Directions and Diversions
in Visual Anthropology            
  1. Introduction
  2. Objects of Affect
  3. The Burden of Representation
  4. Uncertain Evidence
  5. Digital Media Infrastructure

  6. Collaboration
  7. Sovereign Vision(s)
  8. Opacity and Refusal
  9. Alter-Futurisms
  10. Visual Anthropology beyond the Visual

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CC BY-NC-SA 2024 Isaac Marrero Guillamón

6. Collaboration


Collaborative audiovisual practices have emerged as a space of aesthetic and epistemic experimentation. We will discuss how collaboration may reshuffle and transform visual anthropology by questioning established hierarchies of expertise and entitlement.

Part 1/2 (15’): theorizing collaboration: ethical, political and epistemic arguments; collaboration and the presumption of inequality.

Part 2/2 (17’): three possible frameworks for collaboration: the ‘native gaze’, re-enacting history, ethnofiction.



  • Required films:
  • Borroloola Aboriginal Community, Alessando Cavadini, and Carolyn Strachan. 1981. Two Laws. Australia, 130 min.
  • Sidibé, Abou Bakar, Estephan Wagner, and Moritz Siebert. 2016. Les Sauteurs. Denmark, 80 min.  
  • Rouch, Jean. 1958. Moi un Noir. France, 78 min.

  • Required reading:
  • Kahana, Jonathan. 2009. “Re-Staging Two Laws: An Interview with Alessandro Cavadini and Carolyn Strachan.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 50 (1–2): 61–81.

  • Suggested reading:
  • Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. 
  • Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel. 2020. “Desiring Bollywood: Re-Staging Racism, Exploring Difference.” American Anthropologist. 122 (4): 961-72.
  • Davis, Therese, and Cassi Plate. 2008. “Surrendering Control: Two Laws as Collaborative Community Film-Making: An Interview with Carolyn Strachan and Alessandro Cavadini.” Studies in Documentary Film 2 (2): 149–68.
  • Estalella, Adolfo, and Tomás Sanchez-Criado. 2015. “Experimental Collaborations: An Invocation for the Redistribution of Social Research.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 21 (3): 301–5. doi:10.1177/1354856515579839.
  • Flores, Carlos Y. 2004. “Indigenous Video, Development and Shared Anthropology: A Collaborative Experience with Maya Q’eqchi’ filmmakers in Postwar Guatemala.” Visual Anthropology Review 20 (1): 31–44. doi:10.1525/var.2004.20.1.31.
  • Friedman, P Kerim. 2013. “Collaboration against Ethnography: How Colonial History Shaped the Making of an Ethnographic Film.” Critique of Anthropology 33 (4): 390–411. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X13499385.
  • Ginsburg, Faye. 2008. “Breaking the Law with Two Laws: Reflections on a Paradigm Shift.” Studies in Documentary Film 2 (2): 169–74. doi:10.1386/sdf.2.2.169_7.
  • Ginsburg, Faye. 2018. “Decolonizing Documentary On-Screen and Off: Sensory Ethnography and the Aesthetics of Accountability.” Film Quarterly 72 (1): 39–49. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.1.39.
  • Holmes, Douglas R., and George E. Marcus. 2008. “Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter.” Collaborative Anthropologies 1 (1): 81–101. doi:10.1353/cla.0.0003.
  • Marcus, George. 2010. “Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention.” Visual Anthropology 23 (4): 263–277. doi:10.1080/08949468.2010.484988.
  • Rappaport, Joanne. 2008. “Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography as Theoretical Innovation.” Collaborative Anthropologies 1 (1): 1–31. doi:10.1353/cla.0.0014.
  • Schiwy, Freya, and Byrt Wammack Weber, eds. 2017. Adjusting the Lens: Community and Collaborative Video in Mexico. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Strohm, Kiven. 2012. “When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art: Notes for a Politics of Collaboration.” Collaborative Anthropologies 5 (1): 98–124.

  • Suggested films:
  • de Heer, Rolf and Peter Djigirr. 2006. Ten Canoes. Australia, 92 min.
  • Friedman, P. Kerim, and Shashwati Talukdar. 2011. Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! India, 75 min. 
  • Karrabing Film Collective. 2016. Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams. Australia, 29 min.
  • Mai, Nicola. 2006. Travel. UK, 63 min.
  • Rouch, Jean. 1961. La Pyramid Humaine. France, 90 min.