Last night was the annual screening of works from the Sensory Ethnography class in the departments of Anthropology and Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. It was an impressive and totally engaging four hours of films taking us from Sudan to Sibera, Quebec to Canary Islands, and Mumbai to Queens.This full-year course, taught by Professor Lucien Castaing-Taylor and teaching assistant Jeff Daniel Silva, provides graduate (and some undergraduate) students from many different disciplines "intensive training in video production and film studies, with a critical emphasis on exploring alternative approaches to an ethnographic art practice." This fall I served as Interim Lab Manager of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, which supports the course.
Several of the nine films really struck me. Alex Fattal's Beneath Trees Tropiques took us on a 30-minute visit to an island in the mouth of the Amazon basin, where families survive in part by chainsawing down the forest where they live. The film was visually captivating, from its opening — a sustained low-angle shot from a dugout canoe paddled by a restless teenager — to its metaphorical closing on an unusual beast hanging tenuously between two trees. But more than the visuals, I appreciated the piece's warm humanity, capturing the subtle decision-making of fathers trying to support their families, teens choosing between studies and soccer, and women navigating their own roles in a world defined by men. These very particular, yet universal, themes interacted quite interestingly with Alex's investigation into "the ethics of deforestation and documentary practice."
Alexander Berman's Songs from the Tundra introduced us to the "awkward modernity" of the Even people in Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula — a reality in which reindeer herding and ancestral folk songs intersect with Cold-War era tanks and three-year-olds playing computer games. Fatin Abbas's Mud Missive looked at a group of potters in Khartoum, Sudan, and reflected on her own ideas of self and nation.
On the homepage of Harvard's Department of Anthropology, you can see a map of the far-flung research interests of its social anthropology graduate students (and mention of a chance to see more Sensory Ethnography works at the Peabody Museum on February 11). Of all the films on faraway lands in last night's screening, it was Verena Paravel's 7 Queens that discovered the most exotic characters — on a long walk beneath the elevated tracks of New York's #7 subway line. Maybe it takes a Frenchwoman to help us see our ourselves through an ethnographic lens.
One side note to this memorable evening: I was curious whether it was a coincidence that almost all of the screen time in these pieces, especially in the audio tracks, was centered on men and boys. Does this say anything about how ethnographic makers gain access to a community? Or is it just coincidence?
In any case, it was a wonderful conclusion to the fall semester at Harvard, coming after my last day of work at the Film Study Center and Sensory Ethnography Lab. Congratulations to all of the students, and to Lucien and Jeff! And welcome back to Harvard, Ernst Karel (who did great sound mixes for these films).