Culture & Power Timetable 2011-12
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University of Edinburgh School of Social & Political Science Social Anthropology 2016 – 2017 Film and Anthropology SCAN10050 Semester 2, Year 3 Key Information Course Organiser Dr Richard Baxstrom Email: [email protected] Room no.5.29 Chrystal MacMillan Building, 15A George Square Guidance & Feedback Hours: Tuesdays 13.00 – 15.00 Location Semester 2 Lecture Fridays 11.10 – 13.00 Room G.05, 50 George Square Film Screening (begin Week 2) Tuesdays 9.00-10.50 G10, Drummond Library, Old Surgeons Hall Course Secretary Lauren Ayre Email: [email protected] Undergraduate Teaching Office Assessment • Short essay: 12 noon Wednesday 15 February 2017 Deadlines • Long essay: 12 noon Tuesday 9 May 2017 Truth is not a Holy Grail to be won; it is a shuttle which moves ceaselessly between the observer and the observed, between science and reality. -Edgar Morin Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit. -Robert Flaherty 2016-17 Film and Anthropology 1 Contents Key Information ................................................................................................ 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 3 Aims and Scope ............................................................................................... 3 Delivery and Assessment ................................................................................ 5 Communications and Feedback ....................................................................... 6 Readings and Resource List ............................................................................ 6 Course Lectures and Readings........................................................................ 8 Appendix 1 – General Information ................................................................. 17 Students with Disabilities ............................................................................... 17 Learning Resources for Undergraduates ....................................................... 17 Discussing Sensitive Topics........................................................................... 18 External Examiner .......................................................................................... 18 Appendix 2 - Course Work Submission and Penalties ................................... 19 Penalties that can be applied to your work and how to avoid them. ............... 19 ELMA: Submission and Return of Coursework .............................................. 19 Extensions: New policy-applicable for years 1 - 4 .......................................... 20 Plagiarism Guidance for Students: Avoiding Plagiarism ................................ 20 Data Protection Guidance for Students .......................................................... 20 2016-17 Film and Anthropology 2 Introduction This course will provide a broad overview of the history of visual anthropology and engage how the formal methods available to anthropological filmmakers have been/are deployed in the context of producing ethnographic engagements with the world that are primarily visual in their orientation. Thus, visual anthropology and its formal (i.e. methodological) relationship to ethnography, cultural and social anthropology, and the social sciences and humanities more generally is the specific focus of the course. Specific anthropologists/filmmakers to be covered will include Robert Gardner, Jean Rouch, Karl G. Heider, Robert Flaherty, Timothy Asch and Lucien Castaing-Taylor; salient non-fiction films or other visual representations (such as the early scientific photography of Charcot or Muybridge and the science films of Jean Painlevé) will also be considered. Note: This is not a technical course in filmmaking technique. As the focus will be on the analysis of particular films, students will be required to attend regular film screenings (scheduled on Tuesdays, 9:00-10:50, weeks 2-10) outside of the weekly lecture. Aims and Scope This course is oriented towards a critical and historical engagement with the development of visual anthropology as a subfield within social anthropology. Therefore, its primary aims are to provide a sustained engagement with visual works understood to be ethnographic in nature or as being a forerunner of ethnographic film as it is understood presently. Thus, in addition to providing a introduction to the history of visual anthropology, an analysis as to how the formal methods available to the filmmaker have been/are deployed in the context of producing particular cinematic engagements with the world will also be a focus. Ethnographic film and its formal (i.e. methodological) relationship to ethnography, cultural anthropology, and the social sciences and humanities is the specific focus of the course and most of the examples would be drawn from films generally recognized (although such definitions are always contested) to be ethnographic. This fact notwithstanding, many of the general issues as to how cinema can convey or produce an idea about the “truth” of the world would be more generally applicable to all types of films. The first half of the will be devoted to the historical issues regarding the emergence of genres of non-fiction film. The emergence of something called “non-fiction” or “ethnographic” film is directly linked to the formal potentials of cinema itself, i.e. its method. The tension between cinema’s aspiration to document the world and the formal necessity in cinema to create a cinematic real will be explored in careful detail. Themes in this half will include: • The emergence of general narrative strategies in early cinema through the formal manipulation of time (through editing strategies) and space (framing, movement, etc.). • The relationship between early cinema and scientific inquiry. • The understood necessity to conceptually distinguish between non-fiction and fiction film. Readings in this section would include extended selections from some of the key general texts (Grimshaw, MacDougall, Heider, Russell) that will provide the major threads of the course. Additional readings regarding the particular topic of each lecture will also be provided on the reading list; these readings are not considered 2016-17 Film and Anthropology 3 mandatory, although students will be strongly encouraged to read these works when possible. Although oriented towards a specific historical period in the early 20th Century regarding film and its relationship to scientific inquiry, this section will be presented as a genealogy of emergent instruments, concepts, and debates; in particular, theories of the real, of fact in relation to film, and methodological debates regarding what constitutes the proper research instruments of anthropology will be highlighted. Therefore this half of the course, while providing a good historical overview, does not aspire to be a complete history of the “birth of ethnographic film”; rather, it is an exploration into the concepts and methods that has made cinema an attractive, ambiguous instrument in conducting anthropological work. The second half of the course will be devoted to the themes and subjects of ethnographic film as a genre and provide a close engagement with precisely how these formal qualities of cinema have been explicitly put to use in the course of anthropological research. In relation to themes and subjects, issues such as issues related to the depiction of “the Other” in film, the ethics of ethnographic filmmaking in the field, and debates over power and reflexivity will be addressed. Regarding the formal qualities of cinema, three aspects of ethnographic filmmaking would be highlighted: frame and the articulation of information or ideas through visual means; time as constructed through techniques of montage; and the relation of sound to visual modes of presentation. This half of the course will focus on several key figures in ethnographic film working from the 1950s onward, including Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. As with the first half of the course, the primary readings will continue to be oriented around the primary assigned texts, with a generous number of secondary readings available to students in order to deepen their knowledge of particular themes and lecture topics. The overall aims of the course can be summarized as follows: • to contribute to preparing students to participate in an effective and informed way in debates regarding the history of visual anthropology, the issues regarding visually presenting human cultural difference, and the relation between visual anthropology and the work of social anthropology more generally; • have a substantive knowledge and understanding of a selection of important historical and social issues with regard to the development and use of visual technologies in the representation and depiction of cultural diversity, and of the contending viewpoints and claims on these issues; • can identify and characterise key approaches from social anthropology, from other social science disciplines, and from interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies, film studies, and science and technology studies to understanding and evaluating issues concerning visual anthropology as a sub-field, and identify advantages, problems and implications of these approaches; • can critically evaluate contributions to the academic and public debates on the use of film in scientific, philosophical, and humanities-related inquiries in order to engage wider audiences