Visual and Textual Reflexivity

Visual and Textual Reflexivity

1. KLIMA 2006: meditation process involving close proximity (awareness and preparation) with the dead. 'memento mori' type concept

   • Thailand: monks and nuns
     • Used to examine the most gory corpses, more visceral and empathetic experience of horror of death, acceptance
       • Access truth through proximity and exposure
         • Due to wider world, forced to reduce practice to photos - impact/effect also reduced
           • Example of 'wider world' impacting cultural practices = importance of ethnography

2. Empathy and responses to the dead

   • Relates to visual and emotion - also questions cross-cultural notions of translation and subjectivity - experience 'universals' differently
     • Or at least DEAL with them differently
       • Intersubjectivity
     • BOWMAN 1997
   • = question of REFLEXIVITY

3. Death Masks: 18th and 19th Centuries

   • like KLIMA, went from direct contact with corpse to boundary of photography
     • physical intimacy to distance
       • so, Victorians has greater intimacy (and thus acceptance?/dealth with it 'better'?) of death

4. GRIZZLY MAN (Werner Herzog)

   • Personal cinema (experimental ethnography)
     • Subjectivity split between the seeing and filmed body
       • Autoethnographic subject blurs the distinction between the ethnographer and other (CHALLENGE TO NICHOLS et al.)
         • RUSSELL 1999 - this type justified by forms of activism

5. Reflexivity

   • Draws us back into our own motivations and explanations
     • Implies working on ourselves at the same time as we research others
       • JACKSON: test our own explanations of others' experience on our own - intimate reflexivity

6. Adam