REVISIÓN DE LA LITERATURA 1 La interlengua

My critical reflections refer in particular to the notions of community, memory and landscape, as well as to the time constraints vis-à-vis the ambition and potentials of community-mapping projects. Tools for research-action such as community mapping are hailed by the most optimistic operators as seeds of new citizenship, initiating participatory processes that help local communities to re-situate and reappropriate their cultural heritage (de Varine, 1988). The communitarian premise of such a conviction is that sense of place is a symptom of a virtuous relationship with one’s territory and that belonging is a premise for participation. This is true in particular of the ecomuseum context, in which Hugues de Varine underlines the distinction between community-driven proj-ects and mere conservation projproj-ects that are part of top-down agendas target-ing the environmental patrimony (2005).

Linking empowerment to a notion of community is not always devoid of ambivalences, however. A social critique to an obsolete notion of community as being small, bounded and homogeneous is often already present in the theo-retical background of some community-mapping projects (which also explains the variety of alternative designation used to name such projects: cultural map-ping, parish maps, community mapmap-ping, perceptive maps, mental maps, partic-ipatory cartography, etc.). Anthropology at least has amply deconstructed the notion of the small-scale community as a natural enclosure in social, symbolic and relational terms. Christian Bromberger reminds us that:

the community and the common can become attractive fields of investigation because of their coherence and relative func-tional simplicity (which abstract conditions need to be verified case by case). Complexity is disarming for anthropologists espe-cially when working individually and espeespe-cially when not limit-ing themselves to gather objects or beliefs, techniques or rituals which are easily singled out of their own contexts. It is neverthe-less such complex context that attributes actual significance to those objects. (Bromberger, 1987: 68; my translation)

In Val Taleggio for instance, the Venetian–Milanese medieval state border still represents a fresh cultural boundary dividing and distinguishing the eastern

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and the western municipalities. Even in focus groups with a dozen people, a dialectic relationship was easy to detect, resulting in reciprocal suspicions that one side could be over-represented in respect to the other, etc. To straddle that boundary meant negotiating choices between the materials gathered and mak-ing sure that the visual outcome would not look unbalanced, both in terms of the number of icons placed on the valley’s aerial view and in terms of the choice of place-values and fiches. Once again, then, mapping Val Taleggio proved its multivocality (Rodman, 1992) which in turn not only presented strictly car-tographic challenges and methodological choices about visual tools, but also raised the issue of representation both in political and epistemological terms.

The idea of a monolithic and coherent community backing the project was unacceptably nostalgic, and the actual research practice favoured an interpre-tation of the ‘community’ mandate in terms of a plurality of communities of practice and a diversity of practices of locality, each putting forward its own

‘skilled vision’ (Grasseni, 2004).

Another critical point inevitably regards the clash of timing between funded schedules, which expect deliverables within reasonable times, and the participa-tory nature of community mappings. The latter include downtimes and longer perspectives, whilst the former require final reports and artefacts for dissemi-nation within and outside the community. Community-mapping projects may oscillate between a communication purpose (congenial to the former perspec-tive) and a participatory mandate (less easy to adapt to fixed schedules and deliv-erables). In the latter viewpoint, processes and relationships are more important than final artefacts, but this generates a number of coordination problems. When is the project actually finished? Should it be left open-ended? How to ensure that someone within the community will take it upon themselves to continue it? As I anticipated above, in this particular case the need to leave the project potentially open to future accretions meant a precise choice in the medium and formats of representation. Their quasi-artisanal technical quality was also meant to facilitate a handover of competences to the ecomuseum operators who had been the protagonists of the first focus groups. Rather than an external incentive to self-representation – a capacity which is not lacking in the valley as testified by the numerous publications and archives – it was meant as a framework and an archive of existent competences, materials and skills.

Moreover, this particular community-mapping project found its rationale within a wider project, the observatory of the landscape of Val Taleggio, part of an Agenda 21 measure aimed at documenting and fostering the knowledge of local resources for more sustainable livelihoods. Thanks to this, visualising a territory was never understood as merely a cartographic exercise but as a social process. The community map was never considered as a tool to initiate a devel-opment plan (since the ecomuseum project was already existing and moving

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Community Mapping as Auto-Ethno-Cartography 109

ahead). Nor was it a cultural initiative in a territory lacking the ambition of self-representation, whether in the form of auto-ethnography (as in the many local history publications) or of auto-cartography (as in the Torriani map). On the contrary, the map served as a process to catalyse the training and cohesion of a group of local operators, and both their previous knowledge of the territory and mine were crucial assets in its development.

