ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the learning process that is at the core of ethnographic research can benefit from the use of videography. Participatory observation, as the research technique that is central to ethnography, foregrounds presence and experience, assuming that ‘being there’ can generate insights into ideas, values, emotions and sensations of the research interlocutors that cannot otherwise be obtained. Yet events are fleeting, easily rendering observation transient. In this chapter I revisit ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the Garo Hills of India. There, funerals are a prime ground for staging social relationships. Engaging the dead as well as super-human entities, these allow for interactions that are either an answer to preceding ones, or are engaged in with the expectation of these being reciprocated later. Making video recordings allowed for ethnographic observation and participation to be extended, refined and reviewed in the weeks, months and years that followed. This close reading and analysis of the events attended, in dialogue with various interlocutors, was conditional to a learning process that allowed for probing beyond pre-existing frames of reference, querying interlocutors’ perspectives, interpretations and significances. The chapter contextualises the research methodology developed, and reflects on its implications, advantages and drawbacks.