fragments and visual ethnography

As a method, ethnography entails fieldwork, participant observation
author/director's position: detached to build "realist tales" (Van Maanen 1988).

Marcus (1992), however, suggested that "[e]thnography ... provides interpretation and explanation by strategies of contextualizing the problematic phenomena focused upon.... The referent of contextualization for the modernist ethnography ... are fragments that are arranged and ordered textually by the design of the ethnographer.... The whole that is more than the sum of the parts of such ethnographies is always in question, while the parts are systematically related to each other by a revealed logic of connections" (325).

Linda Lai's video work, I told them my camera was on (2005), Excitable speech: all About Cinderella (2006), Trespassing world cities (2006), Non-place ･ Other Spaces (2009), Shanghai saga: other skies, other lands (2009), demonstrate the importance of fragments in representing the world she lives in. These fragments include travelogues, daily interactions with friends, structured and unstructured interviews, written and visual diaries, found footage, critical insights on mainstream media texts, recitation of cultural studies texts, and self reflections. These fragments do not conjure up to a exposition-development-resolution story, nor do they pretend to show audiences the final and definite "truth" of the personal, social, and the material world. Rather than provide a linear, comprehensive, and explanatory account of an event, a person's life, or city life, the fragments under Lai's camera interrupt the "mainstream causal narrative logic" in Lai's words (2005: 1) and acknowledge the constructedness of the "ethnographic field"--the fleeting images, the split screen, and the silence--and "the limits of intelligibility" (Hegde 2009: 292; Butler 2004). As a film historian, cultural studies scholar, an artist, a postmodernist, a university teacher, a traveler, a wife with a Spanish husband, a woman circled with women friends, Lai composites her video fragments from these multiple positions to research and represent the world she lives and studies. Her works create new possibilities of experimentation in visual research and in appropriating others' cultures. That is, Lai's videos do not claim to tell us an objective truth of a specific location; instead, she provides audiences "with some powerful propositional, tacit, intuitive, emotional, historical, poetic, and empathic experience of the Other via the texts" she produces (Lincoln and Denzin 1994: 582).


References
Butler. 2004. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Hegde, R.S. 2009. Fragments and interruptions: sensory regimes of violence and the limtis of feminist ethnography. Qualitative inquiry 15 (2): 276-295.
Lai, L. C. 2005. 4748 moons and 13 elliptical years. Artist statement.
Lincoln, Y.S. 1994. The fifth moment. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Denzin and Lincoln, 575-586. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Marcus, G. E. 1994. What comes (just) after "post"? The case of ethnography. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Denzin and Lincoln, 563-574. Thousand Oaks: Sage.