In the late 1960’s the social sciences (mainly anthropology and sociology) entered a crisis period in which traditional ways of conducting the study of the Other were re-examined in the context of their association with dominance-submission hierarchies and the objectification of the subjects of study. There was seen to be an association between Western imperialism’s objectification of the Third World and the Western data imperialism’ that objectified the subjects of study.
Increasingly social science research was called to task in the creation of new ways of conducting social science research outside of the positivist-empiricist paradigm and conducting research that was relevant and useful to the people studied. Lyotard questioned the authority of all self-validating theoretical frameworks that were used to legitimize science.
He argued that researchers should study the world in its fragmentary state, examining each distinct fragment, rather than creating meta-theories to explain observed cultural phenomenon and argued for the creation of new, temporally appropriate, modes of expression which questions the implied authority of traditional theoretical and methodological constructs (1984).
Derrida (1976) questioned the relationship of text and author, challenging the dominance of the latter over the former, offering deconstructionism as an answer to the problem of authorship and interpretation of texts. Clifford (1988) viewed the accepted ethnographic authority as being derived from the privileging of “participant observation” as evidence of the authenticity of the text; the author having gone there, observed the event, and which he objectively reported as fact on his return.
Nichols writes: “mobility and travel no longer serve as a symbol for the expansion of one’s moral framework, the discovery of cultural relativity, the heroics of salvage ethnography, the indulgences of secret desires in strange placemovement and travel no longer legitimate, ironically the subjects’ right to disembodied speech, disembodied but master (italics in original text) narratives and mythologies in which the corporeal “I” who speaks dissolves itself in a disembodied, depersonalized, institutional speech of power and knowledge (Nichols 1994:7), in the postmodern context, he argues, “movement and travel become an experience of displacement and dislocation, of social and cultural estrangement, of retrieval, survival, and self-preservation (1994:7).
The Postmodernist view in ethnography, then, questions the basic assumptions underlying the reportage of ethnographic information, noting that reporting ethnography is a distinct action from doing ethnography, though equally important (Clifford and Marcus 1986); that there is not only one single language or style able to convey the elusive truth’ of the universe, in fact there are a multiplicity of reporting modes or voices capable of conveying ethnographic information (Rorty 1982); and thus ethnography should not be based on the conveyed understanding’ of the researcher (which places him or her in a position of privileged interpreter), on a dialogic relationship between the ethnographer and subject in which both participants within the dialogue are an integral part of the study (Marcus and Fisher 1986).
The current debate concerning the validation and reporting of ethnographic material generally takes the form rejection of all theoretical paradigms (Lyotard 1984), the deconstruction of texts (Derrida 1976), the removal of the authorial voice and sobriety in style (Marcus and Fisher 1986). Counterpoised to the postmodernists are the traditionalists, such as Geertz, who assert that ethnographic legitimacy is concomitant with the authors narrative ability and rejects the removal of the authorial voice from ethnographic texts.
Fontana states that, “traditional ethnographers sought (and continue to seek) to explain a slice of culture by understanding’ the members of that culture”, yet the observations made of the Other are still interpreted within the conceptual framework of the ethnographer and communicated via the ethnographer’s own subjective voice. To what ever degree the ethnographer has participated in the subject culture, what is seen and recorded is still filtered through the ethnographer’s perceptual, conceptual, and communicative paradigms (Fontana 1994).
Classical ethnographic film, based, as it is, upon its written sister, the ethnographic monograph, as well as its historical forms – travelogues, romantic historical reconstructions (Curtis, Flaherty), and the early scientific’ salvage ethnographies – suffers from the same criticisms concerning its objectification and essentialization of the cultures it purports to visually represent.
The connection between First World and Third World relations of paternalism-dependence’ and powerful-disempowered’ with modes of representation is not insignificant in the discussion of ethnographic film’s current crisis as this is the macro-context in which anthropology/ethnography and ethnographic film developed and exists. Postmodern ethnography attempts to subvert the dominance-submission hierarchy implicit in the traditional ethnographer-subject relationship through deconstruction of the text and multi-vocality. Going beyond reflexive techniques of drawing attention to the author’s involvement and influence, postmodernists argue that the entire relationship has to be horizontalized so that it becomes a dialogic relationship of communicative exchange and one in which the process of exchange becomes part of the data – and a subject of study (Fontana 1994).
