Audiovisual Evidence & Anthropological Knowledge

AUDIO-VISUAL EVIDENCE AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE CARLO A. CUBERO Introduction This chapter discusses the multiple forms that audiovisual media— specifically video—take in the production of anthropological knowledge. It draws from my own experience of using video as part of my doctoral research to demonstrate how the dualities suggested by participantobservation operate simultaneously in the experience of producing an ethnographic video. I discuss specifically how an ethnographic video at once generates material evidence of social relations and constitutes a body of knowledge. Crucially, in this situation, the process of producing the audiovisual itself becomes a form of anthropological knowledge. Making an ethnographic video as part of an academic research programme challenged me to consider two different conceptual and technical ways of approaching my fieldsite. One was text-based, argumentative, and supported by academic references; the other imagebased, suggestive, and composed solely of materials I collected in the field. In retrospect, the difficulty I encountered in bringing these two approaches together into one project was mainly due to my assumption that they were incompatible and needed to be addressed independently. Throughout my research I found that both items, the video and the text, were born out of the same process of fieldwork, and responded to the same constellation of circumstances and subjectivities that characterised my research experience. In this chapter, I argue that the main challenge presented in a social anthropology project that uses audiovisual media does not only concern the productive use of the visual versus the textual, or the subordination of one to the other. The challenge, in my experience, 2 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge is to embrace and navigate the tension generated between the different types of knowledge with which one is confronted; the final product reflecting how such a tension was negotiated or balanced out. My suggestion is that audiovisual media, by their capacity to produce meaning at various levels (through their content and form, for example), are capable of presenting and representing different types of knowledge simultaneously. In this chapter I will discuss how audiovisuals carry out a double role in anthropology. I will argue that this double function occurs through ethnographic video's capacity to record events and processes that can be scrutinised at a later time, while at the same time offering an openended, suggestive, and reflexive account of fieldwork. In both cases, knowledge is generated in a peculiar state of awareness that is mediated through the camera and sound recording equipment. I will begin by discussing an application of audiovisual media that prioritises their function as material evidence of social events and processes. In this approach, films are treated as exemplary recorders of ethnographic data, capable of capturing social events and processes as they occur in real time. To make films in the spirit of collecting evidence suggests that audiovisuals contain some kind of consistency or truth-value, perhaps by virtue of being experienced through the visual and aural senses, from which anthropological knowledge can be extrapolated and validated. However, in this approach, the consistency of audiovisuals is merely technical rather than analytical, requiring an external component such as text or narration to communicate ethnographic knowledge. The production of audiovisuals for evidentiary purposes can be a valuable addition to an ethnographic project because their examination can provide insights that were not appreciated with direct observation, but were realised after careful and repeated examination of the footage. I will then address an alternative framework by which anthropologists use audiovisuals as the principal means of carrying out their ethnographic research. In this approach, the very experience of making and watching a film constitutes anthropological knowledge. Audiovisuals are valued for their capacity to communicate a sense of social experience through their cinematic and auditory complexity. They thus invite the viewer's imagination and intelligence to explore the sensuality and sensibility of the sounds and images. Audiovisuals, perhaps better than any other medium, are capable of presenting and representing the totality of movement, vision and sound simultaneously “as the originary structures of embodied existence and the mediating structures of discourse” (Taylor 1996, 80). This approach suggests that images and sounds precede knowledge; they constitute what we know before explanation (MacDougall 2006). They Carlo A. Cubero 3 allow us to examine processes and events in their state of being, untapped by political and historical contexts yet mediated by the filmmaker's subjective stance towards the film subjects and fieldsite. Knowledge, from this perspective, is not exclusively related to the historical, discursive or political. Rather, the production of knowledge is contingent on the experiential, the propositional and the affective, and is generated in an inter-subjective relationship between the filmmaker, film subjects and the viewer performing an exploration of lived experience in all its ambiguity (Taylor 1996, 80). Finally, I draw on my own experience of making an ethnographic documentary as part of my PhD project in order to discuss the ways in which the process of making a video produced knowledge at the same time as it created audiovisual objects from which analytical concepts were extrapolated. My dissertation includes a fifty-minute ethnographic film, called Mangrove Music, which explores the ways in which mobile and insular practices and discourses operate simultaneously in the constitution of an island musical identity on the Spanish-speaking island of Culebra in