explain anthropology with a related film (The study field is ANTHROPOLOGY)
James Clifford, Akhil Gupta and George Marcus: Ethnography Beyond «Culture» Globalization, neoliberalism and technological developments since the 1980s => Its effects on cultures and societies. Social Sciences are in a crisis, had to reinvent themselves => New Ethnographies. Based on the criticisms of the old ones (Malinowski, Pritchard and Shostak). Interdisciplinary, team work, multi-sited ethnographies.
They include not only how they see the people do ethnography about, but also how these people view the ethnographers. A more nuanced positioning within the fieldwork site. Ethnography is actively situated between the powerful systems of meaning, questions at the boundaries of civilizations, cutures, classes, races ad genders => Encounters. Making sense of their cultures and social lives.
Political and historical contextualization in postcolonial World (political => economic and cultural influence)
Ethnographic work enmeshed with political inequalities, complex, ambivalent, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic. Indigenous ethnographers. «Cultures do not hold still their portraits» Fluidity, fragmentation and flexibility. Edward Said-Orientalism, textual reading of societies, egzotization, otherization. => self-reflexive. Culture is not an OBJECT to be described/ unified corpus of symbols and meanings. It is contested, temporal and emergent. Against fetishization. Society is not equal to culture.
Akhil Gupta: reconstruction of space, geography, not a frozen grid. Displacements, migrations, dual citizenships, many people live in different places in different times. Technologies, virtual belongings. Critique of the word «subcultures» and multiculturalism, they assume that there is one particular culture. Localized global cultures. East and West, North and South, First, Second and Third World all criticized. Why do we need all those categories?
Interdisciplinary: Open to new knowledge, science and technology, medicine, drones. Team work, multiple belongings, citizenships: Multi-sited ethnography. Borders, Mexica-US, China-Malaysia. Places and insititutions where different people encounter with one another: Schools, labs, airports. Boundaries: Physical and cultural (racism, homophobia). Larger sense of «encounters».
Space imagined and reconstructed. Fluid senses of belonging and identities. More complex and nuanced. Who is the real American? Real Turk? «home», « family» fictive kinship, multiple homes. Shostak: Nisa depicted as egzotic and isolated. Colonial encounters not mentioned.
Postmodernity: Fragmented truth, collaboration of the production of knowledge. Perspectives coming together.
Contemporary political debates, discourses and dynamics, NGOs, international organizations. Developmental issues, media, social media. Arts, museums and markets. Marcus: Specialization of disciplines: Gender Studies, Cultural Studies.
Visual analysis in new ethnographies: