Centred on the idea that police forces are often a focal point for conflict in today’s societies, this chapter takes an interest in big data policing in Amsterdam as a contested development. Looking at the socio-technical preconditions of such new, algorithmic forms of policing brings to the surface that police forces employ certain grids of legibility upon the input they receive from communities, both by recognising only certain forms of input as legitimate, and by decomposing individuals into their predictive features. Against the background of a grim conflict between police officers and young Moroccan Dutchmen, the authors offer a selected description of three security innovations on the basis of the six months of fieldwork in Amsterdam that were part of larger ethnographic study of the Dutch police (2008–13).
‘Parallel society’ is a term with clear negative connotations, often used as self-evident without further need for explanation. In Northern Europe, the term has been used to describe a danger scenario – an unwillingness to integrate, a growing risk of disintegrated society, crime, ethnic enclaves and Islamic fundamentalism – and it has provided journalists, police and politicians with a ‘scientific’ term to forward anti-migration and anti-multiculturalism discourses. The term ‘parallel society’ (parallellsamhällen) is new to Sweden, but has lately been increasingly used in reports from the police, where it is framed as a force on its way to take over core societal structures in socio-economically vulnerable areas, such as criminal and private law, banking, housing and labour markets. The ambition of this chapter is to examine the content of the term ‘parallel society’ as it is used in reports from the police, and scrutinise this use considering notions of a punitive turn and the practice of categorisation of population groups in Swedish criminal policy and practice. By drawing on examples of a recent police operation in Sweden and the Danish ‘parallel society law’, I argue that the parallel society discourse might have consequences in terms of police work, by affecting how the police understand and thus act upon social problems and social phenomena, and that this is driven by categorising some population groups as the foreign ‘other’. By transforming social phenomena and problems into police questions, they are translated and understood as criminal problems, as are the population groups connected to the phenomena.
Our ethnographic research aimed at exploring the communicative practices of police officers in Germany when encountering speakers of different languages. However, we soon realised that they face similar communicative issues in many other encounters. Therefore, this chapter widens the focus, not only studying communicative practices when different ‘named languages’ are involved, but also exploring encounters involving differing language varieties, styles and registers; these differences are not grounded in nationality or culture but in the citizens’ class, community, state of mind and more. In these encounters, police officers routinely reach a sufficient level of understanding by mixing languages and language varieties, by using gestures, by relying on common-sense sequences of bureaucracy, and ultimately by employing the potential to use violence. Surprisingly, the main challenge – and the main source of misunderstanding – is not translation in a linguistic sense, but the need to translate complex everyday situations according to organisational guidelines and legal norms. Communicative practices are intertwined with ‘doing police’ – the challenge of translating between citizens’ expectations and organisational rationalities of the police.
The Art of the Observer is a personal guide to documentary filmmaking, based on the author’s years of experience as a writer on film and a maker of ethnographic and documentary films. It devotes particular attention to observational filmmaking and the distinctive philosophy and methodology of this approach. Each of its chapters addresses a different aspect of filmmaking practice, offering both practical insights and reflections on what it means, in both intellectual and emotional terms, to attempt to represent the lives of others. The book makes clear that documentary cinema is not simply a matter of recording reality, but also of analytically and artfully organising the filmmaker’s observations in ways that reveal the complex patterns of social life.
In 1988, prior to making the film Photo Wallahs (1991), the filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall had to import their filming equipment into India. This chapter provides a narrative account of the process of clearing the equipment through Indian customs, written immediately after the event. The importation involved numerous documents to be tendered and signed by officials, as well as the inspection of the equipment, carried out in the heat of an Indian summer, all this in competition with other people trying to get similar clearances for their goods. The hero of the piece is the clearing agent, Mr Gandhi, who has been doing this sort of thing for years.
This chapter describes a meeting of filmmaker Robert Gardner with students in a graduate seminar at Harvard University. In a discussion Gardner responded to questions from the students about the making of Forest of Bliss (1985), his film about Hindu rituals of death in Varanasi (formerly Benares), which the students had just seen. He tells how he was inspired by the films of the Italian Neorealist directors, the themes he had in mind in making the film, the convergence in it of poetic elements, and the practical problems he encountered in making it. Other topics covered include overcoming the ethnocentrism of viewers, the role of chance and circumstance in documentary filmmaking, and why he is attracted to making films in other cultures as a way of addressing universal aspects of human experience.
This chapter discusses the varied historical and epistemological conceptions of ethnographic film, from the idea of films conceived as museum collections, to so-called ‘illustrated lectures’, to films made as visual equivalents of written ethnographies, and films that explore the performative, emotional and underlying cultural patterns of human societies. The pros and cons of several approaches are considered, along with their different methodologies. Among these are the various forms of observational cinema, ranging from films focusing on the filmmaker’s immediate observations, to those using narrative methods, to those creating more multi-level structures. The chapter describes how some films extend existing filmic possibilities in the temporal and sensory realms, in their uses of narrative, in emphasising thematic elements, and in combining several of these approaches in the same film. The author concludes that if ethnographic filmmaking is to develop its full potential, no single approach can be held up as the only legitimate one.
Filmmakers are frequently called upon to film in small communities, where the objective may be as much to convey the unique character of the community as the individuals within it. Following on from the previous chapter, the author describes in detail the history of making the Doon School film series in India. He discusses the various approaches required to convey the intertwined personal, physical and social aspects of the subjects’ lives. In some cases this involved the simultaneous layering of several different cultural and social patterns. The author concludes that only through such complex structures can films represent social experience in ways that transcend those of written texts.
Films are born out of ideas and hard work, but also out of the energies and emotional lives of their makers. This chapter discusses the range of emotions experienced by filmmakers when making films, as they undergo sensations of pleasure, empathy, delight, worry, frustration and sometimes a divided consciousness. Documentary filmmaking also allows filmmakers to cross the borders of culture, class, age and gender as they record the lives of others. Referring to his own experiences and those of such filmmakers as Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Basil Wright, the author links the feelings of filmmakers to the films they produce, exploring the challenges they face along the way.
This chapter discusses the potential of children to use filmmaking to explore aspects of their communities from their own unique perspective as children. Based on the ‘Childhood and Modernity’ video workshop project in India, the author (who directed the project) describes how children responded to the opportunity to film the subjects they had chosen, and the unusual films that resulted from it. With no previous experience of documentary filmmaking, they often invented new ways of using the camera, producing films and filming styles clearly marked by their own personalities. An unexpected aspect of the project was the extent to which some children identified with their cameras as confidants and friends.