In ethnography this crossing of the line’ is most visibly associated with the reflexive ethnographer in the event’ styles of Rouch, Stoller, MacDougal, Myerhoff, and Shostak, the first, third, and fourth also utilizing reflexive elements in their ethnographic films. Though they all broke with the conventions of traditional ethnography, in my opinion Myerhoff and Shostack come closest to the stated goals of postmodern ethnography via there virtually horizontalization of the ethnographer-subject relationship. At this time I am not aware of any ethnographic text which exemplifies the postmodern ideal, though I am aware of the movement in ethnography towards a more prose and narrative based structure. Deconstructionism
As postmodernism seeks to create new modes of ethnographer-subjects relationships and create access to voices previously unheard, it also seeks to deconstruct textual representations of social phenomenon I order to dissect and reveal the underlying meanings, biases, and preconceptions that structure the ways in which a text conceptualizes its relations to what is described. Closely identified with the philosophical analysis of Derrida, and at once an offshoot and an element of the postmodern critique of social science and humanities, deconstructionism utilizes a methodology directed at the interrogation of texts. It attempts to dissect and reveal the underlying meanings, biases, and preconceptions that structure the way a text is conceptualized in relation to what it purports to describe.
Critical to deconstructionism, is the deconstruction of traditional conceptual, theoretical and indexical frameworks, as well as the notion that the means and intention of the author can be easily determined. To do this, deconstructionism seeks to: disengage the equating of written with spoken words, spoken words with mental experience, and voice with mind; demonstrating the fundamental indeterminacy of meaning; the textual production of the subject as a system of difference; attack the notion of mimesis (the ability of a work to represent experience; and seeks to develop a grammatology, or study of writing, speech, and texts (Denzin 1994). These goals entail rewriting the history of writing, developing a new theory of writing and a set of deconstructive grammatological practices (Denzin 1994).
As part of the postmodern perspective, deconstructionism seeks to subvert and tear down the all theoretical constructs seen as containing preconceptions and paradigms which have become sterile and obsolete in ttempting to create knowledge and understanding of the contemporary world. The deconstructionist perspective rejects totalizing and essentializing meta-narratives and meta-theories of social origin, causation, structures, and intentions; confronting the centering of the subject in constructed roles, status’, norms, values, and structured social systems – while simultaneously attempting to expose the ideological suppositions of contemporary research and theory – seeking to replace them with a humanistic social science’ (Denzin 1994). Deconstructionism, therefore, embraces the previously marginal’ and those who were often located on the subjective side of the texts.
Postmodern Social Theory Postmodern social theory aims to produce interpretive analyses that speak to and of the social’ through a close up analysis of social texts (Denzin 1989). Postmodern social theory does not aim to formulate science’, seeing the scientization of the social sciences and the subjects as merely conceptual conventions which reveal the disciplines as being mired in the continual attempt to legitimize themselves as scholarly disciplines (Denzin 1989). Denzin views the “Great Masters” of social science as creators of texts that reflected and supported the social and intellectual order in their temporal an spatial locations (1994).
Their master works “mapped a social world that never was and implicitly served an ideological purpose, including new ways for the state to control the behavior of its members” (Denzin 1989: 187). In contradistinction to the “Great Masters”, postmodernist theory focuses on the contemporary society in which technology and media are see as increasingly defining what we conceptualize as real’. In the postmodern global society, symbols and meaning circulate in an absence of a connection to reality’ (Denzin 1989). As Baudrillard writes, the real has become hyper real’ and things, including human beings, are now judged by there ability to match up against media representations” (1988: 5).
