Memories of a blue nile home: The photographic moment and multimedia linkage

TL;DRAbstract

This chapter is based on an ongoing collaboration between the authors. We first explore the role of photographs within what became a long-term, though intermittent, anthropological engagement by Wendy James in the turbulent regions of the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands, especially with the Uduk-speaking people. Although only touching occasionally on photographs taken by local people, our case study offers what we believe to be a usefully different picture of the social relations of photography carried out in Africa from that of the classic ethnographic encounter. Moreover we argue that a creative use of today’s digital technology, as being developed by Judith Aston, is opening up fresh possibilities for the circulation and exchange of pictures, old and new, between the original ethnographer and various members of the original studied community, both ‘at home’ and in various parts of what became their diaspora.

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