Digital Drama in Tanzania

Presenter: Paula Uimonen, Associate Professor, Spider/DSV, Stockholm University
Discussant: Professor Gudrun Dahl, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University

The seminar is open to all participants and will also be webcast on www.spidercenter.org. Welcome!

4 September 2012
16:00 to 18:00
Lecture Hall C
Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV)
Isafjordsgatan 39, Kista

Abstract:
Digital media and intercultural interaction in Tanzania, animated with African sights, sounds, and sentiments. A vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa’s only institute for practical art training, narrated through the life histories of students, teachers, and alumni. Cultural digitization in the historical context of a nation that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways. Cultural hybridity as a starting point for rethinking one of the classic concepts in anthropology – liminality – while introducing a new way of understanding statehood – the state of creolization. This pioneering study in digital anthropology is based on ethnographic engagements at Taasisi ya Sanaa na Utamaduni Bagamoyo (TaSUBa) from 2002 to 2009, combining participant observation with digital, visual, and sensory research methods.

This presentation offers a summary of the newly published book Digital Drama. Teaching and Learning Art and Media in Tanzania (Uimonen 2012), and its accompanying web site, http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/digitaldrama. The book is one of the first in the Innovative Ethnographies series published by Routledge New York, combining printed, hyperlinked, and multimedia forms of ethnographic representation.