Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WOOL (Wool Worked Worlds - Studying industrial landscapes through collaborative filmmaking.)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-01-01 bis 2023-12-31
This study anthropologically investigates tensions within the transnational wool industry, a commercial network that emerged from European colonial projects that distributed sheep to the Global South’s grasslands. Wool production is an industry with a key paradox: it is highly industrialised yet cannot be detached from place-specific ecologies and social relations. Wool sheared from sheep is materially shaped by the geopolitical and ecological particularities of the grasslands where they are raised. This study explores 1) how these local diversities shape the global wool industry, 2) how local sheep rearing and landscape management practices are shaped by practitioners’ imaginaries of geographically distant parts of the wool industry. It develops a bottom-up approach to studying supply chains, attending to situated perspectives and knowledges of actors in three wool regions: Patagonia, Australia and South Africa. The approach deploys collaborative filmmaking as both method and analytical tool: the project engages sheep farmers, elderly, laboratory technicians and ambulant sheep shearers in the three regions, and businessmen at the Europe based International Wool Textile Organisation, in describing their version of global wool, analysing their own position within wool networks, and discussing how they understand the ‘globalities’ of the other sites. Building on previous work by the researcher and conversations in visual anthropology, the project positions collaborative filmmaking as research practice. It also specifically explores connections and imaginaries that travel directly across the Global South (and not via European centres). Bringing in Global South perspectives, this project disrupts a notion of linear north-south axes and describes how a complex weave of knowledges among grassland regions shapes sheep grazing and landscape management.
The University of Cape Town hosted the project during the outgoing phase, 2022 and 2023. This stimulating intellectual realm gave theoretical insights into existing debates on the local/global in anthropology allowing for a comparative focus on different notions of ‘globality’. My integration at the host institution was possible through access to lectures, seminars, workshops, online events, and conferences. Further networking was made through weekly writing and reading sessions, which included students, staff, and affiliates. I taught a course in multimodal methods with a multispecies focus for Master's and Ph.D. students. I shared my work at an open seminar at the end of 2023.
The fieldwork during this phase involved gathering detailed data with special attention to the experiences of people in sites of wool production. This work was carried out in South Africa, Australia, Patagonia, and at the International Wool Textile Organisation IWTO in Brussels. A good rapport was upheld through longer and returning stays at the farms where farmers had expressed an interest in maintaining a dialogue, always with informed consent as a precondition. The work involved walks on the fields with the farmers, conversations, and more formal interviews, observing sheep and their relations in the surroundings, and attending activities, such as shearing, caring, moving herds across the lands, fencing, securing the rangelands predators, parasite management, sales, and auctions. Interviews with key figures in the wool industry and laboratory technicians or administrators were conducted to broaden the insights. The work led to about 60 hours of footage and 30 interviews, 15 deep interviews, and informal conversations. In Patagonia, where contacts had already been established during previous fieldwork, my return visits proved fruitful for deepening the collaborative work. The work included conversations about the other sites, their view on ‘globality’, and when possible the watching of footage from farms in the other sites.
The fieldwork during this phase involved gathering detailed data with special attention to the experiences of people in sites of wool production. This work was carried out in South Africa, Australia, Patagonia, and at the International Wool Textile Organisation IWTO in Brussels. A good rapport was upheld through longer and returning stays at the farms where farmers had expressed an interest in maintaining a dialogue, always with informed consent as a precondition. The work involved walks on the fields with the farmers, conversations, and more formal interviews, observing sheep and their relations in the surroundings, and attending activities, such as shearing, caring, moving herds across the lands, fencing, securing the rangelands predators, parasite management, sales, and auctions. Interviews with key figures in the wool industry and laboratory technicians or administrators were conducted to broaden the insights. The work led to about 60 hours of footage and 30 interviews, 15 deep interviews, and informal conversations. In Patagonia, where contacts had already been established during previous fieldwork, my return visits proved fruitful for deepening the collaborative work. The work included conversations about the other sites, their view on ‘globality’, and when possible the watching of footage from farms in the other sites.
The work has opened up insights that are breaking new analytical grounds. For instance, a chapter for a volume on filmmaking as methods, asks what the necessarily experiential approach of filmmaking offers to an aesthetic appreciation of the life worlds of woolen merino sheep. Aiming to foster other ways for viewers to notice and acknowledge their presence in the landscapes we share with these beings, it suggests that we reconsider the conventional human focus on facial expressions and instead use the camera to respond to sheep’s various movements during grazing and shearing. I demonstrate how cinematic techniques associated with these practices can showcase other-than-human subjectivity through a focus on encounters between the merino sheep and a researcher (and their camera equipment) on the level of physicality. I explore the possibilities of sonic and visual close-ups beyond the notion of the individual for which the face has become a symbol. With what I refer to as ‘embodied attention’ to the lives of merino sheep, I consider how experiential sensory proximity may lead to other ways of thinking about sheep as other-than-human protagonists in non-fiction filmmaking.
Expected further results are two publications in edited volumes, a panel at the EASST 2024, a 'sheep network' with other researchers, a joint UCT-AU workshop, the conclusion of a film, two open-access articles, and screening of the film. Additional results are a joint website with sister projects funded by EC and an exploitation plan for the researcher's future career.
The project's methods bring together southern voices and foster north-south knowledge exchange in academic contexts, among wool farmers, and in wider public spheres. The potential impact is twofold in that it works towards a better understanding of global environmental concerns by demonstrating how the tools of ethnographic filmmaking can foster new types of collaboration. The project demonstrates the value of this method for understanding a complex, geographically distributed environmental problem, by presenting a transferrable methodological model applicable beyond the particular case of wool, and academia. Secondly, the work, the networking, and the results along with a personal career development plan, potentially secures a permanent post for the researcher.
Expected further results are two publications in edited volumes, a panel at the EASST 2024, a 'sheep network' with other researchers, a joint UCT-AU workshop, the conclusion of a film, two open-access articles, and screening of the film. Additional results are a joint website with sister projects funded by EC and an exploitation plan for the researcher's future career.
The project's methods bring together southern voices and foster north-south knowledge exchange in academic contexts, among wool farmers, and in wider public spheres. The potential impact is twofold in that it works towards a better understanding of global environmental concerns by demonstrating how the tools of ethnographic filmmaking can foster new types of collaboration. The project demonstrates the value of this method for understanding a complex, geographically distributed environmental problem, by presenting a transferrable methodological model applicable beyond the particular case of wool, and academia. Secondly, the work, the networking, and the results along with a personal career development plan, potentially secures a permanent post for the researcher.