The Anthropologist's Video Camera as Stage
Forced Displacement and Production of Audio-visual Witnessing in Northern Sudan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4380237 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Valerie Hänsch (0000-0002-0401-0623, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich, Germany [email protected], corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 37-54 |
| Publication date | 2021-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7674 • E-ISSN: 2047-7716 |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3167/cja.2021.390104 |
| OpenAlex | W3136598308 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 30 |
In this article, I explore how Sudanese communities have attempted to visually document, witness and communicate a silenced history of forced displacement. Thousands of peasants in rural Northern Sudan were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003-2009 Merowe Dam construction project. My aim is to examine both the complex local interactions with and appropriations of the anthropologist's video camera, which, in the relational process of witnessing, turned into a stage to provide audio-visual evidence against hegemonic discourses of Sudan's successful hydroelectric future. I show how my video camera's affordances of capturing and mediating 'truth' evoked specific performative genres of representation in moments of crisis and illustrate how these usages differ from everyday interactions with a video camera. These performative genres of 'crisis witnessing', I contend, resonate with globally distributed media realities and thereby reproduce certain practices of communication that are stereotyped in the mass media
Aesthetics · Affordance · Art · Hegemony · Media studies · Performative utterance · Political science · Representation (politics · Sociology · Visual arts · Witness · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure
The Politics of Aesthetics
Transnational Humanitarianism
Media Witnessing
On Visual Evidence
Reporting War
Experimental Collaborations
Moving images
An Anthropology of Images
Expert Witness
The ironic spectator
The Social Dynamics of Video Media in an Indigenous Society
The Aesthetic Constitution of Space
Witnessing
Principles, Publicity, and Politics
On patience
The Anthropologist as Witness in Contemporary Regimes of Intervention
We Were There
The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities
Introduction
The Corporeal Image
Martyr bodies in the media
On the materials of mats
The Primacy of the Ethical
Beyond 'Riot Porn
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2025 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |