Metareflexivity

Yet what strikes the viewer most is neither the Wichís’ cultural difference nor the evidence of transculturation within the community, but John’s own remarkable assimilation into the Wichí language and culture. The film shows us how perfectly John has adopted the quiet, pausing speech and reticent manner of his Wichí companions. Rosell’s patient recording of everyday, unremarkable detail immerses us to such an extent in the new life John has chosen that the film succeeds in reversing the ethnographer’s gaze. John’s relationship with his home country is condensed into a single phone call with his mother, whose voice is left “suspended somewhere off-screen, just as it is for John.” The scene is wonderfully evocative of cultural distance, and acquires a particular poignancy for a British viewer who would immediately capture from the mother’s accent that the difference between their two environments is one of

The visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (1939-) also rejects this form of reflexivity, which may be “completely at odds with the narrative or emotional logic of a work” and “act to block precisely those forms of understanding that visual anthropology makes possible.” In both Huellas y memoria and El etnógrafo, as we have seen, the interaction between filmmaker and subject is not the source of a methodological weakness that needs to be overcome with greater scientific rigor; rather, it is the very basis of intercultural