Cool and Crazy: Anthropological Film at the Point of Convergence between Humanities and Social Science

ABSTRACT

The use of film as a tool in anthropological fieldwork is a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about scientific research. Nevertheless, documentary filming of the informants in their own context has proved to be an interesting supplement in the exploration of what the anthropological research field actually covers. Furthermore, film work confronts the researchers with aesthetic aspects of mediation that have not been epistemically well attended to within social science. This article highlights pivotal problems in the professional no-man's-land where visual culture studies take place, as exemplified by the film Cool and Crazy.     

Samoyedic Diary: Early Years of Visual Anthropology in the Soviet Arctic

This article describes Georgii and Ekaterina Prokofiev's expedition to the Bol'shezemel'skie Nenets and their experience in filming documentary chronicles. Their records form a unique part of the visual anthropology of the Samoyedic peoples. From extant archival documents it is assumed that the chronicles were filmed with funding from the cooperation agreement that was signed by Franz Boas and Vladimir Bogoras in New York in 1928. The article offers a reconstruction of Prokofiev's fieldwork experience and his accounts of the early history of collectivization. In this regard the filmed chronicles and a collection of photos taken in the field are treated as a visual conceptualization. Available studies of visual anthropology in the USSR suggest that the documentary chronicles by the Prokofievs, made in 1929–30, are the first cinematic records to be produced by ethnographers in the Soviet Arctic.     

The role of motor learning in spatial adaptation near a tool

Some visual-tactile (bimodal) cells have visual receptive fields (vRFs) that overlap and extend moderately beyond the skin of the hand. Neurophysiological evidence suggests, however, that a vRF will grow to encompass a hand-held tool following active tool use but not after passive holding. Why does active tool use, and not passive holding, lead to spatial adaptation near a tool? We asked whether spatial adaptation could be the result of motor or visual experience with the tool, and we distinguished between these alternatives by isolating motor from visual experience with the tool. Participants learned to use a novel, weighted tool. The active training group received both motor and visual experience with the tool, the passive training group received visual experience with the tool, but no motor experience, and finally, a no-training control group received neither visual nor motor experience using the tool. After training, we used a cueing paradigm to measure how quickly participants detected targets, varying whether the tool was placed near or far from the target display. Only the active training group detected targets more quickly when the tool was placed near, rather than far, from the target display. This effect of tool location was not present for either the passive-training or control groups. These results suggest that motor learning influences how visual space around the tool is represented.     

Gender,Photography and Visual Participatory Methods: An Ethnographic Research Project between Colombia and France

This article explores the construction of gender in urban settings, through visual participatory methods. It is argued that gendered experience may be studied, described and visualized through engaged visual practices using photography as a research tool. I suggest that visual participatory methods provide a new support to explore the multidimensionality of the urban experience in which gender acts. By focusing on visual experience and in the process of “doing gender,” we were interested in new ways to depict gender in two cities, Sarcelles, France, and Medellin, Colombia. In that sense, visual cartographies of gender, a technique developed in both cities, strengthens new ways of understanding gendered experience through a multimodal, critical and embodied visual practice.     

Textualizing the san “past”: Dancing with development

The anthropology of conservation and the way that visual media, especially documentary film, contribute to mythical Tourist perceptions of the San, are discussed in relation to categories of conservancy, living museums, cultural ecology and the marketing of ecological legitimacy. The central metaphor of dance as a mythical tourist image of Africa is the vehicle through which the analysis is undertaken.     

