An van. Dienderen. (2007). Visual Intervention:Applied Visual Anthropology. Sarah Pink (Ed.).
Dienderen records her observation of the community film project held by an artist in an immigrant neighborhood in Brussels.
In the author's interview, one of the participants, who acted in the film, said, "I believe it was, I'm sure it was therapy for me, precisely helping me to digest what had happened to me. Just by talking about it, I freed myself. At least I felt relieved from this feeling locked inside me for such a long time" (p. 204).
The author quotes Pink's perspective about visual anthropology in social intervention, "In these projects applying visual anthropology involves promoting self awareness by representing individuals and groups to others and to themselves" (Pink, 2004:8, Visual Anthropology Review. 20(1), 3-16; as cited on p. 253). Pink calls this intervention intersubjectivity between researchers and the local, developed through reflexive process of collaboration and research.
But the artist who directed this project hired professional crew to shoot and edit the film, which seemed to entail incongruity. The author writes this aspect by quoting the concept that Raoul Ruiz used to describe a Western cinema: a Central Conflict Theory (Ruiz, 1995:14). The authors writes, "According to him, this theory has turned into a predatory theory, a system of ideas that devours and enslaves any other idea that might restrain its activity" (p. 266). As the author writes, Pink clearly differentiates visual anthropological production from commercial film/video production.
Raoul Ruiz (1995). Poetics of Cinema. NY: Distributed Art Publishers.
Fabian, J (1990). Power and Performance.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Talking about pictures
: a case for photo elicitation, Harper, Douglas. (2002). Visual Studies, 17.1. 13-26
Harper defines photo elicitation, which was first named by photographer and researcher John Collier in 1957, through a history of its development in anthropology and sociology studies. He explains that benefits from using photos or images in general for interviewing are partly due to the particular quality of photos: capturing the impossible, thus evoking our emotion, and compensating verbal communication.
His methods includes taking photos in a particular way to elicit story-telling from his informants(!). Other forms of image elicitation he explains include reflexive cinema, such as in Chronicle of a Summer directed by Rouch, and 'photofeedback', which was coined by Sampson-Cordle in her dissertation (2002). She let her study subjects (teachers, community members and students) photograph their worlds with inexpensive automatic cameras.
He considers photo elicitation "a postmodern dialogue based on the authority of the
subject rather than the researcher". The aspect of shifting authority of photo elicitation, he asserts, addresses some postmodern ethnography.
Sampson-Cordle, Alice Vera. 2001. “Exploring the relationship between a small rural school in
Northeast Georgia and its community: an imagebased study using participant-produced photographs” (dissertation).
Harper defines photo elicitation, which was first named by photographer and researcher John Collier in 1957, through a history of its development in anthropology and sociology studies. He explains that benefits from using photos or images in general for interviewing are partly due to the particular quality of photos: capturing the impossible, thus evoking our emotion, and compensating verbal communication.
His methods includes taking photos in a particular way to elicit story-telling from his informants(!). Other forms of image elicitation he explains include reflexive cinema, such as in Chronicle of a Summer directed by Rouch, and 'photofeedback', which was coined by Sampson-Cordle in her dissertation (2002). She let her study subjects (teachers, community members and students) photograph their worlds with inexpensive automatic cameras.
He considers photo elicitation "a postmodern dialogue based on the authority of the
subject rather than the researcher". The aspect of shifting authority of photo elicitation, he asserts, addresses some postmodern ethnography.
Sampson-Cordle, Alice Vera. 2001. “Exploring the relationship between a small rural school in
Northeast Georgia and its community: an imagebased study using participant-produced photographs” (dissertation).
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
"I Didn't Leave Y'all on Purpose"
:HIV-Infected Mothers' Videotaped Legacies for Their Children. Donna B. Barnes, Susan Taylor-Brown, and Lori Wiener. (1997). Qualitative Sociology, 20.1. 7-32.
