The Wenner-Gren Blog

Dr. William Lempert received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2015 to aid research on “Broadcasting Indigeneity: The Social Life of Aboriginal Media,” supervised by Dr. Jennifer Shannon. In 2019, Dr. Lempert returned to the field when he received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Palya Collaboration: After-Images and Visual Sharing in the Social Life of Kimberley Aboriginal Media.”

With the Engaged Anthropology Grant, I was able to return to the Kimberley region of Northwestern Australia in July-August to share the results of my primary dissertation fieldwork that took place during 2014-2016. This fieldwork includes a total of 30 months since 2006 with two Indigenous media organizations in the coastal pearling town of Broome, as well as in regional communities. Throughout this period, I followed the lifecycles of dozens of film projects through daily collaboration within production teams in order to understand the stakes of Aboriginal self-representation embedded within the process of filmmaking itself.

The projects I collaborated on included a wide variety of genres and topics, from documentaries following Dreaming stories and Songlines, to clay animation and music videos. These projects were broadcast locally, as well as broadly on National Indigenous Television and Community Indigenous Television. I was particularly focused on the relationship between the production of films that vividly imagine hopeful and diverse Indigenous futures, and the widespread defunding of Aboriginal communities and organizations.

Completing this trip was central to my primary goal of ethnographic practice: to engage at the deepest level of collaboration possible. This approach led me—after multiple consultation trips in 2012 and 2013—to follow the social lives of media projects at Goolarri Media Enterprises (Goolarri) and the Pilbara and Kimberley Aboriginal Media Association (PAKAM). I followed the biographical social lives of interconnected film projects from their initial idea through their circulation and beyond. In my dissertation, I discuss the Kukatja concept of “palya,” which translates to something done “the good and right way,” with an emphasis on process. Thus, my return in 2019 represented the completion of this process and the commitment I made with my collaborators.

In Broome, I hand delivered copies of my dissertation to key individuals at Goolarri and PAKAM, and discussed the next stage of turning it into a book. Their feedback was invaluable, and these dialogues will continue over the coming years. I was also interviewed twice by local radio legend Sandy Dann on Goolarri Radio; our discussion on the broader themes of my research was broadcast widely over the National Indigenous Radio Service.

I have worked with the Nulungu Research Institute through the University of Notre Dame Broome Campus since 2012. During this recent trip, I presented an hour-long lecture through their “Talking Heads” public seminar series, located just across the street from Goolarri and PAKAM. This series emphasizes plain spoken discussions of long-term regional research and provided a forum to articulate my ethnographic results to the broader Broome community.

As a PAKAM volunteer, I drove their Toyota Land Cruiser from Broome to Balgo—my second primary fieldsite—located in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. I gave copies of my dissertation to key collaborators, including Kukatja elder Mark Moora, women elders at the Kapululangu Women’s Law and Culture Centre, and community members at the art center. We discussed the process of developing this into a book over the coming years.

As part of my volunteer work in Balgo, I collaborated on a community men’s health and music project. This centered around a trip out of Balgo with a large 4WD truck—built and operated by Broome musician Staf Smith—that ran on solar power and vegetable oil, and which transformed into a powered mobile music stage. Local musicians played above a waterhole to their brothers and cousins, who were cooking dozens of kangaroo tails in an earthen oven nearby. The musicians played on this stage around the community—including locations like the basketball court and the art center—and recorded their songs in the local music studio. I worked with Staf and the local PAKAM media crew to integrate this audio and footage into an extended music video, which aired nationally on Indigenous Community Television.

Since last visiting Balgo, I completed final video editing for multiple films featuring local hand signs, which I had facilitated with community members through PAKAM and National Indigenous Television (NITV). I held multiple screenings in Balgo that included the official community premiere of these programs. Following proper cultural protocols, I first held a private screening at the women’s center, which included the elders most closely involved with the projects. After that, I organized a community film festival featuring these and several of our other collaborative media projects from the last several years. This provided an interactive forum to watch and reflect on our past videos, as well as to consider ideas for future projects.

Visual sharing was an essential part of this return trip, as it provided key opportunities for engagement that were inclusive and aligned with the “palya” process. As I describe in my dissertation, the social lives of films do not simply end when they have been screened and circulated. Rather, they often give birth to “after-images,” which are new projects and ideas that have other multiple and rippling lives. Thus, my dissertation and this follow up trip represent such after-images, which are themselves embedded within the social lives of these media.

In 2013 Suma Ikeuchi received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to aid research on “Brazilian Birth, Japanese Blood, and Transnational God: Identity and Resilience among Pentecostal Brazilians in Japan,” supervised by Dr. Chikako Ozawa-de Silva. Dr. Ikeuchi was able to return to the field in 2019 when she received an Engaged Anthropology Grant to aid engaged activities on “Jesus Loves Japan: Workshops on Migration, Religion, and Citizenship in Japan and Brazil”.

