An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object

Abstract

Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations. KeywordsBlack America, native anthropology, visual anthropology, reflexivity, gifts

Multimodality: An Invitation

“…On their way to producing anthropological media, anthropologists weave a complex skein of trace media behind them: from social media posts to relationships built with communities; to hastily recorded sound bites and photographs taken to help us remember specific details; to rough cuts and early edits of films; to varied exchanges and quid pro quo arrangements where field researchers produce recordings, photographs, and film at the behest of the community (Jackson 2004). These traces reveal the complexities of how our interlocutors engage with media as well as the processes through which we conduct research and arrive at particular understandings.…”

“…How could we use the immense insight provided by the ethnographic method while not falling into the traps made apparent over anthropology's infamous history? As we critically engaged with this concern, we relied upon the longstanding literature on reflexive ethnography, attempting to construct a process founded upon the precepts of ethnographic sincerity (Jackson 2004). The camera was one means to think through these concepts, as students were forced to determine when and how each of them would be in front of and behind the camera, creating multiple reverse gazes-what Ginsburg (1995) termed the "parallax effect"-that drove many students to think through their positions in this particular school context with these particular high school students.…”

“…Understanding the ways in which the anthropologist is simultaneously native and foreign (Jackson 2004), we began to transcend our initial paralysis about the Otherness that our presence in the WPHS classroom entailed. However, a second hurdle arose as we began wondering how this reflexivity would translate in the field, outside of the field (e.g., in our fieldnotes), and in the final product.…”

“…However, a second hurdle arose as we began wondering how this reflexivity would translate in the field, outside of the field (e.g., in our fieldnotes), and in the final product. Did the acknowledgement of our own subjectivities beyond reified social categories (Jackson 2004) extend only to the process of making the film, or were there ways to critically engage with our own presuppositions in the final product as well? Moreover, what was our role as Penn students in the creation of this film?…”

The Anthropology of Family Business: An Imagined Ideal

“…One such form of access that suits family business research is native or auto-ethnography, such that insiders study their own firms (Jackson, 2004;Jacobs-Huey, 2002). Learned's dissertation (1995, pp.…”