Understanding Alveolar Stop Liquid Rules Theory for Dance Applications
The hidden world of ethnographic music videos
In 2020, the journal Visual Ethnography dedicated its first issue to a topic that had rarely been discussed openly: music videos produced during ethnographic fieldwork. The monographic number grew out of conversations its co-editors, Dario Ranocchiari of the Universidad de Granada and Eugenio Giorgianni of Royal Holloway, University of London, had at anthropology and ethnomusicology conferences. Their own separate experiences as both videomakers and ethnographers converged into a shared discovery: what had begun as a seemingly marginal, almost accidental by-product of their academic work had become central to the ethnographic knowledge they produced.
Ranocchiari recalls the first time he presented a paper on this subject at a conference panel on collaboration in music and dance. Twenty or so people attended. His talk covered several attempts he had made at “shared research” over his career, including the unexpected adventure of co-producing music videos with musicians from the Caribbean island of San Andrés, Colombia. Silence followed the presentation until one astonished question broke it: was it true that one of the videos had reached seven million clicks? Yes, it had — by that date the count actually stood at 58. Silence resumed. Disheartened as he left the room, Ranocchiari encountered someone on the stairs. “I’ve shot a music video myself while I was doing fieldwork,” she said, “but I never talked about this in a conference.” Another person then shared the same confession, adding that he had not deemed his experience sufficiently “scientific” for scholarly discussion. A third admitted, over lunch, that he had been talked by some rappers into making not one but three music videos. “I understood,” Ranocchiari writes, “that the society of the videomaker-ethnographers is secret, but not necessarily small.”
Meanwhile, Giorgianni had co-produced a music video with the Big Tree Collective in Goma, Congo. Together the two editors convened a panel at the 2016 AIBR International Conference of Anthropology. Alongside themselves, the cast included Kieran Hanson, who had made a documentary on postwar Sierra Leone that featured two music videos, and Yushi Yanohara, a Japanese ethnographer and rapper who worked with a hip-hop crew in Cameroon. Only three people attended that panel. At later conferences brought better turnout, especially when sessions were plenary rather than parallel, but the questions were few and the atmosphere tinged with perplexity. Private confessions were more numerous than public comments.
The curious mix of absence, silence, whispered sympathy, and palpable suspicion made the editors realise that their line of research was difficult to discuss within the boundaries of ethnographic decorum. What made the experience of making music videos during fieldwork so unspeakable? They set out to answer that question while also gathering reflections on what music videos can contribute to ethnographic knowledge production.
A turning point in the field
Ranocchiari’s own resistance to music video production dates back to 2002, when he was doing his first long-term ethnography in Lisbon with Afro-Portuguese rappers. He turned down multiple requests to film music videos. The fear of losing control over research data — of no longer being able to distinguish the product of participant observation from what his own participation had helped to create — kept him at a distance. That same fear resurfaced in 2009, when he was in San Andrés working on a project about musical practices and performative ethnicity. Iván Samir and Maki Egusguiza, his partners at the small production company Cotton Tree Media, asked him to act as their cameraman. He initially refused. He wanted to study their music videos for his research — how could he analyse those videos if his own aesthetic choices and preconceived ideas had helped shape them? Eventually he agreed, out of friendship. He had no inkling that his relationships with the musicians of the island would change entirely.
Almost without noticing, his status shifted from researcher attempting to work on San Andrean music to another actor within the local music scene, one who was involved in making a musical artefact of real importance to the music market. Doors that had remained closed for months suddenly opened. Interviews he had been unable to secure turned into friendly lunches where research topics flowed as freely as the whisky. For the first two videos, Ranocchiari tried to limit his creative input, following director Maki Egusguiza’s instructions as strictly as possible. The idea was to leverage his participation for ethnographic data consistent with his research agenda. Yet as months went by, his interest in video making gradually overlay the priorities of that agenda. During the shooting and editing of the next two videos, he let himself be carried away, accepting a loss of control. He became intimately involved in editing, something he had previously avoided entirely. When he later read his field diary back in Spain, he discovered with surprise that the notes had metamorphosed into production notes. The intense collaborative experience had overwhelmed every other ethnographic concern.
Giorgianni underwent a similar intensification. When he first mentioned to Congolese musician Mulele Matondo Afrika that he wanted to make a music video, he had already expressed interest in Congolese music, and they were having a pleasant conversation about it. But as soon as Mulele understood that video was also on Giorgianni’s mind, the discussion came to life at a different frequency. Mulele began scrolling through folders of raw footage, sharing ideas about visual strategies and politics in music and images. Within twenty‑four hours, Giorgianni had been invited — and booked — as camera person for an existing project.
Arriving at the warehouse in North London that served as the set, he was immediately swept up in a boisterous web of art‑making. The singers were still recording through a studio microphone plugged into a laptop. Actors painted dots and lines across one another’s faces and arms. Mulele demonstrated Congolese dance patterns to friends who added their own repertoire to the growing choreography, the song looping from the speakers again and again. Except for Mulele, nobody had heard the track before; the Lingala lyrics were unintelligible to part of the crew. Performing collaboratively, tuning into the project by watching each other, they barely discussed the song’s meaning and instead explored the creative potential of the space they were learning to share.
Light from trembling candles animated decorative elements and the bodies of dancers and actors rehearsing. The camera was already running when Mulele briefed a Londoner of African-Caribbean origin about her role as an African priestess. A Congolese backing vocalist on break offered a suggestion for expressing ancestral power in a short choreographic sequence. The actress began to inhabit her role, moving across the stage with shell necklaces, straw skirts, and other props.
Giorgianni felt sensorily overwhelmed. He found himself trying — vainly — to make sense of the symbol‑packed whirl: the interplay of body painting, the spectrum of skin tones, the movement of muscles, the colourful clothes, the intricate rhythms, the multilingual exchanges. The exuberant creative storm was far beyond his capacity to command. But he was there to shoot: he had to commit his body to the camera and everyone expected him to fulfil that role. He abandoned the position of observer, surrendered himself, and let the film happen around him. The performers, he gradually understood, were directing the audiovisual product more than he was. Their bodies, the spaces they arranged, the lights and shadows they selected — these generated most of the drama, counterbalancing the camera‑and‑editing selectivity of the ethnographer. “I started engaging with the performers through the camera, spurring them, intervening in the stage dynamics, constantly feeding back. It felt nice,” the scholar later reported. At one point Mulele — the artist he was apparently helping — suddenly exclaimed: “Man, it’s your turn! Take your shoes off, step in the circle and dance, just express yourself. I want you in the video, definitely!” Awkward and embarrassed but somehow also exhilarated, Giorgianni handed over the camera and danced.
When he later started editing, he wanted to reproduce the vibe: to structure the sequence around participants’ improvised rhythms and narratives, respecting their own pace by exercising restraint. He says modesty in the edit. But Mulele intervened throughout, systematically dismantling that idea. He introduced jump cuts, variations in pacing dictated by intricate polyrhythms, overlays of post‑production effects. During the prolonged edit, the artist re-mastered the song multiple times, shot new and supplementary footage, reworked sections — even reconcepts the edits in response to feedback. For Giorgianni, it was hard to accept, but the video had to fulfil Mulele’s idea of what was most effective: He for his song among Congolese radio and music TV in a Kinshasa TV screen context or in an even broader environment. The final cut remains an ever-fascinating patchworks was one member could not ultimately disconnected one part completely split the creator himself. “…Mulele and his artist friends” sums the merged control in unusual final video product experience; Giorgianni candid.
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Operating a camera for a music video hits another sensitive spot within academic circles: the role of the researcher’s emotions, tastes, desires, opinions, and senses.
