Karl Andersson

Anthropologist

Unreal Boys discussed at SIEF 2021

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My film Unreal Boys was selected for the audio-visual programme of the 15th congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore “in” Helsinki (online) in June 2021. The theme of the congress was “breaking the rules”, which sort of aligns with the theme of my research.

After the screening I participated in a roundtable discussion called Mediating Empowerment, a title that I think captures quite well how my research participants use the “medium” of comics to empower themselves.

Here is the recording of my part of the roundtable (shared by the organisers with a Creative Commons license):

What I watched at RAI Film Festival 2021

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The film festival and conference of the Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK just ended. I was invited to present my master’s thesis in the panel Empirical Art, but my film was not part of the programme. So for the past ten days I watched loads of films, some talks, and also participated in a few discussions. I’m exhausted and inspired!

Main competition

  • One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), 1h 53m – Canada
  • Ayouni (2020), 1h 15m – Syria
  • A Colombian Family (2020), 1h 20m – Colombia
  • Half Elf (2020), 1h 4m – Iceland
  • Oyate (2019), 1h 12m – USA
  • Persistence (2019), 54 min – Mexico
  • Survivors (2018), 1h 24m – Sierra Leone
  • The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019), 1h 27m – China

Already watched The Body Won’t Close (2020), 1h 14m – Brazil. Skipped the remaining five films.

Werbner Award

  • Broken Gods (2019), 42 min – India
  • Suspension (2019), 1h 13m – Colombia

Already watched A New Era (2019), 1h 11m – China. Skipped the remaining five films.

Shorts

Shorts 01 – Creative lives

  • Making Worlds Otherwise | 2020 | 28 min – Australia
  • (The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze | 2020 | 27 min – UK – already watched)
  • Nobody’s Metaphor | 2020 | 30 min – UK
  • IntranQu’îllités | 2019 | 20 min – Haiti

Shorts 03 – Pleasure

  • Come Here Come Here | 2019 | 28 min – UK/Netherlands
  • (Motels | 2020 | 27 min – Colombia – already watched)
  • Oink! | 2020 | 22 min – UK/Germany

Shorts 05 – Migration at the crossroads 2

  • Skrana | 2019 | 13 min – USA
  • Unwritten Letters | 2020 | 59 min – Italy/Syria

Shorts 06 – Animals | Humans | Ritual

  • Lives and Deaths Between Ebbs and Flows | 2019 | 14 min – Taiwan
  • Tajen | 2017 | 30 min – Indonesia (West Bali)
  • (Okinami | 2019 | 24 min – Japan – already watched)
  • Wild Honey: Caring for bees in a divided land | 2019 | 30 min – Indonesia (Timor)

Shorts 10 – Environmental crisis

  • Mountain of Trash | 2020 | 20 min – Thailand
  • The People Next to Coal Power Plant | 2019 | 23 min – South Korea
  • Don’t Let the sunny weather fool you | 2019 | 27 min – Philippines

Global Racialisations shorts

  • The Changing Same | 2018 | 22 min – USA
  • (Emails to My Little Sister | 2018 | 35 min – Germany/Ethiopia – already watched)
  • Cry Out Loud | 2019 | 43 min – India

Decolonising the Archive

  • VHS Diaries (2020), 1h 12m – Iran

Decolonising the Archive shorts

  • A New England Document | 2020 | 16 min – USA (Namibia)
  • New York Just Another City | 2019 | 18 min – USA (Brazil)
  • Faces Voices | 2019 | 18 min – USA (Nigeria, Sierra Leone)
  • Sight Unseen | 2019 | 20 min – Italy/Libya
  • This Is A Majlis: A Sound Essay | 2020 | 17 min – Pakistan

Talks

  • Global racialisations – Q&A with directors
  • The Visual Scholarship Initiative Emory University
  • Interview with André Singer
  • Filmmaking for Fieldwork
  • Honouring Professor Marcus Banks

Panels

  • P12a – Immersive Ethnography, 1h 1m
  • P21 – Crisis through comics: a roundtable discussion on graphic anthropology, 25 min
  • P26a – Empirical art, 54 min
  • P26b – Empirical art, 1h 12m
  • P26c – Empirical art, 60 min
  • P26d – Empirical art, 50 min

Bonus

In the middle of the festival I attended a very interesting seminar on dōjinshi culture at the University of Vienna:

  • u:japan lectures: Transcultural Potentials of dōjinshi Culture

Despite the screen fatigue, I must say that it’s so nice that important events like the RAI conference (and previously EASA and later SIEF) and the Japan lecture go online, so that more people can participate. I think we’ll have to rethink what a conference presentation and discussion should be like, though. Some of them were so hard to follow – they need to be shorter and clearer when online, in my opinion.

