Ginsburg Media worlds

In Media Worlds, chapter 5-8, Lughod discusses the role melodrama has in constituting a part of modernity.  He describes how in Egypt  television shows include melodrama which is  intended to foster individualization for civilians thus connecting individual and social development.  I understand how through reflection and emotion we can better create ourselves as subjects in relation to society but I don't know if this rationalization goes so far.  Focus on the individual self can lead to neglect of social surroundings and the needs of the greater society.

I question whether studying internal thoughts can play itself out in the context of larger social roles but this is not important here as the article focuses on the type of individuation that might be happening.  All characters in these serials tend to be more emotional (though more so women than men).  The serials place emphais on the characters faces to "invoke interior worlds" Perhaps this regulates the culture values in the audience more than if individual ideas were expressed verbally by characters. 

The author suggests that melodrama played a part in individuals constructions of subjectivity.  Melodrama causes individiduals to see themselves centered within their life.  The elements of individuals' discussions and stories crystallize in the same fashion the the narratives on t.v. develop. 

The development of a rich interior or pysche for Egyptians is one that is politically charged.  For this reason it is important to remeber that the rich interior lives displayed in other countries such as the U.S. do not have  social/political/religious aspects.

the philosophy of photography

How is photography examined cross-culturally?
How can we understand the link between the photographer, the photo, reality and the receivers?
What properties do cultures use to index and conceptualize the meanings from photos?
What does a photo allow us to view and what meanings do we discover or bring to the photo?

Christopher Pinney's article details some of the ways photography is believed to engage with culture.  It views the cultural practices used and the ability for photography to represent reality or cause a reflection of identity and the cultural subjective itself.

In the West, photography acts as a mirror for us to dwell on self consciousness.  In central India, photography is a medium that includes painting and chromolithography and the photo is used in the same ways that ancient representation is.  Thus, Pinney believes it is not "modern."

Foucault says that photography maintains to function as a reflection of the culture and politics at the time.  While Foucault is on the right track,  Ginzburg offers the idea that the sign and its referent are believed to be fixed but isn't.  He notes that epistemes change and the information a viewer brings to a photo in one era is drastically different for a viewer in another era.  Therefore there is no formal link between qualities and effect.  The study of what causes transformative meaning in a photo should be looked at through "sophisticated analysis"

Because of the fixity of a photographgh it is easy to assume that there are strict connections between a signs an their referents, however, Photography is a rich form of art with many perspectives to discover.  The photographer's motivations and ideologies plus the lens inability to deiscriminate offersa rich landcape and multiple codes of information.  This allows presumably for the viewer to "look past" to find another inherent and sometimes subversive meaning about the politics of the time of the photo.   Looking past is the transformative or transedental quality of the photo (for the West.) 

Photography

In the article by David Macdougal"Photo Whallahs" An Encounter with Photography, the author sets out to explain his film about the ways in which photography is incorporated in culture and facilitates meanings, indexed within the culture itself.  To facilitate this idea he and Judith Macdougal went to India where the scenery is vivid and visually rich for photograhing to to take place.  India is also a country where individuals have only just begun using personal cameras, so what they document or create and how is of importance to anthropology. 

In an interview, the philosophy behind the film and methods are seen  as well as the culture which was studied.  In Mussoorie the filmmakers noticed that people flock to cameras happily. I find it interesting that they are interested and open to being photographed, because of the intensity at which we shun photos in the U.S.  This self conscietiousness may be due to the high standards of beauty and the difficulty of this attainment.  We also index photography in a way that is scientific (documenting) or as art both of which include a quest for a transformative property of a person or a scene.  How we act according to social abstractions, and dispositions placed on us by the institutions we are in and the vast number of abstractions and stratagems that we employ or follow and at which mold our identity in elusive ways exacerbate the the problem of finding self-hood in a modern society.  A lens placed on us might shine light on how we act which we are afraid is acting too much or not accordingly to what is socially permitted. 