As numerous ethnographic music video accounts attest, being part of a video clip is great fun. Low-budget music video production — a situation that holds for almost all cases discussed below — typically involves a network of friends and collaborators who share skills, interests, creative activities, resources, spaces, and free time, coming together to carry out their artistic endeavors with imagination. The ethnographer usually joins the project as a volunteer camera operator; she becomes just one node in the video clip network, a resource gathered free of charge by the producers — sometimes the musicians themselves. The usual result of these creative dynamics of mutual aid is a friendly atmosphere where the researcher, like everyone else involved, can experiment with new languages, play with ideas and roles, and meet interesting people. This fosters deeper personal connections with research subjects and increases the flow of information between ethnographer and interlocutors. But this comes at the price of a significant shift in the researcher’s position: the ethnographer loses her aura of prestige and becomes a part of the workforce, needing to be ready to renegotiate the research agenda — entirely or substantially — at any moment. Moreover, making a music video requires the researcher to expose her feelings, depend on emotions, personal preferences, and sensory impressions, deliberately interfering with every cultural dynamic at play through irreversible decisions made in an instant, far from any academic comfort zone. This intense fieldwork engagement — its thickness and messiness — forces the researcher to take a stand, a position very close to that of the other research subjects.
Music video creation brings creativity and proactivity to the forefront of ethnographic practice, and consequently the ethnographer’s choices, tastes, and personal dispositions become immediately visible and directly shape the musical object of the research. The audiovisual ethnographer dives into the observed dynamics, collapsing any remaining distance between subjects and objects, outside and inside, the lens and the scene. The practice of making music videos imposes on the researcher a bodily commitment and sensory saturation that become a form of non-verbal communication, emotional intelligence, and intimate connection to the fieldwork and its protagonists. The ethnographic music video allows anthropologists to generate knowledge with their bodies and to communicate with their interlocutors — both in the field and later — through the texture of dreams, desires, and feelings, activating new exchanges between anthropology and other human practices.
Giving a minimalist definition to these peculiar visual artifacts, they are essentially music videos produced while (part of) their creators were doing ethnographic fieldwork — videos that both influenced that fieldwork and were influenced by it. As we explain later, our ambition for the future ethnographic use of this type of videos is larger, but at this early stage we mainly apply the term ‘ethnographically grounded music video’ in this broader sense.
So they are not conventional ethnographic films. They do not document any aspect of local communities’ real life. They do not directly portray the daily existence of subjects representative of a certain cultural context. They do not tell the story of an ethnographic encounter—they are rather one of its consequences. If that were not enough, they are works of fiction operating on the level of the imaginary rather than in the realm of academic documentation of cultural practices. Recalling an old debate, they try to work on ‘the true’ rather than ‘the real’, as standard ethnography does.
Fiction proves valuable in ethnography primarily when used as a methodological tool for reaching a level of knowledge — about musicking, the creative process, the social meaning that subjects give to what they do — that could not be achieved otherwise. The title of this dossier, and at least two of its papers, evoke ‘ethnofiction’ as closely related to ethnographically grounded music video. Jean Rouch’s ethnofictions are among the first and most successful ethnographic visual experiments seeking to move beyond factual representation and scientific authority. In these films, participants are encouraged to express themselves by establishing a direct relationship with the camera: the cultural elements captured on film are those of their personal and cultural imagination, not the product of a phenomenological observation of social life.
As we wrote elsewhere, “Our idea of participatory music video transfers to a musical context Rouch’s practice of ethnofictional filmmaking. After all, participatory music videos share with ethnofictions the idea that people express, through a performance facilitated by the camera, some aspects of a more intimate truth that otherwise would stay implicit. The central importance that Rouch gives to improvisation and spontaneity at the expense of the narrative combines very well with the non-narrative structure of most music videos. And even if the pre-conceived or even pre-recorded musical track limits in some way the freedom of improvisation and requires a certain shooting plan, it also allows experimentation with the video layer largely independent of the audio layer.” (Ranocchiari & Giorgianni 2018)
The hybrid, ambiguous status of the music video clip as a mode of communication is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the academic hesitation we have encountered so far. This special issue presents a series of ethnographic experiences that welcome the otherness of music video into academic debate, exploring short circuits and hybrid forms, rethinking fieldwork, and generating critical discourses from that otherness — taking music video as a mode of producing knowledge.
