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Visual Anthropology
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Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues: Rouch's Family of “Scoundrels” in Niger Anne Mette Jørgensen
To cite this Article Jørgensen, Anne Mette(2007) 'Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues: Rouch's Family of “Scoundrels”
in Niger', Visual Anthropology, 20: 1, 57 — 73 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460601061701 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460601061701
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Visual Anthropology, 20: 57–73, 2007 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460601061701
Filmmaking as Ethnographic Dialogues: Rouch’s Family of ‘‘Scoundrels’’ in Niger Anne Mette Jørgensen
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This article is an investigation of the dialogic collaboration between Jean Rouch and his family of ‘‘Scoundrels,’’ with whom Rouch made numerous films in Niger. By ‘‘walking in the footsteps of Jean Rouch’’ and making a film with these informants, friends, and collaborators, the author has studied their methodologies. In this essay, she discusses their dialogic aspects, including the impact of this collaboration on the lives of the informants. She poses the question of whether dialogic methods may lead not only to the sharing of knowledge but also to a dialogic exchange of ways of knowing.
We are sitting in the front seat of a white pickup truck on our way through Niamey, the dusty capital of Niger. The camera and mike point at Moussa at the steering wheel, who clearly knows his way in the roundabout. We continue across the large Kennedy Bridge. The steady flow of the Niger River passes under us, matching the steady flow of people on the bridge—trucks, taxis, a few bicycles, and tall camels, which seem even taller with their enormous bundles of cargo strapped between their humps. We are sweating profusely, slightly annoyed that Moussa, again today, is wearing his woolen striped scarf over his blue gown. Combined with the grey sky it must convey to our prospective viewers a sense of climate that is far more friendly than the actual 35 Celsius and the dry and dusty air, which hits us like a fist every afternoon. The radio is playing pop music from Mali, and despite the growing patches of grey hair and his thick, square glasses, there is no mistake about Moussa’s energy. We have asked him to introduce the film we are about to make together: Moussa Hamidou: Well, we are entering the Kennedy Bridge now. We [ . . . ] are going to the other side of the river, to the area called Lamorde. We will meet Damoure´ Zika. Damoure´ is [ . . . ] a doctor who’s retired. Actor in all of the films by Jean Rouch. Jean Rouch is a Frenchman, anthropologist, cinematographer who has made a lot of films about tradition . . . not only in Niger, I would say, but here and there all over Africa. And I, I am his sound engineer, that is beside the camera, never in ANNE METTE JĂ˜RGENSEN is a social anthropologist. She has done extensive work on the films and anthropology of Jean Rouch and on film and television production in West Africa. She is the vice-general secretary of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) and a project coordinator at the National Museum of Denmark. E-mail: annemj@ mail.dk
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front of it, through 40 years. We are going to meet Damoure´ in his clinic and talk a bit about Jean Rouch. Because Rouch has been for us the . . . well, he’s the grandfather of cinema in Niger. It’s by his hands that cinematography came to Niger. We continue along the Niger River, arriving at the residential quarter called Lamorde. Here Damoure´ lives, surrounded by his seven wives, most of his 35 children and even more grandchildren; and this is also where he still treats patients in his medical clinic. We follow Moussa through the compound and feel an almost surreal sensation when looking through the open window into the clinic, seeing the blue crosses painted on the red mud walls. It’s almost like entering one of the many film sequences that have been shot here. We meet a couple of his sons and three of his wives, who jokingly throw a series of insults at Moussa, who retorts by expressing even worse insults. Damoure´ appears, a cup of morning coffee in his hand, and Moussa suggests that he replace his wives with some younger women. The reply is deafening laughter. We agree to go to his office to discuss our film project. We take a seat in the confined space of his office, which is decorated with pictures of Rouch, Moussa, Damoure´, Tallou, and Lam, who had died, alongside other celebrities of African cinema, as well as numerous doctoral diplomas and medals. I pass an introductory letter, which Rouch kindly had given us, to Damoure´. Damoure´: Voila`, the letter from Jean Rouch. What’s he saying? . . . Ah, good . . . ‘‘ . . . we make up a part of the Society of the Old Fools . . . ’’ hehehe . . . Okay . . . well . . . ‘‘ . . . she’s called Anne. They are charming, so I demand you and Tallou to be wise. The time of love adventures is no longer at our disposal . . . ’’ . . . He’s lying! Moussa: He’s lying! He himself recently got married! Damoure´: He’s just married! Moussa: Hehehe . . . he’s making a joke with us . . . hehe . . . Through this joking and pulling of legs the two of us, female Danish anthropologists approximately 40 years younger than either Moussa or Damoure´, were instantly accepted because of our letter of introduction from Rouch. They enthusiastically agreed to make a film together with us and to ask their third colleague from their film work, Tallou Mouzourane, to join us. We thus recorded a film [Madsen and Jørgensen 2005] with them in February and March of 2003 about their ways of collaborating with Jean Rouch, a film that would explore the character of these extraordinary cross-cultural dialogues. Their collaboration had lasted for about 50 years and, although Rouch was 86 years old in 2003 and prevented from going to Niger by illness since 2001, his friends still expected him to return. He did return in early 2004, when he was reunited with Damoure´ and others. Unfortunately, this journey became his last: a car crash in central Niger ended his life and thereby an era in visual anthropology. FROM ‘‘SHARED ANTHROPOLOGY’’ TO ‘‘ETHNOGRAPHIC DIALOGUES’’ Long before arriving in Niger I had felt that Jean Rouch’s ways of approaching his subjects and their enduring relations were highly relevant to the continued
