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Created: October 12, 2003
Latest Update: October 12, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Answerability and Storytelling

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This is a summary and review (comments in blue) of Chapter 8: Trapped: Women Take Control of Video Storytelling. By K. Sasnandan Nair and Shirley A. White. pp.195 - 214 in Shirley A. White's Participatory Video: Images that Trnsform and Empower.

A few scenes from the script of Trapped open this chapter:

• (Image of young mother leaves "baby in a sling basket hanging on the side of her thatched hut.") Voice over of young girl remembering having to care for her little brother when she was five. At p. 196.

• ("Image of young girl comforting crying baby under a blanket tent in the field . . . background of women in field.") Voice over of "Our crops get so much attention . . . do our children get as much?" At. p. 196.

• ("Images of small girl helping mother who is cutting weeds with a scythe, she is carryng away the weeds in a big bowl on her back; women working on a road crew, breakig up rocks with a heavy hammer. At pp. 196-7.

This series of scenes creates for me a world in which it is much harder to live than in ours. A world in which women's labor comes before the concern for both women and children, since often the children are said to be raised more by their siblings than by their mother. " . . . [W]e had t wait hours on end watchihng the empty road waiting for our parents to come home. . . " (At p. 196.)

The following introductory paragraph explains the dilemma: "The powerful words and images that opened this video production were those selected from the perspective of a professional viedographer and written by a well known female narrator in Indian cinema. Based on research data that identified women's problems, the video depicted the plight of village women in India. The video pictured them as trapped by dire circumstance, deploring their lifestyle and crying out for rescue and upliftment. The documentary was exceptionally well done and effective for an urban, NOT poverty-stricken aidience. While it vividly portraye the serious problems village women face, was it an accurate picture of how village women perceived themselves? Ultimately, Dr. K. Sadanandan Nair, director of the research, for which this video was produced, found that it was not. When women took control of video production, they portrayed quite a different image of their life." (At p. 197.)

This is an extraordinary introduction. One of the reasons that led me to order the book for the sociology of knowingness. One of the great sins of knowingness is the firm and usually unchallenged belief that we may not know what another's life is like, but that if we put forth efforts to understand it, rational, well-meaning efforts to understand it, we can do so. This is a wonderful example illustrating that we cannot understand the Other without fostering answerability as part of that understanding. And when we do acknowledge the answerability of the Other, the resulting video is different from what we thought we "knew."

"Village women of Hivare and Sonori, Maharashtra, with the assistance of researchers, were given the opportunity to orchestrate video images to tell their own story. we will take you through the process used with the women later in this chapter, but, to show the constrast of their 'storytelling,' they chose to open their tape with rhythmic drum beats over images of women's daily life---20 quick, one second shots, depicting their daily reality. Their title was simply Rural Women's Problems (Gramin Stree Samasya). They wished to visually depict the realities---their satisfactions and joys as well as their hard work---and omit narration that judged those realities. They wanted to take control of the interpretation of their lives and tell a story from their own perspective."

* * * * *

Discussion Questions

1. Were the village women in Trapped passive or active with regards to their own life stories?

   Consider that they went off to work each day under what we would consider horrible circumstances and from generation to generation seemed to make little progress and seemed not to complain. Consider their response to the utterance of depicting their lives when they were given the opportunity to answer.

2. Of what, based on just this short excerpt, did their answer consist?

   Consider their wish to present their life as it was. Did that reality, as they saw it, match the reality of the video researchers?

3. What was missing in the original video professional's view of the village women's life?

   Consider that the original video spoke only of depression, omission, lack, and that the women's own video spoke of joy. Continued on More on Chapter 8.