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Visual anthropology and sensory ethnography in contemporary Sardinia: A film of a different kind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Silvio Carta
Silvio Carta*
Affiliation:
Department of Italian Studies, University of Birmingham, UK
*
∗Email: sxc741@bham.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article reads David MacDougall's Tempus de Baristas (1993) as an instance of the rejection of the didacticism of documentary films driven by the logic of the written text. This ethnographic film about the life of three goat-herders is one of the films that allows the Sardinian-speaking subjects a space and, therefore, a far more prominent role in the total cinematic construction than has usually been the case. Tempus marks the definitive departure from the transmission of written socio-anthropological knowledge that is typical of expository documentaries. The article concludes that the filmic approach of which Tempus is a landmark produces a corporeal and emplaced knowledge that counterbalances the abstract vision of many documentaries about the author's native island and questions traditional forms of scholarly communication, opening up new areas of ethnographic understanding.

Keywords

visual anthropologyethnographySardinian cultureindividualitycorporeal images
Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 305 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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