Microsoft Word - Botticello VS 12016 MSS.docx 1 Julie Botticello, Tom Fisher & Sophie Woodward (2016) “Relational resolutions: digital encounters in ethnographic fieldwork”, Visual Studies, 31:4, 289-294 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2016.1246350 Abstract The articles in this Special Issue highlight the relationality existing between researchers, participants, cameras, and images, with each article bringing complementary perspectives on the use of digital images in ethnographic fieldwork. These include reactivating archives through their digitization for visual repatriation, facilitating dialogue and understanding between participant and researcher, analyzing the relation between participants and the virtual spaces of their self representations, and exploring the range of capacities for new research methodologies afforded by digital technologies. Individually and through their juxtaposition, the articles highlight the complexity of the interactions between researchers and participants in their digital encounters, and open dialogical spaces, in ethnographic fieldwork and in visual anthropology, about access, participation and transparency in representational practices. Relational resolutions: Digital encounters in ethnographic fieldwork Photographs and film have long been used in anthropology as a form of supplementary documentation, objects to enhance other data as a tool for reconnection to pasts or recovery of lost processes and practices. The focal point here, however, is not, or not only, on the image created as object or tool, but on the processes involved in generating images in contemporary ethnographic fieldwork contexts and their continued meditational salience of images once created. The four papers in this special issue were first presented together in a panel at the RAI’s Anthropology and Photography conference, held at the British Museum in May 2014. As organisers of the panel, we wished to explore different engagements digital photography (as still images) enables, in making as well as viewing images, and what these encounters suggest for thinking further about the visual in anthropology. In particular, has the advent of the digital image in the fieldwork context significantly changed the parameters of the relationships between researchers, participants and images? If so, what impact might this have for visual anthropology more generally? The anthropological tenets of participation and observation can seem at odds with photographic and filmic methods, as cameras and recording equipment can create detachment and distance between an observer and those observed. Yet, since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a growing emphasis on the relationality evident in these encounters (Banks 2001; Edwards 2003; MacDougall 1991; Morley 2006; Morton and Edwards 2009; Peers and Brown 2003; Pinney 2016; Pink 2003). Since the 1960s, as Woodward (2008: 863-4) recounts, anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch ‘aimed to change the research relationship from people who had power “interrogating people without it”, to a “shared … dialogue between people belonging to different ‘cultures’”’ (citing Morley, 2006: 117), with the camera encouraging people to ‘reveal 2 themselves’ (Morley, 2006: 119) as part of this engagement process. MacDougall highlights that from the 1970s onward, this ‘tendency towards dialogic and polyphonic construction in ethnography’ (1991: 2) has been growing, particularly in the handover of power and equipment to indigenous peoples to represent themselves (Ginsberg 1991; Turner 1992, Worth and Adair 1972[1997]). However, Turner (1991: 7) reminds us that communities are not homogeneous, inclusive groups and that whether in the hands of an outsider or an insider, who holds the camera still does so from a particular perspective, situation, and power base, and thus does not represent the whole, but remains a partial perspective (Haraway 1998; Clifford and Marcus 1986). Nevertheless, Turner argues there is much to learn from the camera techniques and social dynamics in the ‘production of indigenous visual media [… which] provides an opportunity to study the social production of representations rarely approached in non-visual ethnography’ (Turner 1991: 16). The encounters between those in front, those behind the camera, and those spectating make ‘anthropology more sensitive to the politics and possibilities of visual representation’ (MacDougall, 2005: 219), regardless of where the researcher is standing in the exchange. While not always overt, this mutual engagement in the creation of visual representation has always been present. Whereas the photographic image is evidence of ‘that has been’ (Barthes 2000), highlighting that an event occurred, ‘the “contractual” elements of photographic events’ (Pinney 2016: 75) are also evident, as the image reveals, not just that an event took place, but also the ‘social relations which made [the encounter] possible’ (Azoulay 2008: 127). This extends Banks’ pragmatic acknowledgement that ‘all image production [… is] the result of a series of social negotiations, some formal […], most informal’ (2001: 119) to the ‘relationality that flow[s] from the contingency of the photographic event’ (Pinney 2016: 76). Collaboration resides at the basis of representation through image creation and that photographer, those photographed and the viewers (Mustafa 2002: 188) mutually construct the event. In short, photography is a social encounter. In spite of this, the place of the visual in anthropology remains ambivalent, with a primacy for textual analysis taking precedence, and the visual often being used as another method for documentation or education (Ruby 2005) and the images created slipping from context to content, losing