Visual Data Collection in an Insecurity Environment: Blangoua, Cameroonian Window on Lake Chad

Abstract

Once an anthropologist sets out a fieldwork, he/she faces myriad of challenges. While it is obvious that access to the target community is related to the prevailing socio-political context, there are even more constraints when data collection is carried out using an audiovisual tool. The aim in the present article is to share the field collaboration experience with informants in the locality of Blangoua. It shows how the audiovisual tool was an actual catalysis in this process, both for knowledge creation and for the discovery of certain latent realities among the youth of Blangoua. This paper endeavors also to highlight the visual anthropologist researcher’s ambivalent position in his/her specific involvement out in research field. Thus, starting from the principle of shared anthropology (Rouch, 1968) which would like the researcher in visual anthropology to consult his informants and show them everything that is constructed as a message from their culture, we manage to detect “truths” that emerge consciously or unconsciously from the behavior of individuals.