Circulating ethnographic films in the digital age

Broken gods: Collaborative filmmaking in troubled times

“…What was set out as an analytical tool to counter the bias implicit in observer–observed relations has often become fetishized as an end in itself. As an aesthetic convention, reflexivity has further excluded other narrative and aesthetic traditions (Dattatreyan 2020). Who is allowed to mobilize the “voice of interiority” also remains an issue within collaborative productions, especially with marginal groups (Sikand 2015, 47).…”

“…Beyond shared anthropology, emergent multimodal approaches include subject‐generated films, shared authorship, and various forms of open‐ended collaboration. What these approaches have in common is a commitment to reflexivity, which has become more firmly embedded in the ethos of anthropological work, in project design rather than post facto, and beyond projects toward understanding the political economies of circulation that underpin each work (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan 2020; Shankar 2020). Emergent forms of collaboration also share a focus on process and circulation rather than the final product and on the forms of political action that these enable.…”

“…Finally, collaborating with communities of nonanthropologists has challenged established disciplinary boundaries, prompting a reconsideration of what counts as knowledge and opening the possibility of work with new media, methods, and aesthetics (Chin 2017). In fact, while ethnographic films continue to be largely judged according to the professional qualifications of the makers and to standards of storytelling that privilege observational and reflexive‐realist representations, the audio‐visual material produced by indigenous and diasporic groups introduced nonlinear forms and hybrid narrative styles that challenge such conventions (Dattatreyan 2020). Indigenous media productions and collaborations, including works by Miyarrka Media, the Karrabing Film Collective, and IsumaTV, often bring a distinct “embedded aesthetic” to storytelling that highlights the ethical‐political concerns underpinning indigenous media practices and their capacity to “embody, sustain and even revive or create certain social relations” (Ginsburg 1994, 368).…”