RAIFF 2021 - Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography

THIS TALK WAS PART OF RAIFF 2021 AND IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.

Panel participants: strong textLorenzo Ferrarini, Faye Ginsburg (Intro), Paul Henley, David MacDougall, Nicola Scaldaferri, Michaela Schäuble (Chair)strong text

This event sees the authors of this book series in conversation with readers of their recently published books, the first in the Manchester University Press series Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography. The series provides a forum for authors and practitioners from across the digital humanities and social sciences to explore the rapidly developing opportunities offered by visual, acoustic and textual media for generating ethnographic understandings of social, cultural and political life. It addresses both established and experimental fields of visual anthropology, including film, photography, sensory and acoustic ethnography, ethnomusicology, graphic anthropology, digital media and other creative modes of representation.

MacDougall’s collection of essays, The Looking Machine, gives unique insights into the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, and the intellectual and emotional links between filmmakers and their subjects. Suhr’s film monograph Descending with Angels, through rich filmic and textual case studies, shows how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients become a battlefield between the moral demands of Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states. Ferrarini and Scadaferri’s Sonic Ethnography makes a compelling argument for taking sound seriously as a crucial component of social life and as an ethnographic form of representation by exploring the role of sound-making and listening practices in the southern Italian region of Basilicata.

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