The photo which is a second layer of information, is seen to heighten the essence of people or a scene, in Mussoorie.  It adds in some ways to the meaning in a truthful way or it uncovers some truth of a situation.  As the article states: "It presents, not represents."   Maybe this is what U.S. americans fear, that the level at which photography is used, is an analysis and a representaion of objective reality.  If a photo taken is a transformation and catches a glimplse of what we do not want others to see.  In an unmediated inversion the photo can be seen as a mirror to reality itself.

The optimistic gardener

Fire hazard

the cultural study of intersecting gazes

Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins in the article, "The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic" speak about photography as a crossroads of gazes and a scenario by which gazes manipulate and have power over other gazes. The view by National Geographic that allows for many cultural actions to take place as views are created about "the other".  On this topic of the photos of the magazine they state that it "threatens to break frame and reveal its social context. 

When westerner is in fact looking at the non westerner, cultural approaches are made.  A feminist and psychoanalytic critique is that the act of looking is an active/male/modern/scientific action while the one being looked at(the nonwesterner) is the subject/female/passive/emotive receiver.

The science or art or photography is a sacred cultural posistion for the westerner.  These are the disciplinary locations that give knowledge of how to analyze culture with a certain narrative key.  This makes the western looking a patriarchial view. 

For this reason, our sacred sets of knowledge are untouched and used as devices to analyze and peer into "the other" even if the subject is sacred or significant to their culture.  Our science of distinguishing the sacred from the profane of every culture is legitimized and takes precedence over how culture (its definitions, views, made legitimized, made illicit) is viewed by its people. 

This is not unlike the female (the other/feminine) who walks in nyc and is met by gazes behind her.  The female is made conscious of the other view (westerner's view/active.)

and 1.) is powerful because she can look back and disrupt their view (of scanning her) and their fun/authority

       2.) is powerless because to look back would break the dialogue formed by the men.  The self accourding to Foucault is cultural and mostly those who oversee power over ourselves are ourselves. The female not wanting any informal social sanction against her keeps walking. (She internalizes the active/male view which places restrictions on how she acts-She becomes self-conscientious.)

Lacan describes the gaze as a way to look at "the other" the other is also constitutive of a separate object (body of knowledge) that the gazer uses in approach when looking.  This is often altering because the person gazing is not met with his own expectations of what he thinks and wants to see from the gazes in the picture.
National Geographic is said to break fram and reveal social context.  The powerful viewer who has an academic background and a history of a liscense to look shifts in his or her seat.  The new distinctions that can be made are powerful for the "masculine/western" viwer for the picture becomes more of an academic object to be examined or arise inteterest. 

However, in this entire context, is the need for the westerner/exerter/academic viewer to see and locate the "viewed" as not entirely an object for understanding but a subject and a subject of structural forces that we all endure.  In the photos, the westerner searches for facial expressions like his own so that he can feel like the exhibited reactions from stressors, feelings, interpretations all arise in the sameway elsewhere.  Westerners and non-westerners alike are subject to the same driving forces of reality and are workable objects within reality so we can understand reality, so that we can obey its rules, so that it can inhibit us. Or this is what the westerner wants to believe. 

It is either an action by National Geographic or the Western lens or anthropology to understand cultures as the same and as different.

About Jean Rouch

This article opened my eyes to the contributions Jean Rouch has made.  He is important for inventing a new style of documentary and he wittingly challenged the traditional thought in his time.  Rouch was called a radical empiricist by Stoller and his style merged opposing ideas.  His work began a new strand of Modernism which was a twist on the Positivist and static views of culture and film. 

Rouch was spoken about for his amount of depth and intimacy in his film as accurately portraying culture. This intimacy was created by how well the image was emblematic of the culture. Also he did more to evoke than explain the rituals furthur creating a more truthful representation.  He challenged notions of European superiority by presenting a world of different experiences which Modern Science could not explain.  Europeans were dismayed and unearthed. Seemingly, his work was documentary and artistic because the film of routines, family, school, work presented drifts, and the dialectical conversations and themes that viewers enjoy. 

Rouch was a Sociologist often of deviance or interaction.  He explanations were sociological and yielded poignant interpretations of communities and social life.  In one film, he devised a scenario for a group of kids.  Some students were black and others were white.  He told them to be racist towards the other race.  This scenario in which the kids must improvise played itself out in the long term and was seen in the jealousy and love interests between the kids.
This study shed light on how blacks could be racist towards whites.   It also was a documentation of reality which was what do people do in an abstract scenario.  This was much different from fly on the wall filming. 

