This polyvocal text is both a narrative and a dialogue between two scholar-activist researchers working in rural communities in distinct parts of the world — South Africa and Southern Mexico — sharing their experiences of using cellular phone and camcorders, while also exploring the potential sustainability of these technologies in the context of rural communities engaging with participatory video projects. These communities are not only playing an increasingly salient role as the mediators of this technology, but through their practices they are drawing much needed attention to the ways in which the researcher — participant dynamic in participatory video practices can be transformed into a more autonomous and participant-led set of practices. The article considers the ways these media forms carry the potential to imagine and honour different worldviews.
This article describes how cellphone technology, specifically cellphilms – films of varying lengths made with cellphones by everyday people – are being taken up in the community of Union Hidalgo as a platform to foster an intergenerational dialogue between youth and Elders, with the specific goal of preserving the Zapotec language and ancestral practices. The study is rooted in two distinct but complementary methodologies. The first is an Indigenous Oaxacan methodology or practice known as comunalidad, a process rooted in a commitment to strengthening the future of communal lifeways. These lifeways reflect the values of the Zapotec ancestors, the community, and local Indigenous identity by asserting strategies that engage a cultural praxis that does not perceive education in terms of formal classroom curriculum. Rather, they engage the cultural process of learning, whether it is making tamales, planting corn crops, or “doing” other embodied ancestral Zapotec practices. This comunalidad methodology is merged with a participatory cellphilm method, in the form of a series of workshops adapting cellphone video, Web, and social-media technologies. The results included a dialogue about how new technologies can inform the transfer of Indigenous ancestral knowledge, language, and embodied practices in the twenty-first century.
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