teaching visual anthropology in italy

Francesco Marano University of Basilicata, Italy

How and when the teaching of visual anthropology started in Italy

The history of visual anthropology in Italian universities is relatively short. Until the 1990s, visual anthropology was taught by Paolo Chiozzi at Florence University, Antonio Marazzi at Padoa University and by Augusto de Vincenzo and Roberto De Angelis at La Sapienza University in Rome. Chiozzi and Marazzi, who trained and taught many young researchers with their books, can be considered the leaders of contemporary Italian visual anthropology. Now retired, they are well known in the international community, since they work as advisors in scientific journals and associations. In relation to film practice, the history of Italian ethnographic film from 1950 to 1980 was marked by filmmakers not trained in anthropology. None of the filmmakers inspired by Ernesto De Martino’s ethnographic research, including Luigi Di Gianni, Giuseppe Ferrara, Cecilia Mangini, and Vittorio De Seta, made their documentary films with an ethnographic approach based on participant

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observation. Their education had been in film direction. Their films have become part of the anthropological heritage because the themes treated – magic, rite, religion, poverty – were similar to Ernesto De Martino’s research interests.

Since the 1980s, most of the new filmmakers were trained in anthropology, the subjects of their film moved from the demartinian themes to a more ethnographically accurate description of contexts, techniques, musical performances and material cultures due to the tremendous effort to promote visual anthropology conducted by ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella.

At the beginning of this century, many scholars who were active in the field of visual anthropology obtained academic positions and visual anthropology began to be taught in other universities, even if the courses are not always entitled “visual anthropology”. Therefore, visual anthropology has been taught at the universities of Basilicata (by Francesco Marano), Bergamo (by Cristina Grasseni), Cagliari (by Felice Tiragallo), Rome (by Antonino Colaianni), Salerno (by Vincenzo Esposito), Siena (by Riccardo Putti) and in Torino (by Cecilia Pennacini).

Many ethnomusicologists are also interested in visual anthropology because the documentary tradition of their discipline requires the use of audiovisual devices. The work and activities of ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella in the 1970s and ‘80s were crucial to the development of visual anthropology and for rooting audiovisual documentation into the practice of ethnomusicological

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research. Ethnomusicology courses now devote little room to visual ethnography and in recent years just a few visual ethnomusicology books have been published.1

In the 1990’s most courses used Paolo Chiozzi’s books Antropologia visuale. Riflessioni sul film etnografico con bibliografia generale (1984)2 and Manuale di Antropologia Visuale (1993).3 But, since 2002, Antonio Marazzi’s book Antropologia della visione,4 Cecilia Pennacini’s book Filmar le culture5 and Francesco Marano’s Camera etnografica. Storie e teorie di antropologia visuale6 and Il film etnografico in Italia7 expanded the offer of publications for the courses. Marazzi’s book focused on viewing as a cultural practice, while almost all the other books focused on the practices of ethnographic film and photography, with sections dedicated to the cultural aspects of vision, visual cultures, indigenous video and photo-elicitation.

1 Leonardo D’Amico, Filmare la musica. Il documentario e l’etnomusicologia visiva, Roma, Carocci, 2012. 2 Paolo Chiozzi, Antropologia visuale. Riflessioni sul film etnografico con bibliografia generale, Firenze, La Casa Usher,1984. 3 Paolo Chiozzi, Manualedi antropologia visuale, Milano, Unicopli, 1993. 4 Antonio Marazzi, Antropologia della visione, Roma, Carocci, 2002. 5 Cecilia Pennacini, Filmare le culture, Roma, Carocci, 2005.

6 Francesco Marano, Camera etnografica. Storie e teorie di antropologia visuale, Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2007. 7 Francesco Marano, Il film etnografico in Italia, Bari, Edizionidi

Pagina, 2007.

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Very few articles dealing with visual anthropology have been published in Italian anthropology journals. Some researchers (Francesco Marano, FeliceTiragallo, Silvio Carta) have published their articles in the Visual Anthropology journal. However, since 2012, the online journal Visual Ethnography (www.vejournal. org) has provided Italian visual anthropologists a place for publishing articles and video, to support young researchers and spread little known ethnographic films on an international level.