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development of ethnographic methodology [Ruby 2000: 13; Stoller 1992: 3]. Today there is a sharpened focus on what we actually do in our fieldwork, highlighting the relationship between ethnographer and informants. There is also a growing interest in knowing the effects of our ethnographic work on the people we study. I hoped to find new inspiration for this trend by examining the relationships that Rouch and his little group of main informants had developed since their first encounters in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. My colleague and I felt that we were best suited to do this with a camera and microphone as our research tools. By plunging into the footsteps of Rouch and making a film together with them, we hoped they would not only tell us but also demonstrate how they used to collaborate with Rouch. The film would become a story about and an analysis of their collaboration. In this article, I want to sharpen that analysis further, drawing on images and dialogues from the film footage as well as from my memory. Rouch himself was not very interested in theorizing about his work. He often used the term shared anthropology [for example, Rouch 1978] but never went into much detail about it. He stressed, however, the important cross-cultural lessons that he learned from experiments with feedback. Whenever he finished editing a film, he brought it back to the people who were in the film, inviting them to screenings and profiting from their reactions, which enabled him to improve the film and acquire knowledge about issues otherwise hard to depict [see, e.g., Fulchignoni 1989: 274–527]. Such special opportunities arising when using the camera as an ethnographic research tool fascinated Rouch, and he spoke of them as ethno-dialogues [Rouch 1978: 8], I want to direct attention to such dialogic aspects of the encounter between ethnographer and informants at various levels in the methodology and epistemology of shared anthropology. The genre of films Rouch termed ethno-fictions, which were created by him and a small group of collaborators, have particularly caught my interest. Jean Rouch is mainly known as an ethnographic filmmaker, and only a few anthropologists have engaged in theoretical discussions of his ethnography. The two most outstanding of these, Paul Stoller in the United States and Marc Piault in France, have both done fieldwork in West Africa, and met and worked with Jean Rouch. The latter was for years a colleague at the Muse´e de l’Homme in Paris; whereas Paul Stoller is an expert on religion and cosmology among the Songhay in Niger, just as Rouch was. In a comprehensive analysis of Rouch’s work from West Africa, Stoller [1992] depicted how Rouch came fully to understand that spirits and ancestors are virtual collaborators upon whose acceptance any appropriation of knowledge about Songhay culture and society depends. He adapted to the thought systems of the Songhay, and they took him as an apprentice and brought him up to become a griot (a storyteller} who, according to tradition, should understand the past and the present so perfectly well as to be able to make the Songhay youth discover their own future. In this sense, being heavily influenced by Songhay systems of thought, we may say—although Stoller does not use these terms—that Rouch engaged in an epistemological dialogue with the Songhay sages. Marc Piault [Piault, 2006] described Rouch’s methodological attitude as ‘‘an open-ended interaction’’ through which Rouch succeeded in reducing the distance between self and other. Furthermore, he entered into a ‘‘permanent dialogue’’ [ibid.]
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with people in West Africa, France, and the rest of the world with his anthropological films. They were well-suited to reach large audiences and engage with political or controversial issues such as (de)colonialism, migration, development, or spiritual beliefs, and on several occasions they brought tempers to a boil. Rouch was daring, concerned, and completely explicit about how he was himself being positioned. Piault wrote that ‘‘the films follow on from each other and undergo the critical gaze of those whose existence they are attempting to capture: this already constitutes the establishment of a procedure of incompleteness in the sense in which I believe that, these days, any anthropological enterprise has to be a permanent dialogue’’ [ibid.]. In what follows, I will bring such aspects of dialogue further into focus because I believe there is still more to learn from Rouch’s open-minded, dialogical, and experimenting approach. Both Stoller and Piault made it clear that Rouch is an outstanding ethnographer and a genius as a cinematographic auteur, respectfully collaborating with Africans and others in his shared anthropology [Stoller 1992: 193 ff; Piault, 2006]. They and other writers taught us a lot about Rouch’s strategies, just as his own voice has been heard through his writings and presentations and, not least, through a number of interviews.1 I have missed the voices of the particular little group of people with whom Rouch collaborated most closely in the production of a vast number of films since the early 1950s—namely, Damoure´ Zika, Tallou Mouzourane, Moussa Hamidou, and the late Lam Ibrahim Dia. I want to add to the picture of Rouch’s shared anthropology by taking into account this ‘‘other side’’ of the dialogue and their points of view on the validity of their shared anthropology. How would they describe and evaluate the collaborations in which they were engaged, and on which criteria of validity would they base this evaluation? In what sense had they profited from their work with Rouch? What was it more precisely that they had been sharing? Did Rouch and they come to share knowledge and, if so, did their ethnographic films then come to reflect their knowledge, Rouch’s knowledge, or perhaps a completely new kind of knowledge? What can we as anthropologists learn from their experiences about cross-cultural collaboration? The concept of dialogue appears to be useful here, because it may shed light on a range of different aspects inherent in the relationship between the ethnographer and the people with whom he is involving himself. In this article, I will base the term dialogue on three analytically distinct but, in practice, closely interrelated, different perspectives—namely, methodology, epistemology, and dissemination. I propose that we ask, to what degree can we consider a given ethnographic project (film, text, process) to be dialogic? I will define the most dialogic ethnography as one that is based on dialogue (the methodological aspect); consists of dialogue (the epistemological aspect); and, ultimately, enters into dialogue in society (disseminating knowledge). In the process of fieldwork, the ethnographer evidently always enters into dialogue with her subjects and comes to base her knowledge on this. Dia- implies that two persons are involved, and -logos that somebody speaks [Crapanzano 1992: 197–198], but the ways that two persons speak to each other, the openness of the two parties, the balance of power, and the resulting production of knowledge may vary immensely from fieldwork to fieldwork. Contrasting dialogue with
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the concept of analogue—which in Greek means ‘‘talking above,’’ ‘‘talking beyond’’ or ‘‘talking later’’—illuminates the dynamic aspects of dialogue; the process and change that are inherent in the concept [Tedlock 1979: 389]. Further, we may see dialogue as a perspective that, ideally speaking, if forming an integral element of the epistemology, requires that any given ethnographic project be designed in collaboration between the ethnographer and his subjects, indicating that the resulting knowledge in this sense is shared. Finally, dialogue may be regarded as an intrinsic element of disseminating knowledge, to the extent that the anthropologist engages in dissemination of knowledge in the society in which she carries out research. In a dialogical approach, the process of the ethnographic encounter and its products (texts, films, photos, exhibitions, CD-ROMS, internet presentations) are shared and ideally to the benefit of ‘‘the ethnographied’’2 as much as to the ethnographer.
