When Names Become Faces: inter-community video-messaging among Amazonian communities of Bolivia and Peru
Principal Investigator: Daniela Peluso
Project dates: 2007
Funding: British Academy
This research is based on over a decade of video messages sent between distant communities of one Amazonian ethnic group. When in 1995 a friend in Bolivia asked to send a message to his relatives in Peru, he initiated a series of recorded messages – what I call video-messaging – between individuals and families in distant communities. Despite many of the sequences being filmed and elicited by indigenous individuals, these video texts are not part of the “indigenous media” genre in its strict sense, rather, they offer alternatives to how theorists have depicted Amazonian’s motivations for using video technology. What my research examines is the confrontational character of these messages and explores how and why video seems to accommodate the communication of conflict and tensions between communities allowing for a novel opportunity for the expression of controversy.