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Heritage and Oral Histories at the Mine of Death in Santa Bárbara, Peru. by Charlotte Williams Graduate Student (UPENN Dept of Anthropology) Multimodal notes from fieldwork supported by the 2018-2019 Multimodal Summer Research Grant at CEE.
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 Videostill from CEE recording of Tambufest 2019, St Thomas, Jamaica Kumina as Embodied Archive Multimodal notes from fieldwork supported by the Center for Experimental Ethnography. This summer, three graduate students accompanied professor Deborah A. Thomas to Jamaica to participate in the second annual Tambufest, in the parish of St. Thomas. Tambufest, organized by Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn (one of Thomas’s collaborators on “Tivoli Stories” and Bad Friday), is a celebration of one of Jamaica’s most vibrant and dynamic traditions – Kumina. Kumina was developed by members of the self-described Bongo Nation in eastern Jamaica, the area that has led the resistance to colonialism, that birthed the Morant Bay Rebellion and inspired the founding father of the movement of. Rastafari, Leonard Howell. Though geographically dispersed, particularly across the parish of St. Thomas, members of the Bongo Nation looked to the Congo-Angola and Guinea Coast regions of Africa as the home of their oldest ancestors. They found in the tradition of Kumina a unifying cultural heritage, one that interweaves musical, linguistic, movement, and spiritual practices that connect them to the ancestors. Kumina is, therefore, an embodied archive of our history. It is also the tradition that is at the root of the popular music of dancehall and reggae. This year, Tambufest began by honoring the elders who have served the tradition over their lifetimes. This was followed by poetry readings, a performance by the Kingston Drummers, and drumming and singing (and dancing!) by the St. Thomas Kumina Collective, a group that brings together representatives of all the St. Thomas Kumina groups. The whole event was recorded by Alain van Achte (sound engineer for Broadway’s The Lion King), and was broadcast live through internet radio by Jake Nussbaum, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology who is pursuing the CEE Graduate Certificate. The event was documented on film by graduate students Dee Asaah (Graduate School of Education) and Farrah Rahaman (Annenberg School for Communications), and Farrah will edit the footage into a number of short clips, and a short film that will also serve as archival material for the community of practitioners. "Broadcasting Tambufest is an opportunity to amplify kumina’s affective, spiritual, and political dimensions, and to think about how creative practices can move through time and space beyond their immediate public.”---Jake Nussbaum, Graduate Student (Dept. of Anthropology) "The Tambufest is an invaluable celebration of timeless cultures. What a sight to behold elders, youth, and even young children from different communities across Jamaica engaging with passion in music and dance! The festival's intergenerationality is particularly poignant, strengthening communal ties through nurturing and propagating the magic of Kumina." Tambufest is part of a broader project, “Bush Music,” which is ultimately meant to amplify awareness of traditional musical practices associated with Afro-Jamaican rituals – such as Kumina, Nyabinghi, and Coromantee – through digital archiving and collaboration with ritual practitioners. On one hand, Wedderburn seeks to preserve the integrity of the original forms, understanding that people constantly innovate based on current experiences, the availability of other instruments, and familiarity with drumming traditions from other parts of the Caribbean and Africa. More broadly, Tambufest seeks to create dialogical spaces within Jamaica and beyond within which communities might discuss the forms of renewal and respect they would like to see moving forward. By embracing that which has been denigrated – “bush” music – we want to re-enchant humanistic practice in a way that could reformulate the grounds of modernity, both within the artistic sphere and more broadly. Watch some short clips from Tambufest 2019 below! Step into the Opening Rituals of the 2019 Screening Scholarship Media Festival at the University of Pennsylvania, a CAMRA-organized festival supported in part by the Center for Experimental Ethnography. This year's opening features a collaborative, interactive ritual performance with Aimee Cox (Center for Experimental Ethnography Faculty Fellow 2019), Saya Woolfalk (New York) and Daniel Alexander (Mellon Foundation Creative Research Fellow at the University of Washington ) and coordinated by Aishah Shahidah Simmons. The artists discussed their process during a panel the following day. They addressed issues related to improvisation, and questions of spirituality and identity, movement and mobility.
The Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research, and to interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/media festival. The 2019 SSMF features works rendering matters of concern and the present histories of: Indigenous people; Persons under any form of detention; Diasporic communities; LGBTQ+ collectives; and environments in conflict. The Center’s official launch party was held on February 15th, 2019. It began in Widener Auditorium at the Penn Museum with the screenings of student films from CEE Faculty Fellow Louis Massiah’s class, "Films of Utility." Massiah is the founder and director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, 1996-2001, two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. In addition to his many film honors, he was recently charged with creating the film archive for the new Musée des Civilisations Noirs in Dakar, Senegal. The launch party then moved to the Upper Egypt gallery for a reception and performances. These performances included a duet by Aimee Cox and Director Deborah Thomas; a performance of the newly released song “Hurricane,” by Vince Anthony (more on him below) and Bridget Ramsey; a bit of juggling by graduate student Juan Castrillon (Music), accompanied on drums by graduate student Jake Nussbaum (Anthropology); some spoken word and rap by former graduate student Osei Alleyne (Anthropology, now at University of the Arts); a rumba band, and a DJ. You can view a “trailer” of the performances here. PROGRAM
The Center supports course development, and this year we offered a grant to Guthrie
Ramsey’s upper level seminar “The Music Industry Meets Activism,” an interactive course that explores the relationship between the popular music industry and the sound-worlds it comes from and returns to. It places the business of music in dialogue with various forms of historical and contemporary activism with an emphasis on Philadelphia. Through case studies, students learn how the industry generates and manages its various revenue streams. Students also witness how music can operate as a living activity that galvanizes and creates community and social bonds through industry and on-the-ground local networks. In addition to readings and discussion, students visited two performance venues, had several in- class visits from artists and industry professionals, organized a performance, and most important, engaged with an artist-in-residence (Vince Anthony), a local singer/songwriter/ producer who attended every class. As students learned about the functions of a management team and record label, they acted as a team to write press kits, develop artistic statements, build a social media campaign, plan and execute a music video shoot, and understand the role of contemporary radio in music promotion. Students also visited, interacted with, and learned about four local activist organizations: the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, OURchive, the One Art Community Center, and Musiqology Rx. Students reported that they enjoyed learning about the music industry from many angles—theoretically, practically and historically, and that they had been particularly excited to interact with living artists and producers who shared their insights from their varied perspectives. The artists reported that they felt it was invaluable to have been exposed to academic discussions each week, because it afforded them a type of discourse and focus that they find hard to come by in the daily grind of hustling resources to make and market their art. Listen to more of Vince Anthony's works on Soundcloud. Learn more about Prof. Guthrie Ramsey's work in the Department of Music.  On Nov. 14 2019, at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, filmmaking icon George Lucas sat down for an engrossing chat with Dr. Deborah A. Thomas, the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the 1.5 hour long conversation, Deb engaged with GeorgeLucas’s early film and writing projects through the lens of experimental ethnography, learning about Lucas’ prevailing interests in mythology and anthropologies of religion. George Lucas shared fresh context behind the writing of American film classics including American Graffitti, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, as well shedding light on the futures of his new education-centric projects including The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and The George Lucas Educational Foundation. Though recording and professional photography were not permitted, we do have a few phone snapshots (and professional photos, taken by AAA staff, are forthcoming). CEE RECAP OF THE 2018 ROUNDTABLE Stephanie Takaragawa sits beside the roundtable participants while addressing an audience question on the specific problems raised by digital vs. analog technologies. by Alissa Jordan, PhD (University of Pennsylvania) At Friday Nov 16th's roundtable, “Bad Habitus”, organizers Dr. Stephanie Takargawa (Chapman University) , Dr. Trudi Lynn Smith (University of Victoria), and Dr. Kate Hennessy (Simon Fraser University) called into question the uncritical techno-centric habits that increasingly characterize the multimodal turn in anthropology. Dr. Coleman Nye (Simon Fraser University) described the experimental graphic novel ethnography that she built with collaborators over the past year, highlighting how visual mediums can be used to craft multilayered political and artistic citations. Yet, Dr. Nye and collaborators encountered numerous institutional barriers in attempting to fairly compensate participating artists using academic funds. Dr. Patricia Alvarez Astacio’s (Brandeis University) discussed her collaborative multimodal ethnography of color in the Peruvian Andes, where women weavers farm and process cochineal insects in order to produce vibrant red dyes. Alvarez described the challenges she and collaborators faced in selecting a media format that could both adequately convey the hapticity and materiality of the farming process while also remaining widely accessible to participants. Following Dr. Alvarez, artist-anthropologist Trudi Lynn Smith narrowed in on the organic processes of entropy currently transforming archival 16mm color film reels of ethnographic footage held throughout museums in British Columbia (and beyond). Originally produced as “salvage” ethnographic recordings, Dr. Smith described how these materials are now themselves imperiled by