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ISSN: 1329-878X |
Contents
AbstractsHart Cohen and Juan F. Salazar: Introduction: Prospects for a digital anthropology Anthropology’s interest in visual communication dates back more than a century, as part of what may be considered the rich history and legacy of visual anthropology and ethnographic film. Moreover, anthropology has always been intricately linked to new media developments from photography to early cinema, from documentary and cinema verité to experimental film. The increasing engagements by anthropologists in applied and public visual research and practice are a sign that ethnographic studies of the social practices of media may provide contemporary anthropology with renewed strategies for a voice in international affairs and public debate. The aim of this special issue is not to trace the history of visual anthropology, but to map out some of the directions in which the discipline is going, in light of current prospects offered by new digital media theory and practice. Graham Murdock and Sarah Pink: Ethnography bytes back: Digitalising Visual anthropology The last decade has seen a sustained debate about the limits and biases of traditional fieldwork practice. The same period has also seen the launch and adoption of a range of new digital information and communications technologies (ICTs), including CD-ROMs, the internet, digital photography and film, and multi-function mobile phones. Investigating how these emerging media are encountered and worked with in a range of everyday settings has opened up a range of new areas and questions for anthropological research, while underlining the central challenges currently facing ethnographic practice. Visual anthropologists are particularly well placed to explore the possibilities opened up by innovations in multimedia technologies since their investigative and presentational practices have, from the outset, sought to use photography and film alongside written text and recorded speech. Their patchy, but nonetheless important, efforts to encourage subjects to take their own photographs and make their own films have also introduced more participatory modes of investigation. Drawing on a range of recent work, this paper explores how visual anthropologists are currently using both the multimedia and interactive properties of emerging media to develop new forms of practice across the three key moments of research: ethnographic investigation, analysis and interpretation, and presentation. In particular, it looks at how varying combinations of digital media are being employed to assemble ‘thicker’ accounts of everyday practices and beliefs that incorporate participant as well as researcher productions, develop modes of analysis that are more self-reflexive, collaborative and participatory, and construct hypermedia archives and research presentations that are open ended and interactive. Barbara Glowczewski: Lines and criss-crossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous narratives The issue of an ethical approach to pleasure does not imply a religious or moral order, but a constant re-evaluation of how each image or representation of any contemporary culture (Indigenous, musical, professional, digital, etc.) impacts on social justice, equity, tolerance and freedom. Two attempts of anthropological restitution developed with Aboriginal peoples for a mixed audience are presented here. The first is a CD-ROM (Dream Trackers: Yapa Art and Knowledge of the Australian Desert), focused on one Central Australian community (Lajamanu in the Northern Territory), while the second is an interactive DVD (Quest in Aboriginal Land) based on films by Indigenous filmmaker Wayne Barker, juxtaposing four regions of Australia. Both projects aim to explore and enhance the cultural foundations of the reticular way in which many Indigenous people in Australia map their knowledge and experience of the world in a geographical virtual web of narratives, images and performances. The relevance of games for anthropological insights is also discussed in the paper. Non- linear or reticular thinking mostly stresses the fact that there is no centrality to the whole but a multipolar view from each recomposed network within each singularity, a person, a place (a Dreaming in the case of Aboriginal cultures), allowing the emergence of meanings and performances, encounters, creations as new original autonomous flows. Reticular or network thinking, I argue, is a very ancient Indigenous practice but it gains today a striking actuality thanks to the fact that our so called scientific perception of cognition, virtuality and social performance has changed through the use of new technologies. Hart Cohen: The visual mediation of a complex narrative: T.G.H. Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend This paper refers to a research project that has been launched to compile a range of related resources into a digital repository with the intention of (hyper)linking this material to relevant points in the text. Those elements of the text of potential and particular relevance to the Arrernte (Aranda) community and Aboriginal sense of place (such as specific totems, sacred ceremonies, kinship connections, etc.) will explicitly be mapped into a range of visual representations (including geographic maps and genealogy charts), and then supplemented with (hyper)links to relevant images, documents, media resources and other online collections. Finally, feedback from the Arrernte (Aranda) community on this visually mediated text will be recorded as oral histories, digitised and (hyper)linked to further supplement the specific cultural content of the Journey to Horseshoe Bend text. The project is in its early stages of execution, and this paper is intended to introduce the project and its background, and to place its knowledge interests within a contemporary framework of similar projects. This paper utilises a complex