Baudrillard characterizes the current era “the third order of the simulacrum” – an era in which cultural experience is determined and ordered via the “hyper real logic of simulation” (1983: 11) – in which appearance creates reality and truth exists only to the extent that it conforms to the simulated models of the real (1983). In recognition of the constructed nature of reality, postmodernism places nothing outside of the text; Derrida states, ” for no thing is ever outside language, and hence inescapable of being expressed in text” (1976:35). Given the postmodern concern with the problematics of presence, intention, rationality, and causation in the production of texts, the process of deconstruction provides a methodology to critically analyze the process and ways in which social texts are organized. Postmodern Texts
Denzin writes, “texts produced in the postmodern tempo display a tendency to disregard traditional boundaries between past and present in a manner which situates the subject (and viewer and the reader as well) in a perpetual present that is flooded with signifiers of the past” (1994:186). Postmodern texts subvert the classical tendency to depict cultures as ahistorically situated in the present without consideration of the factors which served to place them in the context in which they are presently found, as well as seek to displace the westerner as the privileged interpretive voice of representation. The dominance of the subject by the ethnographer/ethnographic filmmaker, through gaze, interpretation, voicing, objectification of subject and context, and cinematic and editorial prerogatives is replaced by collaboration, indigenous filmmaking, and disruption of narrative structure.
Ethnographic filmmakers’ have been at the forefront of this movement: Facilitating the use of video technology by indigenous peoples as a means of self-empowerment and self-definition (Ginsberg 1995; Aufderheid 1995); Elder’s horizontalization of the filmmaking project, in which the subjects determine what is filmed, filming is conducted with cultural context and prerogatives in mind; and subjects are active in the editorial project; and Minh-ha’s rejection of narrative structures, use of unconventional framing of the subjects, montage and editing style which resists the attempt to impose narrative structures upon her work by viewers (Moore 1994).
Postmodern texts also display a tendency to bring the unrepresentable (sexual violence, violent death, brutality, insanity, homosexuality, the degradation of women, sadomasochistic ritual, drug and alcohol abuse) before the viewer in ways that challenge “the boundaries that ordinarily separate private and public lives” (Denzin 1988: 186). Postmodern texts are frequently structured along the lines of classic mortality tale: the subject travels through three phases or steps; seduction, corruption, and redemption.
Denzin sees the use of this “biographical trajectory ” as a means of criticizing the “corrupt, unethical society that has loss sight of traditional moral principles and values” (1994:186). Deconstruction of Texts Traditional critics of social texts view readers, viewers, writers, filmmmakers, and speakers as existing spatially in the present tense and generating thoughts, intentions, meanings, and representations in a linear-sequential order according to a particular process of logic. The intent and meaning of a text are therefore accessible to those who peak and read the language as the speaker, writer, or creator of the text. Derrida argues that this perspective is fallacious and in dire need of deconstruction (Derrida 1972, Denzer 1990).
Western thought, in Derrida’s view, is trapped in the heritage of logocentrism (presence is the center of truth) and phonocentrism (the emphasis of speech over writing and voice). Both logocentrism and phonocentrism operate under the assumption that direct access to the thought and intent of a text’s producer can be had through language (Derrida 1990). Derrida: “Consider the radical possibility that language does not facilitate this kind of understanding. Suppose that the signs that make up language can never function without referring to another element which itself is simply not present and that this results in each element being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of other elements of the system. This interweaving yields text produced only in the transformation of another text.
Nothing is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces (Derrida 1981:27). The cognitive-physical process of generating thought, followed by the generation of speech or writing, entails a loss of the one as the other is grasped. Denzer writes, “language does not permit speakers or writers to ever have full access to the meaning they are attempting to convey. Nor can they ever be fully present to themselves. As they reach forward or backward to catch a thought, that thought blurs with another until what they attempt to write or speak becomes something that bears the traces and meanings of everything that has come before” (Denzer 1994: 189).
