New ethnographic ventures: Portraying ‘the other’ and explaining self as other by Elhum Shakerifar

“All the inhabitants of this planet are others meeting others” – Ryszard Kapuscinski

Introduction In Jean Rouch’s Petit à Petit, his Senegalese friends Damouré and Lam become ethnographers of Paris, turning the traditional gaze the other way around, and creating a parody of ethnographic film. They ridicule elements of Paris that seem perfectly natural to its locals: Damouré refers to the Seine as a strangled version of the Nile and they express their dislike for certain fashion trends such as coloured stockings. One particularly amusing scene sees Damouré taking measurements of men and women in the riverbank. This is a study of the ‘other’ seen from the ‘other’ side. As in the case of Petit à Petit, Rouch’s style of cinema verité and observational documentary often led his characters to take a lead in the unfolding of events. As such, Jean Rouch’s work can been seen as a first legacy of indigenous media, an anthropological endeavour to include the ethnographic ‘other’ by giving them the camera. I thought it apt to begin this paper with a reference to the values of this conference’s patron. Much attention has been devoted to the indigenous ‘other’ and their interaction with the camera or with various forms of media. However, there has been less anthropological commentary on the emerging idea of ‘other’ in Western cultures, where migration, globalization, new technological developments and the omnipresence of media in everyday life have created new models of communication, and perhaps also vacuums of understanding. By stating that “All the inhabitants of this planet are others meeting others”, Polish journalist Kapuscinski was pointing to the potentials that globalization has afforded those who were traditionally studied and othered. Kapuscinski suggests that it is no longer the journalist or the anthropologist meeting ‘the other’, but ‘the other’ meeting ‘the other’ (both may well also be anthropologists and journalists). With examples taken from the work of a new anthropological endeavour, ‘Postcode Films’, the aim of the present paper is to look specifically at ‘the others’ that have been created within British society, the context within which

anthropological matters are currently implicated, and how to, as a result, engage young people in anthropology’s concerns. Anthropological filmmaking – Current Context Ours is a media saturated generation where the relationship between responsibility and representation is increasingly fractured, with a concomitant widespread failure to grasp that visual media is a representation of reality rather than reality itself. Whilst television has undergone fundamental changes over the past decade, documentary arguably remains a widely broadcast genre (Singer 2002). However, it would seem that the quality of the documentaries being produced has changed drastically, and perhaps the definition of ‘documentary’ is being stretched too far. More than ever before, many of today’s documentaries are based on market research rather than fieldwork. And as such, it is also notable that despite the supposed prevalence of documentaries, the anthropological content of British television has reduced dramatically. 15 years ago, Karl Popper expressed his worry that those producing television were not aware of the responsibility of education they had towards the public. It seems that indeed, the role of television has shifted from one of disseminating information to providing entertainment. The anthropological concern of studying the way different people live their lives has been superceded by celebrity culture and reality TV, a voyeuristic media construct that creates a sizeable quantity of current British television content. The term ‘reality TV’ carries within its name the fallacy that by virtue of being recorded, or captured, an event is a reflection of reality itself. Dai Vaughn’s brilliantly laconic statement “film is about something, reality is not,” reminds us of the main ingredient inherent in all visual material: intent. Beyond television, digital media offers much empowerment and proliferation to new generations. Mark Allen Peterson writes of media production in 2003, that: “like consumption, media production is fundamentally a social and cultural act, involving not only the creation of media texts but also the generation of identities, subjectivities, statuses, and meanings among the persons engaged in media production.1” At the time, Peterson was referencing television producers and film directors, but today, these comments hold true for a population far greater 1

