Autoethnography Week (make-up blog)

To answer a peer’s question of what’s at stake in the timelessness of these indigenous films, I would answer the preservation and presentation of authentic cultural experience.

In Marketing Alterity, Moore argues for the function of indigenous films. One interesting quote s in the following: “The Asch/Chagnon films, however, used formal tropes for disorientation and unfixing authorial positions to gain a rhetorical advantage for science and explanation…What comes to us from the synch sound and apparently candid images of people is, always, strange and chaotic. The sound from the ethnographers by contrast…is full of reason and explanation” (129).

Because knowledge and evidence are the priorities, there seems to be a kind of authorial devices used by Asch/Chagnon and it is evident that they have an intellectual curiosity in their endeavors as well. Furthermore, the silence of the majority of the films (especially in the weaving woman) served to reinforce the intimate nature of the images. Silence as an auditory device posits a powerful question: did the filmmakers use silence as a metaphor for the voiceless? If so, a potential interpretation is one of empowerment, what we might consider ‘the roar of silence’; on the other hand, the empowering dimension rendered by the absence of audio might perpetuate a cycle of marginalization if the message is lost upon some of the audience.

I feel as though the indigenous filmmakers, in an attempt to showcase and preserve their native culture, opened a portal between themselves and their ancestral past and in so doing embarked upon a journey of self-discovery that “solves their problems and not ours” (137). As one peer pointed out Moore’s “theoretical burdens of representation” and “self-ethnography,” we must remember the importance of representation and what images presented can come across. Although the Navajo Project “legitimizes” and epitomizes oppositional and expresses the participatory studies, we must keep in mind the significant events that occurred during this period such as post-colonial and the radicalization of 1960s in our understanding of the penetration of video and community films. It is also important to note the time gap between the films’ movements. Ginsburg uses the metaphor of the “parallax effect” and remarks on the framework that it can allow us to view ethnographic film and indigenous media. Again, we are still operating on these assumptions of perhaps our preconceived notions of culture and what may be our “realist illusion” within a Westernized gaze (171).