add to this list.
Zack Kurtovich, October 12, 2020
Post-productionLast week, I thoroughly interrogated the nuances of ethnography’s contextualization, using “authenticity” as a benchmark of a study’s success. However, as I mentioned in my comment on Gallery 347, this is problematic in itself, due to the culturally relative nature of its definition. As Rei famously pointed out in a previous class, perceptions of authenticity are highly situational and dictated by subtle, almost Foucauldian conceptual schema in the public discourse surrounding the idea of representation. In other words, what signifies authenticity for one person may not for another, depending on which cultural ideology they identify with. In this post, I intend to investigate the implications of authenticity’s cultural relativism. Although this topic has already been extensively discussed in others’ post-productions, I plan on extending the existing discussion by illuminating a simple yet previously overlooked question: why does this cultural relativity matter? Of course, conceptualizations of representation and authenticity are immersed in inextricable webs of culture, everything is, but what does that mean? How should that inform the practices of ethnographers?
These are all questions I feel like we failed to devout commensurate attention to, as we mostly focused on identifying the embeddedness of this concept. They are all complex questions that require complex answers, and I am merely hoping to alert others to these areas of discussion and help stimulate other people’s thinking. To offer my own personal insight, I believe it is hard to ignore that using authenticity as a benchmark to judge the success of a cultural representation probably has an impact on the continual, cyclical production of discourse, culture and media. As I wrote about in one of my first post-productions, true power lies in the ability to subliminally control the production of culture through the limitation of a community’s conceptual framework. Thus, if “the western trap of authenticity” continues to dominate and dictate existing scholarship, excluding diverse and non-Western voices, the external validity and standing of ethnography as a whole could be challenged (Rei). After all, if Western conceptions of “authenticity” are used to gate-keep against those that don’t share that understanding, how is the anthropological community supposed to achieve the true diversity required to repurpose ethnography’s contextualization to their benefit, as I discussed in my last post? This in itself should incentivize ethnographers to attempt to expose and dismantle this cultural bias when challenging or critiquing others. While I understand how the differing standards of authenticity could impact the review of others’ work, its effect on the rhetorical construction of the ethnography itself is less obvious to me. I would love to explore this topic in detail and hear your thoughts on Thursday. How do you think authenticity’s cultural relativism should inform the conceptualization, creation and editing of ethnographies? Do ethnographies even need to take this concept into account during their construction or is the onus mostly on the consumer to illuminate and eliminate the cultural bias in our dialectical responses to new ethnographic contributions? Looking forward to learning more in class this week!
Joe Bartusek, October 9, 2020
Post-productionIn class, we were thinking about the Premiere Pro timeline as a spatial environment in which the emergence of audio-visual media occurs through the layering and (mis)alignment of distinct auditory and visual recordings/representations. For me, the fact that layering and aligning is the predominant form of media production (in music production, in the control rooms of news broadcasts, on TikTok, etc.) means that we are collectively engaged in a system of representation way more complex than the “one-track” recording/distribution of live audio or video; the ability to appeal to the interaction between two senses creates a large, multi-dimensional environment in which representative exchanges can take place.
I think Turner claimed Kayapo editing to be a further extension of the representation inherent in video recording, which I think is one of the most interesting points of the piece when using it to generalize about culture.
I think it’s important to note that there is a range of intentionality when it comes to atomic edits, e.g. in film editing. We have a cultural dictionary of the editing tropes we expect to encounter in film, including the very simple decision to have the speaker’s voice match their mouth, or editing moves like J-cuts; we usually aren’t surprised or even attentive to these edits, because we’ve seen variants of them applied in audio-visual media for our whole lives. Some edits, however, may draw the audience’s gaze and reveal the position of the editor. Likewise on the other end of the process, I assume, film editing includes some edits that are entirely procedural, and some through which an editor makes conscious decisions to fulfill an abstract narrative.
The ethnographic questions of interpretation and of producing representation through film then become about the consciousness of editorial decisions, and, on another blink/wink level, the attentiveness of the audience to those edits.
