Working, Thinking and Knowing with Audio-Visual Media in Music Worlds
Penelope Moore, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester
This paper explores how doing anthropology with visual and aural media both formed and transformed my research with musicians in Vienna. During fieldwork, I engaged with musicians’ worlds using video and photography alongside more traditional techniques of participant observation. Since then, I have edited a film alongside writing-up my research. My work with visual media has therefore, been integral to my anthropology. The paper will explore some ethnography (written and filmic) that emerged through this engagement and the implications of this approach for my work. I would like to argue the case for an anthropology that engages with human experience and knowledge through lively experiment and explorations with different techniques and technologies because they open up different ways of knowing. In particular, I would like to show how working with a video camera allows for a different engagement with space and people in place, a more material thinking. Also, the filmic thinking involved in processes of making film (like juxtaposition and montage for example), can take us beyond a communication of knowledge and experience to include an active thinking through research questions in ways that constructively work together with more traditional ways of knowing in anthropology. The use of audio-visual technologies helped me to explore the intersection of musicians’ sociality, music making and place in ways that brought me closer to the experience of musical living for professional musicians.
