Between Hollywood and Bandjoun: art activism and anthropological ethnography into the mediascape

Abstract

Audio-visual media are a powerful vehicle of globalization engaged in the creation of widespread mediascapes shaping the imagination and the feelings of the people all around the world. As a consequence the audio-visual media are not only a means of anthropological research but a constituent part of the ethnographic field as well.It was in this perspective that in 2009 I asked the Italian artistic collective of Alterazioni Video to accompany me to the Bamileke chiefdom of Bandjoun (Cameroon), where I usually conduct my research. The main topic of our work was fear, an emotion we investigated by filming some traditional masquerades of secret societies (which also made use of some Hollywood-inspired masks) and by making a horror movie with a local cast, using the set and the backstage as an ethnographic field. The vampires and the zombies who were the subject of the film form a part of a shared global imagery but they are also an invisible, effective presence in local sorcery practices. We have tried to stay on the border between facts and fictions, feelings and actors’ performances, as well as art and anthropology, but also to question it, in order to test the way in which anthropology and artistic activism could find a meeting point on the terrain of ethnographic practice.