Collaborative Visual Ethnography as Anarchist Anthropology

Abstract

In DIY punk scenes around the world there are varying interpretations of what ‘doing-it-yourself ’ means. For the punks at Rumah Pirata, a punk collective near Bandung, Indonesia, DIY is a form of practiced anarchism. They frame their definition of DIY around interactions based on mutual aid, non-hierarchical organizational practices, and deep-seated anti-capitalist sentiments. To them, doing-it-yourself means doing-it-with-friends and doing-it-without-profiting. In many ways, the power dynamics embedded in standard ethnographic research run counter to Rumah Pirata’s collectivist ethics. In this article I discuss a collaborative visual ethnography project done in conjunction with the Rumah Pirata collective, designed to incorporate DIY anarchist principles into ethnographic methods. Through participatory ethnographic photography and the collective construction of a photo-book/zine, I demonstrate that collaborative visual methods offer a way to curtail the power dynamics inherent in ethnography, thereby facilitating enhanced understandings of the interworking of a punk anarchist collective.