Adjusting the focus: A public health ethics approach to data research

This paper contends that a research ethics approach to the regulation of health data research is unhelpful in the era of population‐level research and big data because it results in a primary focus on consent (meta‐, broad, dynamic and/or specific consent). Two recent guidelines – the 2016 WMA Declaration of Taipei on ethical considerations regarding health databases and biobanks and the revised CIOMS International ethical guidelines for health‐related research involving humans – both focus on the growing reliance on health data for research. But as research ethics documents, they remain (to varying degrees) focused on consent and individual control of data use. Many current and future uses of health data make individual consent impractical, if not impossible. Many of the risks of secondary data use apply to communities and stakeholders rather than individual data subjects. Shifting from a research ethics perspective to a public health lens brings a different set of issues into view: how are the benefits and burdens of data use distributed, how can data research empower communities, who has legitimate decision‐making capacity? I propose that a public health ethics framework – based on public benefit, proportionality, equity, trust and accountability – provides more appropriate tools for assessing the ethical uses of health data. The main advantage of a public health approach for data research is that it is more likely to foster debate about power, justice and equity and to highlight the complexity of deciding when data use is in the public interest.     

Transfer of tools and food between groups of tufted capuchins (Cebus apella)

This research examined tool and food transfer between two groups of tufted capcuhin monkeys (Cebus apella). Subjects in one group transferred stones to subjects in a second group who in turn used the stones as cutting tools and then transferred food to subjects in the first group. Aspects of the capuchins' behavior are similar to those described for food-sharing in Cebus, cooperative tool use in Papio, and tool and food exchange in Pan. We propose that tool use and food-sharing facilitate tool and food transfer between captive groups of Cebus apella. Am. J. Primatol. 43:33–41, 1997. © 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

‘Antlers inside’: are the skull structures of beaked whales (Cetacea: Ziphiidae) used for echoic imaging and visual display?

Skulls of many living and extinct beaked whales (Ziphiidae) contain various bizarre bone and tooth structures. Many of them show sexual dimorphism in their skull anatomy: males have bizarre skull structures, whereas females do not. Opinions differ as to what the function of these structures might be. Some believe that these are weapons; others, that they are sound transmitters. This article argues that these structures are the means of visual display. Many of the bizarre bone structures of beaked whales are not exposed like ‘visuals’ of terrestrial tetrapods, but are located deep in soft tissues. Nevertheless, toothed whales recognize objects (including three‐dimensional bodies), using echolocation. So, along with visual means, they can ‘see’ and ‘show’ their internal bone structures with echoic imaging and use them as informational sources in social interactions and in individual or species recognition. © 2014 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2014, 113 , 510–515.     

Orientalism in the Documentary Representation of Culture

Structured around the idea that there is a non-linguistic and cross-cultural, possibly biological, basis on which the understanding of pictures rests, this essay looks at the ways whereby images in documentary films challenge the notion of cultural difference. Drawing on Said's Orientalism [1978] and its impact on the basic assumptions of anthropologists, the essay stresses Said's relevance to documentary film theorists, and discusses the work of visual anthropologists and filmmakers influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the phenomenology of perception. Discussion suggests that the kind of knowledge disclosed by revelatory films represents an important answer to one of the fundamental epistemological issues that Said does not take up in Orientalism, namely the question of the materialization of an “authentic human encounter” not subjugated to the dead book. The essay implies that we should have no objection in principle to the self/other dichotomy when it is used intelligently.     

Interoceptive Focus Shapes the Experience of Time

The perception of time is a fundamental part of human experience. Recent research suggests that the experience of time emerges from emotional and interoceptive (bodily) states as processed in the insular cortex. Whether there is an interaction between the conscious awareness of interoceptive states and time distortions induced by emotions has rarely been investigated so far. We aimed to address this question by the use of a retrospective time estimation task comparing two groups of participants. One group had a focus on interoceptive states and one had a focus on exteroceptive information while watching film clips depicting fear, amusement and neutral content. Main results were that attention to interoceptive processes significantly affected subjective time experience. Fear was accompanied with subjective time dilation that was more pronounced in the group with interoceptive focus, while amusement led to a quicker passage of time which was also increased by interoceptive focus. We conclude that retrospective temporal distortions are directly influenced by attention to bodily responses. These effects might crucially interact with arousal levels. Sympathetic nervous system activation affecting memory build-up might be the decisive factor influencing retrospective time judgments. Our data substantially extend former research findings underscoring the relevance of interoception for the effects of emotional states on subjective time experience.     

