My research projects on Chinese goddesses aim to analyze the various disciplines in the social sciences and their possible relationship to the visual as a research tool, as a methodology. How does video footage recall conversations between ritual participants and how is this hidden context inserted into the anthropologist’s representing of the event? How do “visuals we can’t take home”—images shared by the ritual in the field—shape the anthropologist’s image making and representing process? How do we effectively create image collection and visual reflection in the fieldwork process? The rituals analyzed in my work are becoming ever more dependent on changing political, religious, and cultural relations; This analysis moves beyond an attempt to ‘represent what we see’ in a documentary, towards an interrogation of what meanings might be attributed to a visual within specific cultural contexts. How does an object derive importance, validity and meaning among its subjects? What vested interests do locals have in creating and circulating particular representations of material culture? And how do these symbolic objects then take on new significance through documentation of rituals and cross borders between the professional and the personal, the regional and the national? I thus aim to reveal how they engage in a continuous process of recontextualization in which the transmission of meaning acquires a political and cultural form, allowing my work to operate as ‘multi-modal anthropology’ (Collins, Matthew, & Gill, 2017), combining text (inscription) and film (aesthetics) in a manner generally associated with photo-ethnography and only rarely explored by film-makers. In line with Timothy Asch’s exhortations to pair written ethnography and the visual, as well as Stoller’s (1995) cautioning against a myopic focus on solely written analysis, my project may be seen as an exploration into the limits of what can, and cannot, be conveyed across ostensibly opposed media.