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ROUCH’S COLLABORATORS IN NIGER AND HIS FAMILY OF ‘‘SCOUNDRELS’’ Rouch worked with many different people in Niger. Many of them became colleagues at the Institut de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Niamey (IRSH), which was inaugurated by Rouch in 1964 and with which he maintained close ties for the rest of his life, some of the most important activities right from the beginning being detailed ethnographic descriptions and the collection of oral traditions on audiotapes. The number of people Rouch met during his making of more than 60 films was countless. We met many of these people while visiting Niger, and I am sure that even many we did not have time to speak to could have contributed further to our understanding of the different aspects of Rouch’s collaborative approach. However, we were forced to make priority decisions in order to ensure coherence in the film and to work more closely with the small group of people who had been Rouch’s nearest partners in filmmaking over the years.3 Our point of departure was Damoure´ Zika, who had been Rouch’s closest friend and assistant during filming and ethnographic fieldwork since 1941. Together with Tallou Mouzourane and Lam Ibrahim Dia, both around 10 years younger, Damoure´ was the most important actor in the ethnofictions the group developed together. Tallou joined the group as a leprous orphan and, apart from acting, took part in varied practical work in connection with the production of the films. Tallou, who still lives in the village of Ayorou close to the border to Mali, became an important poetic source of inspiration in the group and was the one who was best at singing, dancing, dreaming . . . and insulting people. Lam, who passed away in 2001, had until then been the innovative ideas man during the planning of the films, as well as the driver and cook. Finally, we chose Moussa Hamidou as the third protagonist of our film. He had been the sound recordist of almost all films Rouch made in Niger. To Moussa, it was something new to be in front of the camera, but we quickly sensed that he had a good memory and was an excellent storyteller, and he obviously enjoyed his new role. According to Damoure´, the group consisted of ‘‘real scoundrels who have come together. We don’t own shyness and we tell each other stories. And now we have become a family—a family of scoundrels.’’
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FILMMAKING IN DIALOGUE: COCORICO, MONSIEUR POULET Right from the beginning, we agreed with Moussa and Damoure´ that we should visit a number of locations from their films to assist their memories and to visualize what we were doing. It was evident that they were emotionally attached to these locations, and they could hardly hold back proposals as to which places we should visit. Most locations were near Niamey, but we also decided to go to Ayorou to visit Tallou Mouzourane and the locations from the films La chasse a` l’hippopotame=Bataille sur le grand fleuve [1951] and Jaguar [1967]. One of the films we frequently returned to was Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet [1974], one of the group’s best ethno-fictions.
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Moussa:
Cocorico comes very close to being the true story about Lam. Because Lam . . . . When Rouch is here, he is his chauffeur. [ . . . ] And he owned a 2CV, you know, the same as Cocorico, the car in the film. Rouch said ‘‘But what do you actually do, Lam?’’ ‘‘When you are not here [ . . . ] I go to the villages. I transport people and millet and other things. Now and then I buy some chicken to sell at the marketplaces’’. And one day we were sitting together, eating together. Somebody said ‘‘Hey, listen, this story about Lam. It may make up the subject of a film.’’ And the others said ‘‘Oh yes, yes, that’s true.’’ We then discussed the ways to record the film. Somebody said, ‘‘What are we going to call the film?’’ And Lam said, ‘‘Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet.’’ ‘‘Oh, yes, that’s a wonderful title!’’ Voila`! Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet. It’s very like the life of Lam when Rouch is not in Niamey.
