Documenting Traditional Garifuna Craft- and Food-ways: Lessons from a Fieldschool project in Dangriga, Belize

• In Event: Negotiating Collaboration and Visual Representation

Abstract

This presentation deals with the inaugural season of a summer fieldschool project in Dangriga, Belize, wherein students were tasked with visually documenting the traditional Garifuna drum-making process of the Austin Rodriguez Drum Shop on Why Not Island and the cassava preparation of the Sabal family Cassava Farm. As part of a growing set of visual anthropology courses offered at the University of Arkansas, and as the first faculty-led travel course offered in cultural anthropology, this applied visual research project started with a site visit in January 2014, where the originally intended project had to be discarded and new ones negotiated. The research team from summer 2014 was comprised of five undergraduate students, one graduate student, and one faculty member. Our primary projects for this pilot season were twofold: (1) Visually documenting and collecting the related oral histories concerning both local craftworks (in the form of making traditional drums) and local foodways (in the form of cassava processing); and (2) Crafting visual products in line with community partners wants and needs (e.g. for marketing purposes, to preserve traditional knowledge, etc.).

This presentation thus highlights the ethical, theoretical, methodological, and practical issues involved in balancing the varying agendas of different interested parties—including (a) the study abroad office, (b) the sponsoring service learning program, (c) the on-the-ground facilitating partners, Peacework (a 501(c)3 global nonprofit organization), (d) the other university team’s and instructors travelling with us, (e) the Garifuna people in Dangriga, Belize, and (f) most importantly, the specific community partners with whom we worked—as well as the visual products that resulted from this work and their reception.

Author

• Jonathan S. Marion, University of Arkansas