BLURRED BOUNDARIES

By Jane and Peter Schneider, professors emeritus Columbia University, New York. Specialists in Sicilian culture and society:

Tuesday April 16th 2020. “We’ve just read your article in Visual Anthropology and think it is compelling.  Your idea of juxtaposing several films that come at antimafia from different angles really works!  It gives the reader/viewer so much more to go on in understanding what Sicilians are up against.  Peter and I cannot wait to see the films, which we assume are on your website”

May 6th 2020. “We’ve now seen Scorched Earth, as well as A Town in Sicily, Casa Nostra, and Pawns in a Game, which is set in Florence.  Your talents as an ethnographer are evident in all of them.  Indeed, they could not have been made had you not won the trust of all kinds of Sicilians -- criminals, corrupt politicians, courageous souls who denounce the pizzo and suffer the consequences, committed anti-mafia activists.  Brava!  Please keep us informed of future work.

We saw the Olive Pickers a couple of days ago and thought it was a stunning film.  It is hard to wrap one’s mind around the experiences of migrant laborers, their precariousness in today’s world, but your movie helped by presenting such a vivid picture of what they are up against.  It also documents the efforts of Libera, including Savatore Ingui whom we’ve met, to mediate the terrible abuses.  

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MY EYES AS A STRANGER (television version of Pawns in a Game)

To be added

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CAUGHT IN A WEB - a trilogy: Village Heritage; Heart of the Village; Talking to Each Other

2020 Paul Henley Beyond the ‘disappearing world’ – and back again :

Over the course of the ensuing decade, Channel 4 supported a number of documentary series that were ‘para-ethnographic’ in the sense defined in the Introduction to this part of the book. That is, although they were not based on academic ethnographic research, they nevertheless possessed a certain degree of ethnographicness as a result of having been made in the course of a prolonged period of immersive cohabitation with the subjects and also because they explored the multiple connections between practices, relations and ideas that underpinned the social worlds of those subjects.2 

These para-ethnographic series took a variety of different forms. A particularly interesting example was Caught in a Web, a series in three parts, each a single television hour in duration, which compared and contrasted life in a traditional village in rural Dorset (or more strictly speaking a cluster of small hamlets) with life in Villes-sur-Auzon, a village of Haute Provence in France.The director was Toni de Bromhead, a film-maker trained at the NFTS where she had been greatly influenced by ColinYoung and his ideas about Observational Cinema. Prior to attending the NFTS, de Bromhead had also studied social anthropology at the London School of Economics, where she had encountered the ethnographic literature on the Mediterranean 

region. By special dispensation from the technicians’ union, she was allowed to direct and shoot Caught in a Web herself, supported only by a sound recordist, in the manner recommended by proponents of Observational Cinema.The series was commissioned not long after the launch of Channel 4 in 1982, though it was not actually broadcast until 1986. 

As de Bromhead has described in an account published in 2014, her explicit concern was to find a means ‘to communicate anthropological concepts through film in a non-expository way’.While she appreciated the methods of Observational Cinema as a means of achieving an engagement with the subjects which could then be passed on to the viewer, she had doubts about its effectiveness in communicating more abstract analytical concepts about the principles embedded in social life. At the same time, she wanted to avoid heavy-handed explanatory commentary, so had turned to the idea of comparison between the two villages as a way of making audiences aware of these embedded principles without her having to identify them explicitly by verbal means.3 

The two villages contrasted in Caught in a Web were chosen on entirely contingent pragmatic grounds: it happened that de Bromhead’s mother had grown up in Dorset and had later moved toVilles-sur-Auzon, so de Bromhead fille had a ready-made entrée to both villages. In cutting the films, de Bromhead wisely avoided the temptation to switch back and forth between the two communities in the course of a single programme. Instead, in the first two films, the first half deals with the Dorset village and the second with Villes. In the third film, each of the two communities is shown watching the material shot in the other and the subjects’ comments are then invited, mostly through interviews of varying formality, sometimes as individuals, but often in small groups. In effect, the subjects acted as the consultant ethnographers, reflecting on their own way life at the same time as they comment on the life of the other village. 

Although they had been selected on an entirely fortuitous basis, the two villages presented in Caught in a Web offered a fascinating ethnographic contrast.The Dorset village is portrayed as being in a quasi-feudal situation: social life is dominated both economically and culturally by the families living in the manor houses while the village church plays an important part in the community, though more for social reasons than on account of personal religious conviction. By contrast,Villes is shown to be a staunchly republican community with a socialist tradition: the mairie, the town hall, is the centre of social life and there is a strong ethos of egalitarianism. Although some members of the community are practising Catholics, there is much anti-clerical sentiment, funerals are often entirely secular and the church building itself is in a state of decay. 

What the two villages have in common, however, is a passion for hunting, though here too there are major differences. In Dorset, hunting takes various forms that testify to class differences: working people hunt rabbits with the aid of ferrets while the elite engage in the traditional mounted foxhunt, or in pheasant shooting, with working people providing ancillary support in both cases as ‘beaters’. In the post-hunt feasting, social differences are reinforced in Dorset, with the elite and the working people eating and drinking separately, and with each group saying that they prefer it that way (figure 12.1). In Provence, by contrast, the principal prey is wild boar and it is an altogether more egalitarian affair, with social differences being actively minimised in the after-hunt feasting. But here too, there are exclusions, though on the basis of gender rather than class. For in Provence, hunting is an entirely masculine activity while in Dorset both men and women participate, albeit with certain restrictions on the use of guns by even the most elite women. 

As de Bromhead readily acknowledges, Caught in a Web was not based on academic field research. She spent ten weeks in each community, which although very long for a television production, is still relatively short by academic standards and she confesses to doing no literature research prior to the shoot. She also acknowledges that if she had spent more time living in the two villages, particularly in Villes, she might have been able to draw a more fine-grained comparison that included a focus on gender as well as class differentiation. But regardless of these limitations, Caught in a Web represents a unique comparative project informed by an undoubted ethnographic sensibility. 

THE LISTENER. to be added