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Hindi Film Songs and the Barriers between Ethnomusicology and Anthropology

Published on March 1, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, interdisciplinary, music

There are only few studies on popular music in South Asia. Tereza Kuldova (Tereza Kuldova) reviews for us the book Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema by ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom. Her review shows – among other things – the differences and barriers between anthropology and ethnomusicology.

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Review: Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema by Anna Morcom, 2007, Ashgate, ISBN 978-0-7546-5198-7

Tereza Kuldova, Research Fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Department of Ethnography University of Oslo

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Popular music in South Asia equals film music, however, even though its popularity is immense, it has been a very little studied phenomenon. This is even more startling when we realize that film songs “have become the music of public spaces in India, being heard from open windows in peoples’ homes, on buses and in bazaars. They are sung and danced to by millions of people in a range of formal and informal contexts, and have been appropriated in many folk genres” (p. 5) and they are thus literally omnipresent. This book thus must get credit for the choice of its subject matter, in the first place.

This book deals with the relationship between Hindi film songs and Hindi films and analyzes them in their cinematic, narrative and visual contexts. The ongoing agenda of the book seems to be to persuade us that the Hindi film song cannot be separated from the Hindi film, which is however a rather obvious fact to any viewer of Hindi film. The only thing I have to say to this is – there is a reason why it is called a film song and ergo, how could the song ever be truly independent or separated from its film context?

Another concern of the book is the definition of the Hindi film song genre as an independent style. Anyone following the Hindi cinema knows that Hindi film songs are extremely creative and varied, drawing on great diversity of inspiration and adjusting it to the particular needs of concrete scenes, and it thus might not be that easy to define them in terms of any style. Moreover, I wonder, do we really have to categorize these songs in terms of any style? What do we gain by that? Well, the answer may be that we gain statements such as follows:

“Amongst an array of inconsistent or over-general stylistic parameters, the only true constant in Hindi film songs is their ‘inclusion in a Hindi film’” (p. 70).

That was not a very surprising fact, was it? The intense argumentation for the analysis of Hindi film songs in relation to the cinematic context, however commonsense, obvious and at times felt as redundant and repetitive is certainly not so obvious within musicology. Because as Morcom argues ”the cinematic perspective of Hindi film songs has been ignored, with musicological studies largely viewing them as separate entities from their parent films” (p.7). So possibly Morcom might get credit for introducing a notion that is rather and straightforward to any consumer of Hindi film songs to the musicological studies.

The conclusion of the books are thus following:

“Far from being an independent tradition of popular songs, this book has found film songs to be profoundly integrated with Hindi films on many levels. Film songs are conceived as part of a particular film, and the musical style of each song is tailored to the parent film and the song scene.

In commercial terms, although film songs have become a big business since the late 1980s, their profitability is only exploitable in association with the Hindi cinema. Even after their release, the consumption of film songs is largely tied up with the Hindi cinema generally, and to some extent, with the parent film in particular.

However, songs are distinct from their cinematic roles and contexts in certain ways, although the degree of this independence varies with each song. As well as tailoring a song musically to a situation, its ability to sound good as a separate entity, its ‘audio value’, is also considered during its production. At the level of reception, audiences are able to appropriate songs and adapt them to new situations, which in some cases may result in the relationship with the parent film and cinema culture in general becoming obscure, or even disappearing entirely. Hindi films have a narrative style and structure that is designed for songs, and similarly, film songs are able to fit around cinematic scenes (p. 239).”

Now that we have begun paradoxically with the conclusion, let us get through the book chapter for chapter.

In the first chapter (available online here), we are presented with the argument for the study of the Hindi film songs through a multimedia model of analysis, which takes into account the context of the film songs in their parent films, their narrative and visuals as well as their production process. However, there is no attempt to frame this whole analysis in the context of Indian society or its changing historical realities (even though the book discusses the different periods in the evolution of the Indian cinema).

We also get to know that the work draws extensively on fieldwork in India, from 1998-2000 and read that the “fieldwork was ethnographically based” and “aimed to study film music through observing, fitting in with and joining in with its own people and culture” (p. 20). However, when we proceed to the second chapter which is concerned with the production of the Hindi film songs, and which is supposed to draw almost exclusively on fieldwork, what is presented to us are mostly excessive and in terms of content repetitive selections from interview transcripts with producers, music directors, lyricists and others. We do not get to know much about the ethnographic reality as such and any ‘ethnographic’ description in the true sense of the word is missing, except for the practical aspects of the production process, in which the roles of the director, producer, music director, lyricist and others are assessed.

The point of the chapter is again to show that lyrics and music is closely related to what is happening in the film and that it is used to express various emotional states, actions or drama in the scenes.

Let us move on to the third chapter which tries to answer the question of “why are film songs so difficult to categorize in terms of style?” (p. 134). This is clearly a question in musicology, it does not make much sense to the anthropologist writing this review.

