Title: Before and After Books: Film and Performance Ethnography
Speaker: Alberto Gerosa (Department of Anthropology, CUHK)
Date: Friday, 23 September 2022
Time: 1-2:30 pm
Mode: In-person and online
Venue: Room 114, Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK
Zoom Meeting Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/98764637857
Meeting ID: 987 6463 7857
Passcode: 172530
Abstract:
‘Before and After Books: Film and Performance Ethnography’ will explore a selection of applied anthropology practices that allow for an enlargement of the scholarship form.
The seminar will introduce creative and artistic ways of gathering, processing and divulgating anthropological data, with a particular interest on movie making and the cinematic form, as well as rituality and performance. Dwelling in the borderlands between art and academia, these performative approaches to fieldwork engage informants and audiences through participatory methods, elevating their agency as that of co-authors, and allowing for serendipity to dictate the course of action.
Some of the analysed ethnographies constitute a collective re-appropriation of the means of representation by subaltern groups; while others make use of parody, playfulness and irony as methods for raising awareness of power relations within a specific community.
Ultimately, these methods depart from the conventional anthropological practice, celebrate imponderabilia (Malinowski) and are an invitation for further experimentation within poetics and politics of knowledge production.
Bio:
Alberto Gerosa is an anthropologist working with film and performance. He holds a BA in Performing Arts and Social Sciences, a joint master of research in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Ljubljana and Stockholm Universities, and a PhD in Cultural and Religious Studies from CUHK. He taught documentary filmmaking at Antwerp University between 2012 and 2014. In 2015-2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Image Anthropology LAB, University of Tokyo, working with visual anthropologist Tadashi Yanai. In 2019- 2021, he taught cinema and performance at Hong Kong Baptist University and Beijing Normal University UIC.