Auto Body: an excerpt from my documentary in progress

An Achamo Gangi

Since the fall of 2004, I have been putting together a documentary project on the civil war in Northern Uganda. It began as a film about the relation between the humanitarian aid industry and the internally displaced population of the region, but as I spent time in the conflict zone and had the opportunity to collaborate with local political leaders, human rights activists, artists, and musicians, the emphasis of the film changed. Instead, I became interested in exploring the question of how to represent the massive social upheaval that has taken place among the Acholi as a result of the civil war, and more importantly the question of how to represent the Acholi response to this upheaval. Thus, what began as an expository documentary project without a significant ethical consideration of process has now become a reflexive piece that meditates on a new set of intellectual and academic questions about: how to represent human suffering, the methodologies that one deploys to interrogate this process, as well as the tenuous relationship between filmmaker and the filmed, between the ethnographer and her informants, which is at the heart of these questions.

Over the many months I have spent in the conflict zone and in the internment camps these last four years, I have come to see how complex and critical the politics of representation are for people living in the midst of a civil war and the necessity for a filmmaker/anthropologist to consider these politics while paying close attention to the global North-South divide. Indeed, a whole host of complicating factors has been introduced for me in investigating cultural production and representation in this contested terrain, among them the unsettling fact that even though I am an Asian American, I am considered white—munnu—by the Acholi.

In addition to the politics of representation, I have decide to focus on three specific themes in my film and written work.

First, I am interested in the theoretical question of the relation between culture and violence. My point of entry into this theoretical field is the work of Swedish anthropologist Sverker Finnstrom whose powerful ethnography on Acholi and the civil war invokes the work of Carolyn Nordstrom and Michael Taussig to inquire into what he calls the “existential uncertainty” that interned Acholi have experienced for over a decade. I have also taken a great interest in the work of Liisa Malkki on the memory of violence among displaced refugee populations in Tanzania, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s exegesis on the camp as social-political form. Mariane Ferme’s work on militias in Sierra Leone has also provided me with insight into the intersection of culture and violence in the processes of paramilitarization in Acholiland. Finally, Allan Feldman's work on violence and vision has helped me think through the aesthetics of terror and suffering.

Second, I am interested in projects directed towards realizing justice and/or reconciliation for the Acholi, and the position of those projects at the interface of local cultural forms and global processes and discourses. The International Criminal Court has intervened in Acholiland in an effort to arrest and prosecute the leadership of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. In reaction, some Acholi have argued for the realization of justice not through punishment, but through “traditional” reconciliation rituals. Thus, the debate over justice for the Acholi has been polarized around the distinction between “universal” human rights and international law—championed by anthropologist Tim Allen, for example—versus culturally specific forms of justice—championed by a number of traditional Acholi leaders. I believe that the dilemma expressed in this debate might be overcome through the recognition of the existing interlacing of global and local.

This pressing issue of justice and reconciliation raises questions about the politics behind the traditional reconciliation agenda. Indeed, reconciliation rituals have come to play a key role in the reintegration of thousands of ex-LRA rebels, many of them youths, and so are helping to redefine the political parameters of Acholi society. The use of “traditional” reconciliation rituals presided over by male elders gives rise to questions about what political interests are being served through such rituals and what kind of society is being constructed under the guise of an authoritative, unquestionable Acholi culture. Certain images of Acholi society are put forth through the performance of these reconciliation rituals, images that ignore the fact that the very terrain of what custom means in Acholi society is currently being negotiated among a wide array of actors, including those previously excluded such as women and youth. Additionally, the intervention of outsiders (like the World Bank, and the structure of NGOs that have come to predominate the region), wishing to promote Acholi reconciliation rituals as a mode of conflict resolution, has introduced further complications. This invocation of local cultural authenticity to legitimate external intervention might be thought of as a continuation of the British colonial practice of indirect rule, as explicated in the work of Mahmood Mamdani and others.

