Keskiviikko 27. syyskuuta

14-16 Judith Okely: Anthropology and Journalism's Images: Gypsies as one case study, Joensuun yliopisto, Agora-talo, Sali H9

18-20 Faye Ginsburg: Black Screens and Cultural Citizenship, Joensuun yliopisto, Agora-talo, Sali H1 (auditorio).

Torstai 28. syyskuuta

10-12 Judith Okely: The anthropologist as filmed subject: returning to a gendered past, Joensuun yliopisto, Agora-talo, Sali H3

Black Screens and Cultural Citizenship

This talk explores the "media worlds" of Indigenous feature filmmaking in Australia, by urban based Aboriginal directors. It is part of the broader project of the burgeoning work in the ethnography of media, which turns the analytic lens of anthropology on the production, circulation and consumption of media in a variety of locales. In this case, I ask what role these media play in the evolution of new ways of conceptualizing diversity, contributing to the expanding (if contested) understandings of Australia as a culturally diverse nation, something that activist filmmakers have long understood. Their films contribute to that process not only by offering alternative accountings that undermine the fictions presented by unified national narratives as they play on screen; their work (in both senses of the word) also demonstrates that a textual analysis is not sufficient if it does not also take into account the "off screen" cultural and political labor of Aboriginal activists whose interventions have made this possible. More broadly, I underscore the importance of media and those who make it as critical to understanding how contemporary states and their citizens negotiate diversity.

Anthropology and Journalism’s Images: the Gypsies as a case study

Professor Judith Okely

Abstract

Bourdieu has distinguished between ‘recovering’ the meanings which a photograph ‘proclaims;i.e. the explicit intentions of the photographer; and deciphering the surplus of meaning which it betrays’.. This paper addresses the contrast between the photographs of professionals in journalism and the interpretations of by anthropologists and draws on a collection of photographs of Traveller-Gypsies taken by non anthropological professionals working for local newspapers in the anthropologist’s field area, together with photographs by celebrated national photographers. The pictures are notable for their aesthetic framing and perfect focus. Some are seemingly with a universalist/humanist or exoticised agenda. Others are provocatively framed to emphasise disorder, and a sedentarist aesthetic. Little is known about the relationship with the subjects, nor the context. But there is much to be retrieved. The anthropologist brings knowledge and interpretations unseen by the journalist photographer. Journalists’ photographs, now with global power, may carry ethnocentric or surplus meanings for different viewers and local subjects. Journalists are asked to provide commentary for footage in studios thousands of miles from the action. Across both time and space, by contrast, anthropologists’ knowledge of cultural specificities offer counter interpretations and added meanings to both local and globalised images. The arguments develop my distinction between looking and seeing.

The Anthropologist as filmed subject: returning to a gendered past

Professor Judith Okely

Abstract

This presentation develops from my article in The Journal of Media Practice providing both film and photographic stills, with specific elaboration. It is based on the experience of the author’s return, with a former inmate, together with an anthropologist film maker, to the boarding school where she was incarcerated for nearly a decade on a remote island. In the English, if not the British tradition, the core ruling class have been educated spatially separated from those deemed below them. This was achieved primarily through the boarding school set invariably in rural or non metropolitan areas. The total institution promoted narrowed views in both the ideological and visual sense. For females, once destined to be the servers and breeders for male colonists, subservience and a lobotomised intellect were essential, along with the protection of reproductive power.Their bodies and imagination were rigorously controlled within restricted space. Film footage shows the women re-exploring the 17 acres of grounds and interiors. The school landscape is crumbling and overgrown.The institution was to be sold the next week. The return by the two liberated inmates, after decades elsewhere, and their re-grounding in their past uniquely evoke suppressed memories, emotions and re-interpretations of a former place of terror. Unexpectedly, the chapel evoked a vanished peace and retreat from human surveillance. Filmed fleetingly with triumphant returnees , the camera becomes a unique means for experiencing and re-living the past through free association. The anthropologist is both analyst and performer

Judith Okely

Professor Judith Okely is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Hull, and Deputy Director The International Gender Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University and Her publications include The Traveller-Gypsies 1982 Anthropology and Autobiography 1992, Own or Other Culture 1996 and recent articles in Ethnos 2001 Journal of Media Practice 2003 The Sociological Review 2006. Her forthcoming book Anthropological Practice will be published by Berg.