Film Series: ANTI-ETHNOGRAPHY

Anti-Ethnography is a selection of video works which examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse, and unveils the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline.

For indigenous peoples the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against us since the device’s inception. Anthropology's obsession with preserving images of our “vanishing” cultures, through ethnographic films or archives filled with boxes of our ancestors' remains, has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress indigenous peoples.

By relegating our identities to the past, and forcing us to authenticate ourselves through this past, our existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines indigenous agency.

The anthropologist's encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that for indigenous communities tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle, and finally achieved under conditions of genuine self-­determination.