I've just discovered the work of a British social anthropologist named Alan Macfarlane: he's got hundreds of videos up on YouTube, and apparently he's cuckoo for the uses of video for teaching and disseminating anthropological ideas. He posts ethnographic videos of any number of social rituals (he's done fieldwork in Japan, Nepal, China, and other parts of Asia); interviews with thinkers of interest for anthropology and related disciplines (I just spent an hour raptly watching a conversation with George Steiner, was less enthralled by a recording of a seminar with Ernest Gellner); and most helpfully for teachers of social theory, extremely lucid, well-organized introductions to various social theorists and fields of inquiry (Macfarlane's rather low-key, tweedy presentations gradually seduce).
Right now I'm in the middle of a fascinating presentation by the anthropologist Piers Vitebski, recorded by Macfarlane, on love, death, and forgetting.
In part Vitebski recounts, orally and via his own videorecordings, the shamanistic practices of the Sora of India, who rely on holy men (but mostly holy women) to channel the spirits of their dead loved ones in order to talk to them. As I was reflecting on the dilemmas of the ethnographer regarding, say, the suspensions of judgment and disbelief necessary to do this kind of fieldwork (I'm guessing these are pretty naive reflections for anybody more familiar with ethnographic methodology), I was suddenly reminded of our own practices of mourning and remembrance: is not the most salient characteristic of all our recent most successful memorials the fact that they allow the bereaved the chance to speak to the dead?
No comments:
Post a Comment