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1993-1994 Ethnohistory Workshop SeriesView our SpeakersFilm in Histories and CulturesProspectusThis year's Ethnohistory Workshop continues the exploration of cultural production that we began last year. In 1992-3, we discussed the activity of the arts in the histories of cultures. This year, we focus on film. When we say cultures are historical, we refer to their qualities of change and variability and to the necessity of their reproduction. But we also imply that cultures are reproduced and transformed by conscious human activity in real space and time. This challenges us to go beyond treating cultural products as mere representations. We should be able to identify and analyze the conscious activities that constitute dynamic energies in the historical processes of cultural reproduction and change. One obvious place to look is inside crative arts, where the engagement by individuals and groups with cultures is conscious and self-referential, where the production of representations is visibly connected to its social, political, and economic setting. In 1992-3, the Ethnohistory Workshop considered papers about how arts can be seen as the outcome of productive activity and as cultural intervention. Discussions suggested that creative producers of many kinds--from singers of devotinal songs in South Indian temples to Madonna and Bob Dylan, from museum curators to the painters and sculptors whose work lands in museums, from poets to architects and film makers--generate subtle, intricate dynamics in historical cultures. This year, we focus on a medium that is so rich in its potential for this kind of analysis that we decided to set aside a full year for its study. Films are not only visible products of creative activity. They involve very complex social relations of production, in their material, finance, design, performance, marketing, viewing, apprciation, and effects. We moved toward the cinema as a subject initially because of its cultural importance in South Asia, Europe, and America. This adds to the richness of film as an object of study--it is a window into much of the modern world. As a window on cultures, films are data for cultural history and education. But film is also narrative and description--like history and ethnography--it necessarily makes an argument about how to realize the world as representation. The form of the film being situated alongside scholarship, we can explore the many connections these forms of cultural activity. In the Workshop, we will not be concerned with film making or film study as such, but rather with the activity of the film as a process inside the historical movement of cultural life. What diffence does a film or act of film making make? Where do they come from? Why do they happen as they do? As with scholarship, with film: the answer to such questions involves a positioning of producers in social space and time. Speakers, 1993-1994Fall 1993 October 7, 1993: Hamid Naficy, Department of Art History, Rice University October 28, 1993: Robert Rosenstone, Department of History, California Institute of Technology November 4, 1993: Sumita Chakravarty, Department of Communication, New School for Social Research November 18, 1993: Jenny Lau, School of Film, Ohio University Spring 1994 January 27, 1994: Gita Rajan, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania March 7, 1994: Nicholas Dirks, Department of History, University of Michigan March 24, 1994: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University April 8, 1994: Jean Comaroff, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago |