BSAS - Filip De Boeck: Scaling the city: visual and vertical modes to write Kinshasa

Abstract

What angle to adopt and how to position oneself in order to write an ethnography on the scale of the city? This is a question that many urban anthropologists are confronting and struggling with. From the start, my own urban anthropology of Kinshasa, the teeming capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has experimented with possible responses to this issue through a sustained collaboration with a number of photographers, visual artists and filmmakers with whom, over the years, I have been exploring some of the multiple possibilities that lay dormant in the combination of text and image, in a joint effort to come up with a more adequate understanding of what cityness in such a context is all about.

Bionote

A Professor of anthropology at the University of Leuven, writer, film-maker and curator Filip De Boeck lives and works between Brussels and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the past thirty years he has conducted extensive field research in both rural and urban communities in the DRC. His research interests focus on social worlds and infrastructures in African cities, particularly Kinshasa. Co-authored with photographer Sammy Baloji, his most recent book is Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo's Urban Worlds (London: Autograph ABP, 2016). De Boeck has also curated several international exhibitions and is the author of a long documentary film about Kinshasa.

The department seminar, known as Bergen Social Anthropology Seminars (BSAS), is the main forum for dialogue and debate about anthropological research and theoretical development at the Department in Bergen. All is welcome!