Visual Ethnography & Creative Intervention

SM4134

An advanced-level research-creation laboratory

Linda Lai

January 15, 2010

What is ethnography?

What is visual ethnography?

What are the concerns and agenda of visual anthropology…

In visual anthropology, images are used as:

1. Research tool

2. Sources of data

3. Representational vehicles/forms/means

Method Meets Art, p. 217

What does visual ethnography do?

1. Using A-V tools to conduct recording and collecting activities

2. Representing research findings in A-V forms

3. Collecting and studying A-V artifacts in our everyday life

Dialectical materialism

Power

Subjectivities

CULTURAL STUDIES as impulse

Contribution from Cultural Studies’ POV: 以小見大-Broad theses/discourses of culture and society / ideologies / common sense etc.

↕Specific site with specific individuals and practices in everyday life dramaturgy [“culture is ordinary” (Raymond Williams); culture as everyday fabric]

-Our (ethnography) is a process of clarification to maintain differences via giving a voice to individual experiences.

CULTURAL STUDIES as impulse

Contribution from Cultural Studies’ POV: 以小見大ultimate concern:

powersubjectivities

Power: not an abstract, top-down force, but…structures of power in concrete everyday settings

and in various locations such as class, race, gender, sexual orientation, different formal institutions, policies…

Subjectivities: the possibility of the individual to “participate” in culture and assert one’s humanness, whether to resist, to appropriate, to subvert, to deconstruct…

Basic orientation grounded in Cultural Studies

Michel De Certeau’s dedication page in The Practice of Everyday Life

*De Certeau’s science of ‘singularity’:Local-ness…People (subjectivities) beyond monumental value…The voice-less, the unrepresented……the limits of representation

*Creativity, artistic vision (CIL, SM4134)The specific, the particularThe observable, the empirical…

*Everyday creativity: small battles, occupying a specific position

*Performativity: emphasis on tactics, especially a response to alienation or the hostility of urbanity via physical presence (occupation) of concrete space, e.g. walking the city

Quote from de Certeau

More key theorists who contribute to an emphasis on the particular and the micro-levels of culture…

Antonio Gramsci“Hegemony” – power is, most of the time, not in the form of coercion,

but as common sense, as bottom-up voluntary practices

Michel FoucaultTechniques of the self (we translate the effect of power into justifiable

practices via methods and routines for the “care of the self”)

Fernand Braudel“Long duration” of everyday practices to view historical processes;

alternative economic history…

Erving GoffmanPresentation of the self in everyday life dramaturgy: roles and persona,

back-stage Vs front-stage, impression management

Naming the course…

Ethnography

Visual anthropology

Visual ethnography

Visual culture

Ethno-methodologies

Intervention

Creative Intervention

Theory & Praxis / Theory =(is) Practice

(concern):

*use of still photographs as a methodological tool in social research

*use of photographs as a means of presenting social research

Photography in the traditions of

visual sociology & anthropology

Visual anthropology:

…concerns • the examination of visual communication in the

everyday domain• the critical analysis of visual methods of

anthropological documentation • the critical analysis of visual productions of the

cultures under study.• Initial focus:

In 1970s on film and television as documentary methods

*What is ethnography?

a research methodology unique to anthropology

BEING THERE…COLLECTING

Research conducted in real life as opposed to smthg. set up in labsResearch conducted about people and things considered human (portr

aits of people)Research that is often location boundResearch conducted on things that are observable and amounting to e

xperiences (the empirical realm)

Observation / Observing / the Observer [varieties]-participant -on-looker

*What is ethnography?

The principles of Grounded Theory:

InductiveDiscovery-based

Observing – understanding - discovery

Unstructured observation (to challenge and undo the pre-given) generating new knowledge on the actual stage of human actions

What’s the difference between looking at a place as raw material and looking at a place as a process?

*What is ethnography?

a research methodology unique to anthropology

BEING THERE…MAKING ‘DOCUMENTS’ (≠ objective records)

What to observe, what to study:• a/ social processes (formalization of relations and abstract reasonin

g)• b/ rituals (everyday rituals unique to the group, proceduralism, situat

ions that lead to the formalization of relations and abstract reasoning)

• c/ exchange mechanisms (interactionism emphasized)• d/ self-narration (mythical dimension)

NOTE: all the above aspects are observable by the researcher’s being there.

Definition…(cont’d)

Atkinson:

a method or set of methods that ‘ involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions – in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research.

Ethnographic research

A narrative based on ethnographic research:

“The Auction”

Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (Granta Publications, 2008), pp. 3-39.

Visual Ethnography paradigms

1 : Using cameras and other recording technology to gather data

How the camera records, recording = collecting data? What kind of data?

2 : The studying of non-verbal data produced by cultures – visual representation of reality

3 : The studying of visual objects

4 : Presenting research findings with images and media other than words

Recommended: on contemporary art relevant to the course

[examples of recent publications]

Archive Fever: uses of document in contemporary art (Okwui Enwezor)

Six Stories from the End of Representation (James Elkins)

Critique of the term “visual”

W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay, “There are no visual media” (2005) in Journal of Visual Culture

provides a good counter-discussion…

In the end, no medium involves solely one level of sensory experience

A project on Yunnan women…

http://www2.bc.edu/~lykes/voices.htm

What we would do in this semester…

*the ethnographic use of film, photography, and new media

*ethnographic research on visual artifacts and projects of visual representation

*exploration of artistic strategies to transform research process and findings into a personalized work of art

*studying visual artifacts in which the work of ethnography is embedded

“Sociology” in Cultural Studies

Micro level of human agencyInteractionismMacro-level of systems and social structures

EmpiricismDurkheim – positivism

Interpreting the observable…

Erving Goffman -- presentation of the self in everyday life

on the key components of the course:

• [source: anthropology] ethnography • [source: documentary cinema] visual ethnography • [source: contemporary art] research-based art-

making, performativity (a cultural tactic)• [source: Cultural Studies, contemporary art] critical

intervention

Collecting for creative intervention…

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Blurry architecture series

http://sweb.cityu.edu.hk/sm4134/2009/Hiroshi_Sugimoto/hiroshi_sugimoto.ppt

Assignment: for consultation in next meeting

*a possible specific subject for final assignment

*ethnography via photography:

Field photography/field collecting –

Photograph things with a future tense

Discover via collecting, observing, being there, photographing