Peterson (2003); p, 161

than media professionals. Currently, the relations between those represented and those representing are increasingly blurred. In May 2009, You Tube’s blog celebrated the fact that 20 hours of video are uploaded to their site every minute, confirming an age of online video, of anybody’s active participation in the creation of filmic content for public viewing and as you tube’s tagline confirms, an age of ‘broadcasting ourselves’2. Such a relationship with media is a norm to many young people today. In an article about this ‘Documentation Generation’, Jennie Yabroff references Caroline Suh’s documentary work in an American high school, referencing how Suh “was concerned about how the kids would react to the camera.” But “she needn’t have worried” as two other documentary crews were already present in the high school. Moreover, the young people “were unfazed by the scrutiny”, and as Suh noted: “They’ve all seen reality TV. They make movies with their cell phones. Being under the microscope is just part of their lives3”. One must question how this impacts upon a new generation of filmmaker’s assumptions. Indeed, cameras are ubiquitous and lie in the hands of a seemingly already media-savvy generation, but the ability to produce, or to produce more, does not automatically lead to greater content value. As noted by Nick Stevenson, “media forms both compress the world while rapidly expanding the amount of information regularly made available.4” and therefore do not necessarily bring us closer to understanding. Stevenson argues further that: “how to make a society more genuinely communicative is, I think, the central moral and ethical dilemma concerning the study of mass communications today. (…) Multichannel access, digitally enhanced television and a fast moving sound bite culture might serve our interests as consumers, but as political and cultural citizens it leaves much to be desired.5”

Postcode Films – Anthropological Filmmaking This is the context within which Postcode Films came to life, and the premise of our work is the belief in a need for a more ethical approach to filmmaking, as much in terms of understanding subjects represented as in the methodologies used. We attempt to teach the responsibility of representation.

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http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=on4EmafA5MA Yabroff (2008) 4 Stevenson (1999); p. 11 5 Stevenson (1999); p. 176 3

As noted in my abstract, the basis of the present paper is the work that I, along with anthropologists Edward Owles and Jaime Taylor, have taken on with our collective Postcode Films. Postcode Films is supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute and maintains strong Goldsmiths’ Centre for Visual Anthropology. The project was set up in 2007, and our aim is to teach young people how to use anthropological and ethnographic mediums in order to better represent subjects in their films and to understand the important responsibility that comes with the representation of ‘the other’. Postcode workshops usually last several weeks, and so whilst it is not possible to develop the long-term and reflexive conditions necessary to qualify the filmic outputs as ‘ethnographic’, we engage with the anthropological aim of making learned reflections, “situated knowledge” as Peterson states6. In order to achieve this, we use methodologies such as the Ba-Li ethnographic experiment, which was devised by anthropologists Luke Freeman and Evan Kilick from London School of Economics in order to make students think about the difficult position of understanding the rites and traditions of another culture when one is conditioned by those of their own culture. “This is a role-play game in which the students are divided into two groups, and taught how to behave as members of two caricatured cultures, the Ba and the Li. Having learnt the rudiments of their own culture, a small group of “anthropologists” is taken from each group and sent off to visit the other group and conduct “fieldwork” amongst them.7” The findings are discussed with the group and the experience of collecting ethnographic evidence, thinking about one’s own conditioning is an important tool in understanding how representation takes place. Against this backdrop, we then watch and discuss films, both anthropological and not, in order to elucidate differences in approach, and we make students film each other during presentations to the rest of the class, so as to understand what it feels like to be the subject of a camera’s focus. In the planning, or pre-production, of film projects, we encourage students to question themselves and their preconceptions and to try to understand people or concepts before representing them. Students are encouraged to spend a week doing fieldwork before filming, so that their narratives are formed on a basis of researched knowledge (to some extent) and so that relationships based on trust and understanding guide the film. Moreover, inherent in the learning of film and editing techniques is a new perspective on how we appear to others, and how what we 6 7

Peterson (2003); p. 8 LSE Research Online: Bond and Freeman (2005)

identify as ‘our own images’ are manipulated by ‘others’ on screen. By teaching that film is a construct, we teach young people to worry about their representations of others. We also teach them to carefully consider their representations of themselves, to think about their translations of the real into an audiovisual language. In view of blurred lines of representation, we have also worked on projects where young people conduct auto-ethnographies and make films to explain their realities to others.