the discursive and ‘messy’ (Jungnickel and Hjorth, 2014: 137) interactions of the encounters enabling their creation. This is not to say that evidence of these encounters cannot be seen in the closer readings of the images (Azoulay 2008; Favero 2014; Herle 2009), which visual anthropologists, as seen above, have been highlighting for some time. The possibilities for revealing the ‘messiness’ of social encounters around the camera and images produced have become more accentuated with the affordances provided by digital photographic technology. While in many ways digital imaging has not ‘revolutionised photography’ (Murray, 2008: 161), there are significant differences between them. These are the near simultaneity of 3 image creation and image viewing; the capacity to store larger numbers of images at a time, facilitating chance capture and content build up; the ease of dissemination to known and new audiences, democratizing authorship and spectatorship; creating access to archives and concretizing connections to ancestors and evoking memories linking past with present (Bell 2003, Edwards 2005, Peers and Brown 2003, 2009, Herle 2009); as well as the familiarity and ease of capturing and representing oneself directly, through the increasingly global reach of digital imaging (Ruby, 2005: 166). Further, digital images extend the information images contain through the meta data encoding embedded in the technology, facilitating virtual emplacement of the images back into the landscapes of their creation. As the papers in this SI reveal, in ethnographic fieldwork, digital images both follow and lead the trend toward greater equitability and transparency of the photographic ethnographic encounter. Following trends towards greater transparency and empowerment already evident within visual anthropology, the articles here acknowledge the particular qualities that photographs, whether digital or physical, have for creating conversations between participants and researchers, across time, in particular spaces, with specialists and those less informed (including the researchers). The visual is both a method and mode of analysis that provokes its own interpretations and responses. Images in this SI are combined with text, not because texts provide the meaning for images, ‘control[ling] their polysemy’ (Barbosa 2010: 300), but because each are different modes of access, understanding and transmission. The visual enables ‘shifting perspective[s]’, ‘identification[s]’ and ‘implication[s]’ (MacDougall, 2005: 220) within and beyond the intention of the researcher and those researched. Helping to drive changes in visual anthropology, the articles here aim to contribute to the calls to communicate research (Ruby 2005: 163) visually and to empower, ‘in terms of access, participation and communication’ (Cohen and Salazar 2005: 7, cited in Pink 2011: 228). This has a two-fold outcome, of revealing the complexity of the interactions researches and participants have with one another in their digital encounters, as well as of bringing the ‘different things to understand’ (MacDougall 2005: 220) and ‘new routes to knowledge and its representation’ (Pink 2012: 12) the visual offers, in a fuller approach to anthropological knowledge. Situated in India, Korea, Spain and the UK, and across a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, art and design, cultural sciences, digital communication, and sociology, the articles in this Special Issue each grapple with challenges arising through the photographic social encounter mediated by digital images in ethnographic research. Sbroccoli’s article, “Between the archive and the village, the lives of photographs in time and space”, explicitly addresses the relationality and power structures between researcher and researched, between eras in which these have occurred, between different participants in relation to one another, in relation to images, from past to present, and in the narrative (re)constructions these continually undergo in making and maintaining historicity and contemporary meaning. His work focuses on bridging fieldwork and a photographic archive made in the 4 1950s by A C Mayer with contemporary fieldwork and a photographic revisitation by Sbriccoli, in the same location of Jamgod, in the central Indian state of Madya Pradesh. The temporalities, spaces and narratives in the research are multiple. These range from the 1950s Jamgod in Mayer’s photographs and fieldwork; to Mayer’s recent discussions with Sbriccoli about that work and further digitization of extant photographs from the period; to Sbriccoli’s relocation to Jamgod, and the undertaking of merging new and old, through image making and narrative generation; and finally, among the Jamgod villagers themselves, on their appropriation of Mayer’s image from his fieldwork, their revisitation of these in mobile digital formats, and their individual and collective reconstruction of pasts bridging the 1950s and 2012-14. In the creation of his talking archive, Sbriccoli aims to make all these different perspectives, meanings, intentions, narrations and representations explicit, to be transparent about process and product to all those involved. This methodology aligns with the perspectivism purposed by Deleuze (2006), in which there are not variations of a single truth, but rather the truth of individual variations held by any subject – researched or researcher alike –disturbing the dichotomy between knowing subject and studied subject. His work aligns with all the papers in this volume, around the fluidity, accessibility, and variability of meaning, where meaning created is dependent on who is looking, how much they know, their ability to reveal or conceal, which again suggests that a methodology incorporating image generation/(re)interpretation