the northeastern Caribbean. I focus on two specific ways in which making a video as part of my fieldwork sensitised me to approach my fieldsite in a way that enriched the research process and led to the inclusion of analytical categories that would not otherwise have been part of my dissertation. I first show how my continuous attention to the landscape of Culebra, an exercise that was born out of collecting footage that was not intended to form part of the final video, provoked me to approach my writing from a perspective that connected islanders’ aesthetic qualifications of the landscape to contemporary political controversies. I then discuss how the experience of filming and editing a seemingly ordinary and routine musical performance led me to consider interpretive ways in which I could explain aspects of the creative and performative processes of the musicians I was filming. In each case, the filming process worked through different channels and to different ends. However, I suggest that both cases reflect audiovisual media's capacity to produce evidence and knowledge simultaneously. Film as Evidence The idea that audiovisuals function as a device for collecting evidence in the field dates back to the origins of modern anthropology itself. At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists applied the recently invented film camera to the study of surface markers of cross-cultural difference, such as skin colour, body shape and technology, using language and 4 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge taxonomy associated with biology (Hart 1998). The camera was viewed as a research tool that, by virtue of being a mechanical object detached from the body, could record social interactions and processes objectively. The assumption was that mechanically-created images and sounds could be scrutinised and exhibited alongside other materials collected during fieldwork, such as objects made by informants, in order to extract from them a narrative that would give insight into the social relations and subjectivities characteristic of the fieldsite. An oft-cited precedent of this approach is the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits led by Alfred C. Haddon. The intention of the expedition was to produce a taxonomical record of cultures and societies under threat by imperialist expansion (ibid.). The expedition included film equipment, and produced a series of short sets of rushes depicting specific events and practices understood to be in the process of disappearing. Cinematically, these sequences were characterised by a static camera on a tripod, which filmed whole bodies in their immediate space. Although the rushes suggest that Haddon’s team was trying to record authentic moments of social life in real time, the irony is that we now know that the team had in fact persuaded their informants to reproduce performances that had not been practised for a generation. This contradiction did not dissuade anthropologists from purveying the notion that film would be an appropriate scientific data-gathering device, akin to the astronomer’s telescope or the biologist’s microscope. Haddon and his team designed their audiovisuals to function as reliable data to sustain arguments and corroborate observations, rather than to narrativise or to turn audiovisuals into a channel of anthropological discourse. Almost forty years later, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson used audiovisuals to construct and represent a narrative that would communicate anthropological knowledge. They intended to use film in order to explore internal processes that led to the formation of cultural attitudes. Mead and Bateson aimed to document, with film and photographs, external expressions of socially learned behaviour— specifically child rearing and non-verbal communication—and evaluate how these physical expressions reflected cultural values and relationships. Their footage and thousands of photographs were intended to accompany a text and construct an argument about the culture of Bali and describe an “ethos” of the people. The social ethos that interested Mead and Bateson was more behavioural than performative. Their attempts to address historical cultural patterns and broader social contexts, as they relate to internal processes, proved elusive to the cinematic and narrative techniques that they Carlo A. Cubero 5 employed. Their cinematic methodology and narrative choice suggests that they—particularly Mead—saw photography and film as an enhanced notetaking device, as a record from which direct observations made in the field could be corroborated and examined in more detail after the filming had taken place. It was assumed that the footage would be a theoretically neutral piece of evidence to which the anthropologist could refer when constructing the ethnography (Mead 1962, 138 cited in El Guindi 2000, 484). The seven edited films produced in this collaboration rely heavily on a didactic voice-over that explains and interprets for the audience the dynamics presented in the film, as if Mead herself were guiding us through her movie, leaving little room for alternative interpretations. The narration is used to corroborate what the images are already showing, or to offer an interpretation that lies outside of the film itself, such as an explanation of the broader social and political context in which the particular scene takes place. This narrative choice suggests that the images and sounds are subordinate to the voice and the text, but it can also indicate a possible predisposition of the research (MacDougall 2006, 224). Film and photography were not the means through which Mead and Bateson did their research, but rather constituted a method through which they used the camera to enhance their direct observations. The Mead-Bateson project valued audiovisuals for their illustrative and didactic potential. However, they did not see the camera as mediating