Denzer identifies three consequences that follow from Derrida’s argument: (1) that speech and writing are not accurately reflecting mirrors of thought; 2) that speakers and writers are therefore never fully present to themselves as they are continually moving backward or forwards, into the past of their thoughts or into the future of their thoughts; and (3) that texts are always fragments of other texts, and therefore are never complete in and of themselves (1994: 189). Representation by writers must therefore be read in terms of the unconscious and conscious strategies employed in the creation of texts which purport to be whole texts of presence, both in terms of the writer’s presence and the presence the text is seeking to present to the reader. This is particularly apropos to film texts, as the representation contains both a visual and verbal dimension – each serving to validate’ the other – doubly implying presence and authenticity of the represented reality.
Following Derrida’s argument, Denzer suggests a methodology of deconstructing texts, applicable to both written and filmic genres, which involves answering four general questions: (1) How are the author’s presence, authority, knowledge, voice, and values evident in the text? (2) How do the norms of logocentrism articulate with intertextuality, where one text is seen to be part of another, often hidden text? (3) How does logocentrism lead to the production of a text that appears to unfold in a linear, rational manner, from point A in time, through to points B, C, D, etc.? (4) How does the writer/filmmaker get structures into the text – how is the structure centered – how do they establish the presence or absence of structure? (1994: 190-92)
Four Films, Deconstructed Following Denzer’s methodology, I will examine and attempt to deconstruct four films dealing with the subject of non-western religions, An Initiation Kut for a Korean Shaman (1991), Voices of the Orishas (1993), Holy Ghost People (1968), and Witchcraft Among the Azande ( ). In An Initiation Kut for a Korean Shaman, the filmmaker’s presence is indicated by, initially, her voice over narration which seeks to orient the viewer in context and time by providing background on the role and position of shamans in Korean society and the life problems experienced by Chini (the initiate) up to the time of the filmed initiation.
The extra-textual information provided by the narration serves to establish the filmmaker as an authority, but as the first few minutes of the film pass and the narration ceases, authority shifts and is shared between the filmmaker (through translation and subtitles) and the Spirit Mother’ who dominates the film through both her commentary and presence. The filmmaker’s presence is indicated by the subjects’ conversation, obvious response to questions, and direct gazes into the camera (or in the direction of the camera) or out of frame at a person we are not shown. Though the translator’s conveyance of the dialogue is meant to be objective, the tone indicates some degree of empathy, if not sympathy, for the initiate’s situation.
The film conveys a multivocality, in that the spirit mother, the initiate, and the initiate’s mother and sister all have voices in the film: the spirit mother conveys her sense of temporal continuity with a long-standing tradition, disappointment with Chini’s performance, as well as a sense being empowered as a woman in an extremely patriarchal society; Chini conveys a sense of desperation – indicated by her embarrassed and self-conscious glances into the camera , of being defeated by the patriarchal society, and that the initiation, like all of her past endeavors, will ultimately fail (throughout the initiation process, she appears unable to let go of her fears and self-doubts); and her mother and sister voice, respectively, hopes of redemption from past transgressions against the gods and that Chini will become self-sufficient through the economic rewards of shamanism.
The voices are all those of women, without men, in a patriarchal society, which tell a story of the daily realities of being marginalized, without power, and few economic opportunities outside of traditional roles – such as shamanism (which apparently also provides an extra-institutional means of explaining and treating’ the psychological disequlibrium brought on by the patriarchal society. The text of the film can therefore be seen as being related to or part of texts concerning the subjugation of women in society, of women’s routes to empowerment and independence, of marginalization, of differential economic opportunities across gender, and of constructed notions of Asian female passivity.
Yet we are logocentrically located in a constructed now’ which orientates us in Chini’s tiny apartment and subject to the conveyance of the impression that her failures and self-doubt are indicative of her own inadequacies. The artificial present produces a text which progresses from the introduction of Chini (her past problems and desire to enter shamanhood’ as an expected solution), the spirit mother, and Chini’s relatives, through the initiation, and finally to her failed initiation process. The text is presented as one continuous sequence which seemingly allows the viewer to know’ Chini and the process of becoming a shaman – essentializing both the person and the process within the convention of narrative. Initiation follows a narrative structure of : introduction > conflict > (potential) solution > failure.