remains an emergent process. Significantly, Sbriccoli highlights the use of narrative as an essential element to gaining an understanding any given meaning of an image. Following Sontag (1977), he argues that without narration, the images and archives remain mute, unable to articulate in visuals alone the links between content and referent. While many, including the authors in this volume, go into the field with a hope of capturing content through the objectivity of images, as we argue here, knowledge in images lies dormant, or least partially inaccessible, in the absence of interpretation. Here, Sbriccoli praises the versatility of the digital image to mediate in ways impossible 60 years ago; a point further exemplified by Dugnoille’s research in Korea on the potency of the digital and virtual to attest to and progress social change. In this regard, it may be a case that although anthropology awakened to its own politics and powers decades ago (e.g.: Turner 1991, MacDougall 1991), the technological advancement of the digital has further assisted in the shift away from knowledge produced by (academically) knowing subjects, to a more conscious and transparent knowledge, co-produced amongst all subjects involved in the research. Sbriccoli’s project aims to elicit visually this multiplicity of knowing subjects and talking archives, and the instrumentality of images for ‘evok[ing]’ (Edwards 205: 29), creating further spaces for transparency over process, product, perspective and potential. Continuing on from Sbriccol’s relationship between the researched and the researcher and the photographic representation remaining in the hands of the researcher, but narrated and discussed through the knowing subject of the 5 researched, Botticello’s paper, “From documentation to dialogue, interrogating routes to knowledge through digital image making”, also focuses on the collaborative aspect of image making. Like Sbriccoli, Botticello’s data collection is not just a collaboration of different visual perspectives, but it is also a collaboration of different methodologies, of talking, doing and capturing, wherein digital imaging is but one part of the wider process. While there are many tangible aspects to the production of Leaver’s lace at the last factory in England, machinery, materials, documents, understanding the processes which go into making lace still remains an intangible aspect which this research was attempting to capture, preserve and appreciate. Her initial enquiry into capturing and communicating lace workers’ knowledge through images, quickly shifted toward the researcher being in need of the researched to guide and direct her toward to some level of understanding in order to not only capture process, but also to understand what was in the frame once it was captured. A complete object or entity produced such as a web of lace, while evident in plain sight, can conceal the multiple inputs that create it. In her paper, Botticello aims to show the processes she undertook to gain some mastery over these in order to be able to explain how a finished piece of lace comes into existence. What she terms a multi-faceted methodology is a fluid and emergent/emerging collaboration between researcher and researched in the shift between intangible knowledge and the tangible creation. Visual highlights of this emergent tension between intangible and tangible are in understanding the relationship between man, materials and machine in the lace making. Her use of Sennett’s (2008) hand-eye-mind complex, together with the chaîne opératoire approach (Schlanger 2005) brings home the fluidity of tacit knowing and doing amid the tangible manifestation of making processes. While maintaining that her learning remained partial, and was thus predicated on moving out of ignorance toward an infinite destination of lace making knowledge, revisiting earlier images in the fieldwork, she found that what were once obscurities hidden in plain sight, these now revealed more content as her own insight increased. This recycled to a return to the partiality and polysemic nature of images, in that they can always reveal more or less to those with greater or lesser knowledge, and they continue to retain potential for reinterpretation, by the same or new people, at other times, and in other contexts. Dugnoille’s article extends these interactions by exploring how informants interact with digital technologies to represent themselves and new ways of understanding own society. His work, “Digitalizing the Korean cosmos: Representing human-nonhuman continuity and filiality through digital photography in contemporary South Korea”, focuses on animal activism and the platform digital images offer activists to re-represent human and non-human animal relations in contemporary Korea. In this, his research aligns with Sbriccoli’s project on the democratization of knowledge and power through digital, and more significantly, online media. Dugnoille’s concern is with contemporary social change in Korea, as it attempts to move away from ‘traditional values’ around dogs and cats, in which dogs and cats are brutally 6 prepared for slaughter and then eaten (as the animal’s increased adrenaline at death is understood to increase the sexual stamina of the person consuming the meat), toward seeing the same dogs and cats as pets. Digital and online media have played a significant role in re-orientating the human and non-human animal relationships in this regard. Dugnoille worked with animal activists in Korea in the early 2010s, who have taken ownership over the online representation of and changing form of human and non-human animal relationships. In expressing this shift from food to pet, Dugnoille details how the animals depicted online are visually represented as singular