This paper establishes the topic of the monographic number of Visual Ethnography that its authors coedited. It begins with an account of how they found themselves in the situation of producing music videos while they were doing ethnographic fieldwork, and how it pushed them to gather other researchers with similar experiences in conference panels and this dossier. After proposing a definition for ethnographically grounded music videos, the authors present the contributions to the dossier. The paper closes with a more theoretical proposal, centred on the idea of ethnographically grounded music videos as transmodal outcomes.

In 1957 a young American researcher, Frank Cancian, took 1801 photographs of Lacedonia, a small town in southern Italy, in the province of Avellino, in Campania. His photos describe the living conditions of the villagers and their work, in particular the peasants, the craftsmen, the middle class but also their social, economic, political and religious life during six months: from January to July. He also wrote an interesting field diary, in which he noted the problems related to fieldwork. In those years, many American researchers went to southern Italy to study the life and culture of peasants, such as Edward Banfield who developed his theory of “amoral familism”. Cancian’s work, however, proposed a partial critique of Banfield’s ideas These materials are the subject of the research that the “Annabella Rossi” anthropology laboratory (University of Salerno - Department of Cultural Heritage Sciences) carries out in agreement with Pro Loco “Gino Chicone” and the Municipality of Lacedonia. This essay constitutes a first account of this research. An attempt to place Cancian’s figure and work in the flow of historical and cultural events after the Second World War.

In this article we aim to present three kinds of artistic-ethnographic projects in a way to provoke reflection about creating experimental ethnographic realities and searching for new languages of their description. Starting from a very neutral project, this article passes through a provocative fake business and ends with an action that is quite controversial in ethical terms. First, we describe the „Work Culture project in the town of Lublin, Southeast Poland which was realized by the „Field Collective”, a group of artists and anthropologists, and conducted in a place like railway station district. The Collective undertook attempt to learn the craft from the local artisans and to create meeting situations that were revealing the embodied, manual knowledge of the performed work. They used film as a visual tool but not as the point of coming up, but it has accompanied them from the beginning, influencing the encounter and bringing a new conditions for ethnography. Second, we present a description of the Tear Dealer, a project conducted by the artists Alicja Rogalska and Łukasz Surowiec, in the town of Lublin of Southeast Poland. In this case we show a kind of faked, new-business set in an impoverished urban district as a particular artistic-ethnographic trap designed for producing the moment of slowing down faced an unexpected emotional work. Third, we draw on the „Outpatient clinic” project that was at the same time an artistic and research project, a showcase and a prototype of action in which the artist, Łukasz Surowiec, created the situation of meeting of actively drinking alcoholics, anthropologists, artists and casual passerby. In these three cases we propose a new theoretical-descriptive framework to the experimental research situations that have been revealed, especially while facing an unexpected emotional work, the unplanned expressions, interventions and experiences. Through this, we also show how artistic experiments with visual and audio-visual methods influence ethnographic perception, and how the films, pictures and recordings used during the project have become an inseparable part of the situation.

This article treats about the use of drawing as a research method during a visual ethnography conducted in Burkina Faso and Ivorian Lobi countries with populations of farmers who are still mainly animist. The emphasis of the article is on the “games of looks” and the invisible, those who reveal the existence of geniuses of the bush that the recent gold rush disrupts. Other games of implicit looks are visually experienced in two types of hunting expeditions: a lion hunt and a photo safari. Finally this article analyzes the ethnographic relationship established with Diniate Pooda, the author-diviner-healer of the drawings here exposed. In his drawings he explores the heuristic scope of the medium, by doing so he is able to reveal the “effects of presence” of the invisible.

Fil: Campo, Javier Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina

This paper introduces an approach of Participatory Ethnographic Filmmaking I developed by making films together with rural dwellers in Namibia, Botswana and Angola. Grounded in the field of ethnographic filmmaking, it aims at making anthropologically informed films together with groups of people with no previous filmmaking experience. Workshop participants shape the form and content of the film and contribute to its practical making. In this paper, I explain how such films can be made in a wide range of different settings. Participatory Ethnographic Filmmaking gives the participants the possibility to shape their own media image and generates new forms of collaborative knowledge.

This article seeks to valorise and understand the potential of ethnographic drawings for anthropological fieldwork, exploring their relations to ways of making records and visual research. I argue that drawing contributes positively to anthropological research and vice-versa: researching anthropologically contributes to drawing the world about us. After a brief review of the literature, I present eleven benefits of using sketchbooks and drawings in ethnography, discussing topics related to the methodological challenges of fieldwork, such as accessibility, memory, temporality, spatiality, visual perception, forms of recording, dialogue with informants, participatory methods and the sharing of results.

Participatory visual methods are changing the way anthropologists forge new knowledge and interact with informants in the field, creating possibilities for intimate and public-engaged inquiry

Though recent scholarship illuminates the significance of film in increasing visibility of Afro-Latinos and expanding the Spanish language curriculum, it fails to consider how film validates oral traditions in the African Diaspora as well as challenge the curricular assumptions that marginalize orality. I therefore consider the counterhegemonic potential of film through a discussion of my 2008 Fulbright funded documentary film on the Afro-Ecuadorian communities of the Chota-Mira valley. A decolonizing process and project, Mas alla del futbol documents the oral tradition of bomba as a means of celebrating afrochoteno culture and raising awareness of their subalternity. Interdisciplinary, it presents bomba and afrochoteno culture as represented by afrochotenos themselves. This article reveals the necessity of critically engaging film and filmmaking as decolonial tools that validate afrodescendant oral traditions and counter the epistemological violence of colonialism and colonial slavery.

The aim of this paper is to use the theory of Art nexus, from the famous book Art and Agency by the anthropologist of art Alfred Gell, and his concepts to analyze a case of artistic appropriation between actors from different cultures. The example is taken from a multi-sited ethnography conducted by the author between 2011 and 2012, in Paris and Southern India and focused on Indian artifacts kolam and kalam and on strategies of some french artists, appropriating these cultural materials and creating new works of art. In these pages, one exhibition of the artist Marie-Therese Latuner is analyzed in particularly, together with kolam and kalam in their native contexts, from the point of view of agency, in their respective social relations. The question arise is: can the theory of agency and art nexus, be useful to observe artistic practices distinguished by intercultural appropriation?