INDIGENOUS VIDEO, DEVELOPMENT AND SHARED ANTHROPOLOGY: A COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCE WITH MAYA Q'EQCHI'FILMMAKERS IN POSTWAR GUATEMALA

Abstract

This article deals with the role of indigenous video, shared anthropology, and collaborative filmmaking among Maya‐Q'eqchi'communities in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. The subjective and historical conditions that provided the context for collaborative video production between local filmmakers, communities and a visual anthropologist are analyzed, as are the implications these had both for the Q'eqchi'and for my own anthropological practice. I argue that this community‐based video project provided important ethnographic insights about an indigenous group and its transformations. It also provided the communities with new mechanisms for sociocultural reconstruction and awareness after an intensely traumatic and violent period of civil war. In this context, the video documents produced provided a space within a wider practice of shared anthropology where each party could advance its own goals through hybrid products. The project represented an opportunity to explore ways in which anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking could, simultaneously, be of use to the researcher and to the communities studied. It also highlighted the contradictions and complexities of collaborative or “shared” anthropological practice in the sphere of applied visual anthropology.