Difficulties in teaching visual anthropology

The first difficulty in teaching visual anthropology is that ethnographic films are hard to find. There are few public archives of ethnographic films8 and there is no online catalog that professors and students can search, except for the Etnomediateca of the University of Basilicata,9 which was founded in 2004 with an archive containing about two thousand audiovisual documents, including some masterpieces of ethnographic film.10 The Etnomediateca is

8 I recall here the Archivio di Antropologia visiva ad the Museo

Nazionale di Arti e Tradizioni Popolari in Rome, founded by Diego

Carpitella, the Laboratorio di Antropologia Visuale dell’Università di

Roma founded in 1992, and the Archivio DemoEtnoAntropologico dell’Università della Basilicata, founded by the ethnomusicologist

Francesco Giannattasio in 1990.

9 <http//etnomediateca.unibas.it>. 10 The Etnomediateca of University of Basilicata was founded by

Francesco Marano in 2004. The web site and the film catalog are at <http://www.etnomediateca.unibas.it>.

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the first and only archive dedicated to ethnographic film from Italy and its catalog can be searched online.

But the problem of the rights to use films is still unresolved: How can we show a film to students who are absent during the screenings? Film distributors do not offer a version that offers the right to screen the film online, even if only on a university network or at home and exclusively for students. We hope that film distributors will resolve this issue as soon as possible.

A second question is the decay of videocassettes bought ten or fifteen years ago. Why can’t distributors replace videocassettes with DVDs at a low cost?

A third question is the availability of audiovisual devices that students can use to learn film language in practice. Universities where visual anthropology is taught should provide laboratories equipped with video and photographic cameras, video editing software, microphones, Photoshop, and at least one assistant to support the research and the technical training of the students.

But we must not forget that visual anthropology is changing its status, extending the fields of research and the forms of representation, requiring more technological devices and competences. Moving visual anthropology towards contemporary art and new media, anthropologists and technicians should become experts in curatorial practices, multimedia management, web site construction, etc.

As visual anthropologists, we are the avant-garde of mainstream anthropology in the 21st century, because

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the recent developments (sensory, artistic) and the sensorialization of ethnography have placed observation and visual anthropology at the core of the reflections on ethnography and its method.

Visual anthropology in Italy today is going beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries, dialoging with other practices and disciplines creating the sense that a new episteme is appearing that is based on multiversality, transdisciplinarity, hybridization and social engagement. In this change, anthropology has to accept that other practices use the same ethnographic methods – the participant observation, and its variants – as a form of easy social engagement.

Therefore, as visual anthropologists, we should teach our students a mixture of film studies, visual culture, history and technique of photography, contemporary art, web design, curatorial practices, exhibition management and web design.

A career in visual anthropology

The career of a visual anthropologist in Italy is very difficult within a “community” that prefers traditional forms of research and is influenced by an evaluation system that does not recognize that films, photo-essays, exhibitions, hypermedia and multimedia works and web sites have the same value as scientific work as do books and articles. I think that this is mostly because of the deep roots of Be-

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nedetto Croce’s philosophy in Italian culture. He considered history as a unique science, and the practices based on data collection and analysis – like anthropology – merely as techniques that are useful to history. On the other hand, Croce asserted that art is just a product of the intuition, rather than the application of a technique and of a coded language. In fact, for many years Croce refused to consider film as art. Croce’s technophobia and cultural legacy must have surely delayed the acknowledgement of visual anthropology and of audiovisual ethnographic representations.

Until today, visual anthropologists strongly interested in an academic career have conducted research on traditional themes that are later published in articles and books, avoiding the risk of being labeled as “pure” visual anthropologists.

