ASA08: Ownership and appropriation
A joint international conference of the ASA, the ASAANZ and the AAS
8th - 12th December 2008, University of Auckland, New Zealand
There was a parallel film programme and abstracts are listed in chronological order.
Session 1, Monday 13:30-15:00
SchoolScapes, by David MacDougall (77 min)
A film composed of long shots showing life in an Indian school.
Session 2, Monday 15:30-17:00
In Gentle Hands, by Howard Morphy (52 min)
A film of a circumcision ceremony made by Howard Morphy and Pip Deveson in collaboration with the Yilpara community (NE Arnhem Land). The film is centred on the emotional experience of a Yolngu circumcision focussing on the boys undergoing the ritual. In the film moments of dramatic tension are balanced with moments of high comedy. Throughout the process the boys are treated with care and reverance.
Filmmaker present
Guraramburrk - The Cheeky Dog, by Christiane Keller (22 min)
Guraramburrk - The Cheeky Dog is part of a series of nine films accompanying the doctoral thesis This Is My Idea. Innovation and Creativity in Contemporary Rembarrnga Sculpture. The aim of this series of films is to provide a close view into the development, production and materiality of contemporary sculptures by Rembarrnga sculptors from the Maningrida Region in central Arnhem Land.
Rembarrnga artist use a range of materials and techniques including wood, all kinds of fibre and even cast metal to produce idiosyncratic and quirky sculptures that tell stories about Rembarrnga ancestors, spirits and the animated environment of central Arnhem Land. Guraramburrk - The Cheeky Dog features the production of a large dog sculpture made of twined pandanus. Pandanus fibre sculptures are a recent invention that lead to national and international acclaim of Rembarrnga artist Lena Yarinkura. Having made her first fibre sculpture in 1994 from bound paperbark, Yarinkura soon developed the technique used in making so called ‘dilly bags' to produce full bodied sculptures of mainly life-size spirits, animals and humans. Her sculpture group Family of Yawkyawk won the Wandjuk Marika Three-dimensional Award at the 1996 Telstra Art Award. Since then her work has progressed in many directions and is always marked by the artist’s inventiveness and versatility.
The film not only follows the genesis of the ‘monster’- dog, detailing each necessary step in its production but also contextualises the working environment of the artist. While working at the sculpture Yarinkura also comments on the story of Guraramburrk a big ancestral dog that roams the home country of her husband and fellow artist Bob Burruwal.
Filmmaker present
Session 3, Tuesday 08:30-10:00
Firekeepers, by Rosella Ragazzi and Tromso Uni (57 min)
The joik, a traditional Sámi song form, has recently become more widely heard, mainly due to the popularity of the band Adjagas. This documen-tary film explores a fascinating, evolving mode of performance that is a healing force for the Sámi people. The documentary follows young joikers Sara Marielle Gaup and Lawra Somby of Adjagas from the stage to their homes to reveal how issues of colonization, identity, endangered language and spirituality are bound up with their music.
Aspects of Tourism in New Zealand’s Sub-Antarctic Islands, by Eric Shelton (30 min)
Until 2007, Heritage Expeditions offered a seven-day Expedition Cruising product that involved visiting New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands. Shelton and Tucker (2007) illustrated how despoliation, indigenous, wise use, and restoration narratives are used to frame environmental management debates in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Shelton (2007) argued that, in the case of the sub-Antarctic islands, material emanating from a wide variety of sources is shaped to fit within a particular, temporally sequenced, narrative of discovery, exploitation and subsequent restoration and appreciation and that the production of this narrative, which eminently suits the development of tourism product, may legitimately be formulated as a process of representation which leads to a distillation of meaning. However, this author argued also that the distillation of meaning is not in fact the most profitable way of representing or understanding the multiple and varied stories produced by the group of individuals who supply or purchase this product. The material presented in this film demonstrates the multiple and varied processes, both frontstage and backstage, involved in visiting the islands, and situates the product within larger personal and economic contexts.
Filmmaker present
Session 7, Wednesday 08:30-10:00
Khangai Herds, by Natasha Fijn (90 min)
The film Khangai Herds focusses on herding families and the herd animals who live amongst them in the Khangai mountains of Mongolia. The herds consist of horses, cattle (including yak), and a combination of sheep and goats. In a land of extreme conditions, both herder and herd animal depend upon one another as a means of survival. Within broad river valleys, beneath steep slopes with patches of forest, herd animals are free to roam, existing within their own complex social structure and hierarchy. Herders successfully integrate themselves within this herd social structure by taking the role of lead animal within the herd, socially engaging and communicating daily in a constant cross-species, cross-cultural, human-other animal dialogue. This is achieved through herders and herd animals growing up amongst one another from birth. Each herding family works hard to nurture and provide for the animals and in turn the herd animals nurture and provide for the herding family, allowing them to live mutually interdependent, happy and prosperous lives.
