Workshop 4: Use of video material in ethnographic research (on Friday)
Chairs: Sanna Tawah, MA / PhD student (sanna.tawah (at) jyu.fi) & SidyLamine Bagayoko, Research fellow, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis
Nowadays, many ethnographers use video cameras in research. However, there is no standard approach as how to use video camera and utilize video footage in ethnography. The individual utilization of video in ethnography is influenced by personal and professional elements of identities of the researchers, such as gender, age, ethnicity, class, theoretical beliefs and various visual representation traditions. As Sarah Pink (2001: 29) explains, ethnographers themselves are members of societies in which the use of video camera and visual images are already practiced and understood in particular ways.
Furthermore, visual material such as anthropological films and documentaries created by others can also be used as research material. This, however, calls for reflection over the role of editor, interests of producers, the dynamics of the productions process, and the layers of interpretations. And can fiction be a source of ethnographic inquiry?
In this workshop, we would like to discuss the use of video material and video footage in ethnography, which can be anything between research films and footage for academic audiences, ethnographic documentaries for wider audience, education films, movies or any other type of image or film produced in the course of ethnographic research or analyzed as part of ethnographic research. What is the role of video in ethnographic representation? What makes a video representation ethnographic? How to go beyond an “objectifying approach” of ethnographic video, in what ways informants can be involved into production of ethnographic video materials? How unedited and edited ethnographic video footage can be used for research purposes? What are the ethical issues of ethnographic video and how they should be addressed in a research?
We welcome topics which address the potential, best practices as well as challenges of ethnographic video in various fields of social sciences and humanities using ethnographic method. We also encourage reflection on the use of films as research material.
References: Pink, Sarah. 2001. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: SAGE
Presentations:
Bagayoko, SidyLamine
Video representations in Ethnography “The real social anthropology”
Though other disciplines like sociology, education, history, development studies etc. might use ethnography as method, it is the privileged one in anthropology. It is said that if you want to know what is anthropology, you need to see anthropologists doing anthropology, and the way of doing anthropology is by carrying out ethnographic fieldwork (cf. Just & Monoghan, 2000).
In this communication, I am concerned by video representations in ethnography as “ The real social anthropology” through examples drawn from my own experience of fieldwork using video camera as main research tool. Besides all the restrictions concerning ethical issue in anthropology, using video camera in field research reveals to be quite challenging. Contrary to the other social anthropologists, anthropologist with can be confronted to different constraints.
On one hand, with camera devices, researcher might need to follow both the rules for normal researcher without camera and the rules for film-maker. On the other hand, the second stage remain to convince the protagonists on your field ground to accept your presence everyday and if possible every moment with camera to film.
This presentation intend to address how challenging carrying out fieldwork with video camera in urban and rural Africa can look like for an anthropologist?
Tawah, Sanna
On a Road to Bushmarket - Video Ethnography in Cameroonian Market Places
This presentation shares some experiences and practical considerations of doing video ethnography in market places in Anglophone Cameroon from a researcher’s point of view. The paper will describe everyday experiences of the researcher doing video ethnography in Cameroonian market places and on roads connecting the markets. The Cameroonian trade women (buyam-sellam in pidgin) with whom the researcher traveled between different markets and trade points buy and sell goods from “bushmarkets” to be sold in larger markets in towns.
Doing ethnography in Cameroonian market places has several challenges. First, a presence of a white European researcher brings mixed feelings into the surface. The researcher with a video camera draws a lot of attention from people, in both positive and negative ways. In an open public space there are people who wish the researcher would not be there, but also those who show interest in the research and are willing to participate. Secondly, despite the popular rhetoric of inclusiveness and equality, the person carrying a video camera and pointing it to people still occupies a position of authority in relation to the subject. There are also ethical considerations, such as situations in which it is clearly inappropriate or unethical to film, but also events in which the researcher has been specifically asked to start taking a video.
Steel, Tytti
3D Ethnography
In my paper I shall discuss the way I have used films – both documentary and fiction – as a source in my ongoing PhD thesis. My research subject is the everyday life and images of harbour workers in the extended 1950s. The core of my sources is interviews of people who have worked in Helsinki and Kotka harbours, but in this presentation I will concentrate on the films.
With the headline’s three dimensions I refer to the process of reading and analyzing the films. The analysis is a dialogue – perhaps it should be called a trialogue – between the films, the oral history sources and my own insights.
Essential in any ethnographic research process is to reflect on the researcher’s undulation in relation to the field: the researcher gets close to and diverges from the subject. To me, also this process is three-dimensional. In addition to being close to and being distant from the field there is a third dimension that I shall discuss in my paper.
Kantonen, Pekka
Kantonen, Pekka
Together with my wife Lea Kantonen we have created a method we call Generational Filming. It is a method of watching and commenting on our videos, taken in the home, or in other settings, with different age groups, specialists, and viewers with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. These discussions are filmed, and added to the next edition as a new generation of the video to be shown to yet other audiences. Viewers in this way help us form both interpretation and theorization. Case studies may have layers of up to six or seven generations. The method is based on 20 years of daily filming of video diary. The footage is about 1400 hours.
I will present two case studies that are realized with other people than our own family members. The protagonist and third author of Autobiography of a Friend is sculptor Goa Zweygbergk, a Finland-Swedish mother of four and a Christian left-wing artist, a landowner and an entrepreneur. This installation suggests a way to present artistic research in spatial terms. It has been constructed as a four-field pattern with two conceptual divisions: artistic-ethnographic and monography-sequence (siikvens). With the help of these concepts and five videos we try to present a polyphonous dialogue about Goa´s identity and place.
The other case study is realized with Seto songmothers of Estonia. The research video The German Time Was Enacted on Us takes as its topic a song composed by Kukka Manni, sung by the Helbi choir and performed in the home of Kala Manni. The video also investigates the problem, posed in the song, of the post-colonial situation in Setoland and the division of the problem into a host of complex issues. Discussion of Kukka Manni’s song is making its way into ever more public forums: from cultural and community centres to museums to an international anthropological conference, yet ultimately returning back home.
More www.kantonenart.com
