So, I pretty much haven't posted in what seems like forever. I realized this a while ago, but since even Tess has written a blog post in between her hour long sessions of writing at the library, I figured I needed to as well. Thesis writing is a bitch. I'd try to think of another, more appropriate term, but I don't really think there is one. It's simply a bitch. My body aches from sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen, typing away. If there was ever a time where science would prove that your eyes becomes square-shaped if you stare at a screen too long, our theses would probably provide the proof.
Claire, Birgit and Tess come to the library here in Leiden almost every day. I try to join them twice a week because I get absolutely nothing done at home, but it's hard to travel all the way to Leiden on days where I have other things to do. Travelling just seems like a waste of 2 perfectly useful hours. Thus we sit, inside, amongst the silence broken only by the clickidy-clack of people typing away and the occasional cough. With too much theory in our heads and too much ethnography too recall with it, our minds slowly become hollow and our bodies lethargic. None of the books we need seem to be available in any library, the coffee here is awful, and the weather taunts us with it's beautiful rays of sunny delight.
So here we sit, isolated from everyday chatter and the daily news, we have become immersed and almost obsessed with that which is our thesis, brilliant insights into things that probably don't matter to anyone but ourselves, and our advisers. As counting the hours becomes counting the minutes and our brilliance slowly begins to fade, another day passes by and we will start all over again tomorrow. I'm honestly amazed at my poetic ability for blogging at this point as I have failed to write so many words as here in my thesis all day. Writing is slow and painstaking, and we suffer in silence (and rather loudly, very publicly on facebook and in our blogs) as we enter the final stage of our academic life.
Please do note Tess' blog post here if you too are in need of further procrastination, and if that doesn't help. I suppose you could always start a blog of your very own.
In the middle of fieldwork, I'm really missing contact with other anthropologists. I'm not feeling challenged and it's really hard to stay motivated. Although I've met a few very lovely people in the field, who have been very helpful, it's just not the same as sharing dinner and some wine with my fellow students. Maybe it's just that I don;t feel like I am allowed to be inexperienced and ask stupid questions with these people. They're all so good at what they do. Fieldwork is commencing slowly however, but I'm finding plenty of interesting data, and am not worried for my thesis. I just wish there were more dinner dates involved in my topic...
On a different note, I have applied to a voluntary job with Antropologen.nl to be part of their websites editorial staff. I'd love to do it. I think it would be a good opportunity to meet new people, be more involved with anthropology in a practical way and get started reaching and uniting people through anthropology.
In order to study all aspects of history and memory making in both personal and national contexts, I have selected a wide range of audio-visual materials that I plan to use in my research. Here are the three most important ones.
Oral History Archive of the KITLV, Interviews about the Netherlands East Indies.
These interviews, recorded, collected and summarized in a publication by Fridus Steylen are an important source of data for me because they can provide me with the information that is not present in the photographic collections I will be working with. Doing research into the photographic representations of cross-national relationships during wartime inevitably means that there is a good chance many romantic or platonic encounters with “the enemy” were never recorded, photographically or otherwise, because it was a sensitive subject and there could be severe consequences if anyone found out. Also, photographic collections and archives are not a static product that represents the whole historic truth, but are subject to social and political changes throughout their lives. Many objects may be lost, discarded, ignored, or forgotten and no longer available or accessible for whatever reason; looking simply at photographic material is not enough to formulate a complete analysis. The interviews contain personal accounts that may go beyond the stories represented in the archives, and tell the stories that were too taboo to record, but remain silently preserved in the memories of the interviewees. Such an audio source is highly valuable when researching national and personal memory of a time of conflict.
Romanticized stories of war-time friendships
Oeroeg is one of the most well known films about the Dutch East Indies, and tells the story of a Dutch boy and his Indonesian friend Oeroeg. As they grow older, and conflict arises, the two friends grow apart and end up fighting for opposing sides. They eventually meet again, and despite the conflict and the complexity of the situation, their friendship remains pure. Both men are portrayed as honorable, likeable characters that the audience can relate to.