the relationships fostered in fieldwork, and the film remained a detached observation of events and processes. The pedagogical value of these films lies in their capacity to illustrate abstract anthropological concepts by showing how they appear in the field, much like an illustrated lecture, offering the student a richer learning experience. The intentions and outcomes of the Mead-Bateson project demonstrated the difficulties of communicating anthropological knowledge without accompanying narration. In her later writings, Mead would argue that anthropology’s historical tradition as a text-based discipline hindered the development of audiovisual techniques and sensibilities within anthropology (Mead 1975). At the core of Mead's argument is the suggestion that audiovisuals and texts operate in fundamentally different ways, and that the project of using audiovisuals in a “discipline of words” (ibid.) may require a re-examination of what are valid anthropological questions, as well as the qualities of anthropological knowledge (Pink 2006). 6 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge Film as Knowledge Following an alternative framework to the traditional practice of collecting film as unmediated evidence, a series of filmmakers have been striving to use film to produce anthropological knowledge and move beyond the use of audiovisual for illustrative or ancillary purposes. They draw their inspiration from film theorists such as Béla Balázs and Sergei Eisenstein, pioneers in writing about film’s capacity to communicate abstractions, and from film practitioners such as Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty, whose works are renowned for their reflexivity, collaboration and narratives that place viewers at the centre of the action (Loizos 1993; Winston 1995). In this approach, anthropological knowledge is produced through a reflexive engagement with the film subjects and fieldsite, which is socially mediated by cameras and sound recording equipment. The knowledge these anthropologists wish to produce is contained within the films themselves. This approach is primarily interested in communicating the experiential and affective dimensions of social life, rather than being motivated by the precision of scientific methods (MacDougall 2006; El Guindi 2000). Their narratives are designed to communicate a sense of place and show the complexity of experience that characterises people's daily life, as opposed to the demonstrative documentary (Winston 1995). Filmmakers associated with this approach strive to make films that evoke an intimate and empathetic relationship with their film subjects. Two filmmakers associated with this approach are John Marshall, known for his films amongst the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, and Jean Rouch, best known for his work in francophone Africa. While each filmmaker is associated with employing different cinematic techniques and working methods, this body of work shares an agenda of attempting to understand, through filming, a social world from within the physical spaces of the film subject, which necessarily entails a collaborative effort between the filmmaker and the film subjects (MacDougall 2006). An important characteristic of these filmmakers’ approach is an interest in the workings of film language and a desire to grasp the imaginative and intellectual attention of the audience through the audiovisual medium. To achieve this engagement requires an honest assessment of the distinct potential and limitations of text and visual media, and an attempt to exploit the visual accordingly. Hence, the ethnographic questions posed in these films and the ways of answering Carlo A. Cubero 7 them are necessarily of a different nature to the pursuits of anthropologists like Mead and Bateson. For example, instead of looking for underlying structures of culture, which relate more to discursive formations and argumentation, their work suggests that the demonstrative and expository language of film is well suited to address the embodied experience of individuals, the relation of people to places and material objects, the performative aspects of social life, emotions, time, the body, and the textures and nuances of a place (MacDougall 2006, 220). The inter-subjective accounts of these filmmakers recognise that anthropological knowledge is the product of relationships of power between the anthropologist and informants; the edited film is the result of such a negotiation. The idea that audiovisuals can convey a sense of social experience embraces the communicative ambiguities of non-textual media as a stimulating and creative tension from which anthropologists can raise questions about the properties of culture. Fieldwork with Video While the two approaches I have outlined above may appear antagonistic (see Grimshaw 2001; Hastrup 1992; Loizos 1992; Taylor 1996), I did not experience a similarly clear-cut contradiction in my own field research. I found that the process of making a video as part of an academic project placed me in a position where I relied on audiovisuals’ capacity to function as evidence of social relations—as an object that I collected during fieldwork and referred to on occasion in the writing of my dissertation—and as form of anthropological knowledge, whereby the process of filming, editing, and showing the film itself constitutes knowledge. The following sections examine how these two paradigms continuously folded into each other during my fieldwork, rather than representing mutually exclusive discourses and practices. My experience points to the multivalency of audiovisual media and its capacity to generate multiple affectations and reactions in different contexts, without altering its actual content. In the present case, I was attempting to construct a cinematic narrative by using materials I collected in fieldwork, not all of which I had originally accrued for that purpose. When I returned