Evan Carpenter and Dr. Julie Hartley, Anthropology
In May through September of 2005 I shot a documentary film about social progress for women in a village just outside the city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India. The original purpose was to learn how the social and domestic roles of a family are affected by a specific development program aimed at helping women become financially independent through microlending and vocational training. What I ended up with instead was an experiment in visual anthropology and an unusual story about the day to day lives of Tamil women and the other stories they tell to misrepresent their experiences.
I conducted semi-structured and informal interviews with women from two self-help groups (SHGs) that actually do all of their meetings together and for all intents and purposes act as one group. These interviews were recorded on videotape. In addition, I loaned the women a video camera. They were asked to record a variety of things including activities in their SHG, group meetings, and interviews with each other. I also recorded various activities, weddings, parties, meetings, daily chores, etc. and interviews with local professors, doctors, and writers. The collection of videos that the women and I created together became the source of many of the interview questions later on. Often, clips were shown to the women after which I asked questions about the segments for further insight. In the interviews that I personally conducted, I dedicated a large amount of time to asking about issues that were brought up in interviews that the women had done with each other. This helped me to learn how the setting of the interview affected the answers that the women would give.
My methods were qualitative and my findings cannot be generalized. This research includes only two SHGs in one village in India. Because of what I learned, I have developed many assumptions about women’s development in India, women and camera culture, and Indian culture in general. Although I will share some of these assumptions they are not meant to be conclusions, rather observations and opinions.
After about two weeks of occasional social visits, I gave a presentation to all of the women in the sample groups. I explained that I wanted to make a documentary film about them and that I wanted them to assist in the creation by doing much of the recording and interviewing themselves. They seemed thrilled and I probably seemed relieved because I had been pretty worried that they might feel exploited at the proposition. I’ve never been much of one to photograph strangers or anything, especially beggars or the homeless. Doing so seems fine and even glamorous when you’re sitting at home reading Time Magazine, but it’s much more awkward in practice. Luckily, the women didn’t express any reservations about the plan.
Once all of the boring technical stuff was out of the way, the women received a crash course in camera work—how to record, how to put on the lens cap, etc. Kalarani, the group’s president volunteered to take the camera and she did most of the shooting for the next five months.
It became evident very quickly that the women didn’t have much of a concept of what a documentary film was. If they did, it was very different from mine. Moreover, it seemed like when they did understand what I wanted they were silently resisting. They looked blank when I discussed shooting in “natural settings” or tried to get them to keep doing what they were doing before I turned on the camera (which I almost never did, but it was impossible just the same). The reality was that the women didn’t want to present their real lives on video. As long as they were the ones shooting, they wouldn’t record anything in a natural setting, especially in their homes even though they always politely agreed to do so when I asked them to. All of the shooting they did was of planned material. There was always a lot of singing and performing, etc. on the tapes. They did spend a little time recording their businesses that they had started with the help of a microlending program. However, the presentation was contrived. It was more of a skit than an observational recording. The women would pretend to buy rice and pretend to sell saris, but it was all acted out.
This sort of contrived presentation continued whenever I asked Kalarani to conduct and record interviews with some of the group members. She would occasionally turn off the camera when somebody didn’t know what to say. In other cases she would feed the interview subjects lines. It wasn’t so much that they were trying to portray that they didn’t have problems. They openly discussed some of their problems. Rather, they wanted to distance the problems from themselves. In some cases they were aware of the public stigma attached to certain practices so they would lie about it. For example, the practice of dowry is common throughout most of India including where I was doing my research. But not in this village, the women assured me. My personal observations through wedding attendance and my conversations with local professionals would suggest otherwise.
The other strange thing I discovered was that the women would answer questions differently depending on who was interviewing. When Kalarani was interviewing, one group member was quite open about how another group member’s husband had beat her in the past. When I interviewed the same person about the same issue she dodged it. She didn’t lie outright, but I couldn’t get her to admit that there had ever been any abuse problems. I don’t know exactly what would account for this difference. The camera was present in both situations, so it probably wasn’t that. The only thing that was clear was that the nature and setting of the interview did affect the information that the subjects disclosed. Also, after Kalarani’s interview wherein the subject openly discussed abuse, Kalarani said to her “You are saying too much.”
Most of the evidence given here is rather brief due to space. There is much more, but it was generally anecdotal just like these examples. That is the result of a project gone awry. My original intent wasn’t to study how research methods affect research findings. It was to study change in domestic lifestyles as women were empowered and became financially independent. What I did learn was that I couldn’t report on the subject with any accuracy because I lost all confidence that anybody was being honest. This means that some of the research on this or similar subjects could be misled and that more long-term qualitative analysis may be necessary to authenticate or discredit previous findings.