Moussa told this to us while we had stopped at the roadside after a dusty drive outside Niamey, inspecting locations from Moi fatigue´ debout, moi couche´ [1997], La vache merveilleuse [2002], and Madame l’eau [1992]. The three films, like Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet [1974] and the earliest film, Petit a` petit [1969], had all been produced by the joint film company of Damoure´, Lam, and Rouch, Films DALAROU,4 all films belonging to the genre of film described by Rouch as ethno-fictions. The way in which these films were created was through collective improvization, in which the story was based on elements from the lives of the informants or other Africans. When Moussa explains that Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet was ‘‘very like the life of Lam’’ he is showing us in what sense the ethno-fictions of the group possess significant ethnographic clout. Apart from being hugely entertaining narrative stories, they come close to daily life and events that are common in Niger. Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet is a collective improvization of an African fable and at the same time a portrayal of Lam’s life as it is when he is not engaged in filmmaking. Lam ‘‘plays’’ a poultry dealer (which he actually is) who is trying to purchase chickens in the rural districts surrounding Niamey (which he really does) in his old Citroe¨n 2CV. Tallou ‘‘plays’’ his business partner, and the two of them are joined by Damoure´, who turns out to be trouble and, among other things, attracts a devil. The car, Cocorico, has no brakes, no lights, and no number plates, and all the hassle—preventing it from falling apart and transporting it across the Niger River three times—becomes the main plot of the film. Rouch had anticipated that he would write the story together with the three others
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during the filming, but it almost ended up being written by itself, because the car really did break down every so often, and every time it happened the story took a new turn [Rouch, in Fulchignoni 1989: 295]. On the way out of Niamey, for example, while driving in the bush, Lam exclaimed, ‘‘We’re not stopping here, the place is inhabited by devils.’’ It was a spontaneous remark that led to a female devil playing an important—albeit fictitious—role in the film. She turned up and possessed Damoure´ several times. He had to be cured, which led the three heroes to encounters with new people and new places. This mystical narrative level is only one among several in the film. Generally speaking, Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet is a portrait of a number of marginalized people and their entrepreneurship, enabling them to survive in a postcolonial Niger that is rapidly changing. Personal restlessness and ways to cope with corruption in society become important forces in their chicken business. The car becomes a metaphor for how to manage in life and for an ingenious and pragmatic flexibility that, according to Rouch [Rouch 1978, in Feld 2003: 223], may be regarded as something specifically African. The protagonists in the film would probably not disagree with this analysis, but they evidently had other criteria of validity than such retrospective and academic analysis. As will later become clear, this had much to do with the dissemination of the knowledge gained in the process of filming and how this was shared when screening the films locally. Apart from that, their enthusiastic demonstrations and numerous tales from the production of Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet clearly indicated that they felt immense joy when in the process of making a film. The value of turning anthropological fieldwork into such joyful moments, clearly, should not be underestimated. ETHNO-DIALOGUE The fact that Damoure´, Tallou, and Lam continued their normal lives when Rouch was not there provided plenty of material for new films. Damoure´ and Moussa explained to us the common procedure for creating a film together. First, everybody brainstormed, Rouch being relatively quiet and expectant, and Lam often the originator of the main theme of the film. From one of the upcoming ideas they then improvized and collectively created a storyline without ever writing a script, or even a single line of speech. They had an idea about elements and directions the film would take, but they never knew the ending. Due to the many years of close collaboration and friendship, Rouch had every reason to remain calm and await their ideas. He and they had the same kind of ideas about what would be interesting to film and, at the same time, they had developed a unique sense of each other’s different personalities, potentials, strengths, and weaknesses. This method of collective improvization and narrative openness is an even more profound dialogue than the feedback method mentioned in the beginning of this article. Rouch usually asked for the feedback of the people in the film when showing them a finished version, but with this particular group he developed a much more dynamic, processual, and particularly well-functioning dialogic collaboration. Rouch described his positive collaboration with his informants as ethnodialogue, by which he referred to a process in which the anthropologist
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[ . . . ] ethno-looks, ethno-observes, ethno-thinks. And those with whom he deals are similarly modified; in giving their confidence to this habitual foreign visitor, they ethno-show, ethno-speak, ethno-think. It is this permanent ethno-dialogue that appears to be one of the most interesting angles in the current progress of ethnography. Knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge; it is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers and those whom they study meet on a path that some of us now call ‘‘shared anthropology.’’ [Rouch 1978: 8]
Through their cooperation with us, Damoure´, Tallou, and Moussa demonstrated how they used to enter into such an ethno-dialogue when making ethnographic films. They were never in doubt about whether the camera was on and, as soon as it was, they would speak with a clearer voice, move around in ways that fitted the camera position, and focus on saying things that were relevant to our film. Just like the camera, they seemed to have an on=off position that both they and we could activate. Perle Møhl [2003: 170] wrote that a ‘‘condensation of signification’’5 occurs when the camera is on during successful ethnographic filming. Subjects seem to act and speak in a more precise manner and at times even accelerate their activity level. The spatial presence of the camera is decisive, and this is an aspect that is interesting in the context of general ethnography and not merely ethnographic filming. Some may claim that the camera disturbs reality and that because of this ethnographic film fails to meet scientific criteria. Rouch replied that the same happens whenever an anthropologist enters a society other than his own [Rouch in Rouch, Georgakas, Gupta, and Janda 1978, in Feld 2003: 220]. Informants are always aware of the anthropologist’s extraordinary presence and always take into consideration what they believe is the reason for the anthropologist’s presence. Even when knowing the anthropologist very well, this often leads an informant to act differently. The scholar is thus always distorting the object of research. According to Rouch, this distortion may be regarded as potentially constructive if the anthropologist actively exploits its potential by turning it into a dialogue. It will raise the awareness of both parties due to the internal conflicting feelings one experiences when entering into a dialogue with the other, and it will then lead both parties to learn something about their respective cultural backgrounds, which have become visible through their juxtaposition with other backgrounds. To summarize, the methodology employed by Rouch and the rest of the group is of a very dialogic nature. Rouch facilitated a space in which they ‘‘acted’’ themselves, and they thus collectively improvized an ethnographic narrative that could be and often was an enacting of their actual lives. As regards the practical aspects, a division of labor existed in which Rouch took care of the camera work and Moussa the sound recording, while the logistical matters were taken care of by the rest of them.