Memories of Days of Ethnographic Film 2021

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I went all in and watched all the films at DEF 2021. Except the two I had already seen (The Chateau and A New Era), and my own film Unreal Boys of course. So 17 films in total:

I was touched the most by The Daring Young Girl on the Flying Trapeze, a sensitive film about a woman with muscular dystrophy, who in a way frees herself through her art. She regretted some choices she had made earlier in life because she didn’t think she would live past 20. Now she’s 65. I think I will always remember these moments.

My favourite was probably Flox, which put me right in the middle of the chaos of a minibus station in Cairo.

China in Ethiopia was interesting and gave me a detailed view, from a Chinese perspective, of a larger development in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa. Tobacco Memories and Zagros also captured larger systems by showing us otherwise unseen parts of the production and manufacturing of tobacco and carpets in Bulgaria and Iran respectively. Likewise, The Days After was ostensibly about alternative farming in France, but captured so much more in terms of suspicion of what diverges from the normal.

To Save a Language surprised in becoming a portrait of a passionate linguist. And I loved the mixture of art and anthropology in The Fantastic – fantastic visuals!

All in all an interesting and inspiring mix of films. I think my film fit well in that it “brought us some variety” (as the organiser said) and showed how one can research a sensitive topic.

The organisers were kind to send us the Q&A’s for our personal use, so here is mine:

Unreal Boys film

Watch my film at Days of Ethnographic Film 2021

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My graduation film Unreal Boys will be shown at the film festival Days of Ethnographic Film in Ljubljana – but online this year.

This means you can watch it and a bunch of other interesting films – at home and for free! There will also be a prerecorded Q&A with the filmmakers, including myself.

The films will be available from 3 to 6 March 2021. You need to register, and a password will be sent to you the day before the festival. Just follow the instructions here:

This is my first film festival and I can’t stress enough how proud I am to be featured! I’m so happy for everyone involved: Solomon, Andy, and my brave protagonists. Kudos to DEF for their fierce selection – I wish we could be there in person!

LaKeith Stanfield as Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma (2014)

White history week

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I made myself a little film festival this week, as one must do in the month of November. It became centered around the civil rights movement.

Gimme Shelter (1970)

Our lecturer in Editing forum had recommended the Rolling Stones tour documentary Gimme Shelter because of how it focuses on another person than the obvious one, namely the drummer Charlie Watts instead of Mick Jagger. Well, it doesn’t really, but I get her point. The film came to be about a stabbing that occurred during an free concert that was improvised at the Altamont racing track in California. We actually get to see the stabbing, or at least the first stab.

Throughout the film I had the uncanny feeling of just knowing how it would turn out despite knowing no details, namely that the stabbing would have a race aspect. And it did. A white Hells Angel “guard” – since the organisers had hired Hells Angels as guards in return for beer – stabbed a black teenager to death: Meredith Hunter. I found this article about the boy:

Yusko quotes Saul Austerlitz who wrote a book about the incident:

The story of Altamont was, as so many American stories were, about the fundamental trauma of race. A black man had gone somewhere white men did not want him to be, and had never come home.

Saul Austerlitz: Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont

This had me watch lot 63, grave C, a short film from 2006 by Sam Green, in which he visits Meredith Hunter’s grave, which does not even have a headstone. Watch it here:

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

Triggered by Gimme Shelter, I finally watched Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin on Netflix. I didn’t know much about Baldwin, despite having read Giovanni’s Room in my twenties (without knowing he was black). The film is about three friends of Baldwin who had been killed: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Marthin Luther King. I didn’t know much about the first two. (Monday.)

Malcolm X (1992)

So this made me watch Spike Lee’s Malcolm X from 1992, which I think was extremely well done, combining historical events with current ones in a way that became very powerful. I didn’t know anything about Malcolm X, but the film had been on my list for quite a while. It’s three and a half hours long. Denzel Washington as Malcolm X is beyond brilliant, dazzling! (Tuesday.)

Who Killed Malcolm X? (2020)

The natural follow up was the Netflix mini-series Who Killed Malcolm X? from 2020, which confirms the authorities’ involvement in his assassination. Very interesting, but in my opinion not necessary to drag out into six 43 minute episodes. Spike Lee’s 3.5 hours were justified (yes, every single minute!), Netflix’s 4.3 hours were not – should have been half that time. But I guess this is the way Netflix does things. (Wednesday and Thursday.)