Session 8, Thursday 08:30-10:00
Roya and Omid, by Elhum Shakerifar (15 min)
‘Roya and Omid’ is an exploration of transsexuality in the Islamic setting of Iran. Bardia, a young female-to-male transsexual reflects on his childhood spent in the wrong body, when he was known as Roya (‘dream’ in Persian), but wished to be Omid (‘hope’ in Persian). His narrative is crossed the insightful comments of several male-to-female transsexuals in Iran Donya, Handry, Leila and Shirin, who have to endure the daily scorn of society in their new roles as women.
Play Jankunu Play: Garifuna Christmas Rituals in Belize, by Oliver Greene (45 min)
The Garifuna are a Central American people of West African and Native American descent. One of their most popular rituals is wanaragua, a three-fold system of masked Christmas processionals commonly called Jankunú. This ritual is a unique blend of African, European, and Native American (Arawak and Carib) art traditions in which social and cultural identities are expressed through music, dance, and costume. As dancers adorn themselves in colorful regalia to mimic past foreign oppressors they symbolically affirm their identity. They perform stylized movements to the accompaniment of drums and social commentary songs composed by men. Descriptions of the three processions and dance styles are interspersed with interviews by Garifuna singers, drummers, dancers, cultural advocates, and scholars on the significance of rituals.
Session 9, Thursday 10:30-12:00
Encountering Eloyi, by Richard Werbner (56 min)
Of all the faith-healing churches in Botswana, Eloyi is the most controversial. Sensational stories in newspapers and on television have made Eloyi notorious for so-called witch-busting and for exorcising demons. Known as tokoloshi, they appear like a nightmare image of an overwhelming consumer society. While attacking traditional ritual as Satan’s work, Eloyi brings back, in a Christian or even more remarkably Old Testament guise, many old Tswana practices. Rarely in the ritual of other churches is empathy for others’ and their mortal frailty so powerfully realised as in this Apostolic church during a séance.
The film shows the impact of such empathy and the demonic in the lives of a childless couple, Martha and Njebe, originally from the countryside and now settled in Botswana’s capital city.
After a long quest for healing by traditional doctors and gynaecological treatment by Western hospitals, Martha chooses to seek help from Eloyi. Her choice widens the gulf between her own faith and her husband Njebe’s scepticism. It also involves her in tensions between Eloyi’s city branch and its village headquarters, between the church’s city bishop and his father, the archbishop.
Filmmaker present
Telling Fortunes, by Jonathan Roper (13 min)
A fortune teller talks about her life and work.
Location: Slovenia
Session 10, Thursday 13:30-15:00
Los con Voz (Those with Voice), by Jeff Arak (55 min)
Los Con Voz documents current efforts in the Southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas to produce what social scientists have dubbed “indigenous media.”
A pacifist group of radio engineers travel days to man the transmitter cabin in the hills of Chiapas, providing the surrounding communities with information about current events, family health, and national politics. An archaeologist in Massachusetts explains how his field has changed throughout the twentieth century. And an international film festival brings together visionaries from twenty-three countries including a girl from Finland searching for love and a Cree man working to keep his peoples’ oral history alive. These stories illustrate the complexities of the indigenous experience today while at the same time they promote the universality of the human spirit. Through it all we find the undeniable desire to speak and be heard.
On Being Banana, by Risa Madoerin (24 min)
Three Koreans living in the West talk about their identity
Location: South Korea
Session 11, Thursday 15:30-17:00
From Honey to Ashes, by Lucas Bessire (47 min)
In March 2004, one of the world’s last voluntarily isolated groups of hunter-gatherers walked out of the forest in northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers’ bulldozers. They formed a new village with their more settled relatives, where they confronted the complexities of learning how to become “Ayoreo Indians” and more critically, how to survive in a rapidly changing world.
This documentary provides an intimate portrait of a divided community four months after this historical event, and their efforts to chart a collective future in a context shaped by deforestation, NGO activity, anthropologists and evangelical Christianity. Self-consciously engaging a history of ethnographic representations and tropes of “first contact,” the reflexive video uses the filmmaker’s narration to reflect on the experiences and confusions of a process that remains ultimately opaque for the “new people,” for their relatives, and for the anthropologist.
This film contributes to the visual anthropology of lowland South America by putting a human face to critical questions about “contact,” “indigeneity” and the ways certain narrow ideas of “modernity” continue to be presented as the only options for Native peoples in the Gran Chaco and beyond.
