Eras

by Nayla Al Khalifa

This piece is a photoshop triptych which contrasts age and modernity in London's architectural scene.

Beyond the Physical Realm

by Radwa Ahmed

No friends or foes, not even me

We were all but one entity

Halos are visible, tangible is envy

Warmth and chill are equally seen

The once simple figures

And the millions hidden in between

All too overwhelming, I ween

We’re back to where children wean

Or is it “when” I mean?

Space-time has never been so fragile

Birds in the sky never this agile

Thin air has never been so thin

What does it mean when you skin

My face, then, gently stroke my chin?

My eyes are wide open

The veil has been removed

My soul is to million pieces broken

But my body has never moved

I can hear you, all too clear

I can hear us, all our fears

I am here, trying to heal

Here to fathom what’s been concealed

My voices personified

Proving that we’re unified

I seek shelter

From the truth

I try to bring silence

I try to call truce

But it’s too late now

I have to listen

To let it all in

I never knew I was so limited

But now I’m so infinite

God help me take this in

Why is my vessel so thin?

So fearful, I spin

In circles, between

The realms, my friends

Say this is how it’s always been

But to me it’s only how it begins

Are these hallucinations

Or was this reality all along?

If this is mere imagination;

Why does it feel like I belong?

To something bigger,

Some system of a sort

This journey was the trigger

To days of teleport

Time is a construct, anyway

Yet I’m still counting the hours away,

Keeping track of passing days

Places are not real

I listen to my music

I want it to conceal,

Make me forget I’m human,

Drown out how I feel

Existence is now a Rubik

A mystery to reveal

Its weight is on my shoulders

I’m Sisyphus with a boulder

This story is getting older

The weight just made me kneel

I’m not satisfied

I’m only terrified

And I feel like I’m a sin

Now, this is how it’s always been

No women, no men

No now, no then

It’s all a metaphor

The physical realm is an anchor

Reality checks don’t work on me

I only want to set my soul free

Though yesterday I didn’t believe

Soul even existed, I didn’t see

I didn’t allow myself to hear

Now surrounded by my fear

I surrender

I submit

The colors are beautiful, I admit

I cannot look away

This never-ending day,

This abysmal array

Is showing me the way

This reality is here to stay.

Cradle

by Regina Legarte

I am someone’s daughter, but

my mother is the universe.

I am not an only child—

my family is unbroken.

My siblings are called Orion, Leo,

Andromeda, Lyra.

Sometimes we collide, and we

apologise through light.

This is how it has been all my life.

Anak, my mother calls to me.

I am not an only child.

I dream in English, but my tongue

remembers my mother’s language.

"El Etnógrafo": A Film Review

by Agustin Diz

El Etnógrafo. 2012.  89 minutes. Ulises Rosell and Pablo Rey.  Fortunato Films.  Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Source: IMDb

Set in the Gran Chaco region, a vast semi-arid plain that occupies a large swath of territory at the heart of South America, El Etnógrafo (The Ethnographer) is a recent award-winning documentary that captures the harsh beauty of one of the continent’s least known regions.   The documentary – which takes its title from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges – provides an evocative portrait of the life of indigenous Wichí communities in the north west of Argentina and captures the pressure that encroaching extractive interests are increasingly placing upon Wichí settlements.

As its title suggests, however, the film is primarily a character study whose protagonist is a man by the name of John Palmer.  Palmer, now in his sixties, is an Oxford trained anthropologist who has worked with indigenous Wichí communities for decades.  Having conducted doctoral fieldwork in the 70s under the supervision of Peter Rivière, Palmer completed his dissertation in the 1990s and returned to the Chaco region of north-western Argentina where he married Tojweya, a Wichí woman.  Somewhat distanced from academic anthropology, Palmer, who received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Lucy Mair medal in 2009, currently dedicates himself to activist work on the Wichí’s behalf.

In beautifully captured scenes of domesticity, the documentary captures the complex, multicultural lives of Palmer, Tojweya, and their five children.  Perhaps the most memorable of these is the family’s visit to Tojweya’s birthplace; here the unforgiving environment of the Chaco contrasts with the warmth of family life and is bound together by powerful images of the muddy Pilcomayo river.  The scenes of Palmer and Tojweya’s family lives are often touching and their rambunctious children provide an endearing source of comic relief throughout the film.  At various points in the film, Palmer and Tojweya reflect upon the cultural complexities of their lives together which include issues like family finance, distance from extended kin networks, and even infant naming practices.

The heart of El Etnógrafo, however, is made up of various scenes in which Palmer enacts the role of activist-anthropologist in a Sisyphean struggle for indigenous rights.  Several of these show Palmer confronting loggers and oil workers who are operating within Wichí territory and drafting police reports to denounce these encroachments.  In one fascinating scene, Palmer and a group of Wichí leaders meet with the representatives of a Chinese oil company that is operating on Wichí land.  Particularly interesting are the ways in which company representatives appeal to the ‘chain-of-command’ within the company and avoid taking responsibility for the company’s actions.  Far from the air-conditioned offices where big decisions are made, the film’s focus on the micro-tactics of both the Wichí and the company representatives illustrate the processes through which politics and extraction interact in the day-to-day of an extractive frontier.  However, as Palmer himself admits at one point, from the Wichí’s perspective the whole struggle is more of a ‘one step forward and five steps back’ kind of affair. 