The conclusion of this chapter is again not very surprising:

“Film songs seen in one way seem very formulaic and standardized, but seen in another way, they are very eccentric and unpredictable. Film song is required to have a regular enough style and enough musical autonomy to work as popular music, to make sense without the film, and even to advertise film, but at the same time to be specific and idiosyncratic enough to fit around a particular given situation. (…) Film songs need to be seen as multi-media, musico-dramatic entities as well as popular songs in order to make sense of both individual songs and the development of the genre as a whole” (p. 135-6).

For me this last statement equals saying: Hindi film songs need to be seen as what they are.

In the fourth chapter, Morcom addresses the question of the relation between Western music and Hindi films and the role of narrative in Hindi film music style. Supposedly the most striking feature of Hindi film music, as I perceive it (being interested in it intensely in relation to my research and being also its keen consumer), is its eclecticism, namely its ability to borrow and combine different styles and traditions in just one song, and that is what makes it so much fun – and also what makes it possibly so confusing for a musicologist, trying to make sense of it. Morcom poses such questions as “how is this Hollywood music able to communicate apparently successfully to the Indian audience? European and American culture has little to do with Indian music” (p.147) or how is it possible that “various types of non-indigenous music may be conveying narrative meaning to indigenous audiences” (p.157).

She considers “the amount of overlap in musical meaning in Hindi and Hollywood films surprising. Ethnomusicology tends to emphasize the aspects of music that are culture specific” (p. 156). Well, maybe ethnomusicology should consider the option that cultures do not exist in isolation and Morcom should consider India’s colonial history, not to mention its history of thousands of years of cultural contact and exchanges. When what is considered a traditional Muslim floral decorative motif (which can be seen for example on the walls of the Taj) comes originally from the European herbaria, I tend not to really wonder why the ‘indigenous’ population can identify with Western musical elements in Hindi film songs.

Satrangi Re

However, Morcom hits on something interesting when she says that “the direct relationship of many musical signs with feeling, experience and somatic states may be one reason why music has greater potential for mutual understanding than language, whose signs are more highly mediated” (p.157). Sadly, she does not really elaborate on this any further. She concludes saying that:

“(M)any of the ‘Hollywood’ techniques most commonly found in Hindi films conveniently constitute an antithesis of rāg and classical melody, and also of film and folk melody, which are associated to a greater or lesser degree with the sacred, love, romance and celebration. They can therefore be used as powerful means to express distortion, destruction and disturbance of these qualities in a range of dramatic situations (p.178).”

However, they can also be used to express many other different things.

In the fifth chapter, Morcom explores the commercial life of Hindi film songs, in relation to Hindi film, in the context of buying, selling, and marketing. She investigates the technologies of distribution, marketing and profitability of film songs from the first few years of sound film to 2000. This chapter is based on fieldwork; however, that again stands for interviews with people in the industry. The chapter discusses the influence of gramophone, radio, cassettes, dvd, vhs, vcd etc. on the commercial potential of Hindi songs.

Again Morcom struggles with the distinction between marketing Hindi film songs and Hindi films, and we can again and again read sentences such as:

“The marketing of film songs and films are ultimately difficult to distinguish. Trailers using the film songs and visuals from the films are produced by the music company to promote the music, and the music, as it gains ground in the popular culture, promotes the film” (p.195).

Even though this book was published in 2007 it does not really take into account the importance of internet and though she discusses the importance of television and various live shows, it appears to me, that she does not really capture the extent of the industry. Moreover, nowadays there are numerous ‘making of the song/film’ videos available all over the internet, as well as numerous TV-shows featuring the stars, directors, singers, music directors etc. discussing the production and marketing process and many other things. This all is the promotion of the songs. However, though she notes that “these shows add another layer of importance to film songs, but are still parasitic on the cinema” (p.220), she does not really consider them in the analysis any depth.

Emi (Chori Chori Dekhe Mujhko) FULL SONG *HQ*

In the last chapter, Morcom deals with the audience reception of Hindi films and with the life of the film song after its release. She again wonders if the songs are “able to become independent of the context of the parent film or of ‘film culture’ in general” (p.208). She analyzes different charts from several websites, concluding:

“(I)ndividual songs have, to some extent, a life of their own in terms of popularity and may become popular even if the parent film is a flop. However, when it is taken into account that only a minority of films are hits, the songs from hit films can be seen to further dominate the chart” (p.211).

When it comes to appropriation of film songs by the audiences, again a part of the text which is based on fieldwork, we get to know very briefly that people appropriate songs by

singing them,
playing them and singing at various occasions such as weddings, Holi, romancing or using them as devotional songs in the temple,
identifying with them across disparate communities in South Asia and the Diaspora as they refer to shared experience
performing them (from amateurs to professionals).