Selma (2014)

After the films on Malcolm X, I decided to switch to Martin Luther King and the feature film Selma from 2014, about the protests in Selma, Alabama, 1965. It started off a bit amateurish (yes, I’m looking at you, high resolution explosion in slow motion and flying body parts of little children) but it grew to the film that actually moved me the most, or maybe it’s just because I watched it yesterday. I was not convinced by the main actor David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King. Sure, he had his moments, but whereas Denzel Washington was Malcolm X, David Oyelowo acted Martin Luther King. (Saturday.)

Selma is done by Ava DuVernay, whose 2019 mini-series When They See Us I watched in June 2019.

LaKeith Stanfield

A name I take with me from the events in Selma is Jimmie Lee Jackson, the 27-year-old unarmed deacon who was killed by the police. Jackson was portrayed by LaKeith Stanfield (see featured image of the two of them). I didn’t even remember him as the main actor in Sorry to Bother You (2018, watched in October 2019), but he made an impression as a side character in Get Out (2017, watched in April 2019). And right after Selma, he turns up as Snoop Dogg in:

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

So this was the finale of my White History Week film festival: Straight Outta Compton from 2015 is a more contemporary take on the same violence and segregation that was the more direct focus of the other movies. A more indirect and distorted version, as reflected in gang violence and gangsta rap? But at the same time with the very direct presence of classical police violence. (Saturday.)

White history

Why “white history” instead of “black history”?

Because the race problem in America is a white problem. I think Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay and NWA would have preferred to just live a good life in peace and quiet. To be seen as equals. But they were not. (The line that keeps surfacing days after I watched Malcolm X is “I am a man!”, yelled by Malcolm’s father as their house was burned down by whites.) Their activism and artistic expressions were the logical results of being seen as subhuman. It was whites who insisted (insist) on the existence of blacks as a category, maybe as a way to understand themselves as another (and better) category – the mirror-image of a black-and-white binary. Meanwhile, the rest of the world pays the price for their insecurity and public self-therapy. In other words, blacks were invented by whites, and race issues are therefore related to whiteness rather than blackness.

Tim Ingold: Lines: A Brief History (Routledge)

Lines: A Brief History by Tim Ingold

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I like Tim Ingold a lot. I loved Anthropology: Why it matters, and used three of his works for my master’s thesis. I discovered him through his text about “the church” that we read for Space and Place, and which kept surfacing in my mind. So I was very happy to be gifted Lines: A Brief History from S.

Like Ingold, I am very fascinated by lines. In fact, if the book was not so academical, I think it should have been titled I love lines, which would have covered both Ingold’s subjective approach and his passion. But sure, it’s also a history of them, the lines.

Lines was not what I had expected. It was more philosophical musings on lines than the sensorial aspect that I remember from Making, and which would have had more relevance for my own research.

Funnily enough, I found the first chapter, which is only tangentially related to lines, the most interesting. According to Ingold, singing and talking were earlier in history not seen as separate entities, as they are today in the modern West. Ingold’s interest is thereby to trace the line that separates them, and find out how it emerged.

To me, this quest reminded a lot of the theory of “the gap” in Tom Boellstorff’s research on virtual worlds, and of Deleuze’s “division”. Maybe this gap or division is so central in so many theories because we as humans are so attached to a binary way of thinking? This in itself is interesting.

A reader called Marc wrote on Goodreads:

What also always bothers me in the work of anthropologists is the antagonism they at all costs want to prove between Western modernity and traditional cultures, with usually a very negative undertone regarding modernity. Also Ingold follows that line a bit; at times I even had the impression that I was reading a downright anti-modernist manifesto.

I also found myself wanting to ask Ingold if he was suggesting we become the “wayfarers” that he seems to hail (but who are extinct today), rather than the “navigators” who use lines as pure transport links between connections. The book itself and my reading it are perfect examples of this so criticised modernity, aren’t they? (Come to think of it, Ingold’s style, in all his texts, are definitely leaning towards the “wayfarer” – maybe that is by design.)

Ingold writes on the last page:

If the straight line was an icon of modernity, then the fragmented line seems to be emerging as an equally powerful icon of postmodernity.

P. 172

I think this is spot on, and shows how well the line analogy works for capturing our society. (Because in a way, that’s what this is all about.) The fragmented line made me think of Azuma Hiroki’s analysis in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, which I read in Bahir Dar two years ago and which opened my eyes to what postmodernity (rather than postmodernism) really is. I would love to read a follow-up book on the postmodern line, since this book is focused on the pre-modern and modern ones.