Chicken Shit and Ash: A Visit to Paradise
Huhnerdreck and Asche, Austria, 1997/98, colour, Beta/SP PAL, 68′
Original language: Nepali, Tamang. By Karl Prossliner, Gabriele Tautscher and Peter Friess
Anthropology was born in sin and still struggles to absolve itself. Self-reflexivity and all attempts to overcome the circumstances of its birth, and transform the practice of anthropology into a more egalitarian rendition of other cultures are still ridden with problems. New techniques, some of them bordering on the gimmicky, surface in anthropology as ways of writing culture. From participant observation, to thick description, to letting the 'object' speak, various methods have been attempted and advocated in the effort to rectify the hierarchy between the anthropologist and the subject.
Since imbalance is inscribed into the practice of the anthropologist (literate and more powerful) observing another set of human beings (illiterate and relatively powerless), it is seldom that such sophistications of method in fieldwork and narrative technique manage to overcome the inherent problem.
Anthropological brilliance usually goes hand in hand with a developed individual sensitivity. It is the successful meeting of this challenge of subjectivity that redeems anthropology, and enables it to express itself in numerous ways—in monographs, photographs, diaries and films. Film is a particularly useful medium of anthropological expression, but it is also a tricky one for obvious reasons. Cinematic anthropology must resist more temptations than its traditional counterparts.