The Southwest Now and Then
Interdisciplinary research - Visual ethnography as the methodology？
Yi Minority, took by Fritz Weiss
Preface
The intertwined histories of photography and ethnographic research are intriguingly parallel.
Walter Benjamin posited that even though photography was heralded as a modern, rational instrument, its documentary nature inadvertently propelled those employing ethnographic methodologies, primarily anthropologists, towards the more 'primitive' facets of the societies they examined. Consequently, 'fieldwork' became a cornerstone of visual ethnography.
Originally a term from biology, "fieldwork" evolved in the early 20th century to be the favored approach for anthropologists, sociologists, and others. It mandates that researchers deeply immerse themselves within a group or tribe for an extended duration, delving into local languages and cultures, participating actively in their day-to-day lives, covering aspects like food, attire, housing, and even spiritual and production practices. The research encompasses informal dialogues, structured interviews, surveys, archival research drawing from public records, and the creation of visual, auditory, or textual materials. Through these methods, an interpretation of the targeted culture emerges, shaping the research's findings.
Early anthropologists perceived photography as a tangible act of documentation. In an era where textual language's ambiguities were perceived as drawbacks, the assertive authenticity and durability of photographic images compensated. Therefore, by visually capturing the subjects, photography facilitated a more 'immersive' approach in ethnographic research.
In early 20th century, the former German Consul, Fritz Weiss, bequeathed a rich tapestry of images and documentations from his voyages in southwest China. As an anthropologist and a polymath, Weiss employed ethnography to scrutinize the Yi people's productive and spiritual undertakings—from rituals and dances to apparel and tools—as well as the region's topography, utilizing diverse mediums like photography, audio recordings, and manuscripts, all underpinned by participatory observation.
This approach finds resonance with today's interdisciplinary creation and ethnographic inquiry. Thus, through this exhibition, we aim to employ a 'comparative studies' approach, juxtaposing images and materials spanning diverse epochs.
Stilted building in Kunming, took by Fritz Weiss
Stilted building in Chongqing, took by Huifeng Wang, 2020
The Kunming exhibition drew from the archival materials bequeathed by Fritz Weiss. By curating pieces from interdisciplinary artists focused on Yunnan's ethnic minorities, this exhibit contrasts their pieces with Weiss's oeuvre. This serves as a platform to explore the theme of 'Visual ethnography as a methodology?' across varied eras and disciplinary landscapes.
Furthermore, it prompts reflection on the essence of ethnography: Is it meant to be an end in itself or merely a methodological pathway to anthropology? Embracing such an approach can inadvertently transform 'knowledge production' into an instrument of power and dominance. Thus, this exhibition's intention transcends merely showcasing an 'ethnographic case study' to delineate a methodology. Instead, it seeks to bridge the chasm, minimizing the feelings of estrangement between 'us' and 'them' across cultural divides. The goal is to unearth shared understandings across cultural paradigms during these conversations. Recognizing the dialectic nature of our research allows for more profound interdisciplinary dialogues.
Part 1
ELEVATION - 1947
- Pu Yun
"Elevation 1947" is an art installation by Pu Yun, centered on the Yi village in Yunnan, elevated at 1,947 meters. Using lime, Pu Yun, with the villagers, marked this specific altitude by drawing a horizontal line that traverses homes, landscapes, and even personal items in the village. This line represents more than just an altitude; it symbolizes the artist's reconnection to his roots and captures the village's culture and essence, influenced by its elevation. This tangible line also serves as a bridge to the stories, emotions, and memories intertwined with the village's identity.
The artwork's emphasis on onsite creation echoes anthropological "fieldwork", contrasting with Fritz Weiss' century-old anthropological images of the Yi. For the exhibition, this white line seamlessly integrates into the wall displays, juxtaposing the past and present.
Pu Yun's intent is to capture a rational moment through this unerring straight line. In this moment, all identities and contradictions converge, forming a bridge between the self and the other, enveloping all the memories, even those tinged with unreliability. Pu Yun is deeply engrossed in the notion that altitude intimately shapes culture. A village, with its unique altitude, naturally boasts its own landscape, products, traditions, and spiritual symbols.
Part 2
Cultivation and Collection: Imaging Study of Food in Southern Yunnan
- Li Zhaohui
As mentioned in the book "Doing Visual Ethnography", the genre of ethnographic photography depends more on the category and research context of the social constructs in which the researcher is embedded. As a researcher and artist with a background in biology, Li Zhaohui habitually observes the world through a biological lens. He chose the direction of 'food' and went to the local area to conduct embedded research with a 'food chain' perspective.