Consistently with this, the community map was never an ‘address card’ for the valley. It is far too rich and complex a document to be adaptable to the simple messages of tourist publicity. Nevertheless, the inhabitants themselves shared the view that Val Taleggio was worth displaying and even ‘packaging’ for tourist purposes – as the following successful development of the Ecomuseum Val Taleggio proves, and as the vocation of the valley as a dairy producer in a sense already required (see Grasseni, 2003b). Val Taleggio has recently become the setting for some innovative formats of tourist guiding based on street-theatre techniques and multimedia installations. Rather than setting up an orthodox ethnographic museum about cheese-making and folk life in the mountains, the ecomuseum has invested in ‘soft’ activities, including the reenactment of some local crafts by professional actors (but not by local crafts-men) and sensory workshops accompanying cheese-tasting sessions.

In the absence of an actual ethnographic collection gathering objects, mem-oirs, oral testimonies or photographic collections of a form of life that is in many senses still alive – an absence which was my main criticism of the eco-museum’s development plan – the community map of Val Taleggio lacks root-ing on the one hand, but on the other, it provides a collection of facets of a single place as it is interpreted and transformed. Precisely because it aims at voicing and empowering collective representations of place, however, commu-nity mapping does not escape a measure of performative ideology, in that, as with any map, its final mise en forme contains hegemonic elements of mise en ordre and a cognitive and emotional ‘erasure of the muddling’ (Turnbull, 2007) that characterises identity claims. In fact, one of the advancements hoped for in visual methodology that this chapter would aim to contribute to is precisely the awareness of the ambivalence and ‘symbolic violence’ (Rabinow, 1977: 129–30) that even the most interactive and participatory form of fieldwork, through multimedia and multidisciplinary engagement, concedes to experiment with.

Certainly in this case, the local bounds of sense did not coincide with the valley’s geographical boundaries. Nor did mapping prove more spontaneous or less constructed thanks to its participatory, interactive and visual methodology.

In fact, this is something that any critical analysis of visual research methods should disband: the presumption or sometimes the hope that an increase in multi-mediality and multi-vocality may result in a more transparent and even mechanical act of inscription. In fact, the advancements in visual methods and

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the interdisciplinary collaborations with IT specialties and cartography proves how the ethnographic object becomes epistemologically complex and ethically nuanced, every time we try to chart it.

Notes

1 At the 1972 ICOM conference of Santiago in Chile the Nouvelle Museologie established a new paradigm of cultural conservation based on the principles of participation and inclusion, of interaction and of a social redefinition of humankind’s cultural expressions.

2 This is a peculiarity of Val Taleggio and of neighbouring valleys that were crossed by a state boundary from 1428 until 1797, dividing the Republic of Venice on the east from the Dukedom of Milan on the west. In Val Taleggio, only one of the two municipalities, Taleggio, was faithful to the Venetian state whilst Vedeseta was part of the Milanese feud, which sparked quarrels and bloodshed throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Arrigoni, 2007).

3 Val Taleggio’s community map (online at www.osservatoriovaltaleggio.it),

acknowledges the essential contribution of research assistants and local informants, historians and operators. By a conscious recognition of equality between

researchers and informants, they are all listed in alphabetical order. Nevertheless, the initial phase of data gathering through focus groups and on-site interviews was carried out by Lia Zola and Chiara Brambilla, whilst the second phase (deciphering, classifying and transcribing the Torriani maps), with additional follow-up interviews and data gathering, was carried out by local operators, notably Erika Arrigoni, Barbara Pesenti Bolò and Osvalda Quarenghi, and by a research assistant, Roberta Capretti. The cartographic and IT realisation was achieved in cooperation with other researchers and professionals within the wider frame of the landscape observatory of Val Taleggio, notably Moris Lorenzi and Grazia Morelli (of Terraria srl).

4 A casello is a traditional floorless building, usually constructed in such as way as to straddle a natural stream, in order to exploit its humidity to maintain fresh fish or to mature cheese, as it would be in an underground cellar, without the aid of refrigeration systems.

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Introduction

Both visual and virtual ethnography have their origins in the late 1990s, and became further established as we moved through the first decade of the 21st century. They are now firmly situated within a range of contemporary research techniques. However, even in the short number of years since these ethnographic practices began to be documented and critically reflected on there have been significant changes in the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of ethnographic practice and the ways it might be under-stood. Elisenda Ardévol (this volume) has highlighted that the Internet brings new challenges and opportunities to visual researchers, and these include those that invite us to develop new methodologies. In this chapter I respond to such an invitation by examining the implications of recent shifts towards phenomenological and multi-sensory approaches, and criti-cal theories of place for the (re)conceptual isation of doing visual Internet ethnography.

In doing so I develop two themes: the question of how visual Internet ethnography might be conceptualised through a theory of place; and how the concept of multi-sensoriality might enable us to better understand visuality in Internet ethnography. I build on two examples of existing work: Christine Hine’s (2000) Virtual Ethnography, and Tom Boellstorff ’s (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life, in which concepts of place and understandings of the visual have been mobilised to discuss Internet environments. Departing from these works, I then draw on a sensory ethnography approach (Pink, 2009) that is rooted in recent conceptualisations of place, movement and knowing