Structure is imparted to the text overtly through the filming of an event with a clearly delineated beginning and ending, and covertly through the editorial process, which I assume left considerable material on the cutting room floor. The initiation Kut occupies the center of the text, however, as Denzin writes, ” since the center does not belong to the totality the totality has its center elsewhere” (1994: 191). This unseen and unknown center lies somewhere outside or the text, and, if known, quite possibly would change the conveyed meaning of the text. Voices of the Orishas, also uses the convention of voice over narration to introduce the film’s subject and location, then becomes a more observational-interview film.
The filmmaker’s presence is thus indicated initially by narration which introduces the subject matter and orients the viewer temporally in an African past- Cuban present and spatially in a Cuban present, and subsequently through the providing of translations from Spanish and Leucumi into English, the interview mode (where answers are presented without the eliciting questions) wherein the subjects speak to the camera’ or slightly off-camera and through the use of subtitles which creates an authorial presence. As in Initiation, the filmmaker’s authority is established initially through introductory narration, an subsequently through subtitling.
The subjects share in the authority’ by appearing to just be speaking into the camera, though it is obvious that they are prompted by some form of interrogatories. The voices present are those of the objective’ narrator/translator, the practitioner-experts, and the Orishas themselves, as voiced through the first part of the film’s dramatization of an apataki (myths’ which recount the origins, interrelationships, personalities, and attributes of the Orishas). In this film the voices complement each other: illuminating the role of Santeria in the lives of its practitioners, the attributes of three of the Orishas, and the structure of the musical component. In this sense there is a uniformity of voice.
Textually, I see the overt one as being that of a syncretic religion serving the spiritual needs of an African diasporic community in the Americas, but covertly there are interrelated texts of: the maintenance and communication of gender roles and expectations through the depictions of the Orishas’ gender attributes in the apatakis and the absence of women in positions of status’ (lead singer, drummer, etc. ), though they appear to be the majority in the depicted events; the failure of the religion to be continued by the younger generations, as indicated by the lament of Lazaro Pedrosa, “the music will never die.
The Knowledge, however, will. of racial and class (yes, in socialist Cuba) differences – the camera pans over a run down urban landscape, then advances through a narrow path through a tenement yard, then focuses on a body of Afro-Cubans; of Cuba’s economic isolation at the maintenance of the U. S. embargo; and of further syncretism through the influence of Cuba’s popular youth culture. Temporality is conveyed in a past (Africa – pre-enslavement) to present (Afro-Cuban) manner in which we are to understand the present in terms of the past as a continuity through adaptation (syncretism). Additionally, there is an mythical atemporality’ presented in the form of the dramatized apataki in which the timeless Orishas are depicted (as well as serves to illustrated the accompanying Orisha specific songs).
But the present we are shown still leaves the viewer not knowing the place of Santeria in the social context of Cuba, and the functions of the religion in the day to day coping actions of the practitioners. Structure takes the form of: introduction > interview 1 : illustration > interview 2 : illustration > interview 3 : illustration > conclusion. The issue of center’ is difficult to determine as no one sequence appears to serve as a middle’ or to dominate over any other sequence, instead as the structure outlines, the film is a sequence of interviews which describe and articulate various aspects of Santeria (deities, belief, and music) which are then followed by an illustrations or events depicting the aspects.
Witchcraft Among the Azande, of the two films thus far discussed, is filmed and narrated in a more traditional’ manner, as well as was produced for television viewers – rather than for an audience anthropologists/ethnographers or ethnographic filmmakers. The narration is conducted via voice over commentary throughout the film, and, in combination with rather formalized interviews with key subjects of the film, establishes the narrator/filmmaker as the authority and dominant voice in the film. Though there are other voices in the film, they are subverted by the dominance of the narrator and largely serve as vehicles by which the plots and subplots are moved forward.