In the advocacy of visually enriched sociology, the authors write:
Chaplin (1994) argues that post-postivist and feminist methodological approaches suggest the desirability of a visually enriched sociology. These methodologies attempt to replace a sociology of a topic with a sociology that emphasizes less distance between researcher and participant, and less distinction between verbal analysis and visual representation as data. Becker (1986) lays out in text and photographs how sociologists can learn to sharpen observational and analytical skills by incorporating photography and methods of inductive reasoning into research. Visual media affords the researcher an extensive opportunity to replay the visual data expanding the analysis by "aiding the human eye for complexities and the memory for unobserved details and observing the fluid and emotionally contexualized reality" (Collier 1967: xii; Beloff 1985; Goffman 1979). Visual data can record the nonverbal content of culture (Collier 1967), and according to Beloff (1985) "drink in the complex of things and happenings" (9).
Their analytical method followed inductive reasoning and systematic comparison of data from the videotapes. In order to do this, they utilized techniques of coding, memo writing and diagrams [how?] and induced a central theme.
The authors write about the advantages of this visual method despite limited interactions between researchers and the mothers: "the method offers the spontaneity and vividness of an uninterrupted stream of information from the individual, as the mother is allowed to talk without researcher intrusion in the form of questions" (p.13).
Through this visual sociology study, they maintain that "We strive to 'produce knowledge that
is 'for women' rather than 'about women' which cast women in the role of active producers of their own lives" (Keller 1985, as cited in Chaplin 1994: 11; as cited on page 13).
In the advocacy of visually enriched sociology, the authors write:
Chaplin (1994) argues that post-postivist and feminist methodological approaches suggest the desirability of a visually enriched sociology. These methodologies attempt to replace a sociology of a topic with a sociology that emphasizes less distance between researcher and participant, and less distinction between verbal analysis and visual representation as data. Becker (1986) lays out in text and photographs how sociologists can learn to sharpen observational and analytical skills by incorporating photography and methods of inductive reasoning into research. Visual media affords the researcher an extensive opportunity to replay the visual data expanding the analysis by "aiding the human eye for complexities and the memory for unobserved details and observing the fluid and emotionally contexualized reality" (Collier 1967: xii; Beloff 1985; Goffman 1979). Visual data can record the nonverbal content of culture (Collier 1967), and according to Beloff (1985) "drink in the complex of things and happenings" (9).
Their analytical method followed inductive reasoning and systematic comparison of data from the videotapes. In order to do this, they utilized techniques of coding, memo writing and diagrams [how?] and induced a central theme.
The authors write about the advantages of this visual method despite limited interactions between researchers and the mothers: "the method offers the spontaneity and vividness of an uninterrupted stream of information from the individual, as the mother is allowed to talk without researcher intrusion in the form of questions" (p.13).
Through this visual sociology study, they maintain that "We strive to 'produce knowledge that
is 'for women' rather than 'about women' which cast women in the role of active producers of their own lives" (Keller 1985, as cited in Chaplin 1994: 11; as cited on page 13).
Monday, May 11, 2009
Picturing the Social Landscape
: Visual Methods and the Sociological Imagination. (2004). By Caroline Knowles & Paul Sweetman (Eds.). New York: Routledge.
Introduction (1-17) (Knowles & Sweetman)
Three key theoretical approaches to visual images within social research are introduced here: 1) in realist paradigm images are regarded as evidence of the reality, as in photo-journalism. 2)From poststructural perspective, images help to construct reality as a part of regime of truth. 3) From semiotics perspective, existing images are texts through which cultural significances or ideologies are uncovered.
Drawing on conceptual and analytic possibilities of visual methods, Knowles and Sweetman write, "Theory or analysis must involve the rearrangement of popular forms of social knowing so that hitherto unknown and non-apparent things become visible. Theory must involve discovery: uncovering what is not readily apparent, connections between one thing and another, the underlying assuptions from which we operate" (p. 7). [By rearrangement, they mean recontexualization that calls for attention of the invisible in a new context.] They attempt to explore visual images' capacity to reveal what is hidden in the inner mechanism of the ordinary and the taken for granted (p. 7).