Anna Durak, October 9, 2020
Post-productionWith this week’s discussion on media editing, I was reminded of a show that I was watching at the beginning of quarentine called the Gallery. The Gallery- Star Wars: The Mandalorian, was produced by DisneyPlus in an effort to bring the audience of the Emmy Award-Winning show behind the scenes and into the processes that occur in order to bring the story to life in front of our eyes. This show is particularly unique in relation to many other shows on the air currently, especially due to its ties to the world-renowned franchise. Behind the scenes, there are multiple directors that all have input in the production process, with Jon Favreau at the center of this group. In the episodes, the directors are seated at a round table and all discuss the different aspects of the show that they had a hand in. The notion that intrigues me the most in this example is the idea of the media producer as the audience. The media producers all reminisce about the Star Wars franchise being an integral part of their childhood, therefore placing them as audiences to the universe (11 movies and lots of cartoon spin-off shows). One of the main challenges that they discussed was the feeling of responsibility that they have to the franchise as well as their childhood selves and thousands of people who this show would impact and thus forever become apart of the Star Wars narrative. With all of that aside, I believe this is a fairly modern/pop culture reference to this idea that we have been discussing. Much like the star wars franchise, ethnography requires astute attention to detail and much care and thought toward the audience of their works. Yet, in both situations the media producer, whether it be for a high budget story or an ethnography, must be able to take themselves out of the narrative they are creating and see their work from the audience’s point of view. They bring preconceived notions and knowledge about their “Field site” to production but must also challenge these ideas in order to create a meaningful piece. The directors are all serving the higher entity of star wars, thus the media is separate from the producers, much like in media ethnography. Ethnographers are all called to the idea of culture, an object in which not one single person owns. Through this calling, ethnographers have the authority to shape and contribute to our understanding of the culture while simultaneously having no ownership of the previously established narratives.
Ailee Mendoza, October 9, 2020
Post-productionI was once told by a professor that the editor should be thought of as “the keeper of genre, the master of human experience.” Using emotion and empathy as his/her guiding tool, an editor must make certain artistic choices to deliver a story that is- despite its degrees of originality and uniqueness- powerful enough to transcend time and space into something familiar and relevant to every audience member around the world…Is that not somewhat the goal of the ethnographer as well?
Since I don’t stop talking about film and film education, I wanted to think about how these skills are learned- particularly on a global scale: How are mediamakers taught to appeal to a “worldwide” audience? How is such a large mission distilled into the smallest, most technical choices, like where to cut, which shots to use, and how to use sound? How does one learn to be “the master of human experience”…and when do you know that you’ve become one? I guess I’m also wondering how this translates to ethnography (and ethnographic film). When we tell stories of distant worlds, how can we tell them in a way that is comprehensible to the widest audience possible?
Watching Prof. Himpele navigate his timeline with impressive ease as he explained to us his editing choices made me wonder where exactly this knowledge and this instinct comes from and if- as the mediamakers and anthropologists of our generation- there are concrete steps we can take to become “masters of human experience” and to thus make our work more accessible…or would that require us to change the “rules” of the discipline or to stray away from our “scientific” origins? Does “objective” = accessible or accurate?
Cynthia Vu, October 9, 2020
Post-productionI had fun getting to see the editing and unediting processes of different documentary videos during our classes this week. I have some limited experience with the unediting process, having made a few AMVs in the past. AMVs, or anime music videos, rely on an editor to split longform content into short clips and reconstruct them in a new order, set to music and occasionally with added sound effects, in order to tell a new story or relay the editor’s vision or version of the story. A lot of other videos can be found on Youtube in which people have edited a particular movie in the style or genre of a different movie. (Please ask me for recommendations if you happen to be interested in this.) My interest in this is part of the reason I took this class.
These AMVs are fan-produced derivative works that allow audience members to become a type of co-producer of the series that they love. Oftentimes these works are community-produced, either literally (in the case of MEPs) or theoretically (a person who produces an AMV is inevitably a member of the community that consumes AMVs and is influenced by the knowledge and insights that are shared within that close-knit community, which informs their production practices). As for this second point, I am beginning to think that all media is community-produced.