from the field and examined the footage, I realised that some of the material I shot that was intended for the video did not fit with the themes and arguments that I wanted my project to address. In the same way, some footage that I shot for more personal reasons ended up becoming important scenes in the final edit. This was possible because of video’s peculiar capacity to manifest multiple meanings and purposes in 8 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge the same images and sounds. It is through this ambiguity that video expresses its double condition as a medium that can engage with the viewer imaginatively and experientially, while at the same time containing evidence of fieldwork and social processes that can enrich the descriptive and analytical dimensions of written ethnography. My research project was concerned with the social processes by which Caribbean islands spaces are constituted and lived. In my dissertation I examined different ways in which Caribbean migrations, creolisations, transnationalisms and other discourses and practices of mobility and travel are produced and reproduced in relation to colonial and post-colonial discourses that separate and fragment the region into discrete island and regional spaces. The video included in my dissertation explores the ways in which mobile and insular discourses and practices are related to the construction of musical identities on the Spanish-speaking island of Culebra, an offshore municipality of Puerto Rico. The main goal of the video was to explore how the production and reproduction of a musical insular identity is formed and motivated by the mobile dimensions of life on Culebra. My intention was to make this ethnographic video in an observational style. My interest in observational cinema stemmed from my training in Visual Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in University of Manchester. An important pedagogical goal of the Granada Centre, at the time, was to place the student in a position to consider the research process as sensorial and experience-based learning. Ethnographic filmmaking was not about adding filmmaking to anthropology but to visualise anthropology, which involves a fundamental reorientation of perspective such that the world is not primarily approached discursively through language, explanation, generalisation; but through a re-embodiment of the self as the foundation for renewed engagement with everyday life (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005, 23). At the Granada Centre we were encouraged to explore this renewed engagement with the quotidian through observational cinema, understood broadly as a methodology and cinematic aesthetic that is associated with ‘ethnographic cinema’, ‘cinéma vérité’ and ‘direct cinema’. Working observationally challenges the student to think visually and to look at a fieldsite through the quality of its space and through the daily situations and processes that take place within it; to appreciate the place’s sense of time, pace, textures, aural, and visual qualities alongside the relationships that these quotidian processes and events suggest. In these exercises, the Carlo A. Cubero 9 students were provoked to consider the production of knowledge by looking at processes and events in their state of “being” (MacDougall 2006, 1-9). Looking at something “as it is” prompts questions that lead towards a more experiential knowledge, stimulating the observer to be in tune with the corporeal and emotive qualities of perception. Amongst the conventions of observational cinema that students were encouraged to reproduce was to work alone, perhaps mimicking the practice of classical anthropological fieldwork. The student was in charge of the sound, image, and editing of the video. This practice suggests that the researcher’s relationships in the field are mediated by the camera and the equipment, that one’s identity as a researcher is enacted as a cameraperson, sound person, video editor and writer. Making a video therefore constitutes doing ethnography, and vice-versa. During my fieldwork and writing, I found myself continuously gauging the narrative possibilities for my text and video. This meant that I was in a position to take note of the visual, expository, and demonstrative aspects of my fieldsite at the same time as I took note of the political, historical, and social contexts at the heart of my research. This challenge became more difficult in the post-fieldwork stage, when I felt that I had to reconcile two disparate ways of thinking about my fieldwork. In retrospect, I have come to realise that all along, and perhaps unbeknownst to me, the visual and the textual were folding into each other throughout my PhD research, and that both products emerged out of the same experience, continuously informing each other during my fieldwork and writing. Understanding the Political through the Audiovisual Throughout my year of fieldwork, the main village on the island of Culebrai was undergoing a process of urban regeneration. The island’s municipal government enacted the development programme with the financial support of the Puerto Rican state. The construction projects were delayed because the engineers had overlooked the fact that, historically, the village was constructed over reclaimed swamplands, such that it flooded when the ground was excavated. Heavy machinery and special cement pipes were brought in to deal with the flow of water and mud seeping from under the main street. I collected a lot of footage of bulldozers pushing mud, their mufflers belching smoke while the workers applied and spread cement as fast as they could on the bits of the street that were dry. It was a noisy and smelly affair that suggested to me a kind of violent modernity that countered my previous experiences of visiting 10 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge the island years before, when I had admired its seemingly pristine