Broken gods: Collaborative filmmaking in troubled times

Abstract

AbstractDrawing on my involvement in the production of Broken Gods, a film that documents the growing participation of India's indigenous groups in projects of cultural erasure and conversion to Hinduism, this article reflects on the relations and tensions between a commitment to collaboration and critique. The film was co‐designed with indigenous communities, although such collaboration became impossible due to contrasting religious‐political affiliations. Collaborative techniques such as feedback resulted in challenging censorship claims that could only be resolved by reclaiming the importance of critique. Collaborative projects with nonanthropologists have often gone alongside a public or engaged anthropology, recasting ethnography as an act of citizenship with the potential to intervene in existing struggles (Lassiter 2005). Within these projects, anthropologists have traditionally taken the side of the oppressed. Yet, what happens when the marginal groups anthropologists traditionally championed align with the powerful forces anthropologists traditionally critiqued? How do we collaborate with groups we disagree with? And how do we represent disagreement in collaboration? The article approaches these questions via a consideration of methods, demonstrating how different media—and film, in particular—have different impacts on the possibilities and forms of both collaboration and critique.