CONFERENCE: A Knowledge Beyond Text: Looking at Each Other, Sharing Interrogations International Jean Rouch Symposium; 14‐20 November 2009, Paris PAPER TITLE: Doon School Quintet: The Politics of Social Aesthetics AUTHOR: Mark R. Westmoreland, American University in Cairo ABSTRACT: David MacDougall's Doon School Quintet, released between 2000 and 2004 and spanning more than eight hours, provides an in‐depth visual study of India's most prestigious boys' boarding school. These films move between social situations and intimate settings to explore the acculturation of children through everyday cultural practices of middle class modernity. MacDougall's project provides a sustained effort to revalue the capabilities of cross‐cultural documentary to portray emotional and sensory worlds largely inaccessible in written ethnography. By revealing the way the adolescent boys at the school must negotiate the tensions between agency and conformity in the process of becoming members of India's national elite, MacDougall's cultural portrait shows how modes of social belonging are experienced both rationally and viscerally. The "social aesthetics" formed under the pressure of various national and class interests, however, necessarily exists in contrast to the subaltern Indian citizenry who nevertheless provide a crucial labor force for the school to operate. This paper evaluates the Doon School Quintet's treatment of these cultural politics and considers the role of "observational cinema" vis‐à‐vis political critique. Drawing upon personal footage taken at the Doon School during a workshop with David and Judith MacDougall on cross‐cultural video methods, my paper evaluates the way the marginalized labor force oscillates between visibility and invisibility in MacDougall's films. Characters (with spaces): 17,171 *** “When I first went to Doon School it struck me as a kind of theater. There was a performance going on. A bell would ring and everyone would rush onto the stage, dressed in the same costume. Then they would depart” (MacDougall 2005:105). INTRODUCTION
Spanning over eight hours, David MacDougall's1 Doon School Quintet provides an in‐depth visual study of India's most prestigious boys' boarding school. Located in the town of Dehra Dun in the state of Uttaranchal, the Doon School opened in 1935 and was patterned on the British ‘public school.’ Its founders wished to model the training of Britain’s colonial administrators in an effort to
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David MacDougall has emerged from a career spanning the last forty years as one of the most prolific and recognized ethnographic filmmakers. Having focused most of his work in East Africa and then Aboriginal Australia, MacDougall’s engagement with India began with the Photos Wallahs made in 1991 with his wife and production partner, which focused on photographic traditions in the Hill Station town of Masoori, a popular middle-class tourist destination during India’s summer heat. And most recently, he followed his Doon School Series with Some Alien Creatures about the Rishi Valley School, an experimental co-ed boarding school in Southern India.
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create a national, secular elite (Srivastava 1998). Among its alumni are former Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, as well as cabinet ministers, army generals, parliament members, and business leaders, who together comprise a powerful network of ‘old boys’ (MacDougall 2005:105). An ethnographic social history of this institution is captured in Sanjay Srivastava’s Constructing PostColonial India: National Character and the Doon School (1998). Srivastava’s study focuses on the shaping of the modern Indian citizen and nation, whereas MacDougall’s “interest has been more in how the school, as a small society, has developed a particular aesthetic design in its informal daily life and its more formal rituals and institutions” (MacDougall 2005:105). In this task, MacDougall recoups the concept of ‘aesthetics’ from merely a dimension of art, ritual, and popular culture in order to explore societies “as complex sensory and aesthetic environments” (MacDougall 2005:105). In the Doon School context this includes, “the design of buildings and grounds, the use of clothing and colors, the rules of dormitory life, the organization, of students’ time, particular styles of speech and gesture, and the many rituals of everyday life that accompany such activities as eating, school gatherings, and sport” (MacDougall 2005:105). As such, MacDougall argues that aesthetics performs a regulatory function in our society, triggering feelings of contentment, pleasure, anxiety, disgust, or fear. In so doing, MacDougall endeavors to bridge “the sensory with the ‘cultural’ landscape” (MacDougall 2005:94) in an effort “to respond to, and record, the sensory and emotional environment in which the students found themselves” (MacDougall and Grimshaw 2002a:100). In this paper, however, my focus will not be on the students who MacDougall devotes the bulk of his attention to in the series. Instead, I’m interested in the way the laboring population known as Subordinate Staff makes recurrent appearances in each of the films. They are always voiceless and nameless performers of regimented labor – bell ringing, lawn mowing, hedge trimming, window cleaning, clothes washing, path sweeping, etc. In other critical assessments of
