African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 251
FILMS ON AFRICAN FOLKLORE
Folklore is not made of timeless archaisms, but is being reshaped and recreated
constantly (Dundes 1980). One can speak of folklore every time one is confronted by a
culturally codified behavior. It means that the members of a group immediately
understand a behavior and its context while it remains obscure to people coming from
another cultural background. History and change is an important dimension of this
codification; today, cultures are not viewed as essentialized organic wholes.
Historically, the term folklore was first used only to refer to archaic parts and regional
cultural specificities of “civilized countries.” Due to racial prejudices and ethnocentric
biases, African cultures were for a long time excluded from folklore studies, as they were
perceived to represent an earlier stage of evolution. Although the term folklore was
already central in texts by Tylor and Boas at the end of the nineteenth century, it was
used only for film subjects in Africa by the German ethnographers of the 1920s and the
1930s, as they shaped ethnographic subjects into Kulturfilme.
Films, like books, were often based on a double paradox: the ethnographers were
going into the field, but they were trying to describe what had just disappeared (Owusu
1978). In a brilliant essay, Johannes Fabian criticized the use of literary devices by
mainstream anthropology to inscribe exotic cultures in a remote and frozen time (Fabian
1983). The same critique can certainly be addressed to many ethnographic films. The
basic assumption was that cultural patterns had remained unchanged until the clash with
Western civilization and their consequent destruction. The urgent agenda of ethnographic
documentary filmmakers was then defined in terms of a salvage agenda.
Under the catalogue heading of “folklore,” most of the ethnographic films that were
filed were those that tried to gather raw material. This corresponds to a tradition of
collecting, identifying, and classifying data. As late as 1959, the Rules for Film
Documentation in Ethnology and Folklore proposed what we can call a “natural science”
treatment for ethnographic film. That is, the films should conform themselves to a
descriptive mode, recording rituals and technical processes, as they would have occurred
without the presence of an observer. The fundamental question of interpretation was
considered to come only secondarily. We know now that the two moments—of collection
and interpretation—cannot be totally separated and that we cannot observe anything
without, at least unconsciously, interpreting it. The observer, as Marcel Mauss noted, is
always part of the subject (Mauss 2001). “The belief that film can be unmediated record
of the real world,” writes Jay Ruby, “is based on the idea that cameras, not people, take
pictures and the naïve empiricist notion that the world is as it appears to be” (Ruby 1982,
124–5).
Films have often been produced by explorers and individual fieldworkers, but
museums and universities have sometimes invested money in audiovisual projects as
well. In the 1920s, museums were well suited to produce ethnographic films; they could
send cameramen on their expeditions and then attract audiences to their programs. The
American Museum of Natural History’s library has some videorecordings reflecting this
time of exploration. Later, museums contributed to film production with the aim of
counterbalancing the lifelessness of artifact displays. Notable recent productions include
African Religions and Ritual Dances (1971), co-produced by the University Museum