Finally, I am interested in the question of specifically aesthetic production in the context of the Northern war. A number of documentary films about Northern Uganda have been released in the last two years, each with different interests behind them ranging from humanitarian aid agencies, to Christian evangelical organizations, to the Ugandan government, to the Acholi diaspora. These different interests have given rise to different modes of representation in the films, with divergent portrayals of the key actors including the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, the interned Acholi population, the government, and the “international community.” At the same time, there have been a number of initiatives by local Acholi church organizations, “traditional” chiefs, and human rights groups to promote the self-representation of the Acholi. Some of these projects have comprised attempts to promote the survival of Acholi culture and traditions in the midst of widespread violence, mass displacement, and the internment of the entire Acholi rural population. Other projects attempt to document the quotidian lives of the interned population, with an emphasis on recording human rights violations by government and rebels. Both of these types of projects raise questions about the specific image of Acholi culture that is being put forth, and the local and international political interests behind those images.

In the clip above, I wanted to experiment with the image of a woman walking through the gardens just outside the perimeter of a displacement camp in an attempt to show the similarities between how the filmmaker/anthropologist follows the subject/object of her work and the ways in which rebels and government soldiers trek through the bush seeking out and or preparing for ambush. Obviously, I have no previous experience of "trekking through the bush" as a rebel or government soldier. And so, I make no claim about the authenticity of the movement or the space that I move in and simulate. My intention is to call attention to the violence that is invested in both projects and to think about what it means to make a conscious and or unconscious claim about the authenticity of the experience of violence in film. On another level, I introduce the notion of reconciliation through the music in the clip and the overlay of the musician's performance-- something I haven't explored as extensively in my visual work.

(performative?) audio experimentation

Denise: Some of you may remember this series of audio tracks beneath my video footage from last quarter. In some sense, I think it was more successful as an audio piece. I've tried to think about this in terms of Bruzzi, Brecht, etc. and my ramblings are below.



For this audio experimentation piece, I have decided to focus on a series of reflexive interviews that I conducted one year ago. From these, I have created an audio collage in order to represent some of the patterns I have noticed across interviews. I have organized these patterns meticulously within this piece to tell a story about how men begin to reconceptualize masculinity in ways that attempt to subvert gender binaries and hegemonic norms. The story is one that is complex. I consider these complexities through a media form intended to be slightly incoherent, blurry, and full of contradictions.


My research involves listening to, documenting, and analyzing a lot of stories. Inevitably, I reproduce these stories through some medium—be it text, film, photograph, audio, or some combination—in order to communicate my research, ideas, and findings to a broader audience. This means that ultimately, I am in a precarious position of representation. Currently, I am grappling with how re-presentation of stories involves creating new realities of my informants. In an article by, Tania Hammidi (2000), she suggests that we need to complicate how we “listen to” our texts. For me, this means finding new ways of listening to the stories of my research participants. In my audio piece, I have taken this idea and applied it to how we represent our texts, and in this case, how I represent interview texts. In experimenting with new forms of representing stories, my aim is to create a kind of sensory experience that helps the audience to listen in new ways. However, in this created audio piece, my own ear is very present. I have carefully adjusted audio levels, background noise, and selected very specific interview fragments to communicate the ideas that I would like the audience to hear. However, I am working towards something multi-dimensional. I hope that in the multi-layered audio form, different people listening to this piece will have different experiences—that is, different people will hear different things.


Through this piece, I reflect upon how a feminist perspective on Brecht’s ([1957] 1964) Verfremdungseffekt, as a representation “which allows us to recognize the subject, but at the same time makes it unfamiliar” (p. 192), might inform our understanding of performative documentary media. Here, I consider Stella Bruzzi’s (2006) explanation of the performative documentary mode as one intended “to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation… [as] an alienating, distancing device, not one which actively promotes identification and a straightforward response to a film’s content” (p. 185). For this particular project, I am exploring how performative documentary might include documentary media forms beyond film, such as audio. Furthermore, I am interested in how the alienation effect works through the content of my piece to bring attention to commonly understood subject matter (wearing clothes), while simultaneously distancing the listener (wearing clothes in marked ways—that is, non-hegemonic articulations of style). This is grounded in Brecht’s notion of “alienating the familiar” (p. 192). Additionally, I am interested in how the form of the audio collage pits moments of recognition (statements that one can actually hear) against alienating incomprehensibility (statements that trail off into indecipherable audio noise). Brecht explains that the alienation effect “is just a widely practised way of drawing one’s own or someone else’s attention to a thing… [and] consists in turning the object of which one is made aware, to which one’s attention has is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking, and unexpected” (p. 143). Through both content and form of the audio collage, I am working to transform familiarity into something strange.