In explaining the process of revealing the hidden and connecting the personal and particular with the social and general, the authors center on C. Wright Mills's 'sociological imagination', by which he means a mechanism that links the larger historical and social scenes in which lives are set with individual experience and biography (in cited on 7). The authors assert that a set of techniques of visual strategies allow us to understand how the smallest units of social analysis operate in relation to broader social landscapes and bigger process, thus enabling social imagination. By visual techniques, Knowles and Sweetman mean an analytically charged set of methodologies which incline researchers towards the tracing of connections between things of quite different social scope and scale (p. 8). [This reasoning is not clear to explain why visual methods elicit social imagination. In addtion, they heavily rely on a researcher's gaze or capacity in the interpretaion/analysis process of images. If so, how can the research justify the connection that she or he makes between the personal and the social? ]
With regard to the criticism about polysemic nature and highly subjective analysis of pictorial representations, the authors argue that writing, for instance, is also polysemic and in spite of polysemic nature, images present the content, such as smile or laugu, which are usually erased in a writing process.
Jenks (1995) mentions that pictorial representation is, like all forms of representation, about selection, abstraction and transformation (in cited on 13).
Working with Visible Evidence (John Grady, 18-31)
He argues conventional social science training helps image-based research while images may also intrigue insights: "Something in the picture, or something glanced at in passing that could be pictured, will suggest an idea or hint at a link to a theory. It is from such moments that insight is born and from such insights that full-blown interpretive and research strategies can be constructed" (p. 27). [There are many sources that instigate insight. Then are images just one of them or do they have any advantages? The polysemic nature and wholeness of visual representation may elicit more prolific insight or imagination than other forms, such as poem, story, etc. I need to define characteristics of images against other forms of representation.]
My Visual Diary (Elizabeth Chaplin, 36-48)
Among the reasons for keeping a daily photographic diary, Chaplin mentions to look critically, abstractly and actively and to intervene taken-for-granted views. Cultural studies emphasizes that images are polysemic, thus its meaning floats. However, Chaplin points out that photographs, a special kind of images, are in debate in that the 'camera' produces a trace or record what has been photographed. To her, the photographic trace is a record of something which could have been recorded differently and open to many different interpretations. She asserts that the degree of objectivity and subjectivity involved in each photograph varies image to image (p. 47).
Reflecting the Self (Ruth Holliday, 49-64)
It is about the author's reflection on a video-diary project that was conducted with nine 'respondents' to examine the performative nature of queer identities.
Holliday underpins that video-diaries provide respondents with potential for greater reflection and editorial control over the materials disclosed. Observing two styles of the material submitted, she argues that self-conscious appears to be the result of performing in front of a known other while relative candor springs up more when the video is taken by themselves. She furthers the confessional aspect of video diaries on the ground of our relation to media productions: because we are more conditioned as a viewer than a producer, we imagine ourselves as audience for our own productions, thus diarists becomes confessional through a narcissistic identification with an imagined viewer (p. 53). Holliday cites Michael Renov to support her idea. Renov (1996) argues that video is a particulary confessional medium.
"confessional discourse of the diaristic sort addresses itself to an absent imaginary other...In the case of video confessions, the virtual presence of a partner--the imagined other effectuated by the technology--turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapperboards are hardly a boon to soul confession" (88-89; in cited on 52).
Holliday foregrounds the concept of reflexivity, which has been centered on methodological debates in ethnographic and anthropological studies. Grounded in modernity, reflexivity, she asserts, relies on a stable sense of self and an internal process of self-examination. However, she contends that as in the mirror/camera lens, the self is reflected back from an external location, thus reflexivity should be regarded as external positions, understandings and explanations. Furthermore, she argues that (auto)biography, as a form of reflexive research, may reprivilege 'authorial authority', typically when the research is based on the experience or identity of the researcher, because it constitutes a kind of moral and political high ground from which critical analysis is less important than experience (p. 57).
Opposing the notion that the camera lens reflects the world, she argues it 'refracts' it through the process of selection, eduting and the production of multiple interpretative positions. Through the 'refraction' of the camera lens, she maintains, the centrality of the academic researcher in the production of social realities diminishes.
Imaging the Intangible (Tony Wincup, 79-92)
He asserts that without memory our life consists of momentary experiences with little relation to each other while memory itself is 'slippery and fragile', thereby we tend to keep personal mnemonic objects as a means of sustaining our memory and identity. Wincup suggests that such identity is constructed more circuitously by witnessing others and comparing with our own than by looking inwards at oneself. In this regard, Bourdieu (1984:172, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste) writes, "social identity is defined and asserted through difference" (as cited in Wincup on 82).
