Abstract
Abstract: In this paper, I will explore the use of fiction films as a teaching methods in classes of social anthropology with regional interest. I will compare the use of different films from the Black Sea region as way to 1. familiarise my students with the historical dis/continuities and presuppositions which contribute to the formation of the ‘region’, 2.bring them in contact with the methods of doing and writing ethnography. For this undertake, I am going to use four films, two from Georgia and two from the eastern shores of the Black Sea (Bulgaria and Romania). The discussion proposes a method of teaching through fiction films which traces the interlinks between imagination and representation.
 Keywords: stereotypes, area studies, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, violence, corruption
Highlights
In the 1970s, Clifford Geertz (1973) criticising functionalist ethnography for observing cultures at a distance considered deep immersion in cultural subject matter as a way for ethnographic texts to postulate the interconnected networks of cultural meanings and actions
The challenges of proximity: The geographic and historical closeness of the Black Sea to Greece often generated in my students certain ideas about what they ‘think they know’ about the region due to the ancient Greek colonisation of the Black Sea, Christianity, the Ottoman and Russian imperial past as well as historical diasporas and present transnational mobilities, for example, the community of the Bulgarian, Georgian or Armenian labour immigrants in Greece
Omi da Qortsili which was funded and support of the Georgian Ministry of Culture did not find distribution in Europe because the film flirted with propaganda
Summary
In the 1970s, Clifford Geertz (1973) criticising functionalist ethnography for observing cultures at a distance considered deep immersion in cultural subject matter as a way for ethnographic texts to postulate the interconnected networks of cultural meanings and actions. Caton developed a fruitful dialogue between the social, the cultural and the artistic in different historical periods from the 1960s to the 1990s, studying issues of travel and colonialism in fieldwork and filmmaking; orientalist representations of the Middle East and hetero/homosexual Otherness In this way, the film shifted from being a text to becoming a context, a space which was not produced by bounded and homogenous territories, cultures and communities, but rather by the inter-dependencies of different and history-sensitive locales constructed by “complex systems such as colonialism or market economies’’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 91).
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