Archive

Water and Anthropology

In April 2002 UNESCO’s Division of Water Sciences introduced a global computerized network of anthropologists (researchers and institutions) dedicated to collect resources related to water. The interaction between anthropologists working on water issues and water professionals such as hydrologists, geologists, engineers and policy makers promoted a shift toward the integration of the cultural dimension of water. Tradition, wisdom and ethical values based on ancestral respect of Nature and intergenerational solidarity could inspire industrialized countries.

At the Third Water Forum, Kyoto, Japan on March 2003, during the session on Water and Cultural Diversity, it was once again United Nations’ Millennium Declaration clearly stated: “human beings must respect one other, in all their diversity of belief, culture and language. Differences within and between societies should be neither feared nor repressed, but cherished as a precious asset of humanity”.

Through the holistic approach of anthropology and its practice of ‘participant observation’, traditional- and even very ancient- knowledge and methods can be updated in the light of contemporary science without disturbing the social fabric of the local cultural and religious values. Anthropology can help communities and professionals meet the imperative need to harmonize modern engineering as well as management and supply of water resources all with the cultural dimension of this natural resource.

A better understanding of the relationship of humans with water calls for a ‘water anthropology’, that studies how various people think about water, how they use it in their homes and outside- whether in irrigated fields, deserts, crowded suburbs or in the wilderness where they fish in lakes and rivers, collect medicinal plants etc. The reverence for water, prevalent among indigenous people and traditional farmers past and present, may stimulate the emergence of new ways to conceptualize water engineering and management.

Consequently, this tribute on water cultural and social issues -as a starting point of a new collaboration with the Mediterranean Wetlands Initiative (MedWet)– aims to underline the variety as well as the importance of ethnographic films on modern societies’ social, economic and political decisions and practices.

Nikos Sfakianakis

Richard Leacock and the direct cinema

Although Richard Leacock was born in Britain, his name has been connected with one of the most important cinematic movements of America in the late 1950s. It was the period that a team of new creators, with the guidance of Robert Drew and the defining technological contribution, changed completely the way of making documentaries, creating what it was later called direct cinema.

Next to Richard Leacock, we find the well known D. A. Pennebaker and David & Albert Maysles, directors who defined with their work the status and the next period of the genre. Films like «Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment», «Primary», «Gimme Shelter», «Salesman», «Grey Gardens», «Don’t Look Back», «Monterey Pop» are only a few of them. During the same period, at the opposite side of the Atlantic, the French anthropologist Jean Rouch realizing the new possibilities that the technology was bringing to the cinema, acted in the same way, with a result -perhaps a term more famous than the direct cinema- the cinéma vérité.

The two schools were defined by technological improvements. These important changes made the creators’ job easier and more direct. The synchronization of sound and image is a reality and the light camera (16mm) solves many problems of the past. This progress led to the formation of small and flexible groups and consequently, direct filming of behaviours was made possible. These two movements emerged from these changes and prevailed in the 1960s in Europe -mainly in France- and across the Atlantic, and had basically the same approach to the object. This was the directness and the creator’s personal relation with the object of their filming and also that the revelation of “vérité” was the main target in their films.

Nevertheless, there was an important difference between them and this difference lies in the degree of intervention of the creator. In the American version of cinema, vérité the cinematographer is there but doesn’t intervene; he tries to be “invisible”, but in the French case the creator has to intervene to uncover the “truth”. According to the French school, the inner reality has to be provoked in order to be revealed while for the American view this reality is manifested by the closeness of observation*.

Richard Leacock was born in London in 1921 and he passed away last March (2011) in Paris where he was living from 1989. He could exceptionally use the camera and this is the reason why we usually see his name in this position. Something that we could call a formality since all the films was really a result of teamwork. The tribute honours this great filmmaker with three films that defined not only him, but also the birth of the school that he was a founder member, and that it definitively influenced the future of documentary as well as the “opposite” side of fiction.

Konstantinos Aivaliotis

* Eva Stefani, 10 texts on documentary, 2007