Logocentrism creates a text which implies that pre-colonial Azande were even more superstitious’ et al. , as it locates the people in a constructed now’ in which their adultery, superstition and witchcraft, and nakedness are by implication tempered by contact with Europeans – Chief Soro’s account of previous punishment for adultery being death and the past use of benge poison on human beings, without elaboration and explication, echo colonial justifications of bringing civilization to the Africans (or as was often the case, bringing the Africans to civilization). The text progresses long a linear development, but as mini-acts’ within a larger text on the Azande, rather than a singular narrative.
The opening narration states, “In the nineteenth century, the Zande kings and princes created an empire which sank into obscurity, decimated slavery and broken by colonial power”, though hinting at the larger issues contributing to the Zande’s current situation, follows with, ” operating within a complex series of practices used to solve problem of everyday life, systems of magic, oracles, and witchcraft” which serves to orient the viewer in a constructed present of exoticism in which the past is forgotten in the face of sex, witchcraft, and nakedness. Produced for a television audience (albeit British), the film is highly structured along narrative conventions, presenting four mini-stories’ within the film, loosely connected via one or more persons. The structure takes the form of: Introduction > Problem A : Solution A :: Problem B : Solution B :: Problem C : Solution C :: Problem D : Solution D > Conclusion.
At center of the this text is the Azande’s use of magic, oracles and witchcraft, though, as previously, this center is an artificially assigned center – a sign for something that is absent from the text (Denzin 1991). Holy Ghost people, also uses the convention of voice-over narration to set the scene and inform viewers of the origins and foundations of the particular fundamentalist Pentecostal church that is the subject of the film. Authority and knowledge on the part of the filmmaker are conveyed in an objective matter-of-fact’ manner by the narrator, which, after having oriented the viewer in space and time, retreats to an objective, though probing, camera only format.
Through introductory interviews with selected members of the congregation, in which the subjects appear to give their testimonies in the absence of questions from the filmmaker, the viewer learns what membership in the church was prompted by and what the subjects derive from membership and fellowship. Though we are not privy to the filmmaker’s values or perspectives on the Holy Ghost people, his frequent use of close-ups on persons exhibiting being filled with the Holy Spirit’ (a process involving seizure like convulsions, spasmodic movements, and a phenomenon known a speaking in tongues’ or glossalalia), suggests an interest in the phenomenon – or at least, that we the viewer should find it interesting.
The intertexts we find, are largely of a post-industrial vein: loss of mining and manufacturing jobs in the surrounding community (in the introductory and locating scenes, we see hat appears to be closed down factories, abandoned mills, and barren coal mines); the cold war; emphasis on urban areas over rural; personal transformations; and following from the minister’s’ statement, “we’re all the same from an African only difference is the way we act” – the text of race relations in the southern U. S. and the temporally proximate civil rights movement. As the risk that the Azande could be viewed as the quintessential Black Africans’ and stand in for other representations of post-colonial African peoples, the southern whites, of the West Virginia/Appalachia region, could be misread as representing a sign signifying hillbilly’ or poor white trash’.
The film unfolds in a linear fashion, not much unlike how one would expect an actual service to conform to, and editorial choices appear to have been made with continuity in mind. Issues of cause and effect are brought into the text in the form of causes that motivated the members to seek involvement in the church’ and causes related to states of holiness which motivate the congregation to handle snakes and drink poison’. As with the Azande, we are shown a people who are presented as being physically in the present, but in terms of their religious practices and their concomitant belief system being rooted in a primitive past with signs of magic’, superstition’, and possession’ being represented.
Structure is both derived from the services progression to the stage where snakes are handled and poison drunk, as well as what was apparently very intentional editorial choices on the part of the filmmaker to present a linear structure which progresses from a beginning to a conclusion. The structure follows the form of: Intro > interview > Service (Testimony) > Service (Worship) > Service (Ecstatic) > Service (Apogee) > Conclusion. Despite, their placement near the end of the film, the center of the film rests around the decline of the Ecstatic’ and the beginning of the Apogee’, as the point to which the film builds up to and declines from. Conclusion This exercise has been more a process of exploration and education for myself, than a definitive deconstruction of the discussed films.