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the Doon School series, as well as MacDougall’s own writing about the films, the significance of this support staff remain unaddressed.2 For instance, Dai Vaughan’s description of the uniforms being laundered and sorted in the opening scene of the first film conveys a message about institutional socialization, “first the uniform, then its wearer” (Vaughan 2005:458). For Vaughan, this one‐two relationship encompasses “the films’ twin strands, the human and the inanimate,” which seem to provide a dialectical tension (Vaughan 2005:458). Of course, the dialectic falsely presumes a totality. Would it not be more accurate to say, “first the uniform, then the Subordinate Staff, then its wearer?” While Anna Grimshaw does not directly reference the labor force in her review of the second film, she does critique its “wholesome” and “ahistorical” view of India’s premier boys’ school. “Certainly,” she says, “it is impossible from the film to learn anything about the particular location of the School within the historical landscape of colonialism and nationalism; nor can we grasp anything of its contemporary social and political standing” (Grimshaw 2002:89). MacDougall defends the project on the grounds that it is unfair to expect a film to encompass everything (MacDougall and Grimshaw 2002b:95). Of course, no film or even series of films can cover everything nor should be expected to do so. And yet, both Grimshaw and Vaughan comment on the “density of detail” in the Doon School Project (Grimshaw 2002:85; Vaughan 2005:458), which enable a variety of readings. So how do the Subordinate Staff figure into the social aesthetics experienced by the Doon School students? What are the politics of these aesthetics? What does MacDougall’s public/private structure tell us about the way the students actually think and feel about those who labor all around them? Does MacDougall’s series merely reify the same social order? How do we disentangle the aesthetics of the school and the aesthetics of MacDougall’s films? The answer to all these questions are beyond the scope of this paper, but they do help guide my thoughts on MacDougall’s project and its ramifications for the “future of visual anthropology,” (Pink 2006) especially regarding its 2
Svivastava, who is not a visual anthropologist, seems to be the only reviewer who highlights the representation of the Subordinate Staff in these films (Srivastava 2000).
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“sensory turn” and its ability to provide social criticism. Indeed, I argue that MacDougall has provided a poignant and nuanced social critique that highlights the complicity of social aesthetics. Lastly, by juxtaposing the Doon School Project with a short video that I made at the Doon School during a three‐week workshop on cross‐cultural video methods with David and his wife Judith MacDougall, I aim to highlight the ethical sensitivity underlying MacDougall’s filmic treatment of the Subordinate Staff. STRUCTURAL ISSUES MacDougall’s five films, Doon School Chronicles a Study in 10 Parts, released in 2000, With Morning Hearts, 2001, Karam in Jaipur, 2001, The New Boys, 2003, and last The Age of Reason, 2004, are edited from 85 hours of footage shot between 1997 and 1999. MacDougall ties together this series of intertextual films “according to several different kinds of logic” (MacDougall 2005:105), forming a complex “three‐dimensional structure” (MacDougall 2005:105). The series can be analyzed through a variety of framings. The first film is the most observationally abstract and broadest in scope, whereas the last film is the most personally revealing and intimate. The second and fourth films follow first‐year students living in Foote House during two subsequent years. The third and fifth each feature a prominent protagonist – Karam and Abhishek, respectively. The second and third films work in sequence, while the forth and fifth films unfold simultaneous from different perspectives. Doon School Chronicles With Morning Hearts Karam in Jaipur The New Boys The Age of Reason 491 min / 8 hr, 11 min
15 occurrences 6 “ 2 “ 7 “ 2 “ 32
If the recurrence of the Subordinate Staff is used as a metric, an interesting pattern emerges. According to my observations, there are thirty‐two scenes with Subordinate Staff and nearly half of
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these occur in the first film. The distribution of these moments of labor also show parallel patterning between the second and third films and the forth and fifth films. It is interesting to me that the first film has the most Subordinate Staff and that the two portrait films (on Karam and Abhishek) have almost none. Indeed, the Subordinate Staff occupy MacDougall’s cinematic landscape in very particular patterns. The most global perspective has the most diversity of class representation. The 2nd and 4th films take place in Foote House – a holding dormitory for first‐year students – and reveal how group dynamics in more compartmentalized spaces work to spatially orient students toward small‐community building. But even in these smaller spaces the interaction with Subordinate Staff rarely required physical contact. Only