This broke the Positivist thought of the time that interactions and patterns and forces of the world were grounded as very real and happened for scientific and functional reasons.  Rouch showed how a representational idea can change the story of people's actions as well as helping the Thomas Theorem that if "men define their situations as real, they are real in their consequences" 

His work was highly Modern because he managed to make film and reality align so that documentation was a transparent view of reality on many fronts.  And it was slightly postmodern because he showed that culture is not set in stone. There is real in what is spontaneous and what is of artifice such as a hypothetical situation can easily be played out and become reality.

His work though was viewed as slightly poetic and his view of other cultures is intimate maybe causing empathy. He could have perhaps romanticized the other cultures by not giving adequate scientific context for their culture. Even still I think poetry is justified for presenting reality.

Margaret Meade

Anthropologists use ethnography to study how another culture is organized and what cultural markers they operate on.  There is an issue of to what extent should Margaret Meade and Bateson just show the footage and culture as it is? Must they include some conclusions and comparisons of what they saw in their work?  Would these conclusions be their own opinion or objective fact? 

I do think something is lost when Meade would only film the interesting parts of culture.  Maybe something can be learn from the body language and specific patterns of everyday interactions. 

Their reasoning that they should shoot spontaneously is sound but participants should have been asked afterwards if their photo could be used.  However, Meade still did good fieldwork within the limits of technology of that time.  She was also working in a different time when there was a drive to find a correct method of child development. The line between Anthropology and Psychology was perhaps blurred.  Her work also was influenced not only by psychological questions but the ideas of cultural types and a reason to find these missing types.

Why Meade would try to illicit reactions from children and stage certain actions when she is an Anthropologist does not make sense to me. 

As far as the films, Meade shortened the trance film to 20 minutes.  The article said "it is easy to slip into the belief that the film is the ritual."  I wonder if her decision was due in part to how much film she had available.  If the video went on for longer than 20 minutes what else would we gather?  Shooting the film during the day might have been her best option with the technology that she had. 
Why would she interfere and use women in the dances when they were traditionally not allowed.

Overall Meade was influenced by the ideas of her time.  She did work to gather a large amount of information about the Balinese. She reasoned through her methods and stated that they were there for future researchers to critique.  There were some incongruencies in her work.  She, unlike her husband wanted to acquire information and not order and summarize it however she did include her own thoughts (non-objective) in her objective work and interfered with the culture she was objectively studing.

Errington article

Errington's article discusses the controversial politics and the trends of Primitive art in the 20th century.  "Primitive art" which gained acceptance in the 20th century also precludes a clash of ideologies in what constitutes art.  Furthermore, the acceptance of "primitive art" can only cause a mystique of the "other" when seen in the from the cultural context of Modern-Western and Kantian thought.    

In the West we view art almost as what can be put in a frame.  It is not reality but a representation of reality which can include potential for abstract thought and later be sold.  Traders in the 20th century have always looked for primitive art that is authentic and untouched by westerners.  However in the 1920's primitive art was picked at so only the hard pieces remained and today artifacts are placed in altered environments so they will endure.  Today Dreamings are framed and sold at exorbitant prices.  So we see friction in that art is sought after which was used for authentic cultural practices unknown to the western eye  but is subconsciously reframed into and is actually portrayed in western notions of art- (priced, showcased, long lasting). And the objects that are called primitive have meaning already in the culture that they are used and are utilitarian or intended for other reasons rather than art.  The act of preserving primitive art is not authentic and is emblematic of an ideology take over.  Artifact collecting is a Western idea that comes from our belief in the stability of civilizations until they fall marking changes in thought.  The dialogue is of western versus primitive because western ideologies are used to assess primitive art.   

collecting authentic art which was intended not for art--> appropriating to make it intentional art --> by way of showing and making into an artifact that situates people in time other than how they view time and history and meaning. 

When applying art in the sand to paintings, will the ritual component be reduced?