Bootlegged: Unauthorized Circulation and the Dilemmas of Collaboration in the Digital Age

Abstract

Recent innovations in digital technologies have exponentially increased the opportunities for collaborative ethnographic filmmaking between anthropologists and our interlocutors. In this article, I focus on a relatively unexplored aspect of these emergent forms of collaboration: the unruliness of circulation in the digital age. I draw on long-standing anthropological debates about controlling the dissemination of taboo cultural motifs to consider how the rapid and promiscuous circulation of digital images and video intensifies these concerns. Reflecting on my experience of collaborative video production with Cuban sex workers and the subsequent unauthorized circulation of these politicized images outside of Cuba, I show how an inability to control distribution presents pressing concerns regarding consent for a growing cadre of anthropologists working in digital mediums.

Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology

“…The debate assumed that the monograph would remain the preferred form of anthropological scholarly production and that the anthropologist was first and foremost a writer (Geertz 1973). Whether "clinging to verbal description" (Mead 1995, p. 5) or trying to master their written craft, anthropological scriveners have since felt compelled to "sharpen their writing tools" (Wulff 2016, p. 3), seek literary inspiration (Narayan 2012), and experiment with different forms of prose (Stewart 2007, Elliott 2016, Bakke & Peterson 2017, Pandian & McLean 2017, if not poetry (Trethewey 2007, Rosaldo 2013. Although the standard ethnographic monograph is richly multimodal-possibly including personal narratives, interview transcripts, and archival excepts, not to mention maps, tables, and illustrations-written text remained anthropology's hegemonic "monomedia" (Pink 2006, p. 12), and audiovisual mediation remained "noticeably absent" from the discussion (Howes 2019, p. 19).…”

“…In other words, our enlarged sensorium is not only embodied but also augmented by media. Accordingly, a multimodal framework embraces the "space of indeterminacy inherent to all processes of mediation" (Mazzarella 2004), which helps cultivate both the generativity of cultural poiesis (Stewart 2008) and "the circumstances in which new knowledge can take us by surprise" (MacDougall 1998, p. 163). Aligned with generative models of research creation (Loveless 2019), mediation's "capacity to bring forth" offers an interchange between the immediacy of making and the lasting durability of the made (Ingold 2013, p. 2), in which the traces of unintended noise become reflexive features of a distributed agency among people, machines, and environments.…”

Multimodal Ambivalence: A Manifesto for Producing in S@!#t Times

“…The questions of who we are collaborating with, to what ends, and under what conditions are necessary “killjoy” questions (Ahmed 2021). These questions force us to confront how a project we conceive of with others might, in its enactment or circulation, produce the conditions for various forms of harm, some of which in our digital era are beyond what we can imagine, anticipate, and inform our collaborators about (Stout 2014).…”

Border South directed by Raúl O. Paz Pastrana United States: Andar Films, 2019. Spanish and English with English subtitles

“…The questions of who we are collaborating with, to what ends, and under what conditions are necessary "killjoy" questions (Ahmed 2021). These questions force us to confront how a project we conceive of with others might, in its enactment or circulation, produce the conditions for various forms of harm, some of which in our digital era are beyond what we can imagine, anticipate, and inform our collaborators about (Stout 2014).…”