20 anos OPOLOGY R H T N A L A U IS V CENTRE FOR
GRANADA
Ideas about beauty in a Brazilian favela; the Israeli documentation of Palestine; an Italian nun in Guinea-Bissau; the sensory experience of Tokyo; the importance of reading in German culture. Old age in Romania; and closer to home, burlesque dancers in the northwest of England. These are but a few of the topics covered in the graduation projects of the students who completed the MA in Visual Anthropology last year, the twentieth cohort to do so. Meanwhile students on the PhD programme completed their theses on topics as varied as Angolan migrants in Lisbon, hip hop in Cuba and indigenous rights in Paraguay. Many of these projects, though not all, involved the making of a documentary film based on the training received at the Centre. The basic principles of this training have not changed since the Centre started. Everybody does everything: research, production, shooting, sound recording, editing. In the first semester the students work in teams of three and make three
Visual Anthropology Manchester, Inglaterra
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training films on topics of particular importance to anthropologists: a technical process, an oral testimony (a.k.a.‘an interview’) and a social event. All these films are debriefed collectively, so that the students can learn both from one another’s triumphs and from their mistakes. This has the additional benefit of creating a wonderful esprit de corps. The student group is currently capped at twenty-four, usually supplemented by one or two doctoral students. After the first semester, it divides into two equal ‘pathways’. One of these offers further film training,which involves students working in pairs on a film about a personal relationship. Over the summer,working alone, they will produce a thirty-minute documentary as a graduation project. They can go anywhere in the world to do it, provided they get their tutor’s approval and can find a way to pay for it themselves. The other pathway,which started in 2004, opens out onto a broader field. It also involves practical projects, but in documentary photography and the recording of soundscapes rather than film. At the same time, it explores a broad range of ideas, including those developed by artists as well as by academic anthropologists, about the use of audiovisualmedia to represent sensory experience. It culminates in a three-day fieldtrip to the formermilitary installation at Orford Ness in Suffolk, accompanied by artists who have previously worked on the site. In their graduation projects, students on this pathway are encouraged to use a range of different media. Amidst the projects listed above, a number have involved striking combinations of sounds, images and texts. All this is a far cry from the first year of the MA, when there were only 8 students all but one of whom was from the UK. Today they come from all over the world and are roughly equally divided between UK, other EU and Overseas students, mostly from the Americas. Back then, apart from a part-time secretary, I was the only member of staff. To make a phone call, I had to go into the adjacent office. Sadly, the secretarial post was recently a victim of a University-wide reorganization. But now there are three full-time