Photo-Ethnography, Political Manifestations, and More-Than-Human Performance on Public Space

• In Event: Situating Methods

Abstract

Continuing our previous research on commemorative political manifestations in the public space of Santiago de Chile, this article seeks to offer a photo-ethnographic methodological approach for observing and understanding this phenomenon from the perspective of the forms of appearance in the Public Space and the struggles for the visibility of the protesters. As we will show, through their performance, ethnic and sexual minorities protesters defy the political power by exceeding the operational and symbolic limits of the Public Space, making present more-than-human entities. During the manifestation, these entities normally invisible becomes perceivable, changing the hegemonic landscape. Those performative interpellations, although ephemeral, by means of the photographic record of the manifestation and its digital publication, have the potency to transform a temporal appropriation in a possible future. Socialized images work as proofs that we have the power to produce other forms of society.

We assume that both the images and the modes of narration of social phenomena in ethnography are not neutral but depend on the positions of the entities involved–protesters, researchers, earth beings, believes–which is why we place ourselves in a perspective of dialogue and closeness to the struggles of the social actors who manifest themselves in these commemorations. In methodological terms, the proposal that we have been developing aims to offer epistemological and procedural guidelines on photo-ethnography and the articulation between knowledge and situated practices of ethnography.

Authors

• Pablo Ignacio Hermansen, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• Roberto Fernandez, Universidad de Chile