Ethnography and cinema in anthropological research. Reflections from the Transgang project

Abstract

This text presents some reflections on the incorporation of cinematographic practices in anthropological research developed in the TRANSGANG project, whose aim is to study youth gangs as mediating agents in twelve cities in southern Europe, northern Africa and the Americas. The project includes visual anthropology workshops in which young people from some of these cities will participate, as well as the elaboration of three documentary films about the gangs seen from within, by three directors selected after an international public competition. Although film and anthropology share a long history of fascinations and reciprocal exchanges, there have been frequent tensions in the relationship between the two. In the text we set out how, from our research, we try to build a joint collaboration between the two disciplines through fieldwork. We believe in the cognitive potential of the exchange between cinema and ethnography, which can contaminate and enrich each other to produce (and transmit) a more complex knowledge of the realities we study. We will also refer to the bureaucratic, academic and ethical dilemmas involved in audiovisual production and its contribution to the generation of knowledge about subaltern social groups.