The term "food chain" is a biological term coined by the British ecologist C.S. Eiton in 1927. The term "food chain" refers to the connection between various organisms in an ecosystem due to food. Humans, originally a common member of the ecosystem, have evolved and developed over 2 million years to reach the top of the food chain pyramid and become the end consumer of the natural ecosystem. Humans have also created an artificial ecosystem through the domestication and even modification of other species to meet the need for food.
The way in which humans obtain food has evolved from 'natural gathering' to 'large-scale cultivation'. The dietary practices of the people in southern Yunnan sit at an intermediate stage of this evolutionary spectrum.
The artist Li Zhaohui captured this transition by photographing over 200 food species sourced from southern Yunnan. He also took full-length standing portraits of a male and a female from each of the six indigenous ethnic groups of the region. These images were then segmented into 'cultivation' and 'gathering' sections, culminating in his iconic series, "The Food Portraits." Those portraits which combining the local people and the food related were reconstructed to tell the story of 'what we are made of' in southern Yunnan.
The rich diversity in the food choices and sources in southern Yunnan mirrors humanity's adaptive prowess and symbiotic relationship with nature. Although some might perceive their food structure and production techniques as archaic, it offers invaluable insights for the 'modern man.' By revisiting and embracing such sustainable and holistic practices, we may find pathways for a more harmonious coexistence with nature in the future.
Part 3
The Spiritual Totem Tattooed on the Body
- Zi Bai
Zi Bai's ongoing project, "The Spiritual Totem Tattooed on the Body," spans several years and delves deep into the traditional tattoos etched on the bodies of the Dai elders. His work provides an immersive exploration of ethnicities, beliefs, cultures, and every intricate facet associated with them.
While the subject exudes an anthropological essence, Zi Bai doesn't let himself be submerged by the sheer anthropological weight of the theme. Instead, he crafts a unique visual language, employing his distinct imagery to articulate and convey the depth and richness of the subject.
According to Roland Barthes, the transformation of the symbol into form is the beginning of myth. The symbol, in the present, is the medium of consumption, even consumption itself.
In Zi Bai's work, the tattoos on the bodies of those Dai elders are also spiritual sustenance, pointing to the closed local cultural logic of memory, clan, divine protection, personal prayers, and the breaking of diseases, which are about to be invisible on the most consumer-conscious young Dai people. In these elderly people, culture, faith and divinity are like talismans, protecting both their bodies and their self-awareness, as well as a code that cannot be easily deciphered.
Zi Bai's work itself is like a ritual, his gradually diminishing documentary perception placing his subjects in a mysterious and spiritual display. Hence the viewer is invisible to their more productive activities, but is fully immersed through the body into the field of the mind dominated by the tattoo. Viewing these images, one is always vicariously drawn into their divine movements and scenes. In this sense, Zi Bai's works are not spectatorship but participation, and the photographs demonstrate the author's reverence and observation.
In the urban cultures, we are also engaged in a daily mythological activities, using information technology to mythologise images on social media, and like Narcissus facing his own shadow inside the water, we are increasingly in love with the image of the self. And as these tattooed people in Zi Bai's lens are seemly parallel to us, without the possibility of intersecting, the myth becomes two pictures, one oriented towards the deification of the self and the other towards divinity.
From our perspective, these works are a harmonious blend of the author's personal design sensibilities and the intricate mental constructs of the subjects portrayed. Thankfully, these images are not relegated to mere cultural archaeology, despite the prevailing penchant for the prescriptive frameworks of contemporary photography. They stand out as vibrant testaments to their creators, underlining the inherent representational power of photography.
This naturally begs the question: when addressing the nuances of ethnicities in remote regions, how does one transcend the clichéd conventions that have permeated traditional documentary photography? And how can one avoid being co-opted by the often superficial allure of contemporary art motifs?
Zhibai's work seems to proffer one of the answer.
Part 4
Strange terrains: Migration and Habitat of a Community at the Border
- Cheng Xinhao
James C. Scott, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, suggests that ethnic communities are artificially constructed in dialogue and competition with other 'communities' and nations, rather than naturally existing. Ethnographies are inherently diverse and varied. But in most cases the boundaries of communities are artificially and arbitrarily drawn on the basis of imagined cultural differences, and social boundaries are not really discovered. The distinctions are mostly based on one difference from among the many cultures of the group. Whichever difference is selected (dialect, dress, diet, mode of subsistence, presumed descent), a culturally and ethnographically agreed boundary is created to distinguish 'us' from 'them'. Thus, James C. Scott argues that the boundary between 'us' and 'them' is a strategic choice, as differences are organized in a particular way.
