Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No.3/Vol. 4, No. 1, Winter 2018/2019 | Page 15

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
This is a combination of three films and two writers works. All of the
material is the property of the original producers and they deserve full
credit. The adaptation presented here was done for a graduate school
course by Patrick Scullin. It is intended to be a Cultural Identity Narrative
for a class on Culture, Technology and Development. We were
tasked with watching at least one film that was produced in another
country, and read at least one novel from that country, and ... then produce
an 8-minute Narrative using music, film and literature. The three
films I watched were all melancholy, and in the novel I read a man’s
best friend and his wife...well, you know... he spends a lot of his time
in agonizing jealousy, I choose an excerpt from a poet as well. I tried to
convey that there is beauty, dancing, love making, sensuality, despair,
hope, and yes, violence in the experience I had with the directors and
authors I read. It is not intended to be an all encompassing judgment or
expression of Brasil. It is what I felt was necessary to communicate, not
because all of the things are nice to reflect on, but because that was my
experience of their experience. Life is a grand opera. It is not intended
to accurately reflect Brasil, it was a reflection of my experience with the
art that was created there.
Conclusion
If multimodality is an inherent quality of our research practices and how research participants
conduct themselves in everyday life, how do we translate that in academic
“scholarship”? Blurring the line between intellectual achievement and sensory response
eschews proper channels of research dissemination and evades definitions of
academic “rigor.” Yet, as anthropologist Paul Stoller has noted, “sensuous scholarship”
demonstrates “how the fusion of the intelligible and the sensible can be applied to scholarly
practices” (1997:xv). “Perhaps,” Stoller asks, “it would be better for the scholar’s
body to remain blissfully asleep in analytical nirvana?” (ibid:xvi). Multimodality not
only awakens the researcher’s body or recognizes it as an affective nexus, conditioned
by experience to tell a story via conventional media such as text; most importantly, it
calls for a profound reconsideration of the different modes of narrating and of the power
relations invested in the production of knowledge.
The examples above acutely demonstrate why the conventional modality of text and its
notion of exclusive authority and monologic communication fail to convey the experiential
richness of academic research. They subvert the force of logos by conjuring up palpable
social encounters and making felt the materiality of interactions with people and
things in the ethnographic field and the university classroom. In doing so, they lay bare
the contours of research participation and collaboration�as well as friction�that give
rise to “knowledge.” Thus, multimodality is a priori relational: it does not “represent” but
speaks for itself as the embodiment of social life�its past traces and future potentials.
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