‘CINE-ETHNOGRAPHY : JEAN ROUCH’

     I have been reading Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch (2003), a book which consists of essays by and interviews with Jean Rouch, the master anthropologist and filmmaker, on anthropology, ethnography, cinema, filmmaking and Africa. Steven Feld, professor of anthropology and music at Columbia University, translated Rouch’s work from French, and edited the book.     

    Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917, and he studied mathematics and engineering. In 1941, during the war, he went to Niger, then a French colony, as an engineer. He was responsible for building roads and bridges, and was in charge of twenty thousand laborers. While building roads he began to study possession among the Songhay. When he returned to France, he decided to take a doctorate in anthropology. His interest in African culture resulted in more than one hundred ethnographic films with “cinema-direct” style on colonialism, racism, African modernity, religious ritual and music; and a life-long ethnographic work in Western Africa until his death in an automobile accident in Niger in 2004. 

    As a ethnographer-filmmaker, Jean Rouch’s attitude to ethnography was very much influenced by his role as a filmmaker. He says on ethnography (p:100):       

   “These critical reflections on the self of the filmmaker lead me to expand on the concept of the self of the ethnographer.     

     In the field, the observer modifies himself; in doing his work, he is no longer simply someone who greets the elders at the edge of the village, but-to go back to Vertovian terminology-he ethno-looks, ethno-observes, ethno-thinks. And those with whom he deals are similarly modified; in giving their confidence to this habitual foreign visitor, they ethno-show, ethno-speak, ethno-think.       

      It is this permanent ethno-dialogue that appears to be one of the most interesting angles in the current progress of ethnography. Knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge; it is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers and those whom they study meet on a path that some of us now call “shared anthropology”. “(1973)        

     It is an excellent book if you want to explore on Jean Rouch’s ethnographic film and ethnographic work in Africa; French colonialism, anthropology and cinema, and the history of African cinema.