Wipcup regards a photograph as a sign, of which the connotations are constructed between the photographer and viewers, thus possession multivocality, and pays particular attention to the role of a photograph that visualizes intangible concepts through tangible elements within its frame. In this matter, he writes, "Through symbolic cultural patterning, tangible objects constitute a significant and lasting medium of intangibl social expression" (p.91).
Telling the story of Linda Lord through Photographs (Ana Maria Mauad and Alicia Rouverol, 178-192)
In this chapter discussed are the significance of a personal story in building historical contexts--as Steven Biel argues, "it is the individual stories, uncovered through oral history, that often challenge our historical generalization" (p. 179)--as well as the intertextual power of a combination of images and text. The authors state that images and texts, taken together, generates a dialogue between the two elements to the extent that they collectively tell a cohesive narrative. Through this intertexuality between text and images, they argue, researchers can gain particular insights and create new understanding of a subject, and write, "It is also the photographs--by revealing multiple stories, contrasts and contradictions, ambiguities and uncertainties--enrich the analysis, deepen and complicate the story we can tell through words" (p.188). To these authors, it is the multiplicity and polyphony of images that widen our knowledge.
Introduction (1-17) (Knowles & Sweetman)
Three key theoretical approaches to visual images within social research are introduced here: 1) in realist paradigm images are regarded as evidence of the reality, as in photo-journalism. 2)From poststructural perspective, images help to construct reality as a part of regime of truth. 3) From semiotics perspective, existing images are texts through which cultural significances or ideologies are uncovered.
Drawing on conceptual and analytic possibilities of visual methods, Knowles and Sweetman write, "Theory or analysis must involve the rearrangement of popular forms of social knowing so that hitherto unknown and non-apparent things become visible. Theory must involve discovery: uncovering what is not readily apparent, connections between one thing and another, the underlying assuptions from which we operate" (p. 7). [By rearrangement, they mean recontexualization that calls for attention of the invisible in a new context.] They attempt to explore visual images' capacity to reveal what is hidden in the inner mechanism of the ordinary and the taken for granted (p. 7).
In explaining the process of revealing the hidden and connecting the personal and particular with the social and general, the authors center on C. Wright Mills's 'sociological imagination', by which he means a mechanism that links the larger historical and social scenes in which lives are set with individual experience and biography (in cited on 7). The authors assert that a set of techniques of visual strategies allow us to understand how the smallest units of social analysis operate in relation to broader social landscapes and bigger process, thus enabling social imagination. By visual techniques, Knowles and Sweetman mean an analytically charged set of methodologies which incline researchers towards the tracing of connections between things of quite different social scope and scale (p. 8). [This reasoning is not clear to explain why visual methods elicit social imagination. In addtion, they heavily rely on a researcher's gaze or capacity in the interpretaion/analysis process of images. If so, how can the research justify the connection that she or he makes between the personal and the social? ]
With regard to the criticism about polysemic nature and highly subjective analysis of pictorial representations, the authors argue that writing, for instance, is also polysemic and in spite of polysemic nature, images present the content, such as smile or laugu, which are usually erased in a writing process.
Jenks (1995) mentions that pictorial representation is, like all forms of representation, about selection, abstraction and transformation (in cited on 13).
Working with Visible Evidence (John Grady, 18-31)
He argues conventional social science training helps image-based research while images may also intrigue insights: "Something in the picture, or something glanced at in passing that could be pictured, will suggest an idea or hint at a link to a theory. It is from such moments that insight is born and from such insights that full-blown interpretive and research strategies can be constructed" (p. 27). [There are many sources that instigate insight. Then are images just one of them or do they have any advantages? The polysemic nature and wholeness of visual representation may elicit more prolific insight or imagination than other forms, such as poem, story, etc. I need to define characteristics of images against other forms of representation.]
