40. Making Ethnographic Collage: Toward Intermedial Ethnography

• In Event: Scholar to Scholar Presents: Dialogues about Communication and Culture
  In Paper Session: Bridging the Cultural and Communication Gap: Japanese War Brides in America

Abstract

This paper reflects on my ethnographic study where I focused on poetic practice by Japanese “war brides” in the United States and discusses multimodal ways in which I learned their cultural knowledge, sensibility and epistemology of seeing. In my research, I found that in singing their memories of homeland and everyday experiences of displacement in poetry, these women often intertextually, or “intermedially” (Lehtonen 2000; Fornäs 2002), borrowed visual images shown on a satellite channel from Japan and translated it into their poetry in words. While their poetry was expressed solely by words, it in fact constituted an intersection of a number of different media texts. Furthermore, the women’s poetry worked on my memory and evoked a series of vivid images and invited sensuous reactions. Their poetry was experienced like haiga, or haiku painting, an old Japanese art form that involves collaborative work by poets and painters, although the images in this case were virtual ones and never realized in any material forms.

Based on my findings, this paper points a direction toward multimodal and “intermedial ethnography” that is more sensitive than conventional ethnography to the transnational experiences of cultural memory that is provoked in the encounter between the ethnographer and the informants. In proposing this I draw on discussions on “ways of seeing” that have developed in the fields of visual culture studies (Mitchell 2002; Bal 2003) and visual anthropology (Grimshaw 2001; MacDougall, 2006; Pink 2009). Here I suggest an active use of available visual and non-visual materials in ethnography (e.g. words, photographs, films, etc.) without essentializing relationships of the human senses to particular mediums. Ultimately, I argue for ethnography that a) responds to the ways of seeing learnt from the informants; b) is reflexive about the research process, and; c) allows creative, critical and ethical engagements with the informants and its audience.

Author

• Ayaka Yoshimizu, Simon Fraser University