entities, with particular personalities, qualities and characteristics, some standing in for their human guardians, others actually taking their own digital images through pet friendly software, which their guardians later upload. Here Dugnoille argues that digital animal photography is used as a ‘vector to demonstrate non-human animals’ affiliation to […] the human domestic sphere’ (Dugnoille, this volume). Further, some of the animals encountered in his research were named according to protocols used in Korean kinship, thus acknowledging that non-human animal relationships relate to cross- and intergenerational kin relationships among human animals. Here Dugnoille’s visual research maps onto the other authors in this volume regarding the interrelationship between visual and discursive practices in representation and the re-imagination of histories and connections. The shift from food to pet, Dugnoille argues, follows Kopytoff’s (1986) notion that commodity status is not a fixed state, but one that things can move in or out of. For the animal activists, the aim is to shift these animals from common commodities toward singular entities falling outside of the market system, where they are not sold as pets, but adopted without charge (as in the 2012 campaign “Don’t buy, adopt”). The great success among activists in promoting animal adoption runs in parallel with an increase in dog and cat meat consumption in Korean society. Whether eaten as food or kept for pets, the sense of non-human animals within Korean society remains the same. Transposed into images, however, without this insider understanding, this notion of an exclusive and interrelated community seems difficult for an outsider to apply when animals are being prepared for consumption and not just adoption. The meanings of the images are not easily transposed beyond Korean eyes, as knowledge in/of images remains decidedly specific to local communities of practice. It remains to be seen whether the use of online digital images may be more successful in shifting toward the singularized expression of non-human animals as pets within the cosmology of Korean society membership. Rounding off this collection of articles analyzing the digital in ethnographic research, Gomez Cruz takes us to forward to consider mobility itself in his article, “Trajectories: Digital/visual data on the move”, and his marking of the pathways between points of capture, made possible through digital technologies. This, he argues, is the next stage in theorizing digital ethnographic research. For Gomez Cruz, the virtual and the digital merge through the concept of a trajectory, whih is not just a trace of having passed through, but a ‘mobile sited ethnography’ (Gomez Cruz, this volume), in which a researcher’s own mobility emerges as a 7 key component in the ethnographic process. Mobility becomes a further element that combines methods articulated already by the other authors in this volume, around visual data, digital methods and reflexivity about practice. Gomez Cruz takes us to Spain, England and beyond, in which he analyses gaze and emplacement. While in Barcelona, Gomez Cruz recounts his daily bicycle rides and the encounters he makes with certain others on his route. Noteworthy are disempowered ‘trolley-men’ (Gomez Cruz, this volume) who migrate daily in an opposite trajectory to Gomez Cruz’s own, using shopping trolleys to collect leftovers from consumer society. Through digitally tracking and mapping their movements against his own, Gomez Cruz constructs a fieldsite of/in movement, through which juxtapositions of class, wealth, space, place, time, and materialities of mobility (bikes versus shopping trolleys), also become evident, and provide the starting points for further ethnographic research by changing trajectories to join others in their movements. In England and beyond, Gomez Cruz considers other happenstance interactions with his mobility, this time not with other mobile persons, but with digital screens. As with the trolley-men, he marks what forms the screens take, what information/content they hold and where they are located – some are fixed and others, like phones and tablets, are also highly mobile – and makes his own digital databases of them. In both instances, Gomez Cruz recognizes that his movements and intersections with other people or screens is not random, but is embedded in situations that call into question notions of agency and structure governing his own movements as much as those he encounters. As other papers in this volume articulate, Gomez Cruz’s concept of trajectories as a research methodology foregrounds the reinsertion of the researcher into relations between self/other, gazing/knowing, technology/change, mobility/stasis in contemporary ethnographic research. Furthermore, reflexivity and awareness also impact on the archive created, in that the serialization of images creates meaning and understanding, which single images or images without further contextual content, be this informant narratives or metadata, cannot. In addressing the processes of generating digital images as well as the interpretive, analytical potential in images collected, the articles in this Special Issue highlight the relationality existing between researchers, participants, cameras, and images. The papers show how digital images in ethnographic fieldwork continue existing trends in visual anthropology around empowerment and equitability. The papers also show how digital imaging can extend the discipline by exploiting the capacities the technology offers for access, participation, transparency and transmission and the impacts these have on researchers, participants, spectators on how they relate to images and one another. 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