landscape. I continued focusing my attention on the landscape, appreciating the changing colours of the sea as the days passed, the different tones of the grass according to the rainy or dry season, and the sound of the wind ruffling the trees in my backyard. I contrasted these sensations of the landscape with the mechanical sounds, mud, and smoke of the village. This exercise of filming the construction sites and my appreciation of the island’s landscape developed as a tangent to the core themes of my research project. As my fieldwork progressed, I gained a more sophisticated understanding of the political dimensions of the island’s development programme and the variety of social contests that were arising from it. The goal of the infrastructure development, as stated publicly by the mayor, his advisers, and the Puerto Rican senators who visited the island to inspect the construction, was to alleviate poverty in Culebra. The infrastructure development was justified as part of a broader goal to pair the socioeconomic resources of Culebra with Puerto Rico, and further democratise Puerto Rico’s resources. The notion that Culebra lagged behind Puerto Rico’s national development agenda was, in many ways, reproduced by Culebra’s physical separation from Puerto Rico (they were connected by an irregular ferry service). The antiquated architecture of Culebra’s main village and the island’s dry landscape dominated by thorny trees were often described in contrast to Puerto Rico’s lush rainforest interior and dense urban spaces. The main critics of the development programme, including those from within the mayor’s own political party, pointed to the fact that the projects were targeted more to expand tourism facilities than to address the genuine needs of the islanders. These critics argued that the type of tourism development proposed by the municipality responded more to development plans originating in Puerto Rico, which in turn followed planning discourses of tourism resorts in the United States. Tourism development, the critics argued, should follow the example of other West Indian islands that had successfully implemented eco-tourism policies or maintained a high degree of control over their own tourism development plans. There was a concern that the type of tourism development that the mayor was implementing on the island would foster processes of land privatisation and disenfranchise islanders from the island’s resources, especially in the coastal areas. As I wrote about this controversy in my dissertation, I became increasingly frustrated in attempting to communicate how the political Carlo A. Cubero 11 camps that emerged from such a social contest did not follow the traditional colonial politics of Puerto Rico and Culebra. The traditional political parties and interest groups of Culebra were either fragmented or held inconsistent positions. I also found that basic social and economic data about the island, such as population statistics, unemployment rates, and income per household, were inconsistent with arguments and expressions printed in the media and voiced in public meetings. To approach this conflict through government statistics and the island’s political parties, which were predicated on regional colonial politics, would paint a contradictory picture of the ways in which political processes are connected to Culebra islanders’ sense of island identity. Instead, I focused on the different types of imagery that were evoked in the rhetoric of development debates on the island. I found that when people discussed their positions on the development, whether in public meetings, published editorials, or private conversations, they referred approvingly or disapprovingly to the mayor’s understanding of the Culebra landscape. Critics of the development programme did not see the island as harsh, inhospitable, and in need of domesticating, but as having a beautiful natural landscape that had served as a means of subsistence in the past and is the main tourist attraction of the island today. Critics also made historical connections between the current struggle for their control of the lands and the struggles carried out thirty years ago, when the islanders mobilised themselves to successfully oust a U.S. navy base that was using the island as a practice bombing range. Corroded war tanks and shrapnel still dot the island’s beaches and hills, and I often heard people draw parallels between military tanks and bulldozers, and manned checkpoints that blocked access to militarised zones during the 1970s and contemporary “Private Property” signs that restrict public access to paths and the coast. I found that the arguments and rhetoric deployed during the development debates were mediated through the visual; they placed the island’s natural landscape at stake by drawing on the relationship between the island’s appearance and a sense of history. For the development critics, the notion of being a person from Culebra, or culebrense, was rooted in a positive valuation of the landscape, which related to their memory of struggles for access to it. In this perspective, being culebrense also evokes a connection to the English-speaking Caribbean through a history of movements throughout the archipelago and the aesthetic similarities between the smaller islands of the northeastern Caribbean. For the development supporters, to be a culebrense was to be Puerto Rican and an active contributor to the Puerto Rican national project. They suggested that 12 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge the people of Culebra should demand that the Puerto Rican state correct infrastructure disparities between Puerto Rico and Culebra following Puerto Rico’s model. A truly democratised Puerto Rico, the development argument suggested, would entail Culebra achieving an urban landscape that was aesthetically compatible with Puerto Rican national standards. I suggest that my sensitivity to the