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Returning to the main themes and lines of analysis developed in the book and to the collaborative research process, this chapter draws the volume’s conclusions. Constructed as a hybrid between written and oral text, it is a dialogue and a conversation in the form of the Mapuche nütxam – extensively adopted during the research project – between the book’s three editors and the project’s coordinators. This conversation, taking place in a virtual format due to the COVID-19 emergency, hovers around the authors’ positionalities, collaboration and frictions. In doing so, it elaborates on the process of collaborative research and collective writing, knowledge production, methodological decolonisation and indigenous political aesthetics and their broader meaning from both an anthropological and activist standpoint.
Building on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, the volume elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space. It moves from practice-based and collaborative research with young Mapuche and mestizo artists and activists in Santiago (Chile), drawing together a range of different materials: from artworks to theatre and performance; from graphics to audio and visual materials. An edited collection, the book is constructed by shifting between different authorships and changing perspectives from the individual to the collective. This approach, while to a certain extent within the classical structure of editors/authors, plays with the roles of researcher/research participant, highlighting the ambiguities, frictions and exchanges involved in this relationship. Elaborating on indigenous knowledge production, the book thus addresses the possibility of disrupting the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city by articulating meanings through artistic and performative representations. As such, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations constructed through an aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed’): a particular way of knowing and engaging with reality, and ultimately an active process of home- and self-making beyond the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. Actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship and knowledge production.
The Proscenium introduces the site-specific theatre play Santiago Waria, addressing the interdisciplinary methodology adopted and lingering on its development, particularly from the perspective of scenic arts. The Proscenium introduces site-specific theatre and performance as it has been developed in Latin America and in Chile. It then illustrates the specific urban spatialities constituting the main nodes of the theatre piece as an interactive city tour, describing the concrete process of construction and rehearsal of the play, as a shared creative process engaging with the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city.
In Santiago, Mapuche communities have been organising and adapting spaces for cultural and political manifestations, ceremonies and exchanges of knowledge. A strong connection to the territory in the south of the country is maintained through travelling and visiting relatives or participating in the activities of the community of origin. However, despite the large indigenous population living in the Chilean capital, there is no clear territorial identity linked to the city and represented in clothing and/or jewellery, as is the case for traditional identities in the ancestral territory. Specific jewellery designs are linked to particular places, according to geographical and genealogical characteristics, becoming testimonial portraits of cosmogonic spirituality and political organisation. Yet in Santiago, there is no specific design of jewellery, but rather a mixing style (champurriado) mirroring heterogeneous and multiple identities. This chapter elaborates on the artwork Sonidos bajo el cemento (Sounds beneath concrete), proposing an imagined Mapurbe jewellery design based on conversations with Mapuche youths in Santiago.
This chapter provides an overview and guide to the methodology, theory, practice and ethics of ethnographic filmmaking. Examining in turn the various uses of film in anthropology, the differences between anthropological writing and anthropological films, and the kinds of knowledge produced by each, it proceeds to discuss the practical concerns of the anthropological filmmaker: questions of point of view, method and different approaches to the construction of films. It considers the pros and cons of teamwork and single-author filmmaking, aspects of film aesthetics, relationships with the subjects of films, the filmmaker’s behaviour in the field and different modes of camera use. Finally, it addresses the different practical strategies possible for this kind of filmmaking, including a focus on individuals as subjects, the uses of narrative, and thematic approaches. Also considered is the filmmaker’s relation to the viewer, and ways of making the filmmaker’s intentions and practice more evident within the film.
The anthropologist George Marcus wrote that cinema helped to inspire the use of montage-like juxtapositions in ethnographic texts. In this chapter, the author argues that the emergence of a cinematic imagination, which imagines the world constructed around the viewer, had more effect on anthropological writing than the presence of films themselves. Concern about how the construction of documentary films represents reality probably preceded similar concerns by anthropologists about the writing of anthropological texts. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, anthropologists conceived of images as a source of knowledge, but this waned as they turned to less visible aspects of culture. Interest in visual anthropology revived only after the Second World War, with the work of Jean Rouch and John Marshall. Rouch pioneered a form of intense, immersive cinema, and Marshall employed filming and editing strategies that placed the viewer imaginatively within the three-dimensional field of the scenes filmed. This tended to counteract the perceptual and conceptual ‘flatness’ of earlier representations of culture. Malinowski’s and Evans-Pritchard's writing had contributed to a more immediate and rounded view, but ethnographic cinema confirmed it, making a significant contribution to anthropology as a whole.
This chapter argues that written and spoken language do not accurately convey how we actually think, or even how language presents itself in our minds. The ways images are organised in films also fail to represent accurately how we see and how we process mental images. The conventions of language and film are partly responsible for this, but the author argues that it is sometimes possible for individual artists to break the rules, bringing films closer to portraying the realities of conscious experience. For example, filmmakers such as Flaherty, Godard and Hitchcock are able to construct new and distinctive ways of looking at the world. Referring to the work of the anthropologist and filmmaker Ivo Strecker and art critic Norman Bryson, the chapter closes with a discussion of the uses of the short and long take in nonfiction cinema, comparing these with the glance and the gaze in human perception.
Research in the sciences, including the social sciences, is usually supposed to be conducted in a systematic way, working from research questions to the gathering of empirical data, to conclusions. But in an analogy drawn from the art of fencing, the author argues for an alternative approach in visual anthropology. Films look at the world differently from the ways we conventionally see, and these differences have optical, social and structural origins. To overcome these differences, filmmakers may have to voluntarily ‘dislocate’ themselves in order to put themselves in a position to view their subject from a different perspective, and so uncover new knowledge. The argument is supported by a discussion of the realities of ethnographic fieldwork, the processes of filmmaking, and the role of play and improvisation in the arts and other human endeavours.
This chapter provides a critical overview of the history of documentary cinema, which gradually lost sight of its early inspiration in the cinema of the Lumière brothers, adopting many of the features of fiction film production and modelling itself increasingly on didactic texts and journalism. In the sound era, British documentary films made under the aegis of John Grierson, despite his celebration of the ‘actual’, turned towards mass education and an idealised vision of collective humanity, and away from recording events in human lives. Italian Neorealist fiction films and changes to camera technology in the post-war period inspired a return to these objectives, but television remained firmly fixed on journalism, entertainment and public issues. Reactions took many forms, including experimental documentaries, social advocacy, biography and autobiography, and films exploring the relationship of film to reality. The rise of observational films promised a return to the more modest aim of giving audiences shared access to what the filmmaker had witnessed, despite the challenges of manipulative ‘reality’ television and designer-packaged documentaries. The essay refers to a host of influences and commentaries, including those of Edward Said, Bill Nichols, Dai Vaughan, Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, Errol Morris, Colin Young and Grierson himself.
Taking the problem of filming children’s lives as a focus, this chapter explores how environments in cinema both condition and reflect the inner life of the film subject, citing films by Rossellini, De Sica, Ozu, Antonioni and several documentary filmmakers. For the author, the experiences of filming children at a school and at a juvenile detention centre in India raised important questions about the relation of physical and social environments to an individual’s consciousness, and how this could be conveyed by cinematic means. One solution was to focus specifically on the concrete objects and surroundings that shaped the children’s perceptual world. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of accurately portraying children’s lives in modern society, caused by parental fears and the increasing idealisation of childhood innocence. These factors may even increase the risks associated with portraying children’s lives in documentary films.