processes of time—-considered “fugitive materials” in the archive as their colors slowly disappear leaving only a pale pink tone. Organizer Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa followed Smith, problematizing the structural alliances that multimodal anthropologists form when uncritically applying technologies as liberatory “new” tools. Taking off from Dr. Takaragawa’s critique, Dr. Shalini Shankar (Northwestern University) addressed how politically and socially marginalized communities have created new forms of organization using digital platforms. At the same time, Shankar warned anthropologists that digital platforms may significantly narrow dialogs according to geopolitical hierarchies, echoing long-established divides of literacy, resource access, and more. Following Dr. Shankar, discussant Dr. Jenny Chio (University of Southern California) inquired after the material and immaterial excesses and waste generated by digitally-centric anthropologies, imploring anthropologists to meaningfully engage with the leftovers of technical processes. Dr. Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania; CEE), the final discussant, emphasized the double nature of technologies as tools that can be wielded both to support and dismantle existing structures of power. Concluding the round table with questions of technology and it’s audiences, Thomas asked 1) “who is the audience for [the materials] we produce”; 2) how do our uses of technology succeed---or fail---to speak with them in ways that resonate and; 3) what kinds of archives are we creating, and who are we creating them for? A CEE RECAP of THE 2018 AAA EXECUTIVE SESSIONBy Alex Chen On Saturday Nov. 16th, Dr. John Jackson, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania) co-chaired an executive session on multimodal anthropology at the American Anthropological Association Annual meeting, bringing together a panel of experienced and emerging scholars whose fascinating experimental work spans everything from choreographed ritual art to 3D printed necklaces. Underpinning the group “provocation” on multimodality was the desire to create collaboration, space, and theory that engages with a world that is increasingly mediated by technology and social media. Working primarily in photography, Dr. Ruth Behar (University of Michigan) relayed a serendipitous story of how a photograph she took of an interlocutor 40 years ago ended up as a tattoo on the interlocutor’s grandson while Dr. Arjun Shankar (Hamilton College) theorized on the ideas of refusal and of listening to images taken by one’s interlocutor. Listening was taken up by Dr. Laura Kunreuther (Bard), who pointed us to the importance of digital infrastructures in enabling and limiting multimodality while revealing the heavy editing process that underlies the apparent transparency of sound recordings. Dr. Maryam Kashani (University of Illinois) took up video opacity as a way to assert sovereignty for Muslim American communities struggling under increasing encroachment by the surveillance state, while Dr. Deborah Thomas screened a film that mined the archive of drone surveillance footage in order to prompt an affective response against state violence. Yet joy and hope can also spring from multimodality. Dr. Harjant Gill (Towson University) presented his collaboration with Indian NGOs to use Virtual Reality as a means to promote dialogue and empathy on critical issues of gender and sexuality. Dr. Aimee Cox (Yale University) showcased her collaborations with conceptual artists like Saya Woolfalk and Simone Leigh, including a ritual performance in Manhattan’s Fulton Center and Transit Station that brought attention to the solar, commercial, transit, and ancient spiritual energies that animate New York City as well as an installation called “Potted Woman” that interrogated the embodied experience of enclosure. Dr. Elizabeth Chin (Art Center College of Design), taking on the provocation mantle, presented her work with students at the Laboratory for Speculative Ethnology – including a “hands up don’t shoot glove,” a beautifully sequined accessory that starts taking photographs for upload into the cloud as soon as the gesture is made – while donning a laboratory jumpsuit she fashioned from Dutch Wax Print fabrics from her collaborations in Uganda.  Dr. Elizabeth Chin in a laboratory jumpsuit made of Dutch Wax Print fabric from Uganda. Dear all,
We are so excited to announce the launch of the Center for Experimental Ethnography!! Why a new Center? And what is “experimental ethnography”? Over the past twenty years, we have seen an “ethnographic turn” across a range of disciplines, a turn that has been grounded in participant-observation research and inductive analytic and theoretical processes. This turn has occurred not only within the humanities and social sciences, but also in professional schools, fine arts, and architecture. Whether in business, medicine, or law, photography, sculpture, or performance art, qualitative social science methods that yield thick descriptions of persons, locations, and processes of meaning-making have become more common as scholars and practitioners seek insights into the everyday worlds and ideas of their collaborators in the field. At the same time, contemporary developments in technology – including inexpensive cameras, editing software and internet platforms for sharing work – have made new representational techniques widely available and familiar, especially to younger generations now moving into academia. As a result, we are witnessing a shift in orientation from the page to other representational formats – film, performance, soundscapes, games, drawing and design, among others – as researchers experiment with new platforms. These two shifts are opening new questions about the public responsibilities of the University in the twenty-first century. What tools for research and communication should we offer the next generation of Ph.D. and graduate professional students? What difference does genre make in research dissemination – analytically, epistemologically, and politically – and what modes of representation are meaningful and relevant? How do non-text based formats transform the processes and products of research, and the boundaries of discipines? In what ways is this work accountable to the communities from which it emerges and through which circulates, and what counter-spaces can be built to