We’ve brought up questions about the positionality of the ethnographer in both culture-media-data and producer-content-audience schematics. However, I am now wondering about our own positionality within these structures and processes as we begin to embark on endeavors of unediting and reediting media content. In the case of an anthropologist who produces an ethnographic account through some type of media (description/article, film, etc.), I still think it is difficult to parse out the degree to which that anthropologist can be considered artist vs. scientist, especially if they take on a major creative role (as opposed to a consultant-type role). This is one of the reasons why I asked so many questions about the roles and personal stakes of the various producers and creatives that participated in the Torture Letters animated documentary. I recalled how the chapter “Putting American Public Television in Its Places” discussed the different goals that individual actors had in terms of putting together the Childhood production. But how should we position ourselves within the new schematics we’re creating by taking up reediting projects? What type of investment is necessary for us to mark the delineation of artist vs. anthropologist in this scenario–or is there even a point in attempting to mark those roles separately? I’m excited to discover what types of new insights we’ll be able to gain from participating in this project from such a unique position.
Zack Kurtovich, October 9, 2020
Post-productionI found this week’s discussion to be particularly impactful because it exposed a misconception I had about the purpose of ethnography, which I now realize was misleading my understanding of its imagined audience and intended function. Last week, I wrote a post that identified ethnography’s contextualization as its largest weakness because of its propensity to take on the value judgements of the ethnographer. While I still firmly believe this, I don’t know if I still consider its reliance on culture interpretation to be inherently negative after our conversation on Tuesday. As such, I feel like it is important to revisit my post from last week with my new informed perspective in order to further explore how ethnography’s dependence on interpretation can actually assist the achievement of its larger goal.
Last Tuesday, we briefly touched on the ultimate purpose of ethnography, which actually made me discover a personal bias that I had when I wrote my previous post. According to Professor Himpele, the goal of ethnography is not to provide a conclusive answer, but rather to create and maintain a sustained dialogue between people. This really resonated with me and made me reexamine my prior analyses / conceptualizations. In my most recent blog, I said that “ethnography’s contextualization can also be perceived as one of its largest weaknesses” because it “heavily relies on cultural interpretation”. In hindsight, this was probably reductionist and neglecting an important nuance because it hinged on the assumption that the value judgements and interpretations of the ethnographer reduce the “authenticity” of the piece. This assumption, I now understand, is steeped in a Western, Mitchell-esque perception that representations always need to strive to be perfect depictions of reality. Based on this reasoning, I conceptualized the influence of the ethnographer as “noise” that hindered the “accuracy” of the work. However, in actuality, as I believe Grace pointed out, embracing one’s positionality can actually increase the “authenticity” of the ethnography’s representation in some cases. After all, if the goal of ethnography is to contribute to public discourse, to add new insight to the conversation, then why pretend that your influence doesn’t exist? Why attempt to venture outside of the community in a vain attempt to capture the subject’s essence like a postcard when you can invite the audience into the center of the action like with the Kayapo?
To me, this speaks to the cruciality of increasing diversity and inclusion in anthropology’s academic community, as well as the positive impact empowering local communities can possess. While I understand the importance of maintaining the appearance of a detached academic perspective, it seems as though this is chasing an unattainable dream of “a room with a voice”, as Morris described. Instead, I now believe anthropologists should encourage their subjects to exercise a higher degree of agency over the representation of their culture and become active members in the ethnography’s construction, to step behind the camera as it were. By embracing ethnography’s positionality and bringing the people they study into the production process, anthropologists can transform cultural interpretation into a source of strength that increases the “authenticity” and “accuracy” of the representation, and in that is tremendous value and power. At least from my experience with sociology, I would argue this represents a critical divergence from traditional ethnographic studies where academics always attempt to distance themselves from their positionality, making it an incredibly profound point that will definitely continue to challenge and re-shape my conceptualization of the role of cultural interpretation moving forward.
Thank you all for this week’s insightful discussion! Have a great weekend!
