Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Experimental Ethnographies

October 5–November 16, 2023

This series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerged from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlighted creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

This seminar lecture featured theatre director and playwright Melissa Moschitto.

Melissa Moschitto’s work encompasses research, expressive movement, and rigorous dramaturgy to pursue new approaches to storytelling. Her company, the Anthropologists, activates archives to ask “How can we recover obscured histories in order to recontextualize the present and catalyze conversation?” Through collaborative theatre-making that elevates play and curiosity, the Anthropologists’ methodology offers research-based theatre as an ideal mechanism for social inquiry.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

Jonathan Thunder is an artist who infuses his personal lens with real-time world experiences using a wide range of mediums. He is known for his surreal paintings, digitally animated films, and installations in which he addresses subject matter of personal experience and social commentary.

In his art, interpretive figures representing identity, situations, and socio-political commentary are often the leaping point for imagery that incorporate masks, humanistic animals, and animalistic humans. Balancing the deliberate with the experimental, each work aims to convey a moment or vignette that is not entirely spelled out to the viewer. The topic of environmental issues is especially present, reflecting part of his identity as a steward of this planet with our future in mind.

Thunder is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe and makes his home and studio in Duluth, MN. He has attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, and studied visual effects and motion graphics at the Art Institutes International Minnesota. His work has been featured in many state, regional, and national exhibitions, as well as in local and international publications. He is the recipient of a 2020–21 Pollock-Krasner Foundation award for his risk-taking in painting. Since his first solo exhibit in 2004, he has won several awards for his short films in national and international competitions. He is a McKnight Artist Fellow for 2022–23. Visit jonthunder.com and https://www.youtube.com/@jonthunder_movies to learn more.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series, and cosponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multimodal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

Artist and filmmaker Jonathan Thunder hosted a screening of several of his short films, including Maamawi. Afterward, there was a conversation and Q&A around the films.

Maamawi (2020, 5 min.) takes as its title an Ojibwe word that means “together.” This experimental film explores connections between a young man and unfamiliar relatives from a not-so-long-ago time. The content reflects a link between our current era and the impact of the 1956 Indian Relocation Act. The story is inspired by Jonathan Thunder’s father, whose family was relocated multiple times during his childhood.

Jonathan Thunder is an artist who infuses his personal lens with real-time world experiences using a wide range of mediums. He is known for his surreal paintings, digitally animated films, and installations in which he addresses subject matter of personal experience and social commentary. He is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe and makes his home and studio in Duluth, MN. He has attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, and studied visual effects and motion graphics at the Art Institutes International Minnesota. His work has been featured in many state, regional, and national exhibitions, as well as local and international publications. He is the recipient of a 2020–21 Pollock-Krasner Foundation award for his risk-taking in painting. Since his first solo exhibit in 2004, he has won several awards for his short films in national and international competitions. He is a McKnight Artist Fellow for 2022–23. Visit jonthunder.com and https://www.youtube.com/@jonthunder_movies to learn more.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series, and coponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multimodal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

How can we create anthropological knowledge through creative strategies where the sensorial and emotional experience arises? Multimodal anthropology proposes a diversity of methodologies to think about the intersections between art and ethnography. In this lecture, anthropologist and filmmaker Mariana Rivera shared her ethnographic experience around weaving as a means of political resistance, showing how textile practices have become narratives of memory that speak aloud about violence, pain, and social injustice, particularly considering blackstrap loom weavers in the native community of Xochistlahuaca in Mexico. In her research, she uses diverse narrative practices such as cinema, workshops, and curatorial displays as co-creative and experimental methodologies to study the language of textiles and to comprehend the worldview around the weaving experience.

Mariana Rivera is an academic researcher in the ethnology and social anthropology division of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. She is a cofounder of the production company Urdimbre Audiovisual, where she works as a film director and photographer. She has been a programmer for the Ethnographic Film Forum and a curator of textile exhibits. She has written on documentary and ethnographic film, visual anthropology, weaving, memory and transmedia narratives, taught courses on visual anthropology, and taken part in workshops for the development of film projects. Since 2022, she has coordinated the seminar “Poetics of Imagination.”

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

Through a case study of Zora Neale Hurston’s methods, cultural anthropologist Roshanak Kheshti explored how synesthesia functions as both a methodology and a praxis in Hurston’s work. She looked to Hurston’s vast archive of films, plays, audio recordings, performances (including choreography, drumming, and singing), and essays as early experiments in performance ethnography.

Roshanak Kheshti is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015), Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Theory (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2024). Her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theatre Survey, and Sounding Out! She has presented performance works in collaboration with Salar Mameni and Helen Cammock.

Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.