This is a supplement to “Waiting Subjects: Social Media-Inspired Self-portraits as Gallery Exhibition in Delhi, India” by ETHIRAJ GABRIEL DATTATREYAN. Read the article here.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan’s “Waiting Subjects: Social Media-Inspired Self-portraits as Gallery Exhibition in Delhi, India” collaboratively curates an “accidental” archive of digital image-making practices by young Somali refugees in India as the site where subjectivities are self-fashioned and ethnographic insights emerge.

 

Suggested Study Questions and Activities

Designed for undergraduate and graduate students to address key methodological questions about collaboration and digital affordances.

Collaboration

Discussion and/or writing exercise. Students spend 10 minutes writing a quick response to one of the following questions

  • What does collaboration mean to you? How does this concept fit with the ethos of ethnography? How has a collaborative or shared anthropology been imagined? Is ethnography already always collaborative by the nature of its engagement? If so, what does an explicitly shared or collaborative ethnography imply and entail?

  • How might digital technologies reinvigorate, and yet, complicate the possibility for creating collaborative ethnographic projects? What sorts of opportunities/challenges do digital infrastructures (social media, smartphones, digital audio-video technology) create with regard to collaborative ethnography?

  • In the VAR article, “Waiting Subjects,” how does Dattatreyan utilize the social media-inspired photographs of his participants as an ethnographic site?

  • What does the author argue are the limits of these photographs?

Shared Anthropology

Assigned film viewing, with discussion and/or writing exercise

Watch this video of Jean Rouch discussing the future of visual anthropology:

Jean Rouch was one of the pioneers of a shared anthropology that utilizes audio-visual technology.

Why do you think he argues that the easily available, inexpensive digital video cameras in our moment aren’t ‘real’ cameras? How does this sentiment impact how we might imagine collaboration in the digital age?

What do you think John Rouch would say about the author’s investments in the digital practices of his interlocutors in the field?

Social Media

Social media exercise

Read this short primer on “Why we are all digital anthropologists” by Olivia Bellas.

Students use social media to find short videos or photographs shot by non-experts.

  • Following Bellas, what do you think of this idea that ‘everyone’ is now an anthropologist with the advent of digital technology?

  • Regarding the virtual artifacts collected from social media, are these objects ethnographic? Why or why not? What can we know from the objects you have retrieved? What remains unknown?

 

Additional Readings

 

 UPDATED SEPTEMBER 6, 2022