the scenes involving haircuts portrayed any sort of contact between the students and the Subordinate Staff, whereas the Subordinate Staff only had corporal familiarity with students through the mediation of clothing and dining utensils. Scenes showing numbered tags being sewn on every garment in effect serialize the relationship between the working‐force and bureaucrats‐in‐training, thus precluding the chance for name recognition. The Doon School, says MacDougall, is “a small, self‐consciously created community in which aesthetic design and aesthetic judgments seemed to play a prominent part. From my initial intention to study the school as a site of cross‐cultural contact and socialization, I soon began turning my attention to more mundane subjects such as clothing, colors, timetables, eating implements, tones of voices, and characteristic gestures and postures” (MacDougall 2005:105). Accordingly, in the Doon School project MacDougall is interested in the “social aesthetics” that provide “culturally patterned sensory experience” of the school from the students’ perspective. In an effort to account for non‐discursive ways of knowing, MacDougall has been a stalwart advocate for reevaluating the anthropological role of the visual. His sensual visual anthropology makes use of principles of implication, identification, visual resonances, and shifting perspectives; it involves the viewer in heuristic processes and meaning creation; and it constructs knowledge not by
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“description” but by a form of “acquaintance” (MacDougall 1997:286). MacDougall says, “we may need a ‘language’ closer to the multidimensionality of the subject itself—that is, a language operating in visual, aural, verbal, temporal, and even (through synesthetic association) tactile domains” (MacDougall 2005:105). For instance, MacDougall recounts a screening at the school in which “Several teachers questioned why I began Doon School Chronicles with the dhobi ghat, the school’s laundry, rather than something more modern or impressive, not grasping the significance of clothing in the film” (MacDougall 2005:105).3 And for that matter, I would say, not grasping the significance of those who launder it. Indeed, the ringing of bells, manicured lawns, trimmed hedges, swept pathways, laundered clothing, and assembly‐line placement of cafeteria plates and utensils as well as many other tasks accomplished by the Subordinate Staff are the visible evidence of regimented labor. These patterns form part of the “social aesthetics” of the Doon School experience. Inscribed in the everyday routine of schedule, the senses mediate a national discourse of social stratification and class difference. These laborers are not manifest on screen as independent agents, but as a subset of the campus environment. For a viewer of the films, the pleasure of rhythm – ringing, cutting, and sweeping – may sweep the laborers into the background and make it easier to naturalize them within the structure of things. Indeed, in the Doon School series we observe shadow people, moving in the background. They are almost invisible. No one speaks to them and they remain speechless while filling teacups, lifting heavy objects, sounding school bells. Visually they are voiceless, but aurally their sounds fill the air with clatter and banging. This assertion of presence makes a subtle but important critique of their situation through a different sensory register than offered vocally or visually. The social aesthetics of the Subordinate Staff obeys a much different set of criteria than the students, teachers, In MacDougall’s writings on the films, this is the only reference I found that even indirectly referenced the Subordinate Staff. But even here, it would seem that the clothing was of a higher degree of importance than the people laundering it. Indeed, MacDougall has many references to the object of labor. Does he reify the subordination of the staff by privileging the aesthetics of labor’s materiality? I am torn between these two readings. 3
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or administers.4 Voices of protest were not heard and names were not uttered, but on a haptic register we experience the laborers as disempowered labor. If we accept that all texts are open to different readings, then does not MacDougall’s observational record of the Doon School have the potential to provoke critical readings of class? On an affective register, how might observational cinema facilitate political readings of existent social aesthetics? How might we understand MacDougall’s inclusion of the Subordinate Staff in the films as a radical, albeit imperfect, effort to sense the experience of social stratification mimetically? Rather than structuring the absence of social stratification by merely not including them in the films, I argue that MacDougall’s inclusion of these moments provide an important critique of postcolonial production of class difference at the school. In keeping with his project, the social aesthetic is also the sensory experience of seeing these people silently working to maintain the school’s grounds and routines. By making them visible MacDougall is actually rescuing their presence for the historical archive. He has indelibly left their imprint on the Doon record. However, the tension between their image and their silence bears a fundamental challenge to cross‐cultural representation. VOCALITY AND VISUALITY