Prevalence and Patterns of Tobacco Use in Bangladesh from 2009 to 2012: Evidence from International Tobacco Control (ITC) Study

Background

Smoking and passive smoking are collectively the biggest preventable cause of death in Bangladesh, with major public health burden of morbidity, disability, mortality and community costs. The available studies of tobacco use in Bangladesh, however, do not necessarily employ nationally representative samples needed to monitor the problem at a national scale. This paper examines the prevalence and patterns of tobacco use among adults in Bangladesh and the changes over time using large nationally representative comparable surveys.

Methods

Using data from two enumerations of the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Bangladesh Project conducted in 2009 and 2012, prevalence estimates are obtained for all tobacco products by socio-economic determinants and sample types of over 90,000 individuals drawn from over 30,000 households. Household level sample weights are used to obtain nationally representative prevalence estimates and standard errors. Statistical tests of difference in the estimates between two time periods are based on a logistic regression model that accounts for the complex sampling design. Using a multinomial logit model, the time trend in tobacco use status is identified to capture the effects of macro level determinants including changes in tobacco control policies.

Results

Between 2009 and 2012, overall tobacco use went down from 42.4% to 36.3%. The decline is more pronounced with respect to smokeless tobacco use than smoking. The prevalence of exclusive cigarette smoking went up from 7.2% to 10.6%; exclusive bidi smoking remained stable at around 2%; while smoking both cigarette and bidi went down from 4.6% to 1.8%; exclusive smokeless tobacco use went down from 20.2% to 16.9%; and both smokeless tobacco use and smoking went down from 8.4% to 5.1%. In general, the prevalence of tobacco use is higher among men, increases from younger to older age groups, and is higher among poorer people. Smoking prevalence is the highest among the slum population, followed by the tribal population, the national population and the border area population, suggesting greater burden of tobacco use among the disadvantaged groups.

Conclusions

The overall decline in tobacco use can be viewed as a structural shift in the tobacco market in Bangladesh from low value products such as bidi and smokeless tobacco to high value cigarettes, which is expected with the growth in income and purchasing power of the general population. Despite the reduction in overall tobacco use, the male smoking prevalence in Bangladesh is still high at 37%. The world average of daily smoking among men is 31.1%. The Tobacco Control Act 2005 and the Amendment have yet to make a significant impact in curbing tobacco usage in Bangladesh. The findings in this paper further suggest that the tobacco control policies in Bangladesh need to include targeted interventions to restrain the use of particular types of tobacco products among specific demographic and socio-economic groups of the population, such as smoked tobacco among men, smokeless tobacco among women, and both smoked and smokeless tobacco among those living in rural areas, those in low socio-economic status and those belonging to the tribal and the slum population.     

Slashing the Complacent Eye: Luis Buñuel and the Surrealist Documentary

Land Without Bread [1932] has always been misunderstood. The film incorporates both documentary and Surrealist traditions and has been considered highly problematic as an ethnographic film. Viewers are still perplexed and even outraged by the insensitivity of the portrayal of the residents of Las Hurdes, a remote region in the western interior of Spain where living conditions in the 1930s resembled those in the Third World. In this article I examine the history of the film's creation in the contexts of both documentary/ethnographic film and Surrealism. I argue that the point of the film is to mock both the complacent viewer and filmmakers who construct colonialist documents; and also that ethnographic filmmaking today still has not fully rid itself of an inherent colonialism that has always characterized the genre.     

Film and Archaeology in the Indigenous and Industrial American West

Phenomenological and postcolonial archaeologies of film bracket the artifactual images and historical narratives in two films depicting hydraulic industrialization in the 20th-century Native American West of the United States. The documentary Echoes of Yesterday [Ball and Gibby 1939, 1979] consists of industrial and archaeological footage shot in 1939 and remixed in 1979 which depicts the building of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, the relocating of indigenous villages there, and disinterring of Native American dead. The independent magical realism film Northfork [Polish 2003] is based on the building of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River in Montana and the subsequent relocation of people and graves in that area. Both films animate the historic Modern period (1934–1975) and present the cultural losses, nostalgia and redemption attendant in a transition to a Supermodern period (1975–present).     

