Call for Papers: 2010 American Anthropological Association Meeting/
Society for Visual Anthropology

“Perception, Production and Circulation: Sensory Ethnography through Media”

Key Words: sensory ethnography, media production, anthropology of the senses, aesthetics, practice, circulation, affect

Session Abstract:
This panel is organized by graduate students at Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab in conjunction with the launch of a new academic journal of sensory ethnography. Selected projects/papers will have the opportunity to be published in the first edition of the Journal of Sensory Ethnography (working title).

Through this panel we aim to recognize and problematize the relationship between theoretical abstraction and material concreteness, to reimagine the relationship between sensing, knowing, and thinking, and to reexamine the implications of this for ethnographic media. "Sensory ethnography" holds promises of engaged scholarship that explores the evocative and representative, the affective and effective, the feeling and the meaning of salient features of everyday life.

Today the potential for innumerable combinations of media promises innovative modes of producing, transmitting, circulating and generating ethnographic material. This panel seeks to discuss these various modes and mediums vis-à-vis its relevance to improving our understanding of culturally mediated apprehension of sensoria. Submitted abstracts may include but are not limited to paper presentations, video, audio recording, and multimedia projects with a goal to elaborate the capacity of these modes for critical engagement with the emerging scholarship of sensory ethnography. Panel abstracts can explore (but are not limited to) such themes as:

- image production and circulation
- senses and religion
- senses and the city
- memory
- place-making
- affect and publics
- senses of home
- sound/soundscapes
- senses and the built environment
- senses and gender
- media and perception
- ethnographic methodologies/ethics/research
- sensory engagement.

Please submit abstracts, no later than March 26th, to:

Julia Yezbick yezbick@fas.harvard.edu and Aryo Danusiri danusiri@fas.harvard.edu

Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, France)
2010, April 9th and 10th.
http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/manifestations-scientifiques/colloques-et-symposiums.html

The abstract including 2500 signs must be sent until 2009 October 31.
This is the link to down load the call for papers and the application form :
http://phanie.ethno.image.free.fr/index.htm

Send abstracts to:

Sylvaine Conord : s.conord@ivry.cnrs.fr
Fabienne Duteil-Ogata : duteilogata@yahoo.fr
Baptiste Buob ; baptiste.buob@gmail.com

Curtis's Landmark 1914 Silent Film of Pacific Northwest First Nations Culture
Restored, Re-evaluated, and Framed with a Live Orchestral Arrangement of the Original Score and a Performance by Descendents of the Indigenous Cast
In 1914, famed photographer Edward S. Curtis produced a melodramatic, silent feature film entitled In the Land of the Head Hunters. An epic story of love, war, and ritual set before European contact, it featured non-professional actors from Kwakwaka�wakw (Kwakiutl) communities in British Columbia. The film had gala openings in New York and Seattle, where it was accompanied by a live orchestral score composed by John Braham. A financial failure, the film was quickly overlooked and barely preserved, although one copy was significantly reedited with a new soundtrack and released in 1974 as In the Land of the War Canoes; this is the only version that has been available until now.
The current project presents a fully restored copy of In the Land of the Head Hunters (with original intertitles, color tinting, and recently discovered footage), reunited with its original orchestral score as well as descendents of the original cast. The project revisits Curtis's work through a scholarly resuscitation of its initial form and historical contexts, combined with unique Kwakwaka�wakw perspectives on the original film, its specific cultural content, and its social context of production (when many of the ceremonies it depicts were outlawed in Canada).
Rather than documenting Native life in 1914, Head Hunters documents a moment of intercultural encounter between Curtis and the Kwakwaka'wakw who were performing a scripted version of their own past for the camera. The film truly represents an active, artistic collaboration between purveyors of two dramatic traditions: the rich Kwakwaka'wakw history of staged ceremonialism, and the then-emergent mass-market colossus of American narrative cinema. When resituated within the history of motion pictures and framed by current Kwakwaka�wakw views, this landmark film can be recast as visible evidence of ongoing cultural survival and transformation under shifting historical conditions. These perspectives shed new light on the origins of ethnographic cinema and the parameters of Indigenous modernities.
Please join us for events in Chicago, New York, and Washington DC in November 2008.
There will also be a Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) Special Event screening and discussion of the restored film (with recorded score and no dancers) at the AAA meetings in San Francisco (Nov. 19-23, 2008).
For further information and event dates in 2008 and 2009, please visit: http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu
- Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center/American Museum of Natural History), co-executive producer.