visual and aural properties of my fieldsite emerged from a heightened state of awareness that came from recording video footage for an extended period of time. ii In order to be successful in my filming, I could not record dispassionately. I had to film knowing that my footage would be edited later into a narrative. In order to do this, I had to be actively engaged in the events that I was recording, be aware of my shots and their sequence, attentive to detail, as well as patient, sensitive, and respectful of my surroundings. I had to maintain a sense of confidence and determination in what I was doing, both technically and conceptually, while at the same time fostering a relationship of trust and empathy with my informants. This state of awareness and excitement would not subside after a recording session was finished. My eyes would continue to sting for hours after recording and, when in certain social interactions, I would often find myself “practising” camera movements and shot positions without my camera, as if I were still filming. Recording video in the way that I did caused me a certain visual excitement that continued throughout my fieldwork. I suggest that this visual sensitivity had a significant effect on the way in which I approached the social processes that I was trying to understand. This excited visual state resonates with the experience of other filmmakers, such as Dziga Vertov, whose writings suggest that his engagement with the world through filming offered him a special insight into the world, which he labelled “film-truth” (Vertov 1963, cited in Rouch 1975, 91). Also, Jean Rouch described his filmmaking experience —both the filming and editing—as a kind of trance or “cine-trance”, in which the camera and the body of the filmmaker were meshed together in the process of observing and participating in social events. For Rouch, the camera acquires an agency during the filming process. He called the film camera a “capricious but faithful little machine, which has an infallible visual memory” (ibid., 82) that participates alongside the filmmaker and the film subjects in an improvised “ballet in which the camera itself becomes just as alive as the people it is filming” (ibid., 89). In my case, the video equipment became a powerful mediator and instigator in the process of gaining an understanding of my fieldsite at the same time as it functioned as a valuable collector of ethnographic evidence that I referred Carlo A. Cubero 13 to while writing my dissertation. I did not actively seek to visualize the Culebra development debates and write about them as such. I believe that my decision to write about and understand this process from this perspective emerged from the experience and mindset of making a video. That is, making a video led me to appreciate the descriptive and evocative dimension of my fieldwork and the processes that characterised it. It offered a way to navigate the complexities and contradictions of this particular political process. Video Recording as Knowledge Another instance where recording and editing video research materials unexpectedly became an experience that I incorporated into my writing occurred early in my fieldwork, while filming an otherwise ordinary musical performance. The most active music group in Culebra at that time was a conga percussion trio called The Wiki Sound. I had chosen to include them in my video because the type of music they played and the instruments they used suggested the histories of movement and insularity that were at the core of my research project. More importantly, I had established a good relationship with the three musicians, which, combined with their charisma and sense of humour, made filming with them very enjoyable. During the Christmas season, three months into my fieldwork, The Wiki Sound invited me to a private party in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, where they had been hired to play. I had recorded their musical performances before and had a general idea of how I wanted their performances to be shot. Still, I was particularly excited and nervous about the trip because I thought that a journey—with its clear beginning, middle, and end—would provide a natural narrative for a sequence in the video, should I choose to use it in the edit. We left on the morning ferry to mainland Puerto Rico and took public transport to the capital. I shot, in a fairly straightforward manner, sequences to show the nature of the trip. I filmed the trio on the ferry, with shots of the sea, the musicians sleeping in the car, arriving to the city, going for lunch, seeing the sights of the capital, and going to a music shop to buy new skins for their congas. We arrived at the party early, and while the musicians were tightening their conga skins, I filmed people mingling, the party food, the bar, and the view of the city from the apartment. When the band was ready to start I positioned myself so as to be able to capture the entire band, and to pan easily to the audience. Since I had filmed the band before, I had an idea of what to expect from the musicians and from the audience. As the 14 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge musicians took their places, I put the viewfinder up to my eyes and held the camera with my two hands, pressing my elbows against my torso to keep the camera as steady as I could. As a result, the viewfinder lay firmly against my eye, ensuring that I would only see through the viewfinder. The group started with their usual salsa number. Wiki, the band’s lead member, counted off, and Rubén, his brother, set the speed on the cowbell. Jorge played the base of the number on three congas, a 1-2-3-3-2 syncopation that emulated a bass guitar playing the standard salsa line. Wiki followed softly on the highest pitched conga, improvising a gentle flutter of beats above the bass line. They started their salsa number very slowly, with Wiki and Jorge swaying side to