After 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.