Lauren McGrath, October 9, 2020
Post-productionAfter class ended on Thursday, I kept thinking about the intersections, namely the similarities, between the genre of ethnographic writing and films that I discovered through Professor Himpele’s media dissection demonstration. Namely, I was drawn to the idea of how dissecting film media can build a greater understanding not only of how it was constructed, but understanding the selections made, where the holes are, and how the arrangement of its parts build meaning. I think this idea also connects to the method of understanding the construction of culture, in that how it is framed shows how it was formed.
Last year, as a junior, many of my required anthropology classes were structured around understanding the theory, methods, and practices of ethnography; aspects such as voice, positionality, intersectionality and narrative came up a lot. In making connections from those classes to this class, I’m realizing that in any form of media, whether it be written ethnography or a Hollywood film, that there are choices, exclusions and decisions that are made deliberately. Viewing film and ethnography in this light, I began to think about what is the distinction between the two, if there is one? I think positionality plays a large role in this distinction; the method of ethnography depends on this to reveal decisions and acknowledge why and when you made them, and how your position as an anthropologist contributed to those decisions. A grounding example that I found was in Professor Ralph’s the Torture Letters (book and film): his positionality of growing up in the city of Chicago as a child is made known to the audience. The audience is very aware of his emotional connection to these stories, both through his acknowledgement and his choice of a personal, letter writing narrative. In doing this, his story and film is made in a relationship with its audience and ethnographic interlocutors. I’m wondering though, if this relationship is heightened through the medium of film; myself, as an audience member of Professor Ralph’s film, felt that my “experience” of film ethnography is different than its textual form. I think a specific reason for this is that Professor Ralph personally narrates this story. Does hearing this story in his words, rather than my voice in my own head as I read, add a layer of context?
I am very much looking forward to working on my group project with these questions in mind; specifically, continuing to learn and make connections back to the King case that we looked at earlier this semester. As we proceed, will we feel as though we are doing something very similar to the defense, in deconstruction media and contextualizing it? Can we understand how media makes some narratives compelling by viewing the narrative in cut sections rather than a whole? I’m hoping through this exercise to gain a greater understanding of how media obtains its meaning so that I can later apply it to my thesis; I want to be consciously aware of which data sets I chose to include and why and what, or whose narrative, I might have left out in making those decisions.
Rei Zhang, October 6, 2020
Post-productionInspired by discussions we had in class about ethnographic videos, I want to reflect upon and offer an extension to Geertz’s description of ethnography and of ethnographic media that we haven’t explicitly discussed yet. Geertz says that ethnography consists of writing down or inscribing social acts and behaviors. He doesn’t mention other forms of anthropologic description, like photos or the films we’ve been watching. To me, films and photos are another way of inscribing, or recording, behavior and events, and can be considered to be part of the anthropologist’s toolset.
Considering that Geertz was writing in 1973, and that anthropology has incorporated more technology since then, how do pictures and video recordings serve the anthropologist’s task of inscribing social interaction so that it can be analyzed and picked apart? And, how do visual forms of anthropology differ from written accounts?
My first instinct was that a video is different from a written account because a video is edited, and thus the editor imposes their own bias on the content. However, this definitely falls into the western trap of authenticity that we clarified in class, and the anthropologist also applies their own lens onto events through their writings and descriptions.
After extricating myself from the trap of the “really real”, I think I’ve managed to pin down one difference between anthropological media like photos and videos and anthropological descriptions. Photos and videos are wider – they show more than words. In the case of written accounts, we only get access to whatever phenomenon the writer chooses to inscribe; incidentals, like colors, facial expressions, or background objects, for example, are recorded or not recorded on the whim of the anthropologist. Photos and videos are also focused on whatever the anthropologist is trying to capture, but they also contain incidental information like the aforementioned clothing colors or facial expressions, that the anthropologist doesn’t have to choose to include or not include. This phenomenon allows for even more layers of description, because anthropologists can then attempt to inscribe their observations from video, rather than from real life.
To paraphrase a trite saying, a photo (video) can be worth a thousand words.