Ecstasy,Choreography and Re-Enactment: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Filming States of Trance and Spirit Possession in Postwar Southern Italy

States of trance and spirit possession have inspired the modernist imagination perhaps more than anything else, as they typically exceed the limits of visual representation. This article investigates different approaches to coping with these challenges, focusing on the works of a group of Italian documentary filmmakers, including Luigi di Gianni, Cecilia Mangini, and Gianfranco Mingozzi, who used a novel set of audiovisual techniques to explore ecstatic religious expressions in southern Italy in the postwar years. I look into the processes through which trance and possession rituals (e.g. Apulian tarantism) themselves have inspired and initiated innovations in audiovisual documentation by means of combining—or blurring the boundaries between—ethnographic and experimental modes of cinematic practice. Through highly stylized image/sound compositions including high-contrast lighting, wood-cut like silhouettes, montage, abstract sound effects and poetic, partly fictionalized commentary, as well as by consciously making use of re-enactments and staged encounters, these films contest both the realist-observational narrative and the focus on individuals otherwise prevalent in ethnographic filmmaking. Reading the Italian films against the backdrop of the earlier and contemporaneous, yet much better-known trance films of Maya Deren and Jean Rouch, the article argues that their antirealist audiovisual aesthetic fabricates a social aesthetic that raises sensitivity to human experience and fosters a radically humanist stance.     

Visual detection of filaria-specific IgG4 in urine using red-colored high density latex beads

The use of urine for the immunodiagnosis of lymphatic filariasis has a definite advantage: the sample collection is not invasive and thus well accepted by people. Urine-based ELISA to detect filaria-specific IgG4 has been used successfully. However, ELISA requires equipment such as a microplate reader, which is often not available in most endemic areas. We have developed a new visual immunodiagnosis that detects urinary IgG4 using red-colored latex beads (bead test). The sensitivity was 87.2% when ICT antigen test positive people were regarded as the standard (136/156), and the specificity was 97.2% with the non-endemic people in Japan and Bangladesh, and the urine ELISA negatives in Sri Lanka (1264/1300). In a prevalence study, the bead test could detect filarial infection more effectively than ICT test among young children in Sri Lanka, indicating the usefulness of the visual test in epidemiological studies.     

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the diagnosis of Wuchereria bancrofti infection using urine samples and its application in Bangladesh

In Sri Lanka, urine ELISA showed high sensitivity and specificity in detecting filaria-specific IgG4. It also produced much higher positive rates than antigen tests in prevalence studies with young children. In this study, we have confirmed the usefulness of urine ELISA in the field of Bangladesh. The ELISA detected 89 of 105 (85%) ICT antigen test positive subjects in endemic areas. With both ICT and microfilaria positives, the sensitivity was 97% (30/31). All of 104 ICT negative people in a non-endemic area were ELISA negative (100% specificity). In a prevalence study with 319 young children (5–10 years) from a low endemic area after five rounds of MDA, seven (2.2%) were detected by the present urine test, but only one (0.3%) by ICT (P = 0.075). The satisfactorily high sensitivity, 100% specificity and effective case detection among young ages along with scope for analyzing the titers will indicate urine ELISA to be an effective tool in the post-MDA surveys to confirm elimination or to detect resurgence in Bangladesh.     

