Carlos Flores

(2007). Sharing Anthropology: Collaborative Video Experiences among Maya Film-makers in Post-war Guatemala. In S. Pink (Ed.), Visual Interpretations: Applied Visual Anthropology (pp. 209-224). NY: Berg.

Following up Jean Rouch's notion of 'shared anthropology' within the postmodern thinking of multivocality where a researcher's subjectivity and univocal representation are challenged, Flores embarked on film-making with local film makers in a Mayan community.

In his observance of the local filmmakers' less engagement in editing process, Flores realizes his position: while his presence was negligible during the shooting process because he was lack of local knowledge, his conventional post-production approaches might have constraint how the local filmmakers edited the rushes. More importantly he perceives the importance of individual and collective actions in establishing social power in Mayan communities. Those actions are regarded as services for the communities, thus the filmmakers already achieved social status and leadership through the actions of filmmaking in the community. [Through this statement, Flores, as Pink mentioned, repeats that the process of making is more important than the outcome products in shared filmmaking.]

Through his experience of recording traumatic experiences in a community under brutal militarism, he stresses that the memory apparatus employed in filmmaking was not only therapeutic acts of the community members but also an instrument to reframe fragmented past events within a social/political context.

In a collaborative yet contradictory situation, he suggests to find common grounds among participants with diverse existential and political backgrounds. [I think that continuous negotiations and discussions to get to common grounds are essential, although common grounds sound misleading if researchers don't count whose voices are more important. Values cannot be separated from the forms where they reside.]