side. I had seen this before, but never before had I been in a position to watch it so intently. I straightened my shoulders and bent my knees, putting my weight on my thighs so I would be able to pan more smoothly with the camera. The 1-2-3-3-2 bass line continued slowly in the dark, smoky room. The repetitive beat, while tiring at first, slowly enticed me and drew me into what they were doing, and I slowly began to feel as if I were caught under some kind of spell. I panned down to the conga nearest to me and stayed on it for a few seconds, perhaps a minute. The disembodied conga was also swaying with the beat; its cream coloured skin was stained with beer, sweat and blood—from an accident where Jorge had cut his hand a few weeks before. I panned up again to the slow rhythm of the congas, focussing on the other two musicians. I then slid as smoothly as I could towards them, staying on them for another lapse of time. As I moved back, returning to a wider shot of the three players, the cowbell accelerated and Wiki closed his eyes. By the time I slid back to my initial position, Jorge’s bass line had accelerated and shifted to another mood, and Wiki’s fingers were now fluttering faster over his conga, occasionally beating the entire face of the drum with the palm of his hand. The audience was swaying to the faster beat but still not dancing—a normal occurrence since it usually takes a few songs before the musicians and the audience get warmed up. As I panned back along the faces of the onlookers, the host of the party pulled a woman from the crowd and started dancing with her, encouraging other people to do the same. Moments later, a second couple emerged from the crowd and joined them. When I panned back to the drummers, they had transformed their rhythm once again. I could vaguely make out Jorge's 1-2-3-3-2 beat as he moved his arms along his three congas at a frantic speed. Wiki now opened his eyes and his hands were a blur to my camera’s shutter speed, which had to be kept open because of the light conditions. Without knowing it, I had moved from my original position and found myself behind one of the Carlo A. Cubero 15 congas. I was filming the backs of the musicians as the audience in the background became more and more enthusiastic about the drumming. I recorded one continuous shot for the length of the song, around ten minutes. During the course of the evening I filmed two more songs with similar intent. I knew something special had happened during the filming of the gig, but I could not explain it in my fieldwork diary. I felt that I had learned something about the band’s way of playing and the relationship they had with each other, but I could not quite articulate it. I attempted to address this revelation when it came to writing about the theme of music on the island of Culebra in my dissertation. Like the other chapters, my writing on music describes the process by which a sense of island uniqueness is constituted in a context of high mobility and travel. I wrote about the mobile histories behind the music groups of Culebra, focusing on their choice of instruments and musical genres. However, my examination of the Wiki Sound video material revealed more than just the historical and geopolitical dimensions of music-making in Culebra. My close observations of the musicians at work, repeated through the process of editing the video, revealed something about the way in which the musicians relate to each other when they play, their relationship with their audience, and their composition process, which are informed by their performance. After multiple drafts and efforts to find the correct words to express what I had seen as the musicians’ creative process, I reached a compromise and wrote about “structure” and “improvisation” as categories that not only suggest the creative sensibilities of The Wiki Sound, but also reflect the social practices of musicians in Culebra more generally. I expanded on this idea by showing how social relations amongst musicians on the island can be described as simultaneously improvised and structured. Improvisation refers not only to a compositional style, but also a social category that addresses the dynamics of a highly mobile society. Structure refers to the regionalisation of Caribbean music and the concomitant insularisation, as well as the compositional style of the island’s music. Like my analysis of local ideas about the island’s landscape, my consideration of island music was provoked by a state of mind brought about through the process of making a video. But unlike the previous example, my ideas emerged from the actual experience of filming and editing the video. I suggest that the experience of recording and editing a specific event revealed more to me than what appeared on the footage itself. My attempts to describe this process of filming and editing 16 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge generated categories that I included in my dissertation, adding a new descriptive and analytical layer to its argument. Conclusion My intention in this chapter has been to address two disparate approaches towards the use of audiovisual media in anthropological research, and to offer an example of how they operate simultaneously in practice. Audiovisuals, I argue, provide this simultaneity because of their capacity to offer multiple meanings and narratives without altering their form. I wish to suggest that the generation of audiovisual materials in anthropological research constitutes a gathering of evidence and a production of knowledge simultaneously. In this way, the distinction between the process of generating knowledge and knowledge itself is not necessarily clear-cut. Ethnographic films, like cinema more generally, generate meaning through both their content and form. Meanings are also created through the viewer’s reflexive stance towards the characters and events depicted. It requires from the audience “a form