Paris, Musée de l'Homme - 14-20 NOVEMBER 2009

Presentation in English / Presentation en Français

CALL FOR PAPERS / CONTRIBUTIONS

The Comité du Film Ethnographique is organizing an International seven-days Conference to be held in Paris in November 2009. This Conference is to honor the scientific and cinematographic work of Jean Rouch, his founding father and leader.
Our purpose is to explore the many research works and investigations pursued to improve the imagetic languages for anthropology in the fields Jean Rouch has pioneered and initiated.
This call for contributions is open to filmmakers, critics, teachers, researchers, and students concerned with the different ways to experiment and to translate the "real" through various audiovisual languages.

Propositions have to focus on one of the chosen topics:
• The colonial ordeal and a contemporary's anthropology.
• The "real" as imaginary, the fiction tells the world.
• A shared anthropology.
• Direct cinema and a making of the "real".
• A new Anthropology, a today's anthropology.

Abstracts of 1500 characters maximum have to be sent electronically to the Comité du Film Ethnographique, together with the applicant information form, by September 15th 2008. The definitive programme will be set on November 1st, 2008. All accepted participants will be expected to submit a full draft of their paper (text and audiovisual documents for a 20 minutes maximum length) by 31st of May, 2009, to allow their circulation among Conference participants.

Please find attached the applicant information form and a detailed presentation of the Conference purpose, partners and proceeding.

Important Dates:
September 15, 2008; Deadline for abstracts
November 1st, 2008; Notification of acceptance
May 31st, 2009: Submission of Final Papers
September, 2009: Conference programme

Contact :
Comité du Film Ethnographique
Musée de l’Homme
17 place du Trocadéro – 75116 Paris – France
Tél. : 33 (0)1 40 79 36 82 - 33 (0)1 47 04 38 20
colloquejeanrouch@mnhn.fr
www.comite-film-ethno.net

The fourth Visual Delights Conference: Visual Empires will take place at the University of Sheffield between July 3-5, 2009.
Call for papers: Popular visual cultures have been central to the construction and propagation of imperial and colonial narratives and have helped define the nature of Empire. They have been intrinsically linked to discourses about the rise and fall of Imperial fortunes in the 19th and early 20th centuries and have been studied as both evidence of imperial attitudes to race and colonial subjects and as propaganda texts which helped spread and cement imperial and colonial ideologies. This conference seeks to explore this rich visual archive and to examine the roles played by popular visual culture in the construction of narratives concerning issues of race, identity, colonial and imperial ideologies, nationalism, patriotism and the ‘Visual Empire.’
We would like to receive suggestions for papers with deal with these issues in popular cultural forms such as photography, advertising, cinema, theatre, the magic lantern, ethnographic display and world’s fairs before 1930. Suggested themes could include:
Photography and constructions of ‘otherness’/Ethnographic display and racial identities/Advertising and imagined colonies/Cinema and the mapping of Empire/The Magic Lantern and the topography of Empire/Music hall and the patriotic show
Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to Simon Popple @ s.e.popple@leeds.ac.uk or The Louis Le Prince Centre, The Institute of Communications Studies, The Houldsworth Building, The University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
The conference will be jointly hosted by the Louis Le Prince Centre, University of Leeds and the National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield. It is held in conjunction with the Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17460654.asp

New directions in visual anthropology and cross-cultural mediamaking.
This weeklong festival at Temple University engages the question, what next? in the arts and praxis of cultural representation. The festival includes screenings, lectures, and a daylong symposium of scholars and mediamakers. The event is free and open to the public.

Web Site and program