Morokapel’s Feast—The Story of a Kara Hunting Ritual, by Felix Girke and Steffen Köhn (26 min)
Traditional hunting ritual in a modern world
Location: Ethiopia
Session 12, Friday 10:30-12:00
Friends, Fools, Family, by Berit Madsen (59 min)
Worldwide, Jean Rouch is known to many as a French anthropologist and innovative filmmaker. Much of his work is linked to the birth of cinéma vérité. However, Rouch’s fifty-year involvement with a particular group of people in Niger shines a more personal light on his work – one of friendship and collaboration. Together with this group, Rouch made numerous ethnographic films and developed a unique cinematographic style. These films have been termed “ethno-fictions.”
In 2003, two Danish anthropologists and filmmakers traveled to Niger to make a film with Rouch's friends. Their film was going to be an exploration of the methods of the group. It became a story about how this unique collaboration came to change the lives of both the filmmaker and his friends.
Session 13, Friday 13:30-15:00
Room A
Qallunaanik Piusiqsiuring (or Why White Men Are Funny), by Mark Sandiford (47 min)
In the spring of 2005 renowned Qallunologists from around the world gathered for the first-ever Qallunaat Studies Conference. Qallunaanik Piusiqsiuriniq is the record of that historic event.
The conference was hosted by the Qallunaat Studies Institute. The director of the Institute, Mammarialuk, acted as chair. He allowed that the following terminology for Qallunaat would be recognized by the conference:
Kudluna, Kabloona, Kodlunarn, Kabloonack, Kaduna, Qablunaat and Naluarmiit (and Alaskan term meaning "bleached white").
The agenda was a full one and included fascinating papers on the following
topics:
Kai-Kai on Qallunaat Greetings;
Nutaraaqjuk on Qallunaat Tribes, Social Structures and Naming Systems (including a technical presentation on the Qallunizer 2000); Ittupasaaq on Qallunaat Knowledge of Things They Have Never Seen; Mammarialuk on Civilized Savagery; Niaqunnguak on Qallunaat: People of the Clock; Sijjariaq on A Proposed Voyage of Discovery and Assimilation to Europe; and Tarralik-Qunngaatallurittuq on The Department of Qallunaat Affairs'
New Q-Number System.
Secret Hebron: The School Run, by Donna Baillie (29 min)
The subject matter of this documentary was the struggle of Palestinian children in the West Bank city of Hebron to get to school safely. They were regularly prevented from going to school by Israeli soldiers, and had resorted to scrabbling across the roofs of the old city as they were not allowed to use the ‘Israeli-only’ streets below. The only way to film their inevitable encounters with soldiers was to use a hidden camera.
Themes of ownership and property are writ large in the continuing conflict in the West Bank, and nowhere more-so than in Hebron, where Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews live right next to each other but in completely separate worlds. The control of territory is officially exercised by the Israeli army, but this film demonstrates how Palestinians struggling to keep their schools running found ways of subverting the loss of public space (which had become the private domain of Israeli settlers) by making previously private space public by turning the rooftops of houses and the houses themselves into public thoroughfares through which children could travel to school.
The filmmaking process itself involved a subversion of what had become private space – the soldiers had banned the use of cameras in the areas where they were stopping the children from going to school – into the very public space of international media through the use of hidden camera footage.
Room B
Last Yoik in Saami Forests?, by Hannu Hyvönen (59 min)
This documentary chronicles the logging damage that has taken place in the forests of Finnish Lapland over the past 50 years, its effect on the indigenous Saami peoples, and the ongoing conflicts between the government and activists.
Wittenoom, by Caro Macdonald (14 min)
“Wittenoom is a beautiful snapshot of human resilience, optimism and a place to belong” Megan Spencer, Revelation Perth International Film Festival
In outback Wittenoom, life is becoming increasingly insular. The government claims this ex-asbestos mining town is polluted, attempting to shut the town by bulldozing buildings and cutting off power. Now nature is taking over. Yet eight determined residents of the once boom-town remain.
Session 14, Friday 15:30-17:00
Room A
We Too Have No Other Land, by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler (61 min)
A winning soccer-based film diary played out within a democracy in conflict. Against all odds, the tiny Arab soccer club Bnei Sakhnin (literally “the Sons of Sakhnin”) won the Israeli State Cup. The first Arab club in the top league battles for survival in the league, metaphor of the Arab minority’s battles for survival in the “League of Acceptance” of Israeli society. The soul of Arab Sakhnin takes on the soul of Jewish Israel in the mother of all contests, Minority versus Majority: it’s the ultimate match for equal rights and co-existence.
The filmmakers' book, entitled 'Goals from Galilee', should be published during the Spring of 2009.
Location: Israel
Room B
Asmara, Eritrea, by Caterina Borelli (63 min)
Asmara - capitol of the East African nation of Eritrea - is recognized as an architectural gem. In this film Asmarinos from different walks of life guide us through the streets of their city and bring us to places of their choice. In doing so, and by talking about 'their own' Asmara, each person locates personal memories in public spaces investing the urban environment with individual meanings. Through their narrations - a chorus of different experiences embodying the nation - the country's history from colonialism to independence comes to life.