3. The papers. Notes on the contributions to the dossier
The essays assembled in this monographic issue all concern experiences of academic and non-academic researchers who took part in music video production during fieldwork. Locations, social settings, music genres, and visual approaches differ from one another: rap by Mapuche artists native to Southern Chile (Rojas, Blanco & Mellado 2020), Brazilian pop music in São Paulo (Leaha & Hilgenberg 2020), working-class rock in Southern Spain (Yáñez 2020), women-centered music in Mozambique (Boswall 2020), Brazilian funk — again in São Paulo (Boudreault-Fournier, Hikiji & Caiuby 2020) — and Indigenous rap in Edmonton, Canada (MacDonald 2020). Space constraints led us to leave out our own papers on video-making experiences with Congolese musicians in Africa and the diaspora (Eugenio) and with Caribbean and Al-Andalus-inspired musicians in Colombia and Granada (Dario).
The dossier opens with the paper by Rojas, Blanco, and Mellado on the production of a music video with rappers from a Mapuche community in Valdivia, southern Chile. The authors analyze their collaborative co-creation as a possible path beyond the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and Bruno Latour as main references, the perspective of the ‘ontological turn’ strongly suggests that we should ‘take seriously’ the ontological premises of the people ethnographers work with. The authors accepted this challenge to its full extent and decided that anthropological discourse — usually shaped by academic modes of knowledge transmission — should respect the format that their epistemic partners (Marcus & Holmes 2008: 83) consider most appropriate for conveying the message: rap music video. A music video — and not (only) an academic paper — as a product of collaborative research and a ‘serious’ vehicle for critical knowledge, in line with the best hip-hop tradition: “The process of building the video clip [Nuestro Territorio], besides destabilizing the researcher/researched dichotomy, made the academic emphasis of the results and consequential limited reach of the resulting knowledge more complex. In other words, it allowed transit in and out of academic circles.” (Rojas, Blanco & Mellado 2020)
In the article that closes the dossier, Michael B. MacDonald expresses a similar concern for what we call, later in this paper, transmodal outcomes. Reflecting on the making of a kind of expanded hip-hop video, the musical ethnofiction Unspittable that he produced with Canadian Indigenous rappers from Edmonton, MacDonald notes that this type of video allows the researcher-artist to engage in the production of screen objects that traverse different media, networks, and audiences, while at the same time maintaining a commitment “to the study of musical meaning in its broadest sense” (MacDonald 2020).
If MacDonald reinterprets the classic form of ethnofiction by blending it with Les Blank’s conception of music film as a piece of music where everything happens musically, Boudreault-Fournier, Hikiji, and Caiuby (2020) focus their reflection on the music video sequences embedded in their ethnofiction Fabrik Funk. While these authors view ethnofiction as a method for approaching — through fictionalization — the fabrication of the everyday, the music video sequences interrupt the daily routine of the main character, aspiring funk MC Negaly, a young woman from the district of Cidade Tiradentes.
Like MacDonald referencing Les Blank, Mihai Andrei Leaha and Katharina Hilgenberg treat their audiovisual collaboration with Brazilian pop artist Kasper Maldonado as an act of musicking — or more precisely ‘videocliping’, paraphrasing Christopher Small — and approach ethnographic research mainly as a moment of co-creation spurred by the dialogue between epistemic partners. The article places the ethnographic music video within the frame of multimodality, as the meeting point of multiple voices, artistic practices, and political intentions. Consistently, the essay is structured as an assembly of written texts, time-lapse animations, photographic collages, and the music video itself, mirroring the non-linear multivocality of the research and calling for an active reception by the reader/viewer/listener.
Space — “a locus of entanglement between human and non-human agencies” — assumes vital importance: the Kasper Factory, an artistic hub near São Paulo’s Municipal Market, provides the creative environment, political discourses, and clashes, and above all the encounters that animate the artistic endeavor of Kasper, the authors, and their friends. Echoing Rabinow, fieldwork becomes assemblage-work, the creative act of putting together different components of the musical fabric. The no-budget production of the video for Papoula, a love song between Kasper and a puppy flower, forces participants to multiply and swap roles during the video shoot; this creative role-playing is the setting in which the authors transform anthropological practice into multimodal invention, endorsing the political stances of freedom of expression and joyful imagination that face homophobia and repression in contemporary Brazil.
Leaha and Katharina Hilgenberg pay particular attention to the scenography and mise-en-scène of the music video as elements of a ‘spatio-temporal event’ with great ethnographic density, where the creative involvement of the researchers becomes the key factor in exploring the complex texture of the musicians’ imagination.
The relationship between artistic creation and research raised by Leaha and Hilgenberg recurs throughout the dossier, and Karen Boswall’s paper is no exception. The British anthropologist and filmmaker, who spent 17 years in Mozambique, writes about producing a series of videos titled [Fala Minha Irmã] (Speak My Sister). The collaborative creation of these videos, arising from workshops with aspiring filmmakers and concluding with a screening tour in those same locations, is deeply concerned with gender equality. Their specific goal is to spark debate on women’s treatment — both among the audience and the young filmmakers (female and male) who took part in the project, called by Boswall ‘the knowledge makers of the future’.
The knowledge makers of the future are not passive ‘informants’ in an extractive process; they are active participants in a collaborative video production that acts as a catalyst for building shared knowledge. Like in the video-making experience described by Rojas, Blanco, and Mellado, Boswall’s paper responds to the invitation to ‘take seriously’ the ontological premises of her epistemic partners and to place the entire project at the service of crafting a better future vision. From this comes the choice to adopt the filmic language of Mozambican music videos. The purpose is not to replicate the gender bias that often defines mainstream music video aesthetics (Illescas 2015), but to embrace the fact that this filmic language is the primary visual reference for young filmmakers and their audience. It can be re-semanticized, thereby reaching audiences who would remain indifferent to filmic products like documentaries, conventionally regarded as more suitable for shaping consciences.
The concept of counter-appropriation through audiovisual spaces and the use of music video language to foster contestational discourses also occupies the central focus of Paloma Yáñez Serrano’s analysis. She discusses her experience producing a “rural-punk” music video by Chotajo, a rock band of agricultural workers in the province of Almería, southern Spain — a work that emerged as a collateral experience while she conducted fieldwork in one of Europe’s most important intensive agriculture areas. By examining the filmmaking process of this do-it-yourself group, the author uses the video clip to explore the (environ)mental ecology of a generation facing cultural and economic collapse. Music becomes a practice of everyday resistance, channeling the anger and sense of displacement felt by young people, providing them with alternative popular narratives even as they seek refuge in musical escapism away from the industrial reality that envelops them. The music video is an apt language for revealing counter-discourses and fostering nonconformity by overlapping musical imaginaries with local landscapes.
4. Towards transmodal outcomes
The contributions we selected demonstrate that an ethnographically grounded music video can be a musical ethnofiction — either as a standalone product or embedded in a longer cinematic text, like Fabrik Funk. It can match the length of its accompanying music track, or expand into a feature film such as Unspittable. It can be conceived as an audiovisual language colliding with cinema, as in the [Fala Minha Irmã] series, where documentaries turn into musical portraits through the attitude of video clips. It can also take the form of video art, as in Papoula; as a tool for community activism, as in Nuestro Territorio; or as a collaborative device that retains the format of a commercial video clip while promoting musical unconformity, as in Menos Animal. These forms — by no means exhaustive of the potential range of ethnographic music videos — are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they overlap and intersect in the ethnographic experiments of this issue. Nonetheless, despite their eclecticism, these experiments introduce a coherent set of methodological choices and critical discourses based on two shared elements: a creative impulse in using the camera during fieldwork, and a radical commitment to collaboration.