Emily Yu, October 2, 2020
Post-productionI am still grappling with Rei’s point that authenticity can only exist when there is some sort of other culture, in this case Western culture, that can be used as a point of contrast. On one hand, I can understand that logic. It’s ironic that it is due to Western imperialism that the value of anthropologists’ ethnographic work can also be revealed: recognizing the ways in which communities are able to solidify their own understandings of themselves only by recognizing the difference between themselves in relation to the “others.” The “others” that very much pose a threat to that same sense of self – like the instance of the Brazilians encroaching on Kayapo’s community-oriented identity or even in the instance of Thai “national” culture being created in response to Western culture.
On another other hand, hasn’t authenticity always existed within communities prior to Western imperialism but has since then only been made more obvious through cultural differences? Turner makes a great point in his article that maybe we should stray away from this idea of preserving authenticity altogether: “The real issues (in relation to indigenous video production) are not the preservation of ‘culture,’ non-Western or Western, but the empowerment of social actors, whatever their degree of culture “purity” as defined by whatever standard, to produce their own cultural mediations (80).” In other words, Turner is trying to recognize that there is no such thing as authenticity because it’s constructed. Instead of focusing on authenticity’s very meaning being derived from difference between two communities, we should be focusing on how authenticity is defined by the community itself and is carried out through mediations, rituals, and actions.
I guess in conclusion, that the answer to authenticity could lie somewhere between both Turner’s and Rei’s point: authenticity is not only derived form within a community but also through recognizing the differences between that community and others.
Anna Durak, October 2, 2020
Post-productionAfter we met for class yesterday, I went right into another Anthropology class’s precept where we discussed thin and thick descriptions in a series of poetry by Renato Renaldo. We debated as to whether or not poetry could be considered an authentic form of ethnographic work and I was reminded of the idea of authenticity that we had just discussed. I believe that a key part of ethnographic work is its appeal to humanity, and what is more a part of the human experience than human emotion. What differentiates filmmaking from poetry? They both require astute attention to detail and are considered to be works of art. They both convey the emotions of their creator’s reality. Both of these representations require expressional decisions in order to portray the intended reality of emotions.
I keep returning to the question Professor Himpele posed as to why the camera was placed at the center of the circle for the filming of the dancing ritual. If the village is considered the center of the village and the camera is then placed in the center of the village, what does this imply? I believe they chose this shot in order to represent the unity of the village in the trying time. By placing the camera in the center of the circle instead of outside the circle or above the circle, we are brought into the raw emotional connections and our presence is placed among the people, on the same level, experiencing the same things. Through this decision, we as the audience view a sample of poetry that is the Kayapo’s existence.
Media ethnography allows the narratives of individuals and cultures to be replicated through a series of decisons of styles and their intended meanings. Through the understanding that an individual’s perspective is their own reality, who are we as ethnographers to discredit its authenticity?
Grace Logan, October 2, 2020
Post-productionIn class on Thursday, we had a discussion about cultural authenticity in the context of two Kayapo villages, Kapot and Gorotire. What was interesting to me is that we began this discussion with a working definition of authenticity that was from the point of view of a “Westerner”. This definition held that authenticity meant the Kayapo staying true to themselves, a past version of themselves. I think many other students recognized that this definition was subpar because it did not allow for any change in Kayapo culture, that is behaviour, ways of dressing, adoption of technology, social and physical structures. I would like to make a connection to Timothy Mitchell’s writing on the Orient. Early on in the passage, Mitchell establishes that the concept of the Orient creates a dichotomy between the Orient and the West. Orientalism portrays the Orient as “passive”, “static”, and “emotional” and the West as “active”, “mobile”, and “rational” (p. 289). If my reading of Mitchell is right, the first definition that we discussed is complicit in Orientalist ideas, as it holds that Kayapo culture must remain “static” in order to remain authentic.
