Ethnographic filmmakers often struggle to balance the need to let people to speak for themselves with the need to create a coherent presentation-through their own creative hand. Ethnographic writers face similar challenges in choosing to approach their subjects through expository versus evocative prose. This article brings out some of the common concerns of ethnomusicology and visual anthropology through an analysis of the author's own processes of learning music, creative writing, and filmmaking. The discussion concerns the role of the ethnographer's creativity in generating and communicating knowledge; and issues of representing and accessing the "real."
Sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) remains a serious and expanding form of violence in Papua New Guinea. The issue is most acute in the Highlands, where accusations intersect with gender inequality, social precarity and shifting media environments. At the same time, smartphones and social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube have become increasingly significant in the circulation of violent imagery and accusation narratives. This article examines whether these same platforms can be used to circulate alternative anti-violence narratives. Drawing on collaborative video production undertaken with young people in Goroka in 2024 and 2025, I analyze the co-design, production, circulation, and reception of the short-form series Stap Isi Wantaim. I argue that collaborative short-form video production functions not only as a communication strategy but as a form of performative and narrative intervention. The production process enabled participants to critically reflect on sorcery accusations, rehearse nonviolent responses, and develop media literacy, while the videos reached a substantial online audience within the intended demographic. The article contributes to visual anthropology by showing how co-created digital video can operate simultaneously as ethnographic practice, public pedagogy, and anti-violence intervention in contemporary Papua New Guinea.
Until his death, South Africa's Sam Nzima was known for his iconic photograph of the 1976 Soweto Uprising on 16 June. This photo, capturing the fatality of the 13-year-old Zolile Hector Pieterson, heralded the representational turning point in the global community's commitment to opposing apartheid. While Nzima was never memorialized as an anti-apartheid hero, the subject of his photograph is honored with the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum in Soweto. This article discusses this omission in post-apartheid South Africa's commemorative enterprise. While the article's theoretical foundation is trauma photography, it applies ellipsis as a viable theory for the photographer-photograph disconnect. The idea of structured absences is also applied to explain the way that the photograph's author is elided from the public mind. This gap is argued to significantly offer a new approach to critiquing the practice of visual memorialization. The article argues that the photograph's full historical significance cannot exist outside the context of the photograph-photographer relationship.
