Mise en scène, Knowledge and Participation: Considerations of a Filming Anthropologist

Embodied Routines and Ethnotheories of Morning Drop‐Offs at US and Chinese Preschools

“…We acknowledge the possibility that Yueyue and Grandpa’ awareness of being filmed led them to perform an unusually unemotional version of their separation. However, as Møhl (2011) argued, when ethnographic subjects know they are being filmed, they generally perform not in false ways, but rather in a “subjunctive” version of themselves, which she defined as “a densification” of their usual modes of being in the world: “They seek to mark out things more clearly by choosing significant actions and activities, or to speak in more precise ways, and even to accelerate movements and processes.” Møhl suggests that the question then becomes how “we may understand and analyze this slightly different manner and the shifts that are taking place” (2011, 233).…”

Paraethnographic Film: Virtual Enactment and Collaboration in Our Digital Selves

“…Ethnographic filmmakers have developed a range of techniques for collaborating with fieldsite interlocutors (Grimshaw 2002; MacDougall 1987). This has included forms of improvisation (Gruber 2016; Lea and Povinelli 2018), “ethnofiction” (Sjöberg 2008), and “filmic anthropology” (Møhl 2011), so as to “undermine the traditional, commonly under‐theorized, division between informants’ and ethnographers’ perspectives” (Stewart 2013, 305). It has also included fieldsite interlocutor participation in filmmaking, which can blur the distinction between “indigenous” and “ethnographic” film (see Pink 2013, 112–16; White 2003).…”

“…Our Digital Selves builds on this history of collaborative innovation, particularly because “emergent digital and visual methodologies… are opening up new possibilities for participatory approaches that appeal to diverse audiences and reposition participants as co‐producers of knowledge and potentially as co‐researchers” (Gubrium and Harper 2013, 13; see Møhl 2011; Stewart 2013). Digital technologies make filming and editing more accessible, particularly when interlocutors already make digital images and videos and images (e.g., when engaging with fandom and other forms of participatory culture [Barney et al 2016; Jenkins 2006]).…”

“…Filmmaker Paul Wolffram’s analysis of collaborative ethnographic filmmaking with a community in Papua New Guinea does not treat as collaboration “the assistance of camera operators who accompany me into the field” (2018, 269). Flores’s description of collaborative ethnographic film included the observation that the participation of younger community members, “ together with the presence of outsiders among the video crew , stimulated the development of a unique, intimate and revealing window… on the different roles adopted by the diverse members of the community” (2007, 214, emphasis added; see also the incidental mention of Curtis Levy in MacDougall [1987] and Vincent Blanchet in Møhl [2011]).…”