memoire authored by T.G.H. Strehlow, titled Journey to Horseshoe Bend, as a means of indicating the full range of strategies and techniques for the exploration of its narrative elements. These explorations will traverse the geographic locations of sites and specific totems, the conceptual relationships between narrative elements of place, the historical connectedness and physical migration of the Arrernte (Aranda) community over time, cultural ceremonies and myths specific to place, and links between a sense of place and other important motifs in the text. The engagement with the Horseshoe Bend story, itself referenced to the death journey of Lutheran Pastor Carl Strehlow in 1922, continues to have resonances for contemporary Arrernte (Aranda) social practices. Indeed, the cultural work of articulating a modern social existence in a white-dominated civilisation, along with an abiding interest in the continuities of tradition, makes cultural practice active, fluid and dynamic. While the paper is only able to sketch these relationships, it also suggests how the formulation of these interests is related to the full range of remediation strategies available. Michael Christie: Words, ontologies and Aboriginal databases Aboriginal people are increasingly making use of digitising technologies for their cultural and educational work. However, databases are not innocent objects. They bear within them Western assumptions about the nature of knowledge, and how it is produced, which may inhibit or undermine the intergenerational transmission of Aboriginal knowledge traditions. Words (or text strings), for example, have a particular constitutive function in Aboriginal epistemology, which implies a rethinking of traditional structures and uses of metadata. Knowledge and truth are understood more in terms of performance than content, which implies something about how digital resources are to be configured and represented. This paper looks at collaborative work done developing a database to support the ongoing work done by Yolngu (northeast Arnhem Land Aboriginal) people in keeping their knowledge traditions strong. Juan F. Salazar: Digitising knowledge: Anthropology and new practices of digitextuality This article examines the subject of digitisation of cultural knowledge in light of the new intertextual possibilities within visual anthropology made possible by digital media. The article argues that new media present several challenges and opportunities for decolonising anthropological research through processes of documentation, visualisation and collaboration. These aspects will be examined by concentrating on a collaborative documentary video produced with the participation of indigenous Mapuche media-makers in Chile. The final product — a 48-minute documentary — was in part an attempt at testing how visual sampling and remixing of authored footage could be conceived as a novel form of collaborative storytelling in practice-based research. Stephen Harrington: ‘The democracy of conversation’: The Panel and the public sphere If news is a fundamental part of the public sphere and ideals of democracy, then continuing assertions about the public’s lack of engagement with its topics is a worrying trend. However, much of this worry may be conflated by a lack of understanding about both the lived experiences of audiences (particularly youth audiences) and the news media environment more generally. This paper examines The Panel, a Ten Network ‘new’ news program which appears to have a significant deal of power in the mediatised postmodern public sphere. Through its discursive format, and by making news more comprehensible and interesting, the program is able to increase the potential for everyday ‘rational-critical’ debate at the heart of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989: 117). This theory is examined here through the use of interviews with members of The Panel’s production team and focus groups conducted with youth audiences. Michael Keane and Albert Moran: (Re)presenting local content: Program adaptation in Asia and the Pacific This article looks at the increasing incidence of television format flows in the Asia-Pacific, and draws upon findings from a three-year, 11-country study. It argues that format activity is both a consequence of demand for low-cost content and a catalyst for change in local content. Fashioning formats has become a means of financial and cultural insurance. Media producers in Asia have joined the international television format trade circuit. This paper looks at a number of international formats that have staked out a presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Simone Murray: Think global, act global: Corporate content streaming and Australian media policy Australia ’s media policy agenda has recently been dominated by debate over two key issues: media ownership reform, and the local content provisions of the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement. Challenging the tendency to analyse these issues separately, the article considers them as interlinked indicators of fundamental shifts occurring in the digital media environment. Converged media corporations increasingly seek to achieve economies of scale through ‘content streaming’: multi-purposing proprietary content across numerous digitally enabled platforms. This has resulted in rivalries for control of delivery technologies (as witnessed in media ownership debates) as well as over market access for corporate content (in the case of local content debates). The article contextualises Australia’s contemporary media policy flashpoints within international developments and longer-term industry strategising. It further questions the power of media policy as it is currently conceived to deal adequately with the challenges raised by a converging digital media marketplace. Born, Georgina, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC
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