Patricia Alvarez Astacio

Filmmaking is a central part of my ethnographic practice. Film is not just an end product of ethnographic research but is also a method to address certain arenas of inquiry and, as I discuss elsewhere, an important part of my analytic approach. While researching the supply chains of alpaca wool garments for ethical fashions in Peru, I moved camera and notebook on hand between indigenous artisanal workshops in the Andean highlands, development spaces that promoted fashion as development, and Peruvian high-fashion worlds. Here I share my fieldnotes, visual and written, and discuss the process of working across both registers or ethnographic fieldnote taking.

Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s films resist neat categorizations—questioning presumed constructs and disrupting the impersonal gaze of ethnographic cinema and the self-situating moves of reflexive documentary. This subversion of Western categories through the politicization of the personal has made her films and texts crucial to a broad spectrum of arenas, from feminism to post-colonial theory. In this chapter, Minh-ha resists the undertaking of this book to present biographical portraits, warning us against assuming “there is a ‘natural’ link between what happened in your life and the kind of work you do.” In addition to her films— which include Reassemblage (1982), Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1992), A Tale of Love (1995), Night Passage (2004), and most recently Forgetting Vietnam (2015; 2016), among others—she has created numerous musical compositions, books of philosophy, theory, ethnography, and poetry, and has designed several pieces of installation art. This chapter includes a biography of Minh-ha, an interview with Minh-ha from 1983 and an essay by Minh-ha from 1987 both originally published in The Independent Film & Video Monthly, as well as an original interview with Minh-ha from 2018.