The Real and the Created in Ethnographic Film: An Ethnomusicologist’s Perspective

Ethnographic filmmakers often struggle to balance the need to let people speak for themselves with the need to create a coherent presentation through their own creative hand. Ethnographic writers face similar challenges in choosing to approach their subjects through expository versus evocative prose. This presentation highlights some of the common concerns of ethnomusicology and visual anthropology through an analysis of the author’s approach to making the film Two Poets and a River. The discussion concerns the role of the ethnographer’s creativity in generating and communicating knowledge, and issues of representing and accessing the “real.”

Speaker:

Richard K. Wolf is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South and Central Asia for four decades. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published on social-cultural “style” in South Indian classical music; conceptions of space, time and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of South India; drumming, “recitation,” and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan; and musical and poetic links between South Asia and Persianate Central Asia. Wolf’s current projects include a monograph on poet-singers entitled The Nightingale’s Despair: Music and Moral Being in Greater Central Asia and a co-edited volume entitled Musical Thinking: Poetry, Improvisation and Theory (Oxford University Press). As an ethnographic filmmaker, Wolf spent ten years making Two Poets and a River (Documentary Educational Resources), a film focusing on the poetry, music, and lives of two Wakhi poets living on opposite sides of the river that divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

In-person: H.C Coombs Building, H.C Coombs Building, Seminar Room D (note a different room)

Zoom link:https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1