Indeed, a common thread across all contributions is the idea that the video-making process creates a shared space-time where it is possible to produce something that would not arise otherwise. It would not emerge from a series of in-depth interviews, nor as a result of revising observational fieldnotes, nor through the meticulous editing of terabytes of observational footage. Despite the different situations and solutions that the authors found in their diverse research settings, we all agree that the music videos described in this issue can be considered fieldwork devices deployed through creativity by the various subjects involved in the research process. As Estalella and Sánchez-Criado highlight: “In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative register of experimentation, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with the traditional trope of participant observation. Building on this, we propose the concept of ‘experimental collaborations’ to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.” (Estalella & Sánchez-Criado 2018: 2)
Yet it is not their experimental or creative nature per se that mainly interests us about these fieldwork devices — the ethnographically grounded music videos. We are far more intrigued by what their non- or paracademic status allows us to accomplish: to open the research process — the process of ethnographic knowledge-making — to people who, within a more conventional methodological framework, would remain passive ‘informants’. Our interest in refining a music-video-based methodology stems from our commitment to transforming research practices in anthropology and ethnomusicology into something non-extractive, collaborative, and shared.
To accept ‘losing control’ and produce music videos with artists interested in this kind of product — rather than, say, academic papers like this one — means letting go of the idea that ethnographic collaboration only involves sharing everyday life during fieldwork or acknowledging co-authorship when we write for specialized journals. We consider it essential to respect what one of us has called the principle of ‘co-utility’ of research outcomes (Ranocchiari 2016). From this perspective, doing collaborative or shared research means not only developing an efficient methodology for co-producing knowledge, but also finding ways to produce outcomes that are equally useful for the various subjects involved. For instance, this paper is useful for those who, like its authors, operate (also) within academic circles. The songs underlying the videos are useful for the musicians who composed and recorded them. But the ethnographically grounded music videos born from the encounter — the listening, the dialogue, the negotiation, the sharing — between academic and non-academic subjects are something quite different. As Dario notes in a recent publication, the question of final products remains one of the least considered issues.
In collaborative research literature, it is frequently stated that “the process [of co-researching] is rightly considered most important than the product, or, in other words, the process is the product, the outcome” (Miguel, Ranocchiari & Sardo 2020: 377). However, for shared research to reach beyond the small group who directly participated, translating that ephemeral process into lasting and sharable outcomes becomes essential. This is precisely the aim of videos from the project described here and the Mapuche rappers featured in this dossier by Boswall and Rojas, Blanco & Mellado.
The key is overcoming the constraints linked to forms of knowledge transmission, producing research results understandable both within and beyond academic settings. The issue is not fundamentally about using a specific medium—text, audiovisuals, live performances, or combinations thereof through digital ecosystems—but about mode. That is, how do we give shape to the knowledge born from shared research in a way that works equally effectively for all subjects involved?
This paper, this dossier, the conferences we took part in, and the ethnographic documentaries we made, all rely on modalities of knowledge transmission valid and effective for the international scholar community. A conventional music video operates in a profoundly different modality, conveying specific knowledge to different audiences through music, photography, and montage. If we genuinely aim to do research that honors co-utility, the challenge lies in creating transmodal outcomes capable of moving beyond these sealed modalities of knowledge transmission.
Can the core of knowledge built through a complex co-research and co-creation process coexist within a specific audiovisual product like a music video? We believe yes, and we are actively working toward it.
Perhaps neither the pioneering experiences in this dossier nor others we know of but couldn’t include have yet produced fully transmodal music videos. Still, they represent first steps in that direction. We hope curating these accounts in a monographic number of this journal can help achieve that.