In recent decades ethnographers have sought to study 'communities across borders' through fieldwork: Can they make their voices heard in the process of modernization and, as spontaneous urbanized groups in the midst of social transformation, can they develop a different path to modernization from that of homogenization?
In this project, the artist focuses on an ethnic group on the Sino-Vietnamese border that has only recently been integrated into the ethnic system: the Mang people. For Cheng Xinhao, the Mang people are a mirror in which to look at the world and at oneself. He is tired of the dichotomy between self and other - otherness is everywhere, even the self can be other, and there can be no real incommunicable stranger. "We are always confronted with the same things, even if they are narrated using different frames and different discourses, the basis of consensus still exists. The Mang people are simply actors with me, only they are facing specific problems and making specific choices."
The Mang people have lived in this area even before the border existed. Their identities were changing with the process that the flexible frontier becoming "sacred". This process was potentially considered as a pre-modern ethnic group being "civilized". However, the artist prefer to describe it in another way. In this version, it was the Mangs practical strategies in the borderlands, which weaken the symbolic space of the nation states; It was the Mangs telling stories and building their new tradition in the ruins of the modern production methods. In both ways, the clear meaning of the space would become fuzzy again. It was a kind of resistance against the governmentality, and also a kind of weapons, which could trace back to the very beginning of the forming of the nations.
The artist tried to enter the field since 2013 in both intellectual way and perceptual way. This is strange terrain comprising multiple familiar planes: between "nature" and society, between "tradition" and globalization, between history and the present, between kin and other. He was learning how to traverse further, and continue to ask: what kinds of planes come together here in what complex way? What boundaries form? What new knowledge emerges as a result? What practices recreate this space? Through which historical practices can the present be revealed?
Silver... and Other Elements(2020), Four-Channel Video
Pan told the origins of the seven "Old Coins" he owned in this video, along with the moving of the borderline, the migration of the people, the wind, the rivers, the mountain and the forests.
The Mang people constantly adapt to the shifting borders and spaces, and the changing discursive and symbolic systems that accompany them. A striking example is the use of coins: during the Qing dynasty, the Mang people used silver and copper coins made by the Qing government, while with the occupation of Vietnam by the French colonialists, the "Piastre", a silver coin issued by France for trade in Southeast Asia, became the dominant currency there.
With the re-independence of Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century and the establishment of the new China, the local currency changed further. Interestingly, however, the silver dollar has somehow survived in the Mang community: no longer as money, but taken out of its original symbolic system and given a new meaning through new practices. In a Manganese wedding, the man is required to give a silver yuan to the woman as a bride-price. Initially, these silver dollars were made in the Long Yang of the Qing dynasty, and later in the Piastre, issued by the French colonists, which is still in use today. The silver dollar was not used as a general equivalent, but as a token in a different set of rules: if a woman's family received a silver dollar and there was a man to marry, the silver dollar received by the married girl could not be used directly, but could only be sold or given away, and a new one bought or given to use: thus, the silver dollar entered into constant circulation according to these rules. This has been going on for hundreds of years.
In Memoriam Tamara Wyss
Tamara Wyss was born 1950 in Heidelberg, Germany. Her interest in literature and film enabled her to early join the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) from which she examined in 1974. Her main interest lied in documentary movies and photography. After examination from the Academy, she went to the Cap Verde Islands, where she stayed several years, engaged in a project to distribute films to rural areas. Her project on the islands resulted in two documentaries: ‘Between pain and laughter’ and ‘Water once a day’. Other projects followed suit as well as teaching assignments in the UK. A documentary about the leading Jewish-German philosopher of the enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, ‘Searching for Mr Moses’ was aired on the German national television. The film caught great interest mirroring the eternal subject of minorities conditions in society.
Starting point of the movie is the diary of her great-great grandmother, Clara Mendelssohn Westphal, descendent of Moses Mendelssohn and the quest of our own memory – when do we not remember anymore. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGXKrJiyjc).
The personal connection to her family was carried on further when she discovered and rescued the diaries and photographs of her grandparents, Fritz and Hedwig Weiss. Using the photographs of her grandparent as a guide, she travels through China, a travel that became the documentary ‘The Chinese Shoes’ (Die chinesischen Schuhe’ 2004, Piffl Medien). The collection of photos resulted in two subsequent photo exhibitions and the book ‘In the Land of Ba and Shu’ (Tamara Wyss, Szechuan Press 2009). A second documentary about the French explorer Victor Segalan travels in Sichuan followed suit (“Victor Segalen - Expedition in the Middle Kingdom”; Tamara Wyss – Maria Zinfert, 2010)
Tamara Wyss passed away much too early in 2016, but thanks to her work we can still enjoy the photos of her grandparents.
