Friday, May 31, 2019

New Film: "A Wanderer's Japan" by Justin Risley



My student from last semester, Justin Risley, recently finished this short film about his experiences in Japan from January to May, 2019. I see it as a very nice collage of ethnographic visual and sound bites and a great example of visual anthropology. Check it out! And you can check out Justin's other work at

https://www.justinrisley.com/

Always so cool to hear from my students and see their visual projects!

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Gonzo Anthropology Lives!

I recently received a surprising and wonderful message from filmmaker/multimodal ethnographer/doctoral student Taylor Genovese about his new article, Going Gonzo: toward a performative practice in multimodal ethnography in the journal entanglements (2019), 2(1): 97-110. The article can be found on-line at the following URL:

https://entanglementsjournal.org/going-gonzo/

Genovese writes: I just wanted to send you an email to thank you for paving the way in formulating gonzo anthropology. When I was in my MA program, a friend and I formed an independent study group to think through “gonzo ethnography” using your paper as a foundation. Since my undergrad, I was drawn to visual anthropology since I worked in the local film industry in Tucson, AZ before going back to school. I was interested in how to merge gonzo approaches within the domains of the visual and performance.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I have finally published a working paper looking at gonzo anthropology through the lens of multimodal ethnography/performance. I wanted to share it with you since a) you were a big inspiration for my thinking through this; and b) I wanted you to know that the gonzo project is not dead in anthropology!


Wow! I am truly shocked that someone not only found my obscure article but that they wanted to build upon it. Thank you so much, Taylor! And I urge others to read Taylor's article. Check out his web page as well.

https://www.taylorgenovese.com/#

And in case anyone else is interested, you can find my Towards Gonzo Anthropology: Ethnography as Cultural Performance in the Journal of Inquiry and Research (2013), (98): 55-70. URL:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/147853006.pdf

If you want a small taste of my original essay, you can find it here:

http://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/2006/11/gonzo-anthropology-circa-1995.html