create new kinds of dialogue and new forms of recognition? The CENTER FOR EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY is a forum dedicated to exploring these transformations. We seek to support the work of faculty and students who are working extra-textually, whether this be through the medium of film, performance, sound, creative writing, or art. We recognize that knowledge production is participatory, embodied, and social. We know that the space of the 21st century university must extend beyond its walls and beyond books and labs. And we understand that sometimes the most transformative experiences come through an encounter with a film, a performance, a poem, or a soundscape. At the Center, we endeavor to coordinate scholarship, research, and public partnerships related to multi-modal work practices; to consolidate those activities in which we and our students are already engaged; and to grow these generative connections in order to make Penn a nationally- and internationally- known hub for these types of inquiry and practice. By hosting Visiting Scholars each semester, we envision a dynamic and vibrant space that puts Penn students and professors in constant contact with others working in these fields elsewhere. We also seek to forge connections with Centers and Programs doing this kind of work internationally, and other institutions worldwide, serving as a hub for a wider network. We hope you will join us!! Best, Deborah A. Thomas Pise seguro, salve su vida (Step safely, save your life) Step sound, step sound, step down with care, take the shortcut if you dare, leave the beaten path to piss, pick fruit, seek share, I hit or miss. Step right, step left, step light, my friend, one step down to rise again metal click beneath a boot, a shredded leaf, a splintered root… “Why engage in experimental ethnography?” is a question I have been asked on more than one occasion. Or more bluntly, “Why do you need to write like that?” in reference to the use of literary and poetic forms of expression in ethnography. I return to the bearing of these questions in the context of the political conjuncture in my long-term “field site,” Colombia, to briefly reflect on the role of experimental methodologies in research, analysis, and writing in times of conflict and transition. Colombia has endured over fifty years of social and armed conflict. Aspects of this war have ended and/or are transitioning after a peace accord was signed in 2016 between the national government and the longest-standing guerilla organization in the Western hemisphere, the FARC-EP. Simultaneously, socio-environmental and territorial conflicts are perpetuated and new configurations of violence are emerging within a post-accord scenario. How does one engage in an anthropology of the emergent and transitional – the open-ended, that which has no guarantees, the affective charges and fleetingness of hope, the conjugations of uncertainty – in ways that are other than historical or the present captured in retrospect? How does one hold in tension the way brute violence explodes, interrupting the rhythms of daily life, while also remaining a latent potential boiling beneath the surface and a blurred topic of conversation and embodied memory? How does one articulate the indeterminate times of glyphosate, its metabolism in the biochemical matrices of soil, the life that grows in the midst of poison sprayed by the crop duster planes of the antinarcotics police? How can we stay attuned to the tentative gradualness of an economic reconversion when open pasture is allowed to return to secondary forest, or the oscillating continuum of destruction and germination in the powerful force of a river as it overflows, reclaims territory, and returns to its previous course? I have been interested in these sorts of questions and phenomena. If the social sciences and humanities aspire to analyze and articulate the complex processes and multiple temporalities that correspond to the interfaces of socio-natural disasters, climate change, and the layered trajectories of war and so-called post-conflict and transitional justice scenarios, there is a necessity to think the long times of rocks in concert with human calendars and the micro-intervals of the metabolisms of microbial ecologies. There is no easy tense to grab hold of when explicitly dealing with transition and transformation. It is hard and often irresponsible to claim definitive breaks in social patterns, structural conditions, and historical cycles, transcendent political success, or consolidated movements and agentive capacities. Justice is always an aspirational and ongoing pursuit. Action is dispersed, at times intensely frenetic and in other moments dulled and imperceptible. The fear of stepping down on a solid and receptive ground is palpable and persists long after landmines have been removed from a landscape as I attempt to convey in the opening sketch of this blog. Imagining how to write these oscillations, potentialities, and uncertainties, keep them alive on and beyond the page, and circulating among diverse publics requires multimodal approaches and interdisciplinary practices. Whom do these methodological exercises serve and for whom might they be a priority? Taking inspiration from social movements in Colombia as well as diverse initiatives at the interfaces of the arts and sciences in the environmental humanities, there have been moves to explore the memories and experiences of war, violence, and constructions of peace through the bodies of soils, water, and rocks as inseparable from human lives and corporalities. For me, experimental ethnography – be it poetry, creative non-fiction, audiovisual work, soundscapes, or performance – does not “give voice” to or represent the subaltern (human and nonhuman), but rather attends to relational modes of existence and shifting affects, which require different genres of expression and creative impulse. If we assume the challenge and ethical obligation of imagining how to cultivate alternative worlds and realities rather than to only diagnose the conditions and conjunctures of the world as we currently know it, then we must be willing to ethnographically follow and perform these temporalities, sensorial experiences, and affective registers without the guarantees of permanence, certainty, and conclusive prose and arguments. Written by Kristina Lyons
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