SHARED KNOWLEDGE? The process of work was thus a collective responsibility of everybody involved and the methodology employed largely dialogic. May we assume, then, that a
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dialogic methodology leads to a dialogic epistemology? Did Rouch and they come to share knowledge and, if so, did their ethnographic films then come to reflect their knowledge, Rouch’s knowledge, or perhaps a completely new kind of knowledge? One day we asked Damoure´ about his role in the first ethno-fiction film, Jaguar [1967]: Damoure´: We were on the road for six months. We followed the people who go down to earn money there. [ . . . ] Ghana was acquiring its independence. [ . . . ] Accra, that is the CPP,6 Nkrumah, the young people were well organized, they were dancing in the streets, ‘‘Jaguar, Jaguar . . . ,’’ they were singing. Jaguar, that is the beautiful young men and the beautiful girls. Well, everybody was dancing. And we were dancing with them. Because there are people who don’t like it when you film them. [ . . . ] When Rouch took his camera, they would say ‘‘no,’’ so I mingled with them, danced with them. When a guy said ‘‘no,’’ I said ‘‘don’t worry, he’s just taking my picture.’’ Finally, people were used to it and we could make Jaguar. [ . . . ] Anne: In the film, we see you working at the harbor [ . . . ] Did you really work there? We also see that at the end of the film you distribute everything that you have earned to people in Ayorou. Did you really earn money in Accra? Damoure´: Yes. No. We were working, but that was in order to make the film. That means that we did what people were doing. We imitated. [ . . . ] We were not paid by these people at the harbor, but by Rouch. [ . . . ] I am a public employee in Niger, so though I travel with Rouch, I get my salary in Niamey. But in order to make the film I did what everybody there did. The carpentry, carrying luggage, this and that. I did everything as if I was one of them. But in reality they didn’t pay me. [ . . . ] Anne: Would you say that you were playing a role? Is it Damoure´ that we see in the film or is it a role? Damoure´: I am the principal actor. I can play anything! I can play any role. I have the habit. I’ve done this for a very long time, since 1950 that is. Alas, if he [Rouch] says ‘‘do this,’’ I’ll do it [ . . . ] I know what he wants to make. So he doesn’t have to tell me ‘‘do this, do that.’’ No, I know in advance what he wants. Voila` [laughing]. Anne: Does that mean that you create your roles together? They are constructed by you and Rouch? Damoure´: Rouch is not in it. He listens. He organizes. For instance [ . . . ] if we want to go to Ayorou. We want to sail on the river. ‘‘Can’t we enter a canoe and film from there?’’ ‘‘Yes, we may enter in this canoe!’’ ‘‘Where does the canoe come from?’’ ‘‘This village! It’s on the island.’’ ‘‘Let’s go there.’’ We will say to the driver of the canoe: ‘‘Can you bring us along?’’ ‘‘Yes, fine!’’ [ . . . ] And Rouch is behind with his camera, the driver gives a damn. ‘‘What’s he doing, le monsieur?’’ ‘‘Oh, him, he’s taking photos,’’ etcetera, etcetera. . . . This is how we make our films.
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Anne: Damoure´: Anne: Damoure´:
Can we then say that it’s a fiction, or is it reality? It’s reality! We don’t invent anything! We just watch what people do. And even your role, it is reality? It is reality!
While Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet closely resembled the life that Lam lived in Niger, Jaguar was based on the way Nigerien immigrants lived in Ghana. Other films were based on a dream—often one of Tallou’s—or a myth. The common feature of these different ethno-fictions is the way in which they express their social and cultural contexts, and not just the personal lives of the protagonists. It is the interaction between these contexts and the actual lives of the persons in the film that forms the temporal and spatial basis of the films and makes them valid ethnographic documents. With no hesitancy whatsoever, Damoure´ claims that he is a professional actor while, at the same time, their films show reality. He does not consider it a selfcontradiction that the film is reality while he is an actor who plays a role. The film meets his criteria of validity because he acts ‘‘himself’’ as a personal individual, as a Songhay man, a citizen of Niger in West Africa, and a number of other characteristics of his personality. He plays all these roles at the same time and thus conveys to Rouch and, in the last instance, the audience the stories that he finds relevant to tell about his reality. His self-perception and understanding of contemporary society form the framework of the story, and as he is building his knowledge on other systems of thought than most of the spectators, our knowledge about Africa is challenged and expanded. Damoure´’s knowledge about his own world defines what he considers as relevant knowledge; and through Rouch’s filtering in the process of both filming and editing this becomes our anthropological knowledge. Damoure´ and the other Nigeriens in such ways contributed to the shared anthropology and with their actual stories even made an impact on Rouch’s epistemology. The secret behind their successful cooperation may be described, as does Piault, more precisely as an ‘‘open-ended interaction’’ [Piault, 2006], in which the knowledge of the Nigerien friends about the world around them strongly influenced the way in which Rouch acted. Their mythology became an integral element of his way of perceiving reality, as did their stories and their very ways of telling them. Most ambitiously, Rouch started a project ‘‘to establish a Songhay theory of the ‘self’ of the filmmaker’’ [Rouch 1978: 8], in which he built on the Songhay perception of the ‘‘self’’ as it comes to expression in possession sessions. Unfortunately, this was never completed. At times, Rouch’s friends were the ones who defined the narrative structure if, for example, it was based on a dream or a myth. Otherwise, it was not their role to structure or impose limits on a film project, and in this sense, there was a clear differentiation in work tasks. Whereas they were the ones to define the kind of knowledge that was relevant to them, it was his responsibility to make this knowledge comprehensible for an audience in Niger or abroad. While they delivered knowledge about places and people, about politics, beliefs, ancestors, possessions, sacrifices, plants, and animals, about mountains and rivers and dreams and so many other things necessary for them in order to experience, understand, and act on reality, Rouch
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delivered knowledge about filmmaking in practice, about film conventions, and about their use in comparative, phenomenological, and cross-cultural communication. Being extremely faithful toward the empirical background, he put his friends’ knowledge into a narrative framework, revealing an exceptionally keen eye for the elements and contexts of their reality that reached beyond the specific situation. Empirical elements often became metaphors for wider social contexts, such as the Citroe¨n 2CV in Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, which may be seen as a metaphor for a creative and pragmatic adaptability in a rapidly changing, postcolonial society. Traveling and movement, which run as a narrative thread through Jaguar and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, form another example that symbolizes the lifelong journey of mankind toward knowledge, a universal and humanist issue. The crucial point here is that just as a successful dialogic collaboration may positively engage people with differing points of view, it may profit from an exchange of knowledge between people with differing systems of thought and differing criteria of validity. While the anthropologist bases his acts on subjective criteria valid in a scientific endeavor, the informant most often bases his acts on other criteria. Therefore, even in the collaboration between Rouch and Damoure´, Moussa, Tallou, and Lam, in which everybody was enlightened, the one who was taught the deepest epistemological lessons was the one who was looking most eagerly for it—namely, Rouch, the anthropologist. Seen from the perspective of the others, one of the more important things was that Rouch intervened in their lives with his ethnographic gaze. He disturbed their ordinary activities and introduced a new space, an ethno-dialogue for him and them to talk about and reflect on their experiences, aims, and dreams. Here they profited from their ethno-acting and ethno-thinking at a personal level. As observed by the Head of la Direction de la Cinematographie in Niamey:7 ‘‘They have been shaped by working together with Rouch and each other . . . they will never grow old, they have a spirit of freedom and anarchy and an ability to look beyond themselves as individuals, reflecting and creating their own lives. This is a very rare thing in Niger.’’