The conclusion she thus draws is that audiences actively appropriate these songs. However, what is striking when we realize that most of the Hindi film songs are dance songs is the lack of consideration of dance as a form of appropriation. As well as the lack of serious consideration of the movements and gestures in relation to the narrative, lyrics and music as a mode of expression. The embodiment of music and sound is definitely a way of appropriation of music that needs to be considered in any such analysis, and even more so in the analysis of Hindi film songs that rely visually to an extreme degree on bodily movements, gestures and dance scenes.

Reading this book as an anthropologist gave me an insight into on which premises ethnomusicology is established and it certainly thought me to be more sensitive to the various ways in which sound conveys meaning, which is possible the biggest lesson of the book – to give a thought to the various sounds and their interplay with the visual (however I would also include the somatic, emotional and embodied practices) and their ways to express, convey and reproduce meaning. At the same time, I feel that ethnomusicology, as I experienced it though this book, would profit from a more thorough study of anthropology, to get a more nuanced perspective and become more sensitive to the context.

Tereza Kuldova

Sharara Sharara

>> more information by the publisher (Ashgate)

>> download the first chapter

MORE REVIEWS BY TEREZA KULDOVA:

How Indissoluble is Hindu Marriage?

Photography, Anthropology and History (Part I)

Presenting 2nd generation Multi-Sited Ethnography

How the Ganges boatmen resist upper-caste and state domination

How neoliberalism reshapes motherhood in Calcutta

“Pop culture is a powerful tool to promote national integration”

The emerging research field of medical ethnomusicology: How music fights AIDS

The globalisation of the Western conception of mental illness

Published on January 14, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, globalisation, medical anthropology / ethnobothany

(Links updated 1.2.2021) As Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology.net, I was kept awake until late at night by an article in the New York Times Magazine – yesterday for reading, today for writing. It is a fascinating article about a kind of globalisation that isn’t talked about much outside the university, written by Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, released two days ago. It’s about the globalisation of the Western conception of mental health and illness

“We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness”, he writes. “We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.” And the idea that our Western conception of mental health and illness might be shaping the expression of illnesses in other cultures is rarely discussed in the professional literature.”

Western conceptions of mental health? Well, as anthropologists stress, illness is not only about biomedicine. It’s not only about parts of the body that no longer work. Our brain is not a batter of chemicals that “needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best” (advertisment for the antidepressant Paxil).

Illness, maybe especially mental illness, is also about culture:

(M)ental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host. (…)

What cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. (…)

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

Contrary to popular belief, “Western” biomedicine is not culturally neutral either:

The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group.
(…)
“Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal,” Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London observes.

Ethan Watters explains why have American categories of mental diseases become the worldwide standard:

American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed.

The export of Western biomedical ideas, Watters explains, can have “frustrating and unexpected consequences”, for example marginalization of people with “mental heath problems”. People with schizophrenia in some developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.

Several studies, Watters writes, suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in biomedical disease terms, when we treat mental illnesses are “brain diseases” over which the patient has little choice or responsibility, when the disease has according this model nothing to do with factors in the outside world like unemployment, racism, larger societal structures that lead to loneliness, despair, depressions:

It turns out that those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. This unfortunate relationship has popped up in numerous studies around the world. (…) “irrespective of place . . . endorsing biological factors as the cause of schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance.”

In Zanzibar, in a group of people with “Swahili spirit-possession beliefs”, the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity according to research by anthropologist Juli McGruder:

For McGruder, the point was not that these practices or beliefs were effective in curing schizophrenia. Rather, she said she believed that they indirectly helped control the course of the illness. Besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness that she had rarely witnessed in the West.

>> read the whole article in the NYT Magazine

>> Ethan Watters blog

The article was published last Saturday. The same day, Greg Downey wrote Exporting American mental illness, an example for great anthropology blogging. And the day after another fascinating blog post by Eugene Raikhel at Somatosphere: The globalization of biopsychiatry with lots of links to related medical anthropology studies.

Nearly at the same time, medical anthropologist Michael Tan has written about the same topic in his column Pinoy Kasi in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He writes about “special children”, children with what Americans call “global developmental delay” or GDD. This diagnosis does not make sense in the Philippines:

The problem here is defining a delay. (…) For example, around the area of language development, you will find books that say a child should have a vocabulary of around 200 words by the age of 2. I can imagine some of my readers beginning to panic now, as I did when I first heard that standard. Imagine me in the middle of the night doing an inventory of my son’s vocabulary and not even reaching 50 (…)
But the anthropologist in me protested that we don’t have studies in the Philippines that established the norm, and given that all our children are growing up in households with at least two, and often more, languages, there’s bound to be some “delay.” As you might have guessed, my son, who is now 4, cannot stop jabbering, and in three languages at that.

