Ethnographic research through film and writing

Ethnographic research through film and writing

This workshop investigates the process of ethnography broadly and considers what kinds of knowledge can be created, represented, or conveyed through the medium of film and writing. All ethnographers cope with matters of establishing rapport and learning culturally appropriate ways of collecting data—whether through observation, participation, or conversation. What then are the different strategies adopted in the field for producing visual, verbal, and other outputs? Our two guests are both filmmakers and writers:

Richard Wolf, an ethnomusicologist and creative writer, and David MacDougall, an anthropologist and film theorist. The first film, Wolf’s Transformation, explores music, craft, and mortuary ritual among the indigenous Kota people of South India using footage and audio recordings made over the course of 90 years. The second, MacDougall’s The Age of Reason, explores the thoughts and feelings of Abhishek, a 12-year-old from Nepal, during his first days and weeks as a student at the Doon School, an elite boarding school in North India. David MacDougall calls for attention to the 'aesthetics of community life', which consist of 'forms and resonances that are often as complexly interlaced as the rhymes and meanings of a poem'. What forms and resonances do we perceive in the two films?

Film screeners

Richard K Wolf is the G Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South and Central Asia for four decades. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published on social-cultural 'style' in South Indian classical music; conceptions of space, time and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of south India; drumming, 'recitation', and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan; and musical and poetic links between South Asia and Persianate Central Asia.

David MacDougall is an ethnographic filmmaker and writer on documentary cinema, having filmed in Africa, To Live with Herds (1972), the Turkana Conversations trilogy (1977-81), Australia, Sardinia and India.  His Indian films include Photo Wallahs (1991), Under the Palace Wall (2014) and studies of children in institutions, including Doon School Chronicles (2000), SchoolScapes (2007) and Gandhi’s Children (2008). His books include: Transcultural Cinema (1998), The Corporeal Image (2006), The Looking Machine (2019), and The Art of the Observer (2022). He is presently Honorary Professor at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University.

Discussant and chair

Kalpana Ram is Visiting Professor of Anthropology at CHL, Australian National University. She has made a key contribution to developing the relationship between anthropology, phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory through extensive ethnographic work on women’s embodied experiences in Tamil-speaking fishing and Dalit agricultural communities. 

Discussants 

Muhammad Kavesh is the Director of the ANU South Asia Research Institute, and an Associate Professor in anthropology with a keen interest in ethics, multispecies anthropology, decolonisation, the anthropology of Islam, and the geopolitics of present-day South Asia. 

Natasha Fijn is Associate Professor at the ANU School of Culture, History and Language (CHL). She has been awarded a mid-career Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to enable her to conduct ongoing research relating to 'A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza' (2022-2026) in Mongolia. 

Workshop agenda

• 9.30am - Richard Wolf’s “Transformation” - film screening, followed by discussion and Q&A
• 12pm - Lunch break: informal discussion and engagement on the first film
• 1pm - David MacDougall's “The Age of Reason" screening, followed by discussion and Q&A
• 3.30pm – Afternoon tea and further informal discussion on the second film

Please register to attend the workshop. Attendees are required to read the two readings (under the attachments section on this site) prior to the workshop.

                                                                          
Image: supplied by Richard Wolf