Italian anthropological associations are striving to change the evaluation system. But, how can the research products11 of visual anthropology be evaluated? This is not a problem only for the Italian community. Is it possible to imagine peer review processes for films, photo-essays, etc.? More precisely, there are two prominent issues: the first and long-standing one is “how to consider a (visual, video, photographic, etc.) production an ethnographic production?” A partial solution could be to accept the judgment of the ethnographic film festivals whose selections are made by committees composed by a majority of anthropologists. We

11 For research products of visual anthropology, apart from written articles I refer to videos, photo-essays, multimedia and hypermedia productions, web sites, installations, and other multimedia texts.

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could accept as ethnographic those films recognized as such by these committees. But in this way, those few ethnographic film festivals with such committees could be inundated by a quantity of films that would be very difficult for the members of the committee to review in a limited period of time.

The other problem is that some visual anthropologists believe that their ethnographic representations have an artistic value and cannot accept being judged by scholars not interested in art, not trained in film studies or not used to appreciating and understanding artistic works.

If visual works are evaluated by “orthodox” anthropologists, as occurs in the academic world of peer-reviewed journals, we run the risk of neglecting original ideas not written according to a scientific rhetoric shared by the anthropological community.

Considering that scientific works are further evaluated by the examination boards that make decisions about academic careers, the judgment of the peer reviewers is not decisive. Maybe it would be more realistic to let the editors in chiefs of journals, readers and the final examination the responsibility to judge the scientific value of the publication.

A desirable change in evaluation

Theoretical and methodological tools exist that allow considering the social sciences as a means for improving society. Until now, research has been regarded as a tool for explaining reality, not for modifying it. In the name of objectivity, science remains distant from reality to be able to understand it

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without contaminating it with the scholar’s subjectivity. Since art is subjective, science must remain at a distance from it.

Moreover, according to this model, the social scientist cannot lead his/her informants towards unsolicited and unrequired social change. But the emphasis on participation, which currently influences both art and anthropology, now resolves the dilemma with the practice of participatory methods involving people in fieldwork and its outcomes as found in projects involving shared anthropology, community art, participatory video and social engagement.

Therefore, in the new wave of social sciences, theory and practice, science and art, subjectivity and objectivity and all cognitive dualisms are abandoned for a general antiCartesian perspective. Consequently, in a broader context, the value of a scientific work should not be evaluated by its explanation of reality, but by its power to suggest changes for concrete improvement and for the aesthetic, cultural and social effects12 produced during the fieldwork.

The future of teaching

As a manager of web sites (visualanthropology.net) and Facebook groups,13 I have had the opportunity to get to

12 As I strived to explain in my latest book L’artista come etnografo.

Intrecci fra antropologia e arte (2013, Roma, CISU), there is an artistic and aesthetic dimension in the anthropological practices and representations that we can choose to express or cancel. 13 <https://www.facebook.com/groups/126120714075058/>.

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know the wishes of young Italian students. Many of them are requesting specialized training in visual anthropology and, since in Italy there are no master of arts programs, the students go to foreign countries to continue their studies, for instance to the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology at Manchester or to the University of Kent. It is thus important to create as soon as possible a master’s degree in visual anthropology to provide an educational path that considers the new trends of the discipline combining museography, contemporary art, visual studies, urban and landscape studies, architecture and anthropology. The aim of the master’s program should be to prepare a trans-disciplinary individual who can intervene in ethnographic museums, art galleries, exhibits, ambient installations and also in the academy, to teach visual anthropology according to a contemporary approach.

Bibliography CHIOZZI, P. Antropologia visuale. Riflessioni sul film etnografico con bibliografia generale. Firenze, La Casa Usher,1984. ______. Manuale di antropologia visuale. Milano, Unicopli, 1993. D’AMICO, L. Filmare la musica. Il documentario e l’etnomusicologia visiva. Roma, Carocci, 2012. MARANO, F. Camera etnografica. Storie e teorie di antropologia visuale. Milano, Franco Angeli, 2007. ______. Il film etnografico in Italia. Bari, Edizionidi Pagina, 2007. MARAZZI, A. Antropologia della visione. Roma, Carocci, 2002. PENNACINI, C. Filmare le culture. Roma, Carocci, 2005.

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