>> continue reading in the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Where shamans understand colonialism as sickness

Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses

The Anthropology of Suicide

(Links updated 1.2.2021) As Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology.net, I was kept awake until late at night by an article in the New York Times Magazine - yesterday for reading, today for writing. It is a fascinating article about a kind…

Colonialism, racism and visual anthropology in Japan: Photography, Anthropology and History part II

Published on December 28, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, history, indigenous people / minorities, Visual Anthropology

Here is the second part of the review of the book Photography, Anthropology and History, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards.

This time, Tereza Kuldova reviews Ka F. Wong’s article about one of the first Japanese anthropologists, who became popular in Japan because of his use of photography: Torii Ryūzō.

Wong shows in his article how Ryuzo’s photographs illustrate the colonial relationships at that time. Ryuzo went on fieldwork two decades before Malinowski in order to document the indigenous Taiwan population.

Tereza Kuldova questions some of Wong’s conclusions:

Review (Part II): Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame (eds. Morton, Ch. & Edwards, E.), Ashgate. 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-7909-7.

Tereza Kuldova, PhD fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

The article Visual Methods in Early Japanese Anthropology: Torii Ryuzo in Taiwan by Ka F. Wong discusses the beginnings of the Japanese anthropology and the personality of one of the first Japanese anthropologists, who became popular in Japan because of his use of photography, as a ‘scientific’ method of investigation and documentation of the Other, during his fieldwork.

We are talking here about Torii Ryuzo, a truly self-made anthropologist, born in 1870 in Tokushima in Shikoku, he received only second-grade education, but that did not prevent him from reading and educating himself on his own.

Torii was hired as a specimen classifier in the Anthropology Research Institute at the Tokyo Imperial University by the professor in physical anthropology Tsuboi Shogoro. “Under his mentor’s patronage and encouragement, Torii began his anthropological career, first as a fieldworker, and eventually as one of the most prominent Japanese anthropologists of the twentieth century” (Wong 2009:173). Eventually, “in 1922, he became associate professor at the Tokyo Imperial University and succeeded Tsuboi as the second chair of the Anthropological Institute” (Wong 2009:185).

As Wong notes, he was a rather special occurrence in the Japanese anthropology, because he was “a Japanese anthropologist working in the manner of a European ethnographer within a colonial context” (Wong 2009:180).
His popularity and rise as an anthropologist can be related firstly to his use of photography, in the manner of the Western anthropologists, as a tool of scientific understanding and documenting of the Other and secondly it can be related to the emergence of Japan as a colonial power.

Wong focuses on the analysis of the photographic legacy of Torii Ryuzo in the context of the modernization of Japan and the era of Japanese colonization.

Wong tries to view the photographs in the light of their own ‘agency’ and thereby to understand the nature of the contact between Ryuzo and the indigenous Taiwanese. When Japan became colonial power it could “count itself a member of the once exclusive Western club of colonial empires, and the native population of Taiwan provided fresh material for Japanese anthropologists to exhibit their intellectual virtuosity” (Wong 2009:175). Ryuzo thus set out for a fieldwork in Taiwan, two decades before Bronislaw Malinowski, and began documenting the indigenous Taiwan population, mostly within the Western style framework, using the methods of natural sciences, such as anthropometric and statistical techniques. “The camera was Torii’s tool for disseminating a vision of indigenous life of this newly colonized island to wider Japanese public” (Wong 2009:177).

Drawing on the western scholarship Torii divided the indigenous people of Taiwan “along perceived racial lines – such as by physical type, language, costume, body, decoration, architecture and material culture – into nine major groups: the Ami, Bunun, Yami, Paiwan, Tayal, Tsou, Siuo, and Salisan” (Wong 2009:177). Most of the photographs that he took were of anthropometric imagery, but he took pictures of people in various social contexts, pictures of landscape and houses, of material culture and the Japanese presence, as well.

Wong shows in his article how the photographs illustrate the colonial relationships. He points out the anthropologist in Western clothes standing and posing with the natives mostly sitting or squatting dressed in indigenous clothing. He argues, in rather classical manner, that “Torii’s anthropometric images mirrored a legitimized racial superiority in the name of scientific representation, and the subjects thereby became ‘dehumanized’ as ‘passive objects of the study’” (Wong 2009:179-80). He observes that the natives “seem to be purposely lined up in formation or staged for display, implying a power relation at play for the camera. Even those pictures that were meant to capture the natives in their natural milieu seem to project rigidity and theatricality” (Wong 2009:180).

Wong shows how photographs can be perceived as ‘social artefacts’ that convey political and personal agendas of their creator. In case of Torii the visualization of himself on the photographs with the natives certainly helped to establish him as a professional anthropologist.

