The Multimedia Mediation of Contact Scenarios

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Although the tropes of "discovery" and “first contact” have been rightly critiqued as myths produced by ethnocentric ideology, they continue to find resonance in Latin American historical experience and cultural imagination. Sites of contact between national societies and isolated indigenous groups still exist in the Amazon, keeping the idea of “first contact,” however flawed as a concept, alive. Furthermore, narratives of contact from the past are often revisited and reworked by artists across several genres and media in examples that range from indigenous video to science fiction novels that recast contact frontiers to outer space.

This panel proposes to think anew about the lingering relevance of “contact” tropes by examining the importance of distinct forms of media and mediation. Media has been central to intercultural encounters, whether it be an Amerindian official's reaction to a printed codex, a battle over a radio tower, or Survival International's aerial photographic documentation of isolated indigenous groups—incidentally, a kind of ethnographic documentation that intends to defer actual contact. Not only have scenes of contact been recorded through specific media in ways that affect their recording and transmission but they often also involve inaugural contact with specific media.Claude Levis-Strauss was not the first to reach the Nambikwara but he claimed to have introduced them to the concept of writing, as he famously described in “The Writing Lesson.” And it was on his notebooks that the Caduveo Indians transcribed their elaborate face-paintings, which Lévi-Strauss also photographed, in a scene that is not just intercultural but inter-medial.

This interdisciplinary and comparative panel investigates several contact scenarios in which media plays a key though often under-examined role. Our examples include indigenous video’s re-mediation of the materials from the ethnographic archive, first contact science fiction, the interactions between photography and writing in travel narratives, and social media activism in indigenous communities.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizers

• Gustavo P Furtado, Duke University

• Zac Zimmer, UC Santa Cruz

Chair

• Juan M Espinosa, Instituto Caro y Cuervo

Individual Presentations

• Indigeneity, Documentary Video, and the Future of the Ethnographic Archive - Gustavo P Furtado, Duke University

• Skin, Masks, Films and the Technological Reproduction of Caduveo Paintings - Carolina Sá Carvalho, UNC Chapel Hill

• Alien Remediation - Zac Zimmer, UC Santa Cruz

• Indigenous media in the era of hashtag activism: a case study from the Guarani-Kaiowá in Brazil - Jamille Dias, University of Sao Paulo