ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the kinds of genre destabilizations that result when unanticipated actors (as well as the usual suspects) produce audio-visual material that can and should be considered ethnographic and circulate this work in alternate circuits. It begins with a discussion regarding the importance of broadening the definition of ethnographic film to recognize a diversity of audio-visual content made possible in today’s digital media ecology. The chapter engages with examples of a few projects that help us think through how one might reimagine what constitutes ethnographic film when they take as they starting point questions of circulation and its concomitant concerns of authorship and authority. Debates that pit the authority of filmic ethnographies against textual ones, of course, are too many and too complex to recount here. What is important is how, historically, ethnographic film, as a category and an endeavor, was narrowed in scope as a result of the historical debates.