A few examples of recent Postcode Films Postcode’s first project, ‘South East Ethnography’, took place in Greenwich Community College, in the borough of Greenwich in London. Three films were made: Anglesea Road (looking at the Somali community in Greenwich), The Good Ol’ Days (about a traditional English butcher’s who has to close because of lack of trade, pointing to the changing population of the area) and Talk of the Trade (looking at the disappearance of market culture because of the emergence of supermarkets). It is telling that in such a cosmopolitan area of London, where the arrival of new waves of migration is significant, all the film topics chosen referenced ideas of community, tradition and transition. Moreover, the cameras enabled the students to question things and venture into areas where they would not habitually go, again referencing Kapuscinski’s idea of globalization and ‘others’ meeting ‘others’. One of the films, Anglesea Road, was the subject of intense debate. The students who made the film were interested in learning more about the neighboring Anglesea Road, where the Somalian community in Greenwich was largely based, because they felt that Somalia wasn’t an iconic country during Black History Month (the time we were running workshops). Contrary to general belief, the students who made the film were not themselves Somali (the group was made up of two Nigerians, one Afro-Caribbean and one Nepali young person), and in accordance with the standards we had set them, they undertook the task of learning about Somali culture from the people of Anglesea Road themselves, and spent a week going there and meeting different people from the Somali community before setting out to film. As a result, Anglesea Road aimed to give a ‘slice of life’ portrait of the Somali community on Angelsea road, as the young filmmakers has experienced it when undertaking their fieldwork. The film tells stories from the perspectives of specific Somali individuals and in the process, touches on a plethora of issues including the issues of forced migration, belonging, inter-generational relations, reconstruction of identity in exile, etc.

The feedback from the Somali community of Anglesea road itself was so positive that there was a large community turnout at the final film screenings at the Greenwich Picturehouse. However, the film has since been widely criticized for not showing negative aspects of the Somali community; the idea of a ‘positive’ film about the Somali community sits with difficulty with many viewers. Some have argued that the film was biased, since issues commonly associated with the Somali community, for instance, of street and gang violence, unemployment or the use of ‘qat’ (a type of chewing tobacco that many chew and that the filmmakers were asked not to film) were not raised in the film. Other students commented that it was not a credible film, and that its lack of negative elements meant that it must have it had been made by Somali students. It is notable that a few weeks after Anglesea Road was filmed, the same road, and some of the same characters, figured in the documentary Lost Boys by British-Somali journalist Rageh Omaar, about Somali youth and the rise of gang crime amongst them. Omaar’s documentary was shot in a completely different vein, and offered typical media images of the Somali community – gang violence, problematic young, death and disaster. This, coupled with the criticism received for the optimist tone of Anglesea Road was certainly food for thought for the students who had taken part in the film workshops. This episode is reminiscent of theoretical debates that formerly surrounded the production of indigenous film; as James Faris (1992) notes, images are “still left to the intention of viewers, and, unless one is to credulously fetishize the film-maker, it is not the camera’s gaze that is the problem but that one of the viewer.8” Indeed, “everyone is a victim of the camera, certainly the documentary camera.9” In the case of Anglesea Road, the students’ zeal to learn and understand was overshadowed by a heavily engrained preconceived idea about the Somali community, but that in itself became a powerful lesson for the students to learn. Representation was also a key question when Postcode began working in East London, in a girls’ school that hosted a largely Muslim Bengali community. After a few sessions of inductions to methodologies and discussion around short films with anthropological slants, the girls chose to make auto-ethnographic films about their identities and communities. One group chose to make a film about the different personas one adopts at home and outside the home, another group looked at the very different types 8 9