This being said, I believe that there is one dimension of the analysis of photography that Wong presented, which is missing. That is the consideration of the technical and practical dimension of taking photography at that point of time. Imagine a heavy machine which for a photography to be taken needs immovable objects. If we think about the ‘theatricality and rigidity’, which Wong describes and attributes it to the demonstration of colonial power over the subjects, is it not also a natural consequence of the nature of the technology used in capturing of the natives?

Further, Wong focuses for example on the clothes worn by the anthropologist as compared to the clothes worn by the natives and interprets this in terms of power relations. At this point, the images from my own fieldwork in the 21st century India came to my mind. When looking at them, you can see me definitely dressed differently that the most of the women in India did. On photographs with them, I definitely look as a foreigner. In the end my photographs are not that different from those of Torii, though maybe his are more ‘rigid’ because of the technology he used, while mine may seem more spontaneous, taken in between conversations.
When turning the attention to the ‘postures’, which Wong notes, when I look at my photographs in that way, I must say that I tend to sit with my leg over the other, while some of the women I was working with tended to sit on the bed or floor with their legs crossed under themselves. However, I cannot claim that any of that, can from my viewpoint be interpreted in terms of power relations (at least in the sense of oppressive type of colonial power relations), though someone may frame it within west vs. rest dichotomy and draw some conclusions from that. At the same time, I believe that these would have little to do with my own relations to the people on the photographs.

Now, using the medium of photography, which at that time needed immovable persons, and objects in front of the objective, and thus necessarily appeared more rigid that nowadays, how could Torii possibly otherwise represent what he encountered? Whatever picture he would have taken would be by Wong and possibly by others necessarily interpreted in the context of the era of Japanese colonial power.

Now I do not want to say that this critique or line of thought is unproductive. What I want to point out is that, instead of looking at the photographs of the anthropologist and the natives and judging from his and their clothes or postures, when trying to understand the messages of the photographs which Torii took, we have to look firstly at what he did not take photographs of as compared to what he wanted us to see, as it is there, where the agenda and context lies. This line of thought is somehow present in Wong’s text, but in my view it should have come out stronger, as it is this what gives us the insight into the practices of representation.

>> Part I of Tereza Kuldova’s review about “Anthropology and the Cinematic Imagination”

>> more information about the book

>> read the introduction by Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton

SEE ALSO:

Anthropology, photography and racism

Kerim Friedman’s dissertation: Learning “Local” Languages: Passive Revolution, Language Markets, and Aborigine Education in Taiwan

Photography as research tool: More engaged Kurdish anthropology

Karen Nakamura’s Photoethnography blog

Visual Anthropology of Japan blog

Here is the second part of the review of the book Photography, Anthropology and History, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards.

This time, Tereza Kuldova reviews Ka F. Wong's article about one of the first Japanese anthropologists, who…

Book review: Photography, Anthropology and History (Part I)

Published on December 23, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, history, media, Visual Anthropology

When filming people became possible, anthropologists began to drift away from it. Though better off than at the beginning of the 20th century, the visual anthropology today is still perceived as a marginal discipline, Tereza Kuldova writes in the first part of her review of Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame.

The topics of the eleven articles range from the discussion of mappaemundi and panoramas as first ethnographic images, to the discussions of the beginnings of the cinematic representations in anthropology, of Evans-Pritchard’s photographs of an initiation ritual, all the way to the discussion of photographs taken by Kathleen Haddon in Papua New Guinea and the tricky relationship between colonialism, photography and anthropology.

Tereza Kuldova is going to write about selected articles, the first one is Anthropology and the Cinematic imagination by David MacDougall. (Update: Here is part II: Colonialism, racism and visual anthropology in Japan)

Review (Part I): Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame (eds. Morton, Ch. & Edwards, E.), Ashgate. 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-7909-7.

Tereza Kuldova, PhD fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

David MacDougall presents in his article Anthropology and the Cinematic Imagination a rather brief discussion of the relations between anthropology and the cinematic. He relates the beginnings of the cinematic imagination to the use of stereograph and after that pinpoints the interest and enthusiasm of the 19th century anthropologists with the new media of photography and motion pictures, which was followed by the ‘dark age’ of visual anthropology in the first half of the 20th century.

At that point of time anthropologists began to be reluctant to publish photographs in their monographs and ethnographic filmmaking has become a “sideline of anthropology, practiced more by amateurs, adventurers, missionaries, journalists and travel lecturers than anthropologists” (ibid:57). As a reasons for this he identifies the ‘contamination’ of the photographic media by popular entertainment; photographic media “were considered vulgar and exuded aura of the musical hall” (MacDougall 2009:57).

He further argues that also the practices of anthropologists and their methodologies have become more logocentric. The anthropological knowledge itself was changing, it was “shifting away from the visible worlds of human beings and their material possessions towards the invisible world of abstract relations such as kinship, political organization and social values”. However, “if observation was so important, you would think that filming people in their daily interactions would have become increasingly useful.

