Preface— through thick and thin
On the reader's side, the text needs to offer pathways through its “thick” information load. And here the digital realm offers real advantages. Hyper-links are not only used to loop together theory and description, but to automate the reference functions that formerly involved paging back and forth between tables of contents, indexes and end notes and the text being read.
In the following text, the reader is linked instantly to a table of contents, to a series of indexes, and to an entire accompanying compendium (the Quotadium) where longer quotes are available for short citations given within the main text, and where supplementary texts, such as the MADANG STATEMENT OF PURPOSE are also provided. There is also a side text (the vocabularium), where special terms, or terms from Japanese, are described in the manner they are used in the main text.
Still, perhaps the most obvious difference between this digital text and the one printed out and sitting on the shelf is the inclusion of video and sound (not to mention the hundreds of photos and graphics). Here are literally the voices and the bodies of this Kyoto group. Because these images and sounds are now so readily available in the text—more or less on their terms (not to deny the editorial control of the camera) —the text itself moves that much closer to the field.
Here, for example, is one of the most important moments of the very first Madang: in fact, the defining climactic dance that signalled both the end of the event and the beginning of the social movement. The shared emotional intimacy of this dance re-animated the collective imagination of the group, as buraku-dwelling Japanese, resident Koreans, physically challenged persons, and others from the neighborhood and from Kyoto, created circles and danced into the night. Apart from slowing the action so that the reader might better see the expressions of the dancers, the video runs mostly in real time and space.
 |
The video is presented to bring the reader a more complete, immediate (also less-mediated), and convenient access to the sites of practice under study. The amount of information packed into video is itself rather humbling. For, at another level of description, any of the included videos could provide enough questions and materials for another text.
With the promise of Internet 2 speed increases, instead of ninety minutes of video, many hundreds of minutes of (similarly compressed) video will be possible to explore, and so digital field reports will be able to (and so, at some point, expected to) achieve a site-reference capability: storing enough materials to approach either an encyclopedic reference of a short event in a small locale—literally bringing the site with it with multiple perspectives (equality of participation between the ethnographer and members of the group who are also collecting these resources). For this we can expect that the skills of the ethnographer and the reader will necessarily converge: readers will have more direct access to massive amounts of field-site generated information, and will be enabled to ask their own questions based on this information.
At a workshop on the Japanese sex trade, held at the YWCA in Kyoto in 1994, several women spoke. One of the speakers, an Filipina activist who had started a call-in hot-line in Tokyo, spoke with great passion about the “everyday racism” that Filipinas face in Japan. With estimates of more than 100,000 “Japa-yuki” Filipinas working—often under conditions that border on sexual slavery (subject to physical abuse, with their passports having been taken away by their bosses)—in Japan, their circumstances, much like those of resident Koreans, articulate the borderlands of Japaneseness. Since 1995, Filipinas and Filipinos living in Higashi-kujo have been active participants in the Madang.
The ability to see this speaker and listen to this voice is not incidental to the task of ethnography. Her passion is more than words.
Video by the author.
|
|
Even in this nascent phase of digital text production, I have tried to increase the reader's control over the video materials. These have generally been presented without prior internal narrative editing. Sometimes a time-lapse video is used to show either an event across hours or a space through an entire journey. Other times, this means that several short videos with no internal editing are used to reduce the pre-narrativization of this material. With great difficulty today, hopefully less tomorrow, the ability to use hyperlinks to specific video stills or a short selection from within a video clip, will enable the videos to run interactively with the text. But, for now, the interface between the video and the text remains that of juxtaposition.
The potentials opening up on the digital front offer many more challenges for than they do relief from the problematics of doing urban ethnography in late modernity. For the availability of digitally reproduced material adds to the burden of working with and through this. And as groups produce their own web-sites and videos, another layer of reflexive expression is added on to an already layered fabric of representations. At times it seems difficult to simply keep pace with the amount of self-ethnography being done by the groups we are attempting to study.