Such romanticized stories of war time, in which the main characters are heroic men fighting for a good cause are by no means an accurate reflection of real war-time relations. Many men (and women) did un-heroic, cowardly things. Some joined the NSB, some refused to hide their Jewish neighbours from the Nazi’s, some stood by idly as they watched others suffer. In times of extreme violence and extreme living conditions, people are rarely heroic. People tend to act in a way that ensures their survival before helping any other. These romanticized stories of friendship reflect a national need to portray people as inherently good, to argue that terrible acts are only done by terrible people, and that we are, in the end, inherently good. On a national level, we suppress the complexities of war-time relationships because we need to feel like we are good people, like we did the right thing, and like we were all the same victims together. Such romanticized stories provide me with the other side of the remembrance of war-time cross-national relationships to those the interviews tell me.
Photographs from the Online Beeldbank of the NIOD.
These photographs represent the aspects of cross-national social encounters that were recorded and are allowed to be remembered. They include professionally produced photographs of women who had their heads shaved for engaging in romantic relationships with German men as well as personal snapshots of Canadian soldiers with Dutch girlfriends. These photographs show the official, shameful side, as well as the friendly relations with allies that were openly photographed. Photographs of Dutch women together with their German lovers, however, are not so widely available in the archives. Most photographs depicting couples are of French or Dutch Girls with American and Canadian soldiers; with allied men, rather than those fighting for the opposition. The photographs showing the bald women prove that these relationships did exist, but the prevalence of allied-relationships over those with soldiers from the opposition also reflect the way we would like to remember the war, rather than the way it actually was. The photographs of bald women prove that Dutch women did not only find comfort with Allied soldiers, but these relationships with Germans are not part of our visual history; a reflection of history as a construction of the present. These photographs form the connection between personal oral histories and national meta-narratives about cross-national relationship in times of war.
So, for my Masters Thesis I am researching photographic material from the Second World War in the hope of coming to some sort of conclusion about the complexities of cross-national relationships that formed during the time and how these personal micro-histories differ from romanticised national narratives about love and friendship in wartime.
Tomorrow, I am meeting with Peter Keppy from the NIOD (The Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) as well as Liesbeth Ouwehand at the KITLV (Institute for South East Asian and Carribbean Studies) about the possibiliy of using their photographic archives and for general advice. My alarm goes off in less than 5 hours, and I am unable to sleep from nervousness and excitement. I'm finally feeling like this all might lead to something exciting and useful. Feeling like a real anthropologist. Almost.
So, insead of sleeping, I am going through the online archive of the NIOD to orientate myself on the subject a little more, so I am able to better articulate what I am looking for at these Institutes. Here are some of my most interesting and representative findings so far.
Sommige Nederlandse vrouwen hadden in de Tweede wereldoorlog
een relatie met een Duitse militair. Zij werden moffenhoeren genoemd
en na de bevrijding kaalgeschoren. Daar waren ook vrouwen bij die
het niet eens waren met de nazi's en toch verliefd werden op een Duitser.
(Some Dutch women had relationships with German soldiers during WWII.
They were called "moffenhoeren" and were shaved bald after the liberation.
Among them were women who did not agree with the nazi's,
but still fell in love with a German man.)
A US Pilot kisses the French, Therese Bourguinon goodbye.
Canadian soldiers in the Netherlands.
This one is of special interest to me personally
because my own grandfather was very close to a group of Canadian soldiers
and travelled with them for a long time. After the war, he wanted to go with them to Canada,
but his father forbode it. I still have photographs of his closest friend,
Jean Paul Berthiaume, Jean Paul's daughter,
and one of an unidentified Canadian soldier with his, presumably Dutch, girlfriend.
Friends. A Dutch girl and an American soldier
walk down a road near the town of Grave, Holland
which was liberated by U.S. paratroopers.
It is official. I actually know somwthing about Anthropology. The University says so. They gave me a Bachelors degree. I'm still not really sure why, it's not like I've ever really said anything substantial about the workings of the universe, but I suppose I atleast know more than the average Joe in the general Anthropological field. Hooray.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mark much of an end to anything, because I started the MA program a month ago, and am still very much enmeshed in the student life and way of things (which mostly means I drink a lot of coffee, get very little sleep and may one day actually know something about Anthropology). This title will be going on the wall Next to my Jakarta International School diploma and my Bilingual International Baccalaureate Diploma. Now I feel like a smart person. Soon, I will appropriately feel like a smart person when I recieve my MA in Cultural Anthropology of Media and Material Culture and Ethnographic Film. Yey.
Congratualations to everyone else who receieved their diploma aswel!
With Cecile Schimmel
With Rosalinde Spitters
I have a title now. What's yours?
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Oh wow, So much to tell....
Beeld voor Beeld is over and it was a loooong week. Yesterday and today were supposed to be my film-review and photoshop-lightroom days, but unfortunately I got sick while taking care of a sick person and have been in bed or sleeping on the couch most of the time. In between that, and trying to find the engery to feed myself and keep the house livably-clean, I haven't found the time to do much of anything. I even left my sore-throat emergency Ben and Jerry's at the sick person's house...
So this is my I.O.U. post. I promise to write a response to Men in the City, The Old Harp, Twenty Days that Shook Tehran, and Daughters of Malakeh as well as my experience behind the scenes of the festival. I'll try to get to them while procrastinating from editing my own film, and writing my thesis.
The Beeld voor Beeld Festival is going on this week at the Tropen Theater in Amsterdam. The first films were shown yesterday, starting with six student films during the day time, and Men of the City by Marc Isaacs (UK)as the official opening of the festival.
The wonderful thing about this festival, is that each screening is followed by Q&A with the filmmaker which invites critical discussion amongst the audience members, most of whom are in the field.
Throughout the week, I will be posting photographs from the festival that will hopefully stimulate your senses and tempt you to attend the festival, be it this year or next.
If you can't make it to Amsterdam however, many of the discussions with the filmmakers wil be streamed live by DocsOnline. On Sunday, I will actually be operating the camera during the streamed discussion, as well as filming an intimate interview with the filmmakers that will later be combined in an item about the film that will appear on a special DocsOnline website, as well as their youtbe channel. Very excited! I expect you all to watch my filmic debut when it arrives.
This tuesday, the Beeld voor Beeld (Frame by Frame) Documentary Film Festival was opened in Leiden at the University with the first Annual Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture. Anthropologists, Archeologists and Historians collected themselves at the lecture given by Dr. Howard Morphy.
Things made by man convey a message [...] It is through things that man visualized, admittedly mainly for his own purposes, ideas and thoughts that shape his culture, his particular communication system. They are the picture-book of his culture, of a culture. All we have to do is to learn how to read it. (Gerbrands 1990, 51)
Gerbrands emphasized participatory ethnographic fieldwork and added a new element to the ethnography of material culture by introducing visual methods - both photography and cinematography. He always emphasized the importance of the study of objects and other non-verbal aspects of communication. In this way he brought material culture and visual ethnography to the University. It is necessary, he proclaimed, that the study of cultural anthropology should include both practical and theoretical training in the use and application of photography, film, and sound recording. His combination of approaches with an emphasis on the individual and on material culture (in the widest sense) culminated in Gerbrands' theory and methodology of ethnocommunication.
I intended to include a part of his film Matjemosh, which is widely acclaimed in the disciplines of anthropology of art and ethno-cinematography, but the internet claims there is not a single video that matches the keywords "matjemosh", "adriaan gerbrands" or "gerbrands anthropology". You will just have to take my word for it that this film, considering its production in the 60s, and the filmic conventions of the time, is absolutely amazing and inspirational to young visual anthropologists. I will attempt to convince Pieter ter Keurs or Janine Prins to allow me to place an excerpt of the film online. I am sure they will be happy to provide the footage, as I am sure they will agree that Gerbrand's work is not celebrated widely enough and needs to be more accessable.