Faris (1992); p. 171 Faris (1992); p. 171

of hijab that was worn by women in the area, another group chose to explore the idea of the traditional housewife versus the working mother, by interviewing women that they felt embodied each of these roles. Interestingly, at the end of the project, in an RAI event disconnected from the workshops, some of the groups attended a screening of one of my films (an exploration of transsexuality in Iran) and came to speak to me after the screening, to express their excitement at the idea that they could use film to explore all sorts of ideas and realities – not just their own. In this instance, it transpired that the strong school identity of Muslim Bengali Girls had automatically spurred all the students on to making films about themselves, when they would have welcomed the opportunity to challenge their conceptions of other things, had they been probed to. This episode truly epitomizes the extent to which representations can be interiorized. Paul Willeman has virulently criticised participatory mediums in the past, suggesting that the ‘othering’ inherent in the construct of such projects was something of a middle-class fantasy and equivalent to “ventriloquist identification”. Concerning the notion of ‘other’ Willeman explains that “both the terms ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘multicultural’ already point to the first problem in the sense that they suggest the existence of discrete, bounded cultural zones separated by borders that can be crossed.10” This is interesting in the context of the young filmmakers referred to above: whilst the project was not a participatory one, and the aim was not for other filmmakers to act as their mouthpieces, the young people sought to portray themselves in the ways they were routinely portrayed. Their films illustrated the ways in which they were multicultural, or in Willeman’s definition of the term, different, to others. Indeed, identity paradigms are important realities of film projects with young people in such a media saturated society, and the influence of projected images remain a somewhat problematic reality. The above examples of the Somali community portrayed in Anglesea Road, and of the films made by the young Muslim Bengali women, illustrate that new generations of filmmakers are being confronted with powerful images that predetermine who they are and what they should be saying. However, it is also important to remember that these ethnographic and auto-ethnographic endeavors also have a strong formative element, inviting filmmakers to engage in a process of identity construction, which, in Faye Ginsburg’s words, allows them to “communicat[e] something about that social or collective identity we call ‘culture’, in order to mediate (one hopes) across gaps of space, time, knowledge, and 10

Willemen (1995); 21

prejudice. (…) What these works share with the current practices of ethnographic filmmakers (…) is that they are not about recreating a pre-existent and untroubled cultural identity ‘out there’. Rather, they are about the processes of identity construction.11”

Conclusion Returning to Kapuscinski’s quote, with which I opened the discussion, we are currently in an age in which there are no restrictions as to meeting others and making judgements about one another. Making media has become inexpensive and finding mediums to disseminate content is second nature to young people today. Almost a decade ago, when evoking indigenous media, Jay Ruby had called for “ethnographic filmmakers to stop being so concerned with making “important” films and to become more interested in how their work affects the people they portray and those who view the images.12” This paper has attempted to make a similar point with regard to today’s young filmmakers and all of those generating visual content. The importance of projects such as Postcode Films, as illustrated by the above examples, is the important and necessary legacy of education vis-à-vis media consumption and production.

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Ginsburg (1993); p. 368 Ruby (2000); p. 221

Bibliography Bond, Stephen and Freedman, Luke; LSE Research Online: DART: Digital Anthropology Resources Teaching, Conference paper originally presented in 2005, available online since May 2008 at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/4562/1/DART_Digital_Anthropology_Resources_for_Teaching_(LSERO).pdf Faris, James C. (1992) “Anthropological transparency: film, representation and politics”, in Film as Ethnogrpahy eds. I Crawford and D. Turton. Manchester University Press Ginsburg, Faye (1993) “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village”, in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, eds. G.E. Marcus and George E. Marcus, Durham: Duke University Press Kapuscinski, Ryszard (2006) The Other; Verso Peterson, Mark Allen (2003) Anthropology and Mass Communication, Media and Myth in the New Millennium, Berghahn Books Ruby, Jay (2000) Picturing Culture: Explorations in Film and Anthropology, University of Chicago Press Singer, André (2002) Beyond Primetime: anthropology and television at war, Manchester Conference Centre, Forman Lecture, 14 May 2002 Stevenson, Nick (1999) The Transformation of Media, globalisation, morarilty, ethics, Pearson Education Limited Wedell, George and Luckham, Bryan (2001) Television at the Crossroads, Macmillan: London Willemen, Paul, (1995) “The National”, in Fields of Vision, Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography eds. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, London: University of California Press Yabroff, Jennie (2008) Here’s Looking At You Kids, Newsweek 24/03/08