The Furkini

Denise: This is a short clip I've been working on, which is about a very special garment known as the furkini. It is a garment that is gifted during the Burning Man festival. Here are some of my musings (and perhaps a little background) about gifted adornments in general, and the furkini, in particular:

Gifting Clothing at Burning Man

The gift is an important component of the Burning Man experience, and symbolizes a redressing of an economically driven society. However, it is easy to criticize such attempts, as fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson (2000) reminds us, that like other oppositional groups throughout history, “their attempt to subvert the dominant ideologies… [use] the very mass consumption means that constitute or contribute to these ideologies” (p. 204). Similarly, Burning Man participants embrace consumerism in order to make gifts that allow them to subvert consumerism in the ephemeral moment of the festival. Nonetheless, the spontaneous and temporal act of gifting affirms the community’s counter-capitalist narrative.

On a more intimate scale, the gift allows strangers to interact and collaboratively construct daily appearances at the festival. Many gifts given are adornments: necklaces, garments, scarves, goggles, or forms of body painting. This two-person collaboration is unique in that the story of the gift (how it was made, what it is made of, what it might mean, where it is from, and the story of the maker) combines with the story of the recipient. The Burning Man experience is thus materialized and memorialized through gifts given and received, and these eventually become mnemonic devices to the wearer once they are re-introduced into what Burners call the "default world" and everyday appearances.

In some cases, the gift is intended to be transformative. When discussed in interviews, “transformative adornments” were almost always are spoken of in reference to men. Large-scale theme camps, such as the Black Rock Boutique and Kostume Kult, provide primarily women’s clothing to Burners. In interviews with members of both camps, they discussed the importance of "getting men out of their khakis and t-shirts and into more exciting clothing." Furthermore, there was an indication that men tended to be more reserved, especially if it was their first year or first day to the festival. While the clothing is the material gift, there was a feeling that the real gift was the freedom accompanying that initial transgression of gender norms.

Another theme camp called Camp Furkini--on a much smaller scale--frames its mission as one of transforming men’s experience of dress at the festival. Each year, Camp Furkini makes 50 garments (“furkinis”) to give out to men.



The furkini is certainly a fascinating garment for a number of reasons. Perhaps because it is a contemporary codpiece? Or maybe because it hearkens to a primitive, caveman-like aesthetic? Or is it because its shape is incredibly masculine, yet it is so revealing of the male body (which is more often concealed by clothing)? The colors, often in bright pinks, blues, and reds tend to be those classified as feminine in western culture. Furthermore, it is interesting how sexuality is complicated by the furkini. Made, designed, and manufactured by gay men, it tends to be most popular with straight men. As James’s partner and co-furkini-maker, Mertz, explained to me, “It’s the straight guys that really love the furkini” (hypothesizing that this was because of their fashion repression in the everyday world). The furkini problematizes, like many other Burning Man outfits, the complex relationships among masculinity, sexuality, and appearance. The story the furkini tells is that it’s ok for men to feel sexy in their clothes, no matter what their sexual orientation, outward appearance, or relative manliness. Furthermore, it carries with it a narrative of democratization, that all men may appear manly, well endowed, and look fabulous at the same time. These narratives are both intimately constituted through the giving and receiving of the garment. James and his partner, Mertz, develop close relationships with the men (and often their girlfriends, too), who receive the furkini. Recipients keep in touch and send photographs of themselves in the furkini, both in public and private spaces. As one recipient wrote to them later in the year, “I can’t take it off; I wear it all the time. Please send washing instructions.”

Vandana: ...this is a clip from an upcoming piece i am thinking about called 'Butter Dosa'. 'Butter Dosa' is an ethnographic film that explores issues of migration and nostalgia through recollections and preperations of the South Indian cuisine, dosa. Following South Asian migrants of the 1965 Immigration Act era in New York City- as they speak about and make dosa-this film argues that everday practices centered around this food become a vehicle for challenging long-held conceptions about national territory, belonging and identity. Visualizing theory 'Butter Dosa' is an ethnography that also explores the ways in which trends in global migration are being appropirated on the ground through the reconfiguration of the homeland via food, thus adding to the theoretical writing on migration, nation-making, and nostalgia