My Visual Diary (Elizabeth Chaplin, 36-48)
Among the reasons for keeping a daily photographic diary, Chaplin mentions to look critically, abstractly and actively and to intervene taken-for-granted views. Cultural studies emphasizes that images are polysemic, thus its meaning floats. However, Chaplin points out that photographs, a special kind of images, are in debate in that the 'camera' produces a trace or record what has been photographed. To her, the photographic trace is a record of something which could have been recorded differently and open to many different interpretations. She asserts that the degree of objectivity and subjectivity involved in each photograph varies image to image (p. 47).
Reflecting the Self (Ruth Holliday, 49-64)
It is about the author's reflection on a video-diary project that was conducted with nine 'respondents' to examine the performative nature of queer identities.
Holliday underpins that video-diaries provide respondents with potential for greater reflection and editorial control over the materials disclosed. Observing two styles of the material submitted, she argues that self-conscious appears to be the result of performing in front of a known other while relative candor springs up more when the video is taken by themselves. She furthers the confessional aspect of video diaries on the ground of our relation to media productions: because we are more conditioned as a viewer than a producer, we imagine ourselves as audience for our own productions, thus diarists becomes confessional through a narcissistic identification with an imagined viewer (p. 53). Holliday cites Michael Renov to support her idea. Renov (1996) argues that video is a particulary confessional medium.
"confessional discourse of the diaristic sort addresses itself to an absent imaginary other...In the case of video confessions, the virtual presence of a partner--the imagined other effectuated by the technology--turns out to be a more powerful facilitator of emotion than flesh-and-blood interlocutors. Camera operators, sound booms, cables, and clapperboards are hardly a boon to soul confession" (88-89; in cited on 52).
Holliday foregrounds the concept of reflexivity, which has been centered on methodological debates in ethnographic and anthropological studies. Grounded in modernity, reflexivity, she asserts, relies on a stable sense of self and an internal process of self-examination. However, she contends that as in the mirror/camera lens, the self is reflected back from an external location, thus reflexivity should be regarded as external positions, understandings and explanations. Furthermore, she argues that (auto)biography, as a form of reflexive research, may reprivilege 'authorial authority', typically when the research is based on the experience or identity of the researcher, because it constitutes a kind of moral and political high ground from which critical analysis is less important than experience (p. 57).
Opposing the notion that the camera lens reflects the world, she argues it 'refracts' it through the process of selection, eduting and the production of multiple interpretative positions. Through the 'refraction' of the camera lens, she maintains, the centrality of the academic researcher in the production of social realities diminishes.
Imaging the Intangible (Tony Wincup, 79-92)
He asserts that without memory our life consists of momentary experiences with little relation to each other while memory itself is 'slippery and fragile', thereby we tend to keep personal mnemonic objects as a means of sustaining our memory and identity. Wincup suggests that such identity is constructed more circuitously by witnessing others and comparing with our own than by looking inwards at oneself. In this regard, Bourdieu (1984:172, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste) writes, "social identity is defined and asserted through difference" (as cited in Wincup on 82).
Wipcup regards a photograph as a sign, of which the connotations are constructed between the photographer and viewers, thus possession multivocality, and pays particular attention to the role of a photograph that visualizes intangible concepts through tangible elements within its frame. In this matter, he writes, "Through symbolic cultural patterning, tangible objects constitute a significant and lasting medium of intangibl social expression" (p.91).
Telling the story of Linda Lord through Photographs (Ana Maria Mauad and Alicia Rouverol, 178-192)
In this chapter discussed are the significance of a personal story in building historical contexts--as Steven Biel argues, "it is the individual stories, uncovered through oral history, that often challenge our historical generalization" (p. 179)--as well as the intertextual power of a combination of images and text. The authors state that images and texts, taken together, generates a dialogue between the two elements to the extent that they collectively tell a cohesive narrative. Through this intertexuality between text and images, they argue, researchers can gain particular insights and create new understanding of a subject, and write, "It is also the photographs--by revealing multiple stories, contrasts and contradictions, ambiguities and uncertainties--enrich the analysis, deepen and complicate the story we can tell through words" (p.188). To these authors, it is the multiplicity and polyphony of images that widen our knowledge.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Performance Ethnography
Denzin, Norman. (2003). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
The Call to Performance (pp. 3-24)
In crafting an emancipatory discourse, Denzin turns to a performance or art-based approach to culture, politics and pedagogy and explores performance autoethonography and performance art as vehicles for enacting a cultural politics.