Later, another definition of authenticity was introduced, which held that the Kayapo would define what was authentic for their own culture. I think it is important that we continue to work with this definition of authenticity as it avoids the othering and infantilizing that Orientalism implies. Regarding the idea of Kayapo determining their own cultural authenticity, we also discussed how the interaction with Terence Turner and the Kayapo Video project made the Kayapo conscious of their culture. This idea of media technology increasing self consciousness and self awareness is fascinating to me and brings to mind an example from a similar project, the Video in the Villages Project. During this project Brazilian activist and anthropologist Vincent Carelli works with the Nambiquara who sometimes use their videos to critique and discuss making changes to rituals. This has prompted me to wonder about how media in our own society can make us increasingly self conscious and self aware. In recent years, social media and other forms of media have been used as evidence when confronting public figures about past problematic behaviour, and arguably sparked broader societal awareness on the related issues. I think that is just scratching the surface on the concept of media/social media raising or producing self consciousness, it would be interesting to consider the ripple effect of these instances, examples that are not related to cancel culture, and examples of non-public figures.
Cynthia Vu, October 2, 2020
Post-productionI think the question of authenticity is a complex one, and as for our discussion of whether the depiction of the Kapot or the Gorotire is more authentic–I still find myself unable to answer this question, because I don’t believe that either answer is correct. I think that Rei hit the nail on the head by proposing that the ways in which we conceive of and discuss authenticity are rooted in Western philosophies, and that outside of Western influences our concept of “authenticity” wouldn’t necessarily exist or at least wouldn’t exist in the same way. I am reminded of the Mitchell reading and how we discussed similar ideas about the concept of and vocabulary surrounding “bias”.
But setting aside questions about whether authenticity even exists and how it might be defined or understood, I’d like to think about how authenticity might be represented through the medium of film, and how a filmmaker might try to depict or convey authenticity to other people (and in this process, perhaps reveal some of his or her own conceptions of what authenticity actually is).
Questions about representing authenticity in film make me think about my recent viewing of Tokyo Story, a Japanese drama film published in 1953. Although Tokyo Story is a work of fiction, it is also a film preoccupied with questions of authenticity and how best to represent relationships, landscapes, and trauma most authentically. Ultimately, director Yasujiro Ozu’s answer was that the best way to maintain authentic representation was to avoid representation at all. Because the reality of Tokyo was too vast and complex to reduce to a scene of a film–he attempted no comprehensive representation of Tokyo. Rather, the city only occasionally appears in snapshots and otherwise doesn’t visually appear at all, even though its presence pervades the text. The characters in the film gaze at and admire landscapes and scenes of Tokyo, but the external audience is only able to access and look at the people who are looking at Tokyo. For Ozu, maintaining authenticity meant understanding that authentic representation was impossible and thus abandoning the attempt at doing so entirely.
This matter makes me reflect on how Michael Beckman and Terence Turner attempt to portray the Kayapo tribe authentically in the documentary, as well as how the Kayapo tribes attempt to portray themselves authentically in their own created media. On the level of the documentary, authentic representation necessitated that the videographers follow alongside the Kapot and the Gorotire as they live their daily lives. This included filmic representation of Kayapo rituals and practices, which were either narrated over or explained through a casual interview format with various Kayapo tribe members. As such, it appears that authentic representation was conceived of and achieved by the ethnographer and videographers maintaining a close intimacy with the Kayapo in order to learn about and represent their culture. There are also many moments in which the documenters follow individuals and learn about their stories. On the level of the Kayapo’s self-produced video content, I was most interested by the fact that the camera often remained in the center of depictions of the Kayapo rituals. The Kayapo cameraperson maintains no distance as he is also a part of the tribe and community that he is trying to authentically represent (and arguably the most authentic representations of a community are only made possible by the members of that community, although this view is complicated, as previously seen in the Media Worlds chapter “Culture in the Ad World: The Latin Look”). Unlike the Western documenters who also try to pick out individual narratives and stories to act as representative instances that make up a single culture, the Kayapo filmmakers also seem to just try to capture the lives and activities of the community as a whole, reemphasizing the importance of their social-centered values through the filmic depiction.
Jeffrey Himpele 
Zack Kurtovich
Comments
A rich set of reflections, Zack. Given the combined relativity and embeddedness of “authenticity” it is indeed worth asking if we must retain the term, or simply “cut it down to size” as Geertz might suggest. Cutting to size entails ethnographic analysis, as this post valuable suggests. It would be very well worth reviewing the ethnographic chapters in Media Worlds to see how this category fares in these ethnographic settings.