ANTHROPOLOGY FOR WHOM? Damoure´, Moussa, and Tallou have learned to reflect on their own lives but also on their societies, their scarce material resources and rich cultural potentialities. Through their jobs as interpreters, photographers, research assistants, and sound recordist for Rouch, Damoure´ and Moussa have built up a considerable knowledge about culture and customs of many different ethnic groups all over West Africa. If Rouch awoke this interest in them, the incentive to know more soon became Moussa’s and Damoure´’s own, and through the years they grew into well-informed experts. Even when Rouch has not been in Niamey, Moussa has been working, and continues to work, for other scholars just as he goes out to record oral traditions, songs, and music of his own accord in all parts of Niger. He started doing this back in 1959, when working with Rouch in the Ivory Coast. When Rouch later helped him become a functionary in the IRSH, he established a sound archive, which has through the years grown into an impressive collection
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of music, songs, and narrations from a huge area of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali. For Moussa, this has become a life project with manifold purposes. Above anything else, he has come to see it as an important preservation for the future of an enormous cultural heritage in the process of disappearing: ‘‘It’s such a shame that we let these old sages die with their knowledge. [ . . . ] Because right now, in your place, you have things aging I-don’t-know-how-many centuries on paper. [ . . . ] If we don’t do it now, then, who will? We, we, we . . . I am sixty-something now. [ . . . ] As a child I knew many things about traditions. They are now lost, and I cannot even tell myself why. It’s a shame. A shame.’’ Moussa’s satisfaction with resisting this negative development by maintaining and expanding the sound archive was as obvious as his concerns for its survival on very scarce resources. Despite the hot and dry climate being relatively friendly to audiotapes, time works on the hundreds of rolls in the steel drawers, which covered the walls of the sound archive. Moussa and Damoure´ expressed another deeply satisfying outcome of the collaboration with Rouch: they had been able to show images of their world to people in Europe. They and Lam and Tallou had joined Rouch on numerous visits to record and screen films in France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and several African countries, too. Sometimes we have gone to screen the films abroad. Sometimes we have been ambassadors for the Republic of Niger. There are many countries where . . . for example in the Netherlands . . . we were there in order to make a film with Rouch. During the day we were filming, in the evenings films from Niger were presented in two cinema halls, and the Nigerien flag was waving over Amsterdam, in our names. After the screenings we were obliged to stay there and answer questions. There were classes of pupils, people came, the halls were full. Sometimes we discussed until two o’clock in the morning. You see? We felt like ambassadors for Niger. Because they asked questions about the lion hunters, about the hippo hunters, about the koli koli, the possession dance, they didn’t know anything about that. So we really felt like . . . like ambassadors.
The dissemination of knowledge works in multiple ways. The anthropologists screen the films and disseminate their knowledge to an academic audience; to a European audience; to the people in the films, in Africa and in Europe. The Africans screen the films and disseminate their knowledge to fellow Africans, to Dutch school-kids, and to European scholars. Audiences are manifold, and knowledge exchanged in very different situations. Even though Damoure´ lightheartedly stated that the object of their films was to ‘‘catch peoples’ interest and make them laugh,’’ both he and the other Nigeriens left us with a clear impression that they had much more serious agendas for their collaboration as well. So had Rouch. Answering the question, For whom, and why? he [Rouch 1974: 4l–42] stated that he recognized himself as his first audience, the people in the film as his second, and the third should then be the largest viewing public possible. The interaction certainly has stayed open-ended [Piault, 2006], and multidirectional as well, as the dialogues have criss-crossed all kinds of geographical and conceptual borders.
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DIALOGICAL DISSEMINATION AND ITS LIMITS In spite of this dynamic picture, it will not be fair simply to conclude that the dissemination of knowledge has been highly dialogical. Rouch and his friends have reached larger audiences in their research areas than perhaps any anthropologists have in theirs, but their impressive work surely had its limits. We disappointedly had to realize that the aim of passing knowledge about Songhay and other ethnic groups in Niger to future generations is—so far—very far from fulfilled. Browsing the shelves and drawers at the IRSH with Moussa revealed to us that copies of only three8 of the about 60 films that Rouch and his friends made in Niger were to be found here. Neither the Centre Culturel FrancoNige´rien, nor the Direction de la Cine´matographie in the Ministry of Culture (Ministe`re de la Culture, de la Jeunesse et des Sports), nor any of the persons we talked to could add to this unfortunate situation. When we visited Ayorou, the provincial chief urged us to pass a request to Rouch for VHS copies of the classics, La chasse au lion a` l’arc [1964] and La chasse a` l’hippopotame=Bataille sur le grand fleuve [1951]. Both are films that have a huge significance for the selfidentification of people in Ayorou. I am not in a position to point out who are the ones responsible for this failure to offer the Nigeriens these films that they seem to be so naturally entitled to hold a copy of. Possibly, Jean Rouch is not to blame the most, as copyrights are most often a matter of the producer, not the director, and he rarely held copyrights on the films. My obligation though is to make this imbalance known, on the chance that somebody should read this and be in a position to influence the concrete case, and yet even more to suggest that all of us reflect on our ways of disseminating our anthropological knowledge. If this has so far been particularly a concern for ethnographic filmmakers, the issue is now increasingly becoming crucial to anthropologists everywhere, who are disseminating knowledge by way of any media.