Yet, it was just at this time, when filming people became possible, that anthropologists began to drift away from it. The human body, which had excited so much interest in the 19th century, when it was constantly being measured and photographed, had ceased to be a site of meaning” (ibid:57). Film images and photographs were rather objects you would put in a museum; they were placed at the margins of anthropology.

However, the first glimmer of hope came after the second world war in the 1930s with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and their Balinese project and later on with Jean Rouch, who was using light-weight camera as a kind of personal writing instrument. Here you can view a sequence from Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été, 1960

My Favorite Scene from "Chronique d'un été"

Together with John Marshall – all of them reinvented the ethnographic film and revived the interest in the possibilities of visual anthropology.
“Beginning in the 1950s they began to demonstrate that cinema had more to offer anthropology than a technology of note-taking or a means of popularization. Their films tried to enter into the thoughts and feelings of their subjects and the physical spaces in which they lived” (MacDougall 2009:58), exploring interpersonal relationships with the camera.

MacDougall thus concludes that “anthropologists and filmmakers invented, more or less separately, a way of looking at the world that involved repositioning themselves and their audiences imaginatively in relation to their subjects; and second, that as far as visual anthropology was concerned, these two inventions remained almost completely isolated from one another for a very long period, until they began to converge after the Second World War” (MacDougall 2009:61). “Rouch and Marshall believed that visual anthropology could and should do more than simply record what was in front of the camera. They were after the invisible content of the scenes they filmed, both in terms of the sense of space they conveyed and the experience of individuals” (MacDougall 2009:62).

There are two points in MacDougall’s argument which might have been elaborated further and which I find interesting. The first one is that of ‘contamination’ of the photographic media by popular entertainment, which was possibly one of the reasons why anthropologists tended not use this media at the beginning of the century. For me this line of thinking resembles the discussion about the concept of ‘culture’, which is not only criticized for being essentializing and bounding, but is also portrayed as being misused, meaning anything and everything and thus turning into a ‘lay’ concept.

This is, I believe, one of the core problems. As anthropology struggles continually with the problem of its own authority, it necessarily creates boundaries between the ‘commonsense’ and the ‘scientific’. Once ‘culture’, ‘photography’ or ‘motion picture’ is connected with the masses or ‘laymen’, the ‘science’ tries to distance itself from it, implicitly claiming a superior ‘scientific’ version of reality.

However, I believe that this attitude can turn out to be counterproductive. What is rather the issue in the case of anthropological or ethnographic photography and film is how to transmit the ethnographic knowledge pictorially and how to rethink the modes of representation, while not merely reproducing the archetype of the ‘documentary film’.

The visual anthropology today, though better off than at the beginning of the 20th century, is still perceived as a marginal discipline. Nevertheless, I believe that anthropology has a lot to gain from the visual field of experience and from rethinking of the visual modes of its representation.

The second point which MacDougall makes and which I find important is that of the turn towards the focus on the abstract structures and relations of social systems, which have dissociated them from the obvious relationships with the material, which led to the surpassing of the material in anthropological writings. Though the focus on the social dimension is no doubt the core of anthropology, I believe that we can get more of it by acknowledging the material and visual dimension of our social lives and by trying to use the methods of visualization innovatively when writing our monographs.

At the same time, I believe that we have to be cautious when dealing with the visual, so that it does not become overwhelming, and in turn reducing the focus on the social. What we need to focus on is rather the dialectics of the social and the material, depicting it in terms of both writing and visualizing.

This was the first part of the review of Photography, Anthropology and History. To be continued during this week! (Update: Here is part II: Colonialism, racism and visual anthropology in Japan)

>> more information about the book

>> read the introduction by Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton

Book review: Presenting 2nd generation Multi-Sited Ethnography

Published on November 25, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, fieldwork / methods, globalisation

Tereza Kuldova has read another book for us: Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon. It consists of 14 articles. Tereza Kuldova is currently planning a “multi-sited” fieldwork and has picked four articles that she considered most inspirational.

Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research (ed.) Mark-Anthony Falzon. 2009. Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-7318-7.

Tereza Kuldova, PhD fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

This edited volume consisting of fourteen research papers takes us right into the middle of the theoretical dilemmas and practical challenges posed by “doing” multi-sited ethnography.

The discussion on multi-sited research can be viewed in the context of the changing realities of the world since the 1970s (commonly connected with terms like globalization, transnationalism, world system, diaspora, etc.).

It can thus be viewed in the context of times when the single-sited methodology is felt as inadequate and when the social sciences are struggling with their relationship to the local, while searching for larger scales of analysis and better ways how to capture the connections between people, things, and places and in the context of times when the concept of “culture” no longer stands the critique of a great deal of anthropologists.

“Second generation” multi-sited ethnography

In this sense this edited volume comes in the right time and is of great value. It presents something that could be labeled as a “second generation” multi-sited ethnography; it overflows with theoretical suggestions, prospects and critique based on highly valuable empirical examples from research and fieldwork.

