“When We Are Laughing Like This Now, We Are Also Being Recorded by Them”: Eliamani's Homestead and the Complicity of Ethnographic Film

Abstract

Eliamani's Homestead is an unfiltered presentation of unequal power relations, othering, suspicions, misunderstandings, and the untranslated in an exchange between Indigenous hosts and their guests in a cultural tourism setting. A family of Dutch tourists visits a Maasai homestead in Tanzania, where Eliamani and her child have no food. The tourists take copious pictures of the women and children and haggle over the price of a bracelet—a common scene in cultural tourism encounters the world over. The discomforting exchange is all the more palpable when Eliamani breaks the fourth wall and reminds the filmmaker and viewer of their complicity. This film dialogue is part review, part conversation with the filmmaker who describes the process of making, editing, and screening the film, including audience and participants’ reactions. It situates Eliamani's Homestead within the ambit of ethnographic film, both illustrating visual ethnography's complicity in cultural tourism and revealing its potential to offer its own critique when it maintains a multivocal approach that strives for dialogue with “the other” on both sides of the camera.

Reframe, Redesign, Realign

“…Each issue will also feature a “Dialogues” section. Piloted in our last issue (Barnabas and Wijngaarden 2019) and inspired by the “In Dialogue” section that included transcripts of public dialogues (Bhabha and Burgin 1992), interviews at film festivals (Lutkehaus 1994), and conversations specifically for VAR with filmmakers and visual theorists (Chen 1992), this new section is pedagogically‐oriented, bringing film, exhibition, and book reviews together with process‐focused interviews that discuss the nuances of filmmaking, curating, and/or publishing, while further contextualizing these practices within the history of and contemporary experimentation in visual anthropology. In this issue, Matthew Webb talks with Brooklyn Museum’s Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture Matthew Yokobosky about Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion .…”

Fashioning Inclusion, Designing Internationalism: Pierre Cardin at the Brooklyn Museum

“… 1 1 This essay is a collaborative product, following the lead of recent anthropological scholarship (e.g., Barnabas and Wijngaarden 2019; Yanagisako and Rofel 2018; see also Ginsburg 2018 on Rouch and anthropologie partagée [shared anthropology]). My dialogue with Matthew Yokobosky transpired over two months, with one face‐to‐face meet‐up and several back‐and‐forth emails, after which I shared the edited transcript and review with him for feedback. …”