Denzin defines cultural performances as contingent events in the flow of everyday life while performance as an interpretive event, an act of intervention and a form of agency that brings culture and the person into play. He argues that if the world is a performance, we need a model of social science that is performative. To him, performance questions an conventional ethnographic textualism, which turns culture to words or books, and instead put culture into action or motion. He also notes that unlike the conventional ethnography, it values intimacy and involvement as forms of understanding and makes sites of oppression visible.
Denzin pays particular attention to performance autoethnographers, who insert their own experience into the cultural perfomances they study and turn the personal into political. Performance autoethnography, he observes, becomes a civic, participatory and collaborative project. With members of community, the performer creates community-based interpretations and community actions for social change, much as Du Bois's all-black theater did (p. 17).
The Cinematic Society and the Reflexive Interview (pp. 57-76)
In his critique about Trinh's film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Denzin discusses a reflexive documentary interview style. To him, reflexivity centers on representation. His summary about Trinh's reflexive and dialogic interivew text includes:
--It makes the audience responsible for interpretation.
--It resists all dichotomies (male/female and so on).
--It foregrounds difference not conflict.
--It uses multiple voices.
--It presents silence as a form of resistance.
Denzin states that Trinh creates the space for viewers to appraise critically the politics of representation by challenging the traditional rules of a unbiased gaze and letting the audience actively participate in the interpretation process.
Critical Performance Pedagogy (pp. 222-241)
Denzin writes, "[Performance ethonography] is a way of being moral and political in the world. Performance ethonography is moral discourse. In the discursive spaces of performativity there is no distance between the performance and the politics that hte performance enacts. The two are interwined, each nourishing the other, opposite sides of the same coin, one and the same thing" (p. 224)
"A genuine democracy requries hope, dissent, and criticism" (p. 224).
"Performance (auto)ethnography is the future of ethnography...The reflexive ethnographer becomes the guiding presence in the ethonographic text" (p. 224).
Performance Ethics (pp. 242-262).
"As praxis, performance ethnography is a way of acting on the world in order to change it" (p. 228).
"Performance texts provide the grounds for liberation practice by opening up concrete situations that are being transformed through acts of resistance" (p. 229).
"Through performance and participation, the scholar develops a 'participatory mode of consciousness' (Bishop, 1998:208) and understanding. This helps shape the participant-driven nature of this form of inquiry and folds the researcher as performenr into the narrative and moral accountability structures of the group" (p. 239).
(Bishop, Russell. "Freeing Ourselves from Neo-colonial Domination in Research: A Maori Approach to Creating Knowledge" International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11: 199-219.)
The Call to Performance (pp. 3-24)
In crafting an emancipatory discourse, Denzin turns to a performance or art-based approach to culture, politics and pedagogy and explores performance autoethonography and performance art as vehicles for enacting a cultural politics.
Denzin defines cultural performances as contingent events in the flow of everyday life while performance as an interpretive event, an act of intervention and a form of agency that brings culture and the person into play. He argues that if the world is a performance, we need a model of social science that is performative. To him, performance questions an conventional ethnographic textualism, which turns culture to words or books, and instead put culture into action or motion. He also notes that unlike the conventional ethnography, it values intimacy and involvement as forms of understanding and makes sites of oppression visible.
Denzin pays particular attention to performance autoethnographers, who insert their own experience into the cultural perfomances they study and turn the personal into political. Performance autoethnography, he observes, becomes a civic, participatory and collaborative project. With members of community, the performer creates community-based interpretations and community actions for social change, much as Du Bois's all-black theater did (p. 17).
The Cinematic Society and the Reflexive Interview (pp. 57-76)
In his critique about Trinh's film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Denzin discusses a reflexive documentary interview style. To him, reflexivity centers on representation. His summary about Trinh's reflexive and dialogic interivew text includes:
--It makes the audience responsible for interpretation.
--It resists all dichotomies (male/female and so on).
--It foregrounds difference not conflict.
--It uses multiple voices.
--It presents silence as a form of resistance.