AN AFRICAN ‘‘PAPA’’ The collaboration of Rouch and his little family of ‘‘soundrels’’ may also provoke us to reflect on the personal relationships without which we would never obtain any knowledge in our fieldwork. Damoure´, Tallou, and Moussa repeatedly emphasized their love and respect for Rouch, conveying the feeling that their main reason for taking part in our research project was to honor Rouch. Their admiration for Rouch almost provoked me since, prior to our arrival in Niger, I somewhat naively believed that dialogue, apart from a degree of reciprocity, was based on a principle of equality. We asked Damoure´ about this: Anne:
We have noticed that when you mention Rouch, you always say ‘‘the old papa.’’ Do you really consider him an old African ‘‘papa’’? Damoure´: Yes. All my children are his. We have grown together. I have children and grandchildren, and they believe that Rouch is my father, because it’s by his grace that I have made it. [ . . . ]
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That’s really nice. But in Europe [ . . . ] we do have the idea that collaboration is something that rests on equality . . . that there shouldn’t be money involved or any differences between people . . . . Damoure´: Well, it’s very rare to see a European who comes to a country and takes a young man who’s got nothing and tries to help him and find him a job. That’s very rare. The European comes, he stays in his hotel, he takes his photos, etcetera etcetera. Rouch didn’t. He took a poor lad, and he used all his means to help this guy to make it. I consider him as more than a president. What can a president do for me? Nothing! Rouch has done more for me than anybody else—including my own father—because he is richer. He has invested everything to help me. That is not just to give your money away to somebody, in order to do him a service. Rouch never gives money away just like that. He provides you with the means that enable you to find work on your own. This is what interests me about Jean Rouch. [ . . . ] This is what really matters!
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Anne:
I had thus been thoroughly mistaken in my ethnocentric idealization of equality and in my reasoning that existing power relations are suspended in cases of dialogic cooperation. What I had failed to recognize was that one cannot build up new relationships without taking already existing differences into account. The ideal is firmly embedded in our Western minds, just like the ideal about avoiding money matters between friends. Damoure´ Tallou, and Moussa, through their frequent use of the family metaphor, all implied that they saw no problems in the superiority of Rouch. On the one hand, they were used to the fact that most relationships were hierarchically structured; on the other, like many other Africans, they knew that economic dependency formed, rather than disturbed, the basis of most social relationships. No matter how thought-provoking this may seem to someone from the West, it has the obvious advantage that differences in status are neither taboo nor a hindrance to social life and cooperation. Rouch has through the years taken on the same responsibilities as any African father, who had the means to do so, would do. When Damoure´ was a young man, Rouch made sure he received training as a nurse. Due to his education, Damoure´ has become one of Niger’s most respected healers within traditional as well as modern medicine. He showed us around all his houses, one for each wife, and explained that his film work, combined with his healing and rice fields, have provided a living for his large family and ensured he could live comfortably when reaching old age. Also, the house of Moussa had been paid for with money from work on a film, Petit a` petit, in 1968–69. Further, while Moussa supplemented his income from the crops he grew on parcels of land he owned on the outskirts of Niamey, his most stable source of income was his job as a civil servant at the IRSH, a position granted to him by Rouch. Tallou is considerably poorer, living in the northern province of Ayorou, which has repeatedly been affected by disastrous periods of drought. To make a living, his small family engaged in trade at the enormous cattle market of Ayorou; but, during our visit, his herd had dwindled due to the latest drought. The financial support we provided him for working with us was thus more than welcome, and we realized that Rouch had helped
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Tallou many times during periods of hardship in the same manner. The first time was when Tallou, still a young boy, was sent by Rouch to be treated for his leprosy. Later, Rouch supported the affiliation between Tallou and the chief’s family in Ayorou, providing him with a security net during the periods of starvation that repeatedly affect the area. In such ways Rouch supported his friends, helped them, and ‘‘made their lives,’’ we might even say. We might also say that they definitely also ‘‘made him’’ as an anthropologist and filmmaker. We may be pleased to learn from Rouch and his family of ‘‘scoundrels’’ in Niger that although we, as anthropologists, most often may feel that our and our informants’ agendas differ considerably, collaboration exists as a most fruitful option. Their shared anthropology stands out as perhaps the most comprehensively dialogic informant-anthropologist relationship in the history of anthropology. If the third leg of this shared anthropology, the aspect of dialogic dissemination of knowledge, is slightly limping behind the other two (the aspects of methodology and of epistemology), these informants described their almost lifelong engagement with each other as a collaboration from which everybody profited and which evolved in numerous and various respects. Rouch and his friends based their shared anthropology on dialogue, in itself a dialogue; and through it they entered into an ongoing dialogue with contemporary societies in which they were filming. It is impossible to replicate this form of collaboration, which relied on the personalities that created it. However, we may learn from their enthusiasm, creativity, and responsibility, as well as from the epistemological openness of Rouch, and be inspired to establish dialogical forms of collaboration at all levels. This is desirable not only due to its ethical implications but also because it helps us in a direction that to a higher degree is defined by the informants, potentially bringing completely new types of knowledge into the realm of anthropology.9
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Danish Research Council for the Humanities for its financial support to this project. All points of view are, of course, my own. I am also grateful to a number of individuals and institutions for their assistance in the research process, of which this article is one result. In Niamey they are Dr. Damoure´ Zika, Moussa Hamidou, Tallou Mouzourane, Abdoulrazak Maman=Direction de la Cine´matographie Nationale, Direction de la Recherche Scientifique et de l’Innovation Technologique, Institut de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines in Niamey (IRSH), and Mai Moussa Latifa from the office of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). In Paris they are Philippe Lourdou and the late Jean Rouch; and, in Denmark, Professor Ton Otto, Mette Bovin, Peter Ian Crawford, and, of course, my colleague, Berit Madsen, with whom I conducted this project and who gave me many constructive comments during the course of writing this article.
