“Service of Anthropology” Night:
Siamack Salari
Siamack is the main populariser and spokes-person for commercial and video ethnography around the world. He was the resident expert-host on Channel 4’s "Shop Til You Drop" and the BBC Money programme’s, "Shoppers in the wild". He began his working life as an industrial designer but he moved to the Henley Centre for Forecasting (a WPP company) where he worked with clients to help them gain a better understanding of consumer change across Europe. He set up EverydayLives (www.everydaylives.com) in early 2000, an ethnographic film market research company.Ultimately, his dream is to collect examples of all human behaviour in a shareable video archive and thereby make the world more lucid.
Michael Stewart
Michael Stewart is a social anthropologist teaching at UCL. He hascarried out ethnograpic research in eastern Europe with Rom (Gypsies)in Hungary and Sheep hill-farmers in Romania. He worked as anindependent TV producer and for the BBC on and off between 1988 and1995. He now coordinates the Marie Curie funded SocAnth trainingprogram in the anthropology of eastern Europe.
Chair: Pat Caplan
Pat Caplan joined Goldsmiths College as a lecturer in 1977 and helped to set up the Department of Anthropology here. She became a professor at the college in 1989. She works mainly on the East Coast of Africa and in South India, but has also done fieldwork in Nepal and Wales. Her interests include social inequality and social justice, not least gender; anthropology of food, including its relation to health; reflexivity; development and modernities; anthropological ethics. She has published and edited a number of books, as well as many articles, and in recent years has explored other means of communication via websites, photo galleries, film, and archives. She is now Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths and also a Trustee and Director of ActionAid UK, a development charity which uses a rights-based approach and prioritises women's rights.
Discussion background:
The question of ethical
responsibility over production and dissemination of ethnographic film
unceasingly addresses researchers and directors, but one has to make a
living. Increasing employment of ethnographic research for market
products of global companies and the
US
army’s deployment of anthropologists as mediators during occupation of
Afghanistan
has prompted the labelling of “mercenary anthropology.” Should one take
a stance against such alliances or can ethnographic film offer a voice
to viable solutions for practical problems? Does short-term gain and
financial concern undermine the ethics of anthropology or offer a
stable role to the future of the discipline? Can ethnographic film
invert the flow of decisions offering a humanistic ‘bottom-up’
perspective.
“Aesthetics of Encounter” night Guests to be confirmed…
Amanda Ravetz (University of Manchester)
Amanda Ravetz trained as a painter at the Central School of Art and Design and later completed a doctorate in Social Anthropology with Visual Media at the University of Manchester where she also lectured. Her edited volume with Anna Grimshaw, 'Visualizing Anthropology' (Intellect Books 2005), explores questions of vision and knowledge. Understanding ethnography not as a specialised method, but as a shared space of practice, the book investigates new collaborative possibilities linked to image-based work. In 2004 Amanda joined MIRIAD as an AHRC Fellow to pursue research into "Contemporary Convergence of Aesthetics and Ethnography”. During the first two years of the award she carried out intensive fieldwork with MFA students and published papers on knowledge and knowing in the contexts of art and anthropology. In September 2006 she ran an intensive workshop for a gathering of internationally known artists and anthropologists which took place in January 2007. She is currently involved in a series of seminars on Art, Anthropology and Architecture being run by Prof Tim Ingold at University of Aberdeen and in March 2007 she ran a Masterclass in 'Visual Ways of Knowing'.
An essay by Amanda Ravetz on Connecting Art and Anthropology
Marc Isaacs
Since 2001 Marc has made more than ten creative documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4. His films have won Grierson, RTS, and BAFTA awards. In 2006 he had a retrospective at the Lussas Documentary Film Festival and his work has been included in numerous documentary books. Marc is a guest tutor at the London Film School and the National Film and Television School. His latest film ‘All White In Barking’ has recently been short listed for a Grierson Award.
Chris Wright (Anthropologist, Goldsmiths)
“My research interests centre around visual anthropology, including photography, visual culture, aesthetics, film, material culture, contemporary art, and the relation of visual images to ethno-history.
I have been involved in various projects to return collections of anthropological photographs to local communities in New Mexico, Sikkim, and the Solomon Islands and curate exhibitions in those locations. I co-curated The Impossible Science of Being: dialogues between anthropology and photography at the Photographers Gallery, London in 1995, and Presence at Leighton House, London in 2003. The latter was an innovatory exhibition that featured interventions and installations by four contemporary artists and archival material from the Royal Anthropological Institute Photographic Collection. I have carried out fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, South Pacific in 1998 and in 2000-2001, focusing on links between photography, material culture, and memory, and this formed the basis of my PhD. I am currently working on this material as the basis of a book “ The Echo of Things”: photography in the western Solomon Islands.
I am also currently working on the practical and theoretical connections between anthropology and contemporary art, particularly in relation to the anthropology of the senses. In 2003 I was the co-initiator and co-organiser of Fieldworks: dialogues between art and anthropology, a major 3-day international conference held at Tate Modern, London.”
Discussion background:
In
embracing the filmic text as a site of cultural creativity and artistic
experiment, we ask whether such research loses power of communication
and whether the integrity of relationship is sacrificed or enhanced?
Can creative engagement offer a space to transcend unidirectional
formats of research? May the encounter of media production initiate an
inclusive community of expressive voice? How may we read these moments
of inventive display? We consider the dialogical aesthetics of
negotiating, attempting to understand. being present and representing.