All articles are theoretically oriented; they lead us towards rethinking of the concept of “multi-sited” in various directions and from various positions. In short, Multi-sited Ethnography deals with the accusations of “depthlessness” or absence of thick descriptions in multi-sited research, with the practical problems of working in diverse localities, the challenges of projects based on collaboration, the problem of implicit holism of the classical statements of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), and much more.

I now proceed to a discussion of several selected articles, which I personally, as an anthropologist who is currently planning a “multi-sited” fieldwork, considered most inspirational.

The value of the delimited field-sites

Let me first turn our attention to the critique of multi-sited ethnography by Mateo Candea in his article Arbitrary Locations: In Defense of the Bounded Field-Site (ibid: 25-46), which ignited and inspired many of the theoretical discussions, not only, present in this volume.

Candea targets in his critique what he sees as a latter-day implicit holism. This is to be found in “a suggestion that bursting out of our field-sites will enable us to provide an account of totality ‘out there’” (ibid: 27). He challenges this implicit holistic idea through his proposal to reconsider the value of the delimited field-sites. He argues that ethnography is about setting up ‘arbitrary locations’, he urges us to opt for ‘self-imposed restrictions’ and to take the path of ‘self-limitation’; to be reflexive and self-critical in our methodological decisions, to take responsibility for those decisions and to take responsibility for what we include and what we exclude.

He believes that being “explicit about the necessity of leaving certain things ‘out of bounds’” would turn “what feels like an illicit incompleteness into an actual methodological decision, one which the ethnographer reflects upon and takes responsibility for” (ibid:34). Arbitrary location for Candea is “not an object to be explained, but a contingent window into complexity” (ibid: 37).

Even though the title might mislead some, Candea’s article should not be read as an attack on multi-sited ethnography, rather, it views ‘multi-sited’ as a positive development, a development which brought a new wave of methodological reflexivity. And it is on this wave of methodological reflexivity that Candea’s article is sailing and challenging the imagined totality of ‘cultural formations’.

Candea’s article is one of those that push you to think further, and whatever your opinion might be, it definitely makes you sit down and rethink your own approach to multi-sited ethnography, though maybe in a different direction than his.

The myth of the “coherent whole”

The article What if There is No Elephant? Towards a Conception of an Un-sited Field by Joanna Cook, James Laidlaw and Jonathan Mair (ibid: 47-72), is a further rethinking of the holistic charge against multi-sited ethnography and in my view it brings Candea’s critique a step further.

The authors intend to lie to rest the holistic assumption that has haunted the first generation of multi-sited research and to carry the disconnection of ethnographic field from space to its logical conclusion through their proposal of ‘un-sited field’.

Studying the Buddhist ethics of self-cultivation in a multi-sited project has led them to question both the implicit holistic assumptions of multi-sited research and similar assumptions present in the theory of world religions. They proclaim that “the widespread assumption by adherents of self-consciously world religions, that there ‘must be’ a coherent whole of which they are part is itself a religious commitment, and one that is framed in distinctively modern terms” (ibid: 54).

Abandoning the “idea of sited field “

This line of thinking, I believe, is rather fruitful and it led the authors to the elaboration of the concept of ‘un-sited field’. Un-sited field means abandoning the idea of sited field altogether and acknowledging the three-fold distinction between space, place and field.

Abandoning the “idea of sited field makes it possible to admit that it never was possible to achieve a complex description of any area or group of people, but in exchange for acknowledging that fields are always constructed out of a too-rich reality, we would gain the freedom to determinate their boundaries explicitly, in relation to our research questions” (ibid: 58). This then means that “a valid ethnographic field need not correspond to a spatial entity of any kind, and need not be a holistic entity ‘out there’ to be discovered” (ibid: 68).

I too believe that our construction of field should be a primarily reflexive activity throughout the whole fieldwork period and even after and that we should be led by our research questions when determining what is within the boundaries we demarcate and what is beyond them. This reflexivity cannot be other than productive as is the clear distinction between space, place and field which is proposed.

Multisited ethnography = “Cross-fertilization of sites”

Another article which discusses, among others, the question of holism is Ester Gallos In the Right Place at the Right Time? Reflections on Multi-Sited Ethnography in the Age of Migration (ibid: 87-102). In this article Ester Gallo discusses her research experience among the Malayali migrants in Rome and in Ernakulam (Central Kerala, India).

She notes that it was first retrospectively that she articulated her fieldwork in Rome and in Kerala in terms of multi-sited ethnography. What she emphasizes is the importance of paying notice to the ‘meanings of movement’ involved in the processes of following people. Movement tends to be easily taken for granted, particularly in the migration studies. But in her view the meanings of movement must become objects of study rather than its premises (cf. Hage 2005).

