Playing with concepts

At the other extreme from jargon is the replication of real people’s experience, something that anthropologists constantly strive to achieve while acknowledging that we do not read people’s minds. Catherine Donaldson, in this issue, offers a fascinating form of serious play as one potential answer to this dilemma. By inviting individuals who have suffered the torments of immigration and its policing to act out roles related to their own experiences and those of their comrades, she proposes a form of productive play that respects these individuals’ agency, their desire to be heard, and the paradox of their need for privacy. Theatrical play becomes a means of conveying experiential truth, especially through engagement in the production process as well as the acting itself. This is the approach Donaldson calls “ethnoproduction”—an approach that is only possible because she is acting as both a cinematographer and a filmmaker. Yes, this term adds to the disciplinary jargon, but this is jargon that helps us to grasp a new way of bringing filmmaking and ethnography into juxtaposition. That juxtaposition challenges, even if it cannot finally resolve, the inscrutability of individual experience.