With the Engaged Anthropology Grant, I was able to travel to Japan and Brazil to share the results of my dissertation fieldwork conducted from 2013 to 2014. The yearlong fieldwork investigated why the Pentecostal Christian churches have flourished among the Japanese-Brazilian (i.e. Nikkei) migrant communities in Japan by probing the connections between their ethnic, national, and religious identities. State-sanctioned return migration is a growing phenomenon in Asia today, with major nations such as India and South Korea legally facilitating the “return” of foreign citizens descended from their emigrants. As part of this trend, Japan introduced a new type of visa in 1990 for foreigners of Japanese descent, which triggered the mass-migration of Nikkei Brazilians from Brazil. While Nikkeis benefit from the visa policy that confers the right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, they often feel discriminated in Japan for their ethnic ambiguity and working-class profile. In this context of racial tension and contested belonging, many have been converting to Pentecostal Christianity—a religion that has grown exponentially in Latin America since the 1970s and subsequently flourished among many Latino migrant communities across the globe. The fieldwork examined this transregional intersection of Asian return migration and Latin American Christianity.

In July 2019, I returned to the main research site in Japan—a Pentecostal church in Toyota City attended by roughly 500 Brazilian migrants—to hold an informal workshop with the people who had participated in my study. The main purpose was to receive their feedback for the two main final products of the research. Since the completion of fieldwork in 2014, I have been able to edit a short ethnographic film In Leila’s Room (2016) and publish a book Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (2019 Stanford University Press). First, I screened In Leila’s Room to a group of core participants, including the main protagonist Leila, followed by Q&A. Some expressed a sense of amusement about the fact that the film incorporated what they considered to be banal interactions, such as family members speaking about barbecue. A vibrant conversation about observational cinema ensued.

Unlike the film, which is mostly in Portuguese, Jesus Loves Japan is in English, a language that the participants in the study cannot read. To make the book content accessible, I prepared a four-page summary in Portuguese and Japanese (many younger migrants prefer Japanese) and distributed it to the community members at the church on Sunday. In addition to the summary, they also received a fifteen-minute oral presentation in Portuguese from me about the significance of the study results and how their cooperation contributed to it. In total, I had roughly 250 people in attendance on this day, many of them previous participants in my study. “What do Americans think about us?” This was one of the most common questions, now that they have seen the book in English and heard about my representations of them in it. Although Toyota City has been a frequent destination for social scientists (both Japanese and Brazilian) who took interest in this migrant community over the years, some Brazilian residents there told me that they had never heard back from these scholars about what was done with the data afterward. As a result, many in the audience were excited to find out how the stories of their lives were recounted in the book, now circulating in an unfamiliar language. We continued our conversations in the church canteen even after the presentation was over. Many interviewees had the chance to see where in the book their remarks appear and listen to me explain how I incorporated them into my overarching argument about the relationship between migration and conversion. In these dialogues, the findings of greatest interest were about how the various church initiatives about “family restoration” seem to address the challenges that many migrant families face as they cope with distance, demanding work, and language barriers in a foreign land.

The grant also enabled me to organize workshops and deliver lectures about Jesus Loves Japan at five universities—one in Japan and four in Brazil—so that I could engage the scholars interested in the study results in their respective languages. I participated in a workshop about my book in Japanese at the Nanzan Institute of Religion and Culture in Nagoya in June 2019. The talk was followed by the comments by two Japanese scholars and Q&A. Since one potential shortcoming of the book is that the majority of references cited are in the English language, their sharp feedback informed by the sources in Japanese constituted valuable and much-needed inputs. In August 2019, I traveled to Brazil to speak at The University of São Paulo, The Federal University of São Paulo in Guarulhos, The Federal University of São Carlos, and The University of Brasília. This time I delivered the lectures in Portuguese, followed by Q&A in a mixture of Portuguese and English. The audience consisted of Brazilian scholars and students, many of whom were deeply interested in the global expansion of Brazilian Pentecostalism due to the growing political power associated with the religion with the recent election of President Jair Bolsonaro. The comments and questions I received from the scholars based in Brazil were very different from those from the researchers in Japan, probably because of the diverging social positions of Protestant Christianity in the two respective societies. For example, some interlocutors inquired if the migrant churches I studied sought any political power in the mainstream society. I responded that doing so is more difficult in a non-Christian society such as Japan, especially for a foreign migrant minority such as Nikkei Brazilians. Overall, the feedback I received in Japan and Brazil demonstrate that different scholarly communities can bring to the table different analytical strengths informed by their respective intellectual and political backgrounds. The bilingual lectures in the two countries reaffirmed the importance of intellectual exchange across linguistic and national boundaries, and I am grateful for the Foundation for enabling me to advance such an initiative.

