3/2/2016 Camera as Cultural Critique | Anthropology-News

Camera as Cultural Critique

Society for Visual Anthropology
Christian Suhr (Aarhus U)

A Report from the Visual Anthropology Research Group at Aarhus University

What does the use of cameras entail for the production of cultural critique in anthropology?

With the launch of the Eye & Mind Graduate Program in Visual Anthropology at Aarhus U and the inauguration of the new 10,000 m2 culture-historical
Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, a group of six scholars, filmmakers, and exhibition designers, headed by Professor Ton Otto, have taken up the
challenge to rethink how cultural critique might be produced through the use of different forms of audiovisual media.

The move toward considering ethnographic film, photography, or exhibitions in terms of their culture-critical potential raises central questions about the
kinds of impact that these modes of analysis have for anthropology. How do the various forms of mechanical and digital perception facilitated by modern
cameras impact on ethnographic analysis? What kinds of understanding and dialogue might be facilitated between researchers and their collaborators
through the use of such media? In what ways does the use of different forms of audiovisual media change the traditional hierarchical roles of informants,
knowledge producers, and knowledge recipients?

The joint research project at Aarhus U and the Moesgaard Museum attempts to
address these questions through six individual case studies. Karen Waltorp, a PhD
student in the anthropology department, is conducting a participatory film and
fieldwork project on the ways in which smartphones are used as moral laboratories
by young Muslim women in Copenhagen. Already in use by these women both as a
means of networking and as a platform for testing out alternative ideals of Muslim
piety, intimacy, and sexuality, the smartphone is now being reinvented as a tool for
the production of a collaborative film that critically addresses moral transformation,
place-making, and future-making among these women in the context of the Danish
welfare state.

Moesgaard Museum. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Two postdoctoral fellows, Arine Kirstein Hgel and Christian Vium, focus on the
ways in which photographic and audiovisual archives can be re-engaged so as to
serve as platforms for new scholarly and public debate. Applying haptic audiovisual
techniques, Hgel reanimates an old archive of recordings from Danish archaeological excavations in the Arabian Gulf. Her project allows for new ways to
perceive how Danish Orientalism has shifted through different stages of attraction and repulsion of the Arab Other. Viums project consists of a
photographic remapping of historical sites from the colonial period in Australia, Brazil, and Siberia. In dialogue with local collaborators, Vium re-enacts old
colonial photographs, using this technique to elicit new reflections about colonialism in the past as well as the present.

Peter I. Crawford is continuing a research project on cultural heritage in the Reef Islands that was initiated already in the 1970s and in which film and
photography have served as a primary medium of exchange between researchers and the local islanders. Crawfords focus is particularly on the interfaces
of filmic and ritual techniques for reconstructions of cultural heritage in the South Pacific.

Ton Otto is also continuing a long-term research project on cultural change on the small island of Baluan in Papua New Guinea. This project has already
resulted in a number of films and an exhibition focusing on topics such as the changing role of tradition, kinship, and mortuary ceremonies; and the local
politics of kastam, culture and tourism. With Christian Suhr, Otto is now producing a new film with the islanders focusing on the impact of deceased
ancestors and religious authorities on the lives of the living (see also Suhr and Otto 2009, 2011).

As part of the joint research project, Suhr is also continuing a film and research project on psychiatry and Islamic healing. While Suhrs PhD focused on
Islamic exorcism among Salafis in Denmark, his new film project explores how young Sufis in Cairo seek to protect and purify their hearts from despair,

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arrogance, and doubtillnesses which reportedly spread through modern mass media, and which the young Sufis attempt to counteract through the
production of alternative images and religious art.

All six case studies in the visual anthropology group at Aarhus U are based on the central hypothesis that audiovisual means of critical inquiry and
expression open up ways of dealing with the immediacy of social life that defy the tendency of much social analysis to accept premature conceptual
closure and temporal freeze-framing. Audiovisual media allow the moment of analysis to be extended, thus transforming it into an experimental zone for
cross-cultural dialogue and imagination.

Visual anthropological analysis and cultural critique starts at the very moment a camera is brought into the field or existing visual images are engaged.
The framing, distances, and interactions between researchers, cameras, and filmed subjects already inherently comprise analytical decisions. It is these
ethnographic qualities inherent in audiovisual and photographic imagery that make it of particular value to a participatory anthropological enterprise that
seeks to resist analytic closure and seeks instead to establish analysis as a continued, iterative movement of transcultural dialogue and critique.

The joint research project aims to ground a platform for innovation and experimentation in visual anthropology in a close collaboration with the Eye & Mind
Graduate Program at Aarhus U and the newly inaugurated culture-historical Museum of Moesgaard. With more than 450,000 visitors since its opening in
October 2014, the museum provides a unique window through which researchers and students, as well as visiting scholars, artists, and filmmakers, can
enter into direct and experimental dialogue with a broad public.

The overall ambition of the project is to explore how the potential of audiovisual media can be used to produce studies not of, but with people in diverse
cultural and social settings across the globestudies in which interlocutors and audiences are not simply treated as recipients of scholarly work, but rather
as active participants in the creation of anthropological knowledge.

Research news and comments, and ideas for future columns may be sent via email to Jens Kreinath at jens.kreinath@wichita.edu and Jennifer
F Reynolds at jreynold@mailbox.sc.edu.

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