The most poignant and controversial of Palmer’s activist involvements concerns the case of Qa’tu, a Wichí a man who has been accused of raping and impregnating an under-aged girl from his settlement.  To its credit, the documentary does not straightforwardly absolve Qa’tu.  Instead, it hints at the cultural nuances and misunderstandings at play.  Through Palmer and Qa’tu’s relatives, the film sheds light on Wichí marriage customs and also on the complexity of the Wichí’s engagements with bureaucracy, health services, and the justice system.  As a viewer, one feels that perhaps this case might have merited some deeper analysis.  In particular, questions of potential gender asymmetries among the Wichí are not explored even though these seem to be at play in the few scenes where we are able to see Wichí politics unfold at the local level. 

From an anthropological perspective, the emphasis on Palmer’s mediating role often seems overemphasised and uncritical.  Indeed, rarely do the documentary’s Wichí protagonists speak without Palmer being present and, in the confrontation scenes, the anthropologist does practically all of the talking.  This is not a critique of Palmer, but rather of the way in which his actions are represented in the film.  In some ways, the overemphasis on Palmer’s role is slightly ironic given the fact in the story that lends its name to the film, Borges writes that, although the story ‘has only one protagonist,’ ‘in all stories there are myriad protagonists, visible and invisible, alive and dead.’  Perhaps the filmmakers could have heeded this advice and crafted a more polyvocal portrait of life in the Chaco.

Indeed, the authorial presence of the filmmakers is pushed deep into the background.  The film is not guided by a narrative thread, but seems to flit from scene to scene, gracefully introducing new characters and situations without ever quite linking them up explicitly.  Coupled with the soft-spoken tone of most scenes, the documentary often becomes an almost dream-like, but not quite nightmarish, portrait of life in the Chaco.  In an aesthetic sense, this impressionistic kind of story telling is, I think, one of the film’s strengths.  However, for a more activist or even anthropological audience, it may seem slightly disengaged or insufficiently contextualised.  For instance, historical, political, and economic issues are hinted at throughout, but they are never presented in an explicit account that might help to situate the life of the people on the screen. 

Overall, however, El Etnógrafo provides an engrossing introduction to South America’s Gran Chaco.  Throughout, it captures the cultural and politico-economic complexities of Wichí lives in the region.  Although as anthropologists we might lament the lack of other, particularly Wichí, voices, the documentary is essentially meant as an exploration of John Palmer’s life.  As such, it raises interesting questions concerning the politics of representation as well as insights regarding the role of anthropology and anthropologists beyond the ivory tower.  Thought-provoking and beautifully filmed, El Etnógrafo is well worth a watch.

Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957)

by Nathalia Joukova Edholm

Source: senseofcinema.com

In honour of the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 100th anniversary, we will look deeper into one of his most iconic films, The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet), a movie that triumphs in its depiction of humanity’s relationship to death in a time when it is a most intimate component of our lives. 

“Who are you?” 

“I am Death /…/ Are you ready?” 

“My body is ready, but I am not” 

So goes the famous dialogue between the knight Antonius Block and Death himself, a dialogue so well remembered even 61 years after its premiere. It is not surprising, since few scenes so directly confront the universal fear of death—we are never quite ready for it. Nevertheless, it has been, and will presumably continue to be, an inevitable part of life. Many anthropologists have considered the role death plays in life. Our very own Bronislaw Malinowski in “Magic, Science and Religion” emphasises rituals that mend the social disorder in events of death, where the body is purified in order to foster an idea of an immortal spirit. Some thinkers such as Ernest Becker and Zygmunt Bauman go even further by claiming that the universal human fear of death is one of our strongest inner drives. In order to escape death, we subconsciously try to immortalise ourselves through genealogical procreation, the making of art, and the following of religious faith. Human life seems, ironically, to be intimately connected to death. So, how does human life and thought react as death takes enormous and arguably unnatural proportions, such as of the Black Plague in the middle ages? 

'Bad death' is the opposite of an expected 'good death'. Survivors left in despair, hopeless in the face of evil. The Plague, estimated to have killed 30-60% of Europe’s population in a matter of decades, could probably count as its archetype. As the film begins, the main character Antonius Block, a knight returning from the crusades, encounters Death who has come to take him away. Antonius, reflecting the human tendency to elude death, challenges Death to a chess match in order to postpone the inevitable. During the match, he experiences a crisis of faith in God, a fact that makes death even more daunting. “Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses? Why does he hide in a cloud of half-promises and unseen miracles?”. The loss of faith, presumably a result from his experiences in the crusades, makes death seem devoid of meaning and substance. Echoing the futility of life, he confesses to Death: “we must make an idol out of fear, and call it God.”  

Not all characters in the film adopt the same defeatist view of death. On the contrary, the role of religion grows alongside that of death. Monks speak of the sins of men that initially brought the Plague as a punishment from God (the HIV epidemic, anyone?). Cults of people reenact the suffering of Jesus through whipping themselves—and as such, society and meaning are reconstructed as physical suffering, that still seems less painful than a meaningless existence. Other characters, such as the macho squire Jöns, adopt an arguably nihilist and hedonistic worldview.  Jöns dismisses love as nothing more than worldly lust and proceeds to ask for the bottle after observing painted murals depicting death, doing so in a desperate effort to forget its lurking presence. Finally, a farmer (who some would regard as simple) comments, regarding the Judgment Day: “if it is as they say one can only take care of one’s house and live happily as long as one stands on one’s bare legs.” 

Bergman’s fluency in black comedy is displayed throughout the film and reveals itself in the best light in one particular scene. An actor, encountering Death, attempts to negotiate: “I haven’t got time… my performance [tomorrow]… is there no exemption for actors?”. Presenting morbid matters through humorous dialogues,  the audience is allowed to playfully reflect over the often suppressed knowledge of one’s own mortality and what it does to oneself. As the Church painter said to Jöns: “Why should one always make people happy? It might be a good idea to scare them once in a while.”