Christopher Morehart received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2007 to aid research on “Agricultural Landscapes and Political Economy at Xaltocan, Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Elizabeth M. Brumfiel. In 2012 Dr. Morehart continued his research when he received a Post-Ph.D. Research Grant to aid research on “Environmental Interaction and Political Transformation in the Northern Basin of Mexico”. After receiving an Engaged Anthropology Grant in 2016 Morehart began working on a, “Collaborative Development of a Book on the Archaeology of Xaltocan, Mexico for Community Members”.

This report presents an overview of a Wenner-Gren engaged anthropology grant project. Funds from Wenner-Gren were used to finance the creation of a book on the archaeology of Xaltocan. Xaltocan is a contemporary town approximately 35 km north of present-day Mexico City with a history that has lasted well over 1000 years. It is also one of the most continuously studied archaeological sites in central Mexico. Archaeologists first visited the town very briefly in the 1950s and again in the early 1970s.

However, in the late 1980s, Elizabeth Brumfiel initiated a long-term archaeological project in Xaltocan, with the promise that she would always seek to engage actively with community members and address questions that they have about their own past. Several other archaeological projects have occurred in the town over the past 15-20 years, all directed by Brumfiel’s students or former students (many funded by Wenner-Gren). Members of the town have a strong interest in their past and in the work archaeologists have been doing. This relationship is a unique example of productive, engaged archaeology. Many archaeologists have created museum exhibits (some financed by Wenner-Gren) as well as public talks and other events.

This project was planned to provide a more tangible and lasting contribution to the community. This book is based on the archaeological work of several researchers, from the United States and Mexico, as well as the experiences and leadership of local historians and organizers. This book is not an academic article or a technical report, both of which are supplied to community members and officials as part of ongoing projects. It is a book written specifically for the community of Xaltocan, written in an engaging, accessible and dynamic prose.

Plan of the book

Although I wrote the grant proposal, I worked closely with Enrique Rodríguez Alegría and Kristin De Lucia, two other archaeologists who have worked in Xaltocan. The book contains 13 substantive chapters, each written either by a researcher or group of researchers who has carried out an investigation in Xaltocan or by a local leader engaged in promoting cultural and historical affairs in the town. Each chapter is brief, 3-4 pages, and written in an accessible prose (in Spanish). At the end of the book, we have included a fairly comprehensive bibliography of publications on the history and archaeology of Xaltocan. Below is a list of the chapters:

Capítulo 1. La historia de la arqueología en Xaltocan, by Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría

Capítulo 2. El medio ambiente de la cuenca de México y del lago de Xaltocan, by John K. Millhauser

Capítulo 3. Antes de Xaltocan, by Christopher Morehart, Abigail Meza Peñaloza, and Destiny Crider

Capítulo 4. La formación de un reino, by Kirby Farah

Capítulo 5. Los grupos domésticos y la comunidad, by Kristin De Lucia

Capítulo 6. Las chinampas de Xaltocan, by Christopher Morehart

Capítulo 7. Impuestos, tributos y mercados, by John K. Millhauser

Capítulo 8. La religión y los ritos de los grupos Domésticos, by Kristin De Lucia

Capítulo 9. Xaltocan y el imperio azteca, by Lisa Overholtzer

Capítulo10. Xaltocan en el periodo colonial, by Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría

Capítulo 11. La historia genética de Xaltocan, by Deborah A. Bolnick, Jaime Mata-Míguez and Austin W. Reynolds

Capítulo 12. La casa de cultura de Nextlalpan “Cualcalli”, by Filemón Hernández Zambrano

Capítulo 13. El museo arqueológico de Nextlalpan en Xaltocan, by Sergio Maya Rodríguez Una bibliografía de la investigación arqueológica en Xaltocan

Distribution of the book

Distributing the book to the community of Xaltocan was an important goal of the project. We produced 315 printed copies and donated them to the town’s cultural center and museum. We worked with local organizers in order to plan an event to present and distribute the book. This occurred in July 2019 at the Casa de la Cultura (cultural center) in the center of Xaltocan. I gave a brief presentation of the book to approximately 60 to 70 attendees. The director of the cultural center (also one of the book contributors) decided to give a copy of the book for free to all in attendance, with the option of a small contribution (virtually everyone contributed something), after which the book would be sold at a price determined by the cultural center.

The presentation of the book was a great success, and attendees were very enthusiastic about the book.