(Un)Becoming Anthropologist

By Fanidh Sanogo (University of Cape Town)

Considering the emergence of new scientific subjectivities in the context of the postcolonial turn in anthropology, this short film expresses contemporary anthropology students’ anxieties around being a “native” anthropologist. The film explores notions of (un)becoming to highlight the complexity and tensions arising from inheriting thinking tools previously utilized to dehumanize historically marginalized people. How does one conduct research in the same discipline that deemed them to be subhuman a few decades ago? Could the historically othered subjects ever be reconciled with ethnography? Here, these ideas are explored through an experimental film approach.

BIO

Fanidh Sanogo is a Mandela Rhodes alumni and a PhD fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. Her PhD research on digital makeup is a continuation of her masters research on the art of make-up and making up among young women in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Passionate about the politics of knowledge production, she hopes to contribute further to this field through visual anthropology.