NOTES 1. A range of the most important among these texts is compiled in Feld [2003]. 2. Rouch, in the ways he described his informants and filmed subjects, revealed his processual approach to the production of anthropological knowledge by calling them ‘‘the ethnographied’’ (‘‘les ethnographie´s’’) [Rouch 1989 [1960]: 349], just as he described ethnography as a process in which we ‘‘ethnography.’’ I find these ways of putting it appealing, but will nevertheless use the term ‘‘informant’’ in the manner commonly employed in anthropology.
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3. Others have made interesting and amusing films looking more or less deeply into the relationship between Rouch and this group before we decided to do so [Bregstein 1978; Fieschi 1998; Meyknecht et al. 1998]. Anyhow, in all these films Rouch is in front, and the appearance of Damoure´, Lam, Tallou, and other Nigeriens always somehow secondary. 4. The company was renamed DALAROUTA when Tallou Mouzourane joined. The formation of it, toward the end of the 1960s, underlined that there was joint authorship. In this, it resembled some of the polyphonic monographs [such as Bahr et al. 1974; Bulmer and Majnep 1977] which other anthropologists later experimented with to avoid some of the representational problems of anthropology. 5. My translation from the Danish. 6. The pan-Africanist Convention Peoples Party (CPP) led Ghana (the former Gold Coast) to independence from Britain in 1957 and become the first black African nation, with Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as its first president. 7. Abdoulrazak Maman, March 2003, personal communication. 8. These are Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Yenendi and Bataille sur le grand fleuve. 9. Translated from Danish by Peter I. Crawford.
REFERENCES Bahr, D., J. Gregoria, D. Lopez, and A. Alvarez 1974 Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness (Ka:cim Munkidag). Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bulmer, Ralph, and Ian Majnep 1977 Birds of My Kalam Country. Auckland: University of Auckland Press. Crapanzano, Vincent 1992 Dialogue. In his Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire. On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Pp. 188–216. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Feld, Steven, ed. 2003 Cine´-Ethnography, Jean Rouch. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Fulchignoni, Enrico 1989 Conversation between Jean Rouch and Professor Enrico Fulchignoni. Visual Anthropology, (Special Issue: The Cinema of Jean Rouch), 2(3–4): 265–300. Møhl, Perle 2003 Synliggørelsen. Med kameraet i felten. In Ind i Verden. En Grundbog i Antropologisk Metode. Kirsten Hastrup, ed. Pp. 163–184. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Piault, Marc Henri 2006 The ‘‘Cine´-trance’’ and the Reign of the Subject: Jean Rouch. In Memories of the Origins of Ethnographic Film. Beate Engelbrecht, ed. Pp. 363–375. Bern, Berlin, et al.: Peter Lang. Rouch, Jean 1974 [1973] The Camera and Man. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 1(1): 37–44. 1978 [1973] On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 5(1): 2–8. 1989 [1960] La religion et la magie Songhay. Bruxelles: E´ditions de l’Universite´ de Bruxelles. Ruby, Jay 2000 Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Stoller, Paul 1992 The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tedlock, Dennis 1979 The Analogical Tradition and the Emergence of a Dialogical Anthropology. Journal of Anthropological Research, 35(4): 387–400.
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FILMOGRAPHY Bregstein, Philo 1978 Jean Rouch and His Camera in the Heart of Africa. Amsterdam: Dutch Television production; 74 min. Fieschi, Jean Andre´ 1998 Mosso Mosso: Jean Rouch comme si. Paris: ARTE. Institut National de 1’Audiovisuel; 73 min. Madsen, Berit, and Anne Mette Jørgensen 2005 Friends, Fools, Family. Aarhus: Manche Film; 83 min. Meyknecht, Steef, Dirk Nijland, and Joost Verhey 1998 Rouch’s Gang. Amsterdam: MM Produkties; 70 min. Rouch, Jean 1951 La chasse a` l’hippopotame=Bataille sur le grand fleuve. With Roger Rosfelder. Paris: CNRS; 33 min. 1964 La chasse a`u lion a` l’arc. Paris: Films de la Ple´iade; 90 min. 1968 Yenendi de Ganghel. Paris: CNRS=CFE; 35 min. 1967 Jaguar. Paris: Films de la Ple´iade; 100 min. 1969 Petit a` petit. Paris: Films de la Ple´iade; 92 min. 1974 Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet. Niamey: Films Dalarou. CNRSH. Paris: CFE, CNRS, Muse´e de l’Homme, SCC; 90 min. 1992 Madame l’eau. Paris: CFE and NFI=Sodaperaga=BBC TV; 120 min. 1997 Moi fatigue´ debout, moi couche´. Paris: CFE; 81 min. 2002 La vache merveilleuse. Paris: CFE; 77 min.