featuring Jenny Chio
(University of Southern California/ Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
This event aims to resituate and rethink the practice of portraiture as an ethnographic method by exploring portraiture as a culturally conditioned, socially resonant form of knowledge production and social relatedness. All portraits, even self-portraits, rely upon a relationship: between the portrayed and the portrayer, the sitter and the artist, the interlocutor and the ethnographer. Nevertheless, the singularity of the portrait — its narrow focus on individual experience and its representation – poses an inherent challenge to the conceit of ethnography as a form of writing (collective) culture. While there are numerous examples of serial portraiture as a form of sociological investigation, perhaps most famously in the work of German photographer August Sander (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts), there is still relatively little theorization around how individual stories are transformed into ethnographic analysis. What happens, then, when one’s dataset is comprised of just one, maybe two (e.g. John Marshall’s classic film, N!ai: Story of a !Kung Woman)? Is it possible, and in what ways, to analyze cultural processes through a portrait of an individual? How might portraiture, as a scholarly and multimodal experiment, radically re-theorize forms of social and scholarly engagement? This presentation will draw on an excerpt from my work-in-progress film, These Days, These Homes, which explores the lives and ambitions of two Miao women in contemporary rural China.
When: Monday, 10 June
Time: 16:00
Where: Institute for European Ethnology, M*hrenstrasse 40/41
Room: 212
Also stay tuned for the next and last instalment of this summer 24 term´s Stadtlabor multimodal event series:
- 1 July “Testing the Kit for Multimodal Appreciation” with the Multimodal Appreciations Research Group
For more information contact: andrew.gilbert@hu-berlin.de