Teaching and Learning Ethnography in the Age of its Technological Reproducability
Notes on becoming media ethnographers and innervating the future
*** Introduction to a panel of young media ethnographers in Gozo, Malta — part of the “Anthropology, Mediated” workshop.
In his ethnography of German Associated Press news outlets, Dominic Boyer asserts that ethnographers’ professional practices are in harmony with those of journalists in the digital age: we are called upon to follow, research, and engage with our topics through devices where touch and thought are mediated by electronics.
For a majority of ethnographers, the process of producing ethnographic information — vignettes, texts, soundscapes, video, photographs — nearly absolutely rely on computational devices. What was once a craft that required just a notebook and scores of pens and pencils, ethnography seems to now demand a range of technologies for electronically producing the worlds that we simply gloss as “the field.” Despite the ways in which this theme is woven through a range of media ethnographies — Boyer’s Life Informatic, and more recently Anand Pandian’s experimental Reel World — no anthropologists have actually attempted to theorize how we teach and learn to do media(ted) ethnography and use technology to create analytically interesting worlds beyond words. I, in collaboration with students from my Anthropology, Mediated workshop on the island of Gozo, do just this in the auto- and ethnographic pastiche that follows. Thus, this theory of ethnographic learning and teaching is underscored by the very ethnographic ethos that it theorizes, a recursivity that marks a true science of the social according to Pierre Bourdieu, Philipe Bourgois, and Loic Wacquant.
The start of any teaching project is a teaching philosophy. This essay’s title gestures towards Walter Benjamin’s essay “the Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducability,” wherein he examines the ways that cinema contains a range of radical imaginings and foreclosed possibilities. But these aspects of cinema do not adhere in cinema for itself; they are product and productive of the social context of cinema. Cinema could either realize a joyful coming together of Germans regardless of the content of the device, or it could foreclose radical imaginings of society through the ideological content constituted the content of Cinema. In the same way, as ethnographers become like their kindred journalists in making technology a key dimension of their field, media technologies contain a mix of potentialities: new forms of connectivity, distractive surface; shared, cross-cultural production, or alienating and off-putting apparatus. What is at stake in each, however, is not some rationalist ideals, but feelings of mediating and being mediated. For Benjamin, the ‘shock’ of encountering the difficulties of connecting reality and representation, that is, a technological consciousness, irreversibly affects how we sense and view reality — seeing ethnographic scenes, for instance, as things to be captured rather than social relations. The key to ethical futures, Benjamin contends, is emphasizing and analyzing the loss of experience without media as a shared experience — what he calls an innervation of the collective. Here, then, we see the promise of an explicitly mediated anthropology.
What does this electro-ethnographic consciousness look like? In what follows, students from the Mediating Ethnography workshop document their use of a range of technologies to reflect, represent, reproduce, and resign quotidian life on the island of Gozo. From digitally mapping the theography of the houses and shops and church of St. George’s square, to attempting to capture the slipperiness of subjectivity and beauty in photographs to later inform ethnographic writing, from attempts to create experiences of opera in the language and dramatic mediums of opera itself, to the use of the ethnographer’s capture of mediated worlds to elicit media about interlocutors’ experiences of mediated worlds, the essays here reflect on the internal and external transformations wrought by technologies. And, in one provocative section, one student documents their frustrations and successes of refusing (on purpose or otherwise) to rely on a computer, the rational technology par excellence that has replaced the notebook. Each of my colleagues provides is an attempt to grapple with shock of not so much learning to mediate the field, but of learning just how mediated fieldwork always already was. Their shock, so to speak, is of realizing the mediation of the world through media that inspire an ethnographic innervation.
Beyond workshop content and geographic location, beyond unified frustration with poor internet and strong winds, I will argue that these vignettes are held together by what I call a “Threshold experience,” experiences where we cross into a type of consciousness irreducible to words, or image, or sound, or taste, or touch alone. And without further ado, I’ll let you begin sharing your anthropology, mediated.
