FEEDING THE PIGS
Denmark, 2012, 5 min
Peter I. Crawford
25.01.2013 19:35
In some of the diverse cultures of the pacific, especially in Melanesia, the pig is the most important domesticated animal. It is predominantly used for ceremonial purposes such as in funerals, weddings and age-set rituals. Several of the films in the long-term Reef islands Ethnographic Film project thus show the killing of pigs in conjunction with such events, at times giving a some what disturbing impression of human-animal relationships, particularly for audiences uses to see meat only wrapped in cellophane at the local supermarket. In this short film a mummy, daddy, and their little son go out to feed their pigs, conveying the impression of an altogether different human-animal relationship, one of tenderness, care, and love, whilst also showing how children learn through awareness of animals nature and technology.
Peter I. Crawford is a social anthropologist, film-maker and publisher. He has been an active member of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) since the late 1970s. He has written extensively on visual anthropology and ethnographic film-making, and has wide experience in teaching the subject both theoretically and practically. He is currently Professor at the Visual Anthropology Programme at the University of Tromso, Norway and visiting professor at the visual anthropology programme at the Free University in Berlin. Together with Dr. Jens Pinholt of Aarhus University he has led the Reef Islands Ethnographic Film project (Solomon Islands) since 1994 and is producing a number of ethnographic films based on material recorded in 1994, 1996, 2000, 2005 and 2010. His publishing company, Intervention Press (www.intervention.dk), has published numerous book on anthropology and visual anthropology. He lives in Aarhus, Denmark.
Director: Peter I. Crawford
Production: Interventinon Press
Language of dialogues:Aiwo (Reef Islands)
Language of subtitles: English, Czech
Launching of film,awards:
The 32 NAFA International Ethnographic Film Festival, Tromse, Norway, 23-26 August 2012
In the Basque country, the local distribution of agricultural products plays a very important role. Despite the strong pressure of foreign import, the traditional markets are an inseparable part of every day life of local people. Thus number of family farms has continued with its first-class production until these days. However, work at a farm is usually connected with a man – a man herdsman, a man farmer, a man trader. Eventhough, a woman is an important part of this world, she is usually overshadowed. But how is the everyday reality of a woman – landowner? To make a woman visible in the context of agricultural production was one of the goals of the documentary „Gaur 8 Azokan“, which resulted from the need of local rural women to emancipate, and whose hard work we do not know at all. The complementary character of gender roles within the rural world is shown in the light of anthropological perspective, and at the end, it will be clear that the rural world could never exist without both components – the productive and reproductive, the male and female.
The film is an attempt to question the ways in which the visual narrative is constructed when using the feedback method. The feedback provided by the people involved (the young performers but also the elders) in the Babaluda Feast, turned out to be very important in offering an insight to the ways in which the Feast was depicted by the visual ethnographer. By recoding the shared visual ethnography, that was arranged in big groups in a large screening rooms, but also in small groups in private houses, the film will try to experiment the ways in which the visual narrative is constructed by looking at, the looked at. The montage method of the film will use a chronotopic montage technique (Bakhtin), in which the time and space unity will be enacted in a visual ethnographic present.