of engagement closer to the experience of an onlooker at the event than to a reader of an ethnographic monograph” (Taylor 1996, 77). The viewers are thus empowered to create meaning in the film by appreciating, for example, the emotive features of social life, the quality of the relationships within the film, and the pace of the film. Ethnographic films and videos do not necessarily state their message explicitly; they instead allow the themes and issues to emerge through the edited narrative and suggestive scenes in such a way that viewers learn through acquaintance rather than through lecture. In my own practice, I attempted to follow conventions of observational cinema because I was attracted to its potential for sharing with my audiences the process of discovery. I especially strived to adhere to the convention of keeping as little distance between the video equipment and myself, as if to suggest that the footage would represent my own subjective position in relation to my film subjects and fieldsite. The rushes represent my shifting interests, my quest for narrative, and my emerging relationships with the people I filmed. They mark my progressions during fieldwork, which can be characterised as a tension between appreciating the aesthetic, the textual, the aural, and the “being” of social events, against gaining an understanding of the meaning behind the utterances, social processes, and relationships with which I was engaging. The two filming contexts I have described illustrate how making a Carlo A. Cubero 17 video enriched my ethnographic research. In the first example, knowledge was produced through my sustained attention to the island’s landscape, an attention that I may not have maintained had I not been engaged in making a narrativised video of my fieldwork experience. In the second example, the actual filming and editing was an experience that I could not fully explain in words. My attempt to do so resulted in the inclusion of interpretive categories that would not otherwise have emerged in my ethnographic writing. The tension between the “being” (appreciating events and processes as they occur) and “meaning” (understanding the social and political significance) of social events manifests itself more acutely in audiovisuals than in text, which points to a general tension in anthropology (MacDougall 2006). Embracing this tension might pose a problem for an anthropology that seeks consistency and certainty associated with academic writing. However, it can serve very well an anthropology whose goal is to represent social worlds as processual, discursive, and metaphoric (see Geertz 2000). I believe that the multivalency of audiovisual media challenges the researcher to confront these tensions in ways that amplify the reflexive aspects of research. More importantly, audiovisuals promise to contribute to broadening the perspectives of anthropological discourse through a renewed examination of anthropological concepts by non-verbal means, and by provoking new ways of assessing traditional anthropological ideas. Notes References El Guindi, Fadwa. 2000. From pictorializing to visual anthropology. In Handbook of methods in cultural anthropology, ed. H. Russell Bernard. Walnut Cree: Altamira Press. Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology, 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books. Grimshaw, Anna. 2001. The ethnographer’s eye: ways of seeing in anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — and Ravetz, Amanda. 2005. Introduction to Visualizing anthropology: Experimenting with image based ethnography, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz. Bristol: Intellect Ltd. Hart, Keith. 1998. Anthropology and psychology: the legacy of the Torres Straits expedition, 1898-1998. Lecture given at the opening session of the Anthropology and psychology: the legacy of the Torres Strait 18 Audio-visual Evidence and Anthropological Knowledge expedition, 1898-1998 conference, August 10-12, in Cambridge. http://www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/hart.html Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. Anthropological visions: Some notes on visual and textual authority. In Film as ethnography, ed. Peter Crawford and David Turton. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Loizos, Peter. 1992. Admissible evidence? Film in anthropology. In Film as ethnography. ed. Peter Crawford and David Turton. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. 1993. Innovations in ethnographic film: From innocence to selfconsciousness, 1955-1985. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacDougall, David. 2006. The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mead, Margaret. 1962. Retrospects and Prospects. Anthropology and Human Behavior. Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington. ----. 1975. Visual anthropology in a discipline of words. In Principles of visual anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pink, Sarah. 2006. The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses. New York: Routledge. Rouch, Jean. 1975. The Camera and the Man. In Principles of visual anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Taylor, Lucien. 1996. Iconophobia. Transitions 69:64–88. Vertov, Dziga. 1963. Kinoki Perevorot. Cahiers du Cinéma 144: 32-34. Winston, Brian. 1995. Claiming the real: The Griersonian documentary revisited. London: BFI Publishing. i The island of Culebra is one of two offshore municipalities of Puerto Rico. Since 1898 Puerto Rico has been an Overseas Territory of the United States. In 1952 Puerto Rico and the US Congress approved a Constitution for Puerto Rico, which designated internal island matters to be administered by a locally-elected government, but also stipulated that the US Congress retain control over external matters and sovereignty over Puerto Rico. ii I recorded a total of sixty hours of footage during my twelve months of fieldwork.