Randomization inference with general interference and censoring

Interference occurs between individuals when the treatment (or exposure) of one individual affects the outcome of another individual. Previous work on causal inference methods in the presence of interference has focused on the setting where it is a priori assumed that there is “partial interference,” in the sense that individuals can be partitioned into groups wherein there is no interference between individuals in different groups. Bowers et al. (2012, Political Anal, 21, 97–124) and Bowers et al. (2016, Political Anal, 24, 395–403) consider randomization-based inferential methods that allow for more general interference structures in the context of randomized experiments. In this paper, extensions of Bowers et al. that allow for failure time outcomes subject to right censoring are proposed. Permitting right-censored outcomes is challenging because standard randomization-based tests of the null hypothesis of no treatment effect assume that whether an individual is censored does not depend on treatment. The proposed extension of Bowers et al. to allow for censoring entails adapting the method of Wang et al. (2010, Biostatistics, 11, 676–692) for two-sample survival comparisons in the presence of unequal censoring. The methods are examined via simulation studies and utilized to assess the effects of cholera vaccination in an individually randomized trial of 73 000 children and women in Matlab, Bangladesh.     

Chronicle of a summer and the editing of cinema‐verite

Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer is held up as an innovative, seminal “work in the formation of cinéma‐vérité, and has a central position in the development of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Although much has been written about fthis film, little attention has been paid to the film's construction. This paper examines ‘elements of the editing structure of Chronicle of a Summer both to consider how this “work was shaped given the constraints of its production and intended reception and to ¦ analyze a relatively neglected aspect of documentary film practice.     

Prevalence and incidence of Helicobacter pylori Infection in a healthy pediatric population in the Lisbon area

Background: Helicobacter pylori is mainly acquired in childhood. Although adult studies reported a high prevalence of H. pylori infection in Portugal, the actual rate in children remains unknown. This study aimed to determine the prevalence and the incidence of H. pylori infection in an asymptomatic pediatric population of the Lisbon area and to correlate prevalence with sociodemographic determinants. Materials and Methods: Helicobacter pylori infection was determined by stool antigen test in 844 asymptomatic children (age 0–15 years; 49.4% boys). For the incidence study, H. pylori‐negative children in the prevalence study were followed‐up every 6 months over a 3‐year period. Results: The global prevalence of H. pylori infection was 31.6%, increasing with age (19.9, 37.0 and 51.5%, in age groups 0–5, 6–10, and 11–15, respectively), but was similar among genders (34.5% in boys and 28.4% in girls). Older age and attendance of nursery/kindergarten during preschool constituted independent risk factors. The overall estimated incidence was 11.6 per 100 child‐years (CY). Although 47.5% of children acquired H. pylori infection before 5 years of age, the mean age of acquisition was 6.3. The incidence of infection was similar among the three age groups (11.5, 13.0, and 10.5 per 100 CY, in age groups 0–5, 6–10, and 11–15, respectively). Conclusions: The prevalence of H. pylori infection in the Portuguese pediatric population is still high. Although this study confirmed that the highest acquisition rate occurs at young age, it showed that in high‐prevalence populations, older children can also acquire H. pylori infection at a rate similar to that of young children.     

Chimpanzee ‘folk physics’: bringing failures into focus

Differences between individuals are the raw material from which theories of the evolution and ontogeny of cognition are built. For example, when 4-year-old children pass a test requiring them to communicate the content of another''s falsely held belief, while 3-year-olds fail, we know that something must change over the course of the third year of life. In the search for what develops or evolves, the typical route is to probe the extents and limits of successful individuals'' ability. Another is to focus on those that failed, and find out what difference or lack prevented them from passing the task. Recent research in developmental psychology has harnessed individual differences to illuminate the cognitive mechanisms that emerge to enable success. We apply this approach to explaining some of the failures made by chimpanzees when using tools to solve problems. Twelve of 16 chimpanzees failed to discriminate between a complete and a broken tool when, after being set down, the ends of the broken one were aligned in front of them. There was a correlation between performance on this aligned task and another in which after being set down, the centre of both tools was covered, suggesting that the limiting factor was not the representation of connection, but memory or attention. Some chimpanzees that passed the aligned task passed a task in which the location of the broken tool was never visible but had to be inferred.