Further discussing the question of holism, she believes that “once we move away from the holistic aspirations of multi-sitedness, we can look at how its application results in the cross-fertilization and reciprocal limitations between different levels of ethnographic perspective” (ibid: 89-90). Multi-sitedness in her view thus implies “both expansion and limitation of the ‘site’, as analytical framework and relational practice” (ibid: 90).

I like the idea of ‘cross-fertilization of sites’, which Ester Gallo comes up with, it suggests the opening of new questions, possibilities and important connections which can be perceived only when expanding, at the same time as bounding the field. She accentuates, that what is so particular about multi-sitedness “is the possibility it offers to interrogate the ‘site’ of research, not as a preconstituted dimension of social inquiry, but as relational process and methodological device” (ibid: 99).

Collaboration with the non-human world

The last article I chose for a closer discussion is Strong Collaboration as a Method of Multi-Sited Ethnography: On Mycorrhizal Relations (ibid: 197) by Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing). I chose it because it is different both in its object of study and in its approach to multi-sited research.

(Image: Tomomarusan, Wikimedia Commons)

In their project the Matsutake Worlds Research Group follows a mushroom – matsutake – a highly sought after mycorrhizal mushroom that grows in Asia, Europe and North America and that is an important element of Japanese cuisine.

But this mushroom is not just something that is followed; it is literary taken seriously as a collaborator in their research and collaboration is thus turned into what is followed along with the mushroom. Not only does this article invite us in a world of strong collaboration between scientists and into what pros and cons such collaboration has, but also into a world of strong collaboration with the non-human world, discovering the various potential relationships with it.

The authors explore both the negative possibilities of collaboration, such as its at times even traitorous nature and positive possibilities and the question of why it is attractive to anthropologists. They urge the fieldworker to use his senses, to sensually immerse in the field.

“Taste, sight, sound, touch, smell, heat, body awareness, pain, anger, frustration, balance, weight, scope, acceleration, logic, instinct, hunger, belief. The senses we engage when we conduct fieldwork are nodal points between our ethnographic environments and us. Through them, we become ethnographers. Through them, our bodies become our research instruments” (ibid: 201).

As an example we can take the “chemical interactions, including smell” that “offer one register of relationality in which humans and non-humans, alike, can participate”.

Ethnographic echolocation

When discussing the strong collaboration between the researchers Lieba Faier uses the term ‘echolocation’, which is “an interactive sense that enables a creature to find its way by reaching out to other bodies with sounds that return to it transformed” (ibid: 202). She relates echolocation to the practice of strong collaboration and draws on a particular example in which more ethnographers engaged with the same matsutake wholesaler, but their depictions of him were radically different.

From this collaboration “a more multidimensional picture of him emerged than any single ethnographic perspective could have provided. Perhaps ethnographic echolocation is one of many new kinds of senses that can be cultivated through multi-sited, strong collaborations” (ibid: 202).

The idea of echolocation as another sense of the ethnographer might prove fruitful in the future, as well as the emphasis on strong collaboration. At the same time collaboration, even though conceptualized as a dialectical practice, may lead to conflicts and unintended power struggles, caused by the often not compatible views or perceptions of the situation and struggle for personal recognition.

At the same time let us listen to what Matsutake research group has to say:

“Why do ethnography? One reason is to spurn spectacular capitalism, which fills our screens with glamorous happy thin elites playing with their globally-standard expensive toys. The world – in its materiality and its diversity – is worth more than that, as ethnography can remind us. But anthropology too is full of glamour stars, all in rush to ‘brand’ their ideas and market their way to top. What might it take to build a slower, richer scholarship, in which we might connect with the living sensual textures of our still diverse world? Might strong collaboration help?” (ibid: 206).

I let everyone judge for themselves. But let me add one more quotation:

“Mushrooms remind us: We are all collaborators. Just because matsutake is not cultivated does not mean it does not collaborate with humans and other beings. Rather matsutake urges us: Strain to find lines of connection. Just as matsutake forms relations with host trees in its essential becoming, strong collaboration makes us remember that all becoming is relational. Taking non-humans – not just fungi but also trees, animals and climate – as collaborators stimulates surprise and wonder. Non-human forms of recognition are not our forms. Thus they open up the framework through which we appreciate relationality” (ibid: 211-2).

This article urges us to rethink our relationship with the non-human and to open ourselves to new ways of thinking and conceptualizing not only of the multi-sited research, but the world itself, as well as of our work in it as anthropologists and ethnographers. (see also their paper A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds (pdf))

This edited volume is a highly reflexive piece of work and, I believe, a must read for any specialist in anthropology, sociology, and development and migrations studies, or anyone dealing with the “multi-sited” in their research.

References:

Hage, G. 2005. A not-so multi-sited ethnography of a not-so imagined community. Anthropological Theory 5:4, 463-75.

Marcus, G. E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95-117.