Denzin states that Trinh creates the space for viewers to appraise critically the politics of representation by challenging the traditional rules of a unbiased gaze and letting the audience actively participate in the interpretation process.
Critical Performance Pedagogy (pp. 222-241)
Denzin writes, "[Performance ethonography] is a way of being moral and political in the world. Performance ethonography is moral discourse. In the discursive spaces of performativity there is no distance between the performance and the politics that hte performance enacts. The two are interwined, each nourishing the other, opposite sides of the same coin, one and the same thing" (p. 224)
"A genuine democracy requries hope, dissent, and criticism" (p. 224).
"Performance (auto)ethnography is the future of ethnography...The reflexive ethnographer becomes the guiding presence in the ethonographic text" (p. 224).
Performance Ethics (pp. 242-262).
"As praxis, performance ethnography is a way of acting on the world in order to change it" (p. 228).
"Performance texts provide the grounds for liberation practice by opening up concrete situations that are being transformed through acts of resistance" (p. 229).
"Through performance and participation, the scholar develops a 'participatory mode of consciousness' (Bishop, 1998:208) and understanding. This helps shape the participant-driven nature of this form of inquiry and folds the researcher as performenr into the narrative and moral accountability structures of the group" (p. 239).
(Bishop, Russell. "Freeing Ourselves from Neo-colonial Domination in Research: A Maori Approach to Creating Knowledge" International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11: 199-219.)
Illumination
Benjamin, Walter. (1968). New York: Schoken Books
What is Epic Theater? (p. 147-154)
Benjamin explains the concept of the epic theater, originated by Brecht, in eight chapters.
1) The Relaxed Audience
The epic theater appeals an interest group and aims an audience to be relaxed and follow the action, as if reading a novel on a sofa. But the audience, being a collective, feels impelled to react promptly. Thus the epic theater should emphasize the action that is based upon the audience's experience and the performance that are mounted artistically in a pellucid manner. In the endeavor to interest the audience in this way, a political will prevails beyond mere cultural involvement in the theater.
2) The Plot
Benjamin states the epic theater purposes to "deprive the stage of its sensation derived from subject matter" (p.148) Thus, he suggests a historical incident or an old story, than an unfamiliar one. He compares the plot of the epic theater with a ballet lesson: first loosening a pupil's joints to the greatest possible extent, therefore purging the sensational.
[This plot scheme makes me compare the movies, Entre les Murs and The Freedom Writers. Whereas Entre les Murs leads an audience to daily events without arousing much sensation in each scene, The Freedom Writers is equipped with mechanisms that make an audience feel the sensational and built coherently toward its last outcome.]
3) The Untragic Hero
With regard to undramatic quality of a man, Benjamin traces back to Plato, who recognized the undramatic quality of the most excellent man. In spite of the dominance of tragic heros in the history of drama, Benjamin argues that the opposite trend has never ceased that says, "It is a mule track, neglected and overgrown, which comes to light today in the dramas of Brecht" (p. 150).
4) The Interruption
As Brecht introduces, Benjamin draws a sharp contrasting line between Brecht's drama and Aristotelian's in that Brecht eliminates the Aristotelian catharsis and emphasizes producing astonishment rather than empathy. "Instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function" (p. 150). Thus, an important task of the epic theater is to discover (or alienate) the condition of life. He argues that this discovery (alienation) takes place through the interruption of happening, as if a stranger appears in the doorway in an ordinary household scene.
5) The Quotable Gesture
Benjamin delineates that interruption is one of the fundamental structuring devices of the epic theater. As quoting a text involves the interruption of its context, actors should "make their gestures quotable" in the process of interrupting the theater.
6) The Didactic Play
"In every instance, the epic theater is meant of the actors as much as for the spectators. The didactic play is a special case largely because it facilitates and suggests the interchange between audience and actors and vice versa through the extreme paucity of the mechanical equipment. Every spectator is enabled to become a participant. And it is indeed easier to play the 'teacher' than the 'hero'" (p. 152)
7) The Actor
Benjamin notes that intervals, such as songs, captions, lifeless conversation, "impair the illusion of the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy" (p. 153). In the same vein, he argues that actors should demonstrate that he is cool and relaxed. Thus for him, an important concept of the epic theater is "putting on a show" (p. 153).
