Taking the Long Route: Ethnographic Metacommentary as Method in the Anthropological Film Practice

Abstract of article forthcoming in Current Anthropology, 2019 This article introduces "ethnographic metacommentary," an experiential, processual, and protracted approach to ethnography. My proposed method goes beyond stating complexity as the defining characteristic of an anthropological project, visual or otherwise. To demonstrate the method, I write an ethnographic metacommentary of my three-minute film "Performing Naturalness" (2008), …

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Mothers as the Clan’s “Sugod”: The Interweaving of Kinship, Gender, and Personhood in the Migration Practices of a Filipino Family

For the 2014 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of Toronto Contemporary mobilities depend upon and re-enact colonization, and today’s experiences and imaginings of home and belonging are also related to these histories (Ahmed, Castaneda, and Fortier 2003). Situating women at the center of this autobiographical ethnography, I focus on the three “mothers” …

Ton-ton (The Descent): Returning Migrants’ Fulfillment of a Covenant in the “Town of Dollars,” Philippines

    For the 2016 Société Internationale d´Ethnologie et de Folklore’s Working Group on Migration and Mobility Workshop, University of Basel, Switzerland The Philippines remains one of the world’s major sources of migrant labour, and Filipino workers are now spread to literally every country and territory in the world. More than 5,000 Filipinos leave the …

“Wasting Time”: Re-encountering the Hometown as Anthropological Field Site

    My fieldsite is my hometown located in Luzon Island, Philippines which is called by its residents the “Town of Dollars.” Returning to the field as an absentee resident and beginning to re-immerse in it as kin, neighbor, and anthropologist proved more complex than the host of theories and methods I had come equipped …

Proudly Local: Crafts in the Midst of Filipino Overseas Migration

For the 2017 Canadian Association for the Study of International Development, Toronto, Canada During my dissertation fieldwork in my hometown called Nabua (Philippines), I revived my grandparents' defunct cottage bamboo crafts business. My initiation into the world of family business, while undoubtedly a capitalist enterprise that starkly contrasts with non-profit academic work, has led me …

The End of a Generation: Stories from Branch 127 of the Fleet Reserve Association, Town of Dollars, Philippines

For the 2016 University of British Columbia Southeast Asia Graduate Student Conference, Vancouver, B.C., Canada In his pioneering historiography of the U.S. Navy, James M. Morris (1984) observes that the Philippines was an important participant in the expansion of US seapower. Filipinos began to be recruited to the US Navy in 1901, after US President …

Performing Naturalness: Intersections of Conceptual Art and Anthropology In Ethnographic Filmmaking

The policing of difference in Tokyo can be seen as one of Japan's strategies for immigration control. Exasperated with the “random” interrogations by Japanese police, I conducted a one-time experiment with the following hypothesis: that without doing anything out of the ordinary, I will be singled out by the police as an “other” from the …