Fieldwork | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Mobile Visual Ethnography Kit

February 18, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

Last year I posted a bit about the simple, mobile equipment that I have put together for the students in my visual anthropology class to use on their visual documentary projects. This year I have made a few updates that are worth a quick share. I’m still committed to using Zoom H1s for audio capture—there really isn’t a better recorder for the price—and I’m a big fan of the tripod/case accessory package that is available for the Zoom H1 on […]

Categories: Anthropology, Fieldwork, Gear, How To, Visual Anthropology • Tags: Canon VIXIA HF R500, FurryHead Windscreens, mobile equipment, visual ethnography, Zoom H1

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Michael Taussig on Field Notebooks—I Swear I Saw This

March 17, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“I think of the hard work I have done and even more of all the waiting and boredom as not exactly irrelevant but as nothing more than a necessary prelude for chance to show its hand” (Taussig 2011:59). Last night I finished reading Michael Taussig’s reflections on drawings in anthropological field notebooks (namely his) in his 2011 book, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (University of Chicago Press.) Similar to my experience with most of his […]

Categories: Anthropology, Drawing, Fieldwork, Quotes • Tags: drawings, fieldnotes, Georges Bataille, I Swear I Saw This, Joan Didion, John Berger, Michael Taussig, notebooks, roland barthes, Walter Benjamin

(Simple) Mobile Visual Ethnography Equipment

March 13, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I’m often telling folks that the goal of my visual anthropology class is not to make filmmakers, but to use basic equipment to have my students make films together with others… For the past few years, students in my class have been working with local volunteers from our university neighborhood—The Hamline Midway—to make simple films together. During the first half of the semester they get to know one another, and the students get to learn the equipment, by making a […]

Categories: Anthropology, Fieldwork, Gear, How To, Visual Anthropology • Tags: FlipCam, FurryHead Windscreens, iPhone, visual ethnography, Zoom H1

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An OFF Pocket™ for Sensitive Fieldwork?

December 16, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

I like the idea of privacy. When you carry a mobile phone, regularly check in to Twitter, often update your Facebook, or use Google products, however, privacy really can’t be much more than that—an idea, a dream, a conceptual ideal. So, earlier this year when I read about Adam Harvey’s Kickstarter project, the OFF Pocket™, I immediately loved the idea—a black pocket that you drop your phone into to disconnect it, shield it from the network, quiet its connectivity. It was […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Gear, Privacy, Review • Tags: Adam Harvey, anthropologist, bag of holding, China, eavesdropping, iPhone, Kickstarter, mobile phone, OFF Pocket™, reporter

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An Afternoon Lunch at the Zhiqing Villa

June 27, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Ten years ago this month I finished my PhD dissertation, “Remembering Red: Memory and Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution in Late 1990s China,” in the anthropology department at the University of Washington in Seattle. My dissertation research examined nostalgia and memory of the Cultural Revolution among members of the generation who were most active in it. Specifically I looked at memorial practices of former “educated youth” or zhiqing who were sent down to the Chinese countryside beginning in the fall of […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Video clips • Tags: chinese countryside, food, nostalgia, video, zhiqing

Remembering Culture at the Terracotta Warrior Museum

January 1, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

In my early twenties, when becoming an anthropology professor was still a far off aspiration, I spent a few years as a tour guide leading groups to China for Pacific Delight Tours. Experience as a guide on the front lines of the culture industry in the early years of China’s Post-Mao development provided me with a wealth of opportunities to see first-hand how tourist itineraries were drawn, sites were narrated and tourists experienced Chinese “Culture.” Here I have to make […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Museums • Tags: memory, museum, Terracotta Warriors, tourism

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Walmart in China

December 29, 2011 by Museum Fatigue

A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to receive my complementary copies of Walmart in China. Many of the papers in the collected volume were presented at a workshop on Walmart organized by Anita Chan held at Beijing University. The conference brought together a wide variety of scholars and activists from Australia, greater China, and North America. For me it was a great opportunity to see the wide variety of work done on Walmart both in Chinese and English. […]

Categories: Fieldwork • Tags: China, corporate culture, Walmart

I Love Beijing’s Sensitive Words!

June 11, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Right in the middle of my visit last summer, Facebook disappeared. It was added to the list of sites blocked by the Chinese firewall. At the time I was in China, hanging out with my friends, so we really didn’t miss not seeing each other on Facebook. When I mentioned it at a dinner, the feeling was that it was only temporary blockage that would surely pass. Someone at the table even thought it might have just been a glitch […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Random Reflections • Tags: China, internet, 敏感词

Replicating Terracotta Warriors

May 2, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Last summer while doing a research visit at the Terracotta Warrior Museum in Xi’an and some associated tourist sights, I noted the proliferation of images and reproductions of the warriors. In this collection of images can you spot the “real” from the reproduced? Of course this is a trick question, because even the “real” warriors have been pieced together from fragmented remains! (This post is also a test of the photo-posting function on posterous.)

Categories: Fieldwork, Photo Essays • Tags: China, museum

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