8) Theater on a Dais ('raised platform')
"Epic theater allows for a circumstance which has been too little notice. It may be called the filling in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the players from the audience as it does the dead from the living; the abyss whose silence in a play heightens the sublimity, whose resonance in an opera hightens the intoxication--this abyss, of all elements of the theater the one that bears the most indelible traces of its ritual origin, has steadily decreased in significance. The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dias. The didactic play and the epic theater are attempts to sit down on a dais" (p. 154).
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin reads progress while looking at a Klee painting "Angelus Novus":
"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (pp. 257-258)
"Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge" (p. 260).
"History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now" (p. 261).
What is Epic Theater? (p. 147-154)
Benjamin explains the concept of the epic theater, originated by Brecht, in eight chapters.
1) The Relaxed Audience
The epic theater appeals an interest group and aims an audience to be relaxed and follow the action, as if reading a novel on a sofa. But the audience, being a collective, feels impelled to react promptly. Thus the epic theater should emphasize the action that is based upon the audience's experience and the performance that are mounted artistically in a pellucid manner. In the endeavor to interest the audience in this way, a political will prevails beyond mere cultural involvement in the theater.
2) The Plot
Benjamin states the epic theater purposes to "deprive the stage of its sensation derived from subject matter" (p.148) Thus, he suggests a historical incident or an old story, than an unfamiliar one. He compares the plot of the epic theater with a ballet lesson: first loosening a pupil's joints to the greatest possible extent, therefore purging the sensational.
[This plot scheme makes me compare the movies, Entre les Murs and The Freedom Writers. Whereas Entre les Murs leads an audience to daily events without arousing much sensation in each scene, The Freedom Writers is equipped with mechanisms that make an audience feel the sensational and built coherently toward its last outcome.]
3) The Untragic Hero
With regard to undramatic quality of a man, Benjamin traces back to Plato, who recognized the undramatic quality of the most excellent man. In spite of the dominance of tragic heros in the history of drama, Benjamin argues that the opposite trend has never ceased that says, "It is a mule track, neglected and overgrown, which comes to light today in the dramas of Brecht" (p. 150).
4) The Interruption
As Brecht introduces, Benjamin draws a sharp contrasting line between Brecht's drama and Aristotelian's in that Brecht eliminates the Aristotelian catharsis and emphasizes producing astonishment rather than empathy. "Instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function" (p. 150). Thus, an important task of the epic theater is to discover (or alienate) the condition of life. He argues that this discovery (alienation) takes place through the interruption of happening, as if a stranger appears in the doorway in an ordinary household scene.
5) The Quotable Gesture
Benjamin delineates that interruption is one of the fundamental structuring devices of the epic theater. As quoting a text involves the interruption of its context, actors should "make their gestures quotable" in the process of interrupting the theater.
6) The Didactic Play
"In every instance, the epic theater is meant of the actors as much as for the spectators. The didactic play is a special case largely because it facilitates and suggests the interchange between audience and actors and vice versa through the extreme paucity of the mechanical equipment. Every spectator is enabled to become a participant. And it is indeed easier to play the 'teacher' than the 'hero'" (p. 152)
7) The Actor
Benjamin notes that intervals, such as songs, captions, lifeless conversation, "impair the illusion of the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy" (p. 153). In the same vein, he argues that actors should demonstrate that he is cool and relaxed. Thus for him, an important concept of the epic theater is "putting on a show" (p. 153).
8) Theater on a Dais ('raised platform')
"Epic theater allows for a circumstance which has been too little notice. It may be called the filling in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the players from the audience as it does the dead from the living; the abyss whose silence in a play heightens the sublimity, whose resonance in an opera hightens the intoxication--this abyss, of all elements of the theater the one that bears the most indelible traces of its ritual origin, has steadily decreased in significance. The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dias. The didactic play and the epic theater are attempts to sit down on a dais" (p. 154).
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin reads progress while looking at a Klee painting "Angelus Novus":"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (pp. 257-258)
"Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge" (p. 260).
"History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now" (p. 261).
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