Ramon Wyss
Stockholm 2021
Part 5：Video of the opening ceremony
Thanks to the DCK for the video of the exhibition
Organizer: Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany Chengdu
Co-organizer: 1903 space,
Chongqing Three Generations & A Lifetime Culture Co., Ltd.
Support: Contemporary Gallery Kunming
Curator: Yuanling Wang, Huifeng Wang
Sponsor: Cachet Boutique Kunming Artime，
Fürst Carl Brauhaus
Duration: April 8, 2022 to May 8, 2022
Address: B1, Arc de Triomphe,Park 1903, Qianwei West Road
Part 6：Interdisciplinary research workshop
Background & Motivation
About 2000 years ago, Aristotle, for the first time in the history of Western civilization, provided a comprehensive and systematic classification of human knowledge and created a relatively complete system of classical disciplinary knowledge (theoretical science, practical science, creation science).
By the pre-industrial era, an increasing number of scholars were attempting to achieve the same goal through a variety of disciplinary paths, and their knowledge constructions were often not confined to a single disciplinary field. As with Leonardo da Vinci and Blaise Pascal, it was common for a researcher to have multidisciplinary interests and pursuits.
For the interdisciplinary researchers, the different fields involved are edifices within an architectural complex, and through their methodology they interactively build a transition between different edifices, and forming a holistic, cognitive approach to the world.
According to scholar William H. Newell, "understanding the role of disciplines in interdisciplinary studies is key to understanding interdisciplinarity".
Therefore, before we can further understand interdisciplinary research, it is necessary to clarify the historical threads of disciplinary development and its cognitive-social constructs of categories and attributes.
A few days before opening of the exhibition in Kunming, we invited researchers with different social and disciplinary backgrounds to Kunming to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinary study as well as its strengths & weaknesses in a three-day workshop with Southwest China as the target research region. The participants have developed their perceptions and reflections on the historical and contemporary images and archives based on their respective fields after the sharing session of works from Fritz Weiss and contemporary artists.
In a short period of time, a high density of materials (texts, images, ideas, methodologies and discourses) were exchanged and finally integrated under a single theme and objective, resulting in a report that was presented as a "zine". We were pleasantly surprised by the breadth of the topics discussed: iconography, feminism, historical inferences... The participants were trying to understand each other's research methodologies, either by agreeing or by remaining doubts. It seemed to us that there was a certain possibility of interdisciplinary collaboration - seeking common ground while preserving differences.
Botany: the botanist who came to south-west China at the same period as Fritz Weiss
Architecture: "National Will" breaks through environmental determinism
Fritz Weiss' photographs provide a glimpse into the construction landscape of Southwest China during the modern era, characterized by:
Challenging terrains;
Limited transportation infrastructure;
A reliance on natural materials like bamboo, wood, and stone;
Artisans skilled in crafting with bamboo, wood, and stone.
In essence, it encapsulated a pre-industrial era dominated by manual construction methods.
This piqued my curiosity, prompting me to delve deeper into more contemporary images and to undertake a blend of fieldwork and archival research. My primary focus was the tumultuous period of the Second World War, a time when the exigencies of construction reached unprecedented levels.
The construction techniques of the southwest were inherently moulded by its environmental milieu. While these methods were economical, efficient, and nuanced, they were ill-equipped for the rigorous demands of wartime defense. Basic materials like mud and bamboo were glaringly inadequate against the ravages of World War II. However, through sheer state willpower, this "environmental determinism" was surpassed, with the state prioritizing the allocation of scarce resources such as steel and cement for fortification efforts.
During the "wartime unification" policy, the government imposed stringent restrictions on the supply of petrol, cement, steel, and other essential materials to the private sector. This even extended to banning the use of automobiles for transporting construction materials. Notably, the cement and steel industries in Southwest China were somewhat underdeveloped during this period.
The World War II era marked a pivotal moment for the modern building materials industry in Southwest China. Yet, while there was significant progress, the production capacity remained constrained. Most of the materials produced were allocated for national defense and vital infrastructure projects, with very little diverted for civilian purposes. This period appeared to be a swift stride towards industrialization. However, the limited production capacity served as a grounding reminder of the prevailing circumstances. The "wartime unification" policy prioritized the scant steel and cement production exclusively for defense purposes. This resulted in the emergence of impressive military infrastructures that stood in stark contrast to civilian constructions.