Indeed, in order to elucidate the potentially dangerous relationship between vocality and visuality in the production of cross‐cultural videos, let’s turn to the workshop I mentioned earlier.5 At the beginning of summer at the Doon School in Dehra Dun, India, the campus becomes a much different place than during the school year. When we arrived at the end of May for the workshop with David and Judith MacDougall, renowned ethnographic filmmakers, the last few students were still waiting to leave. It seemed that most of those remaining would linger at the pool or fly kites in
Indeed there are several scenes of political pomp and masculinity contests for the elite middle and upper classes. I question the way agency has been situated in voice, such as Robert Stam’s notion of multivocality (Stam 2006), and argue that this risks replicating the superiority of logocentric regimes of knowledge. 4
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the large open fields. But soon a different population emerged to dominate the social landscape of the campus. Daily life at Doon became filled by the sounds of laborers maintaining the grounds – leechee pickers, grassclippers, road and path sweepers, kitchen staff, security guards, administrative servants, launderers, and many more. The workshop guided Indian and non‐Indian academics through a series of exercises that had us shooting short videos on campus and around the city of Dehra Dun, observing people perform various quotidian tasks.6 To find our material we had to negotiate the politics of representing people with whom we had very little report and perhaps no common language. For my final project I decided to focus on one of the Subordinate Staff. Often women could be found squatting around campus pulling up grass. After they had collected a large sack‐full, they would place this grass on their heads on leave the campus. Arrangements were made through a liaison from the Doon School for me to film a woman named Chundani. Implicit but unscrutinized was the power dynamic of socially empowered individuals coercing socially disempowered individuals to cooperate with the foreigner workshop participants. Naïvely I followed her when she left with her sack of grass and walked less than a mile to her home and gave her cow the grass while she scooped out the excrement in the stall with her hands. Unwittingly, by following her home I put her safety in jeopardy. The next day when she returned, I learned that men in the neighborhood had harassed her and her husband had hit her for bringing a strange man home with her. On the end of my video about her I included an unsubtitled comment that she made to a Mumbai‐based professor who was translating for me. The voiceless subaltern spoke, but only after the rupture of violence spawned by my video exercise. In contrast with MacDougall’s voiceless,
The workshop had thirteen participants, five were Indian women – one a Doon School headmistress, one a Catholic sister at a local convent, and three university academics based in New Delhi, Mumbai, and California. The remaining eight were Anglos from abroad, including professors and graduate students from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. 6
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campus‐bound observational footage, I suggest that my close engagement with Chundani ruptured the inside/outside boundaries of different social aesthetic regimes. By doing so I disrupted the anonymity and autonomy of the Subordinate Staff. Does this not reveal MacDougall’s sensitivity to the regulatory power of the social aesthetic at the Doon School? Perhaps, MacDougall’s sensorially engaged observational approach also helps us embody the experience of the interlocutor, who is navigating the competing registers of embodiment across forms of social stratification. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimshaw, Anna 2002. From Observational Cinema to Participatory Cinema - And Back Again? David MacDougall and the Doon School Project. Visual Anthropology Review 18(1-2):80-93. MacDougall, David 2005. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. The Visual in anthropology. In Rethinking Visual AnthropologyPp.276-295. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacDougall, David and Anna Grimshaw 2002a. Comments on the Email Exchange between David MacDougall and Anna Grimshaw Regarding the Review of With Morning Hearts. Visual Anthropology Review 18(1-2):100-101. 2002b. Exchange of Emails between David MacDougall and Anna Grimshaw. Visual Anthropology Review 18(1-2):94-99. Pink, Sarah 2006. The future of visual anthropology: Engaging the senses. Oxon & New York: Taylor & Francis. Srivastava, Sanjay 1998. Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School. Culture and communication in Asia. London: Routledge. 2000. Imagining Social Landscapes. Visual Anthropology Review 16(1):95-98. Stam, Robert 2006. Cultural Studies and Race. In A Companion to Cultural Studies, Toby Miller, ed. Pp.471-89. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Vaughan, Dai 2005. Review Essay: The Doon School Project. Visual Anthropology 18(5):457-464.
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