Yoeme Indian Lutu Pahko (Sorrow Ritual) Film Project

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Many indigenous organizations have begun utilizing the internet as a means to demonstrate cultural survival: websites and digital archive projects provide means by which to tell community outsiders and insiders about tribal history, identity and language. Anthropologists have also begun to create ethnographic websites, moving their cultural analyses across the digital divide: from print sources to digital publications. This project bridges these two parallel technological shifts by exploring how field recordings, particularly digital video, can be used by both anthropologists and community members in a website that not only offers cultural history and analysis, but also an audio and video archive for cultural and linguistic revitalization. Traveling to the Yoeme Pueblo of Potam (Sonora, Mexico), this investigator will film a family ceremony called the "lutu pahko," or sorrow ritual. Performed over four days, this ceremony releases the family members from their year of mourning following the death of their kin. At the family's request, this investigator will film the preparations and completion of the ritual for the explicit purpose of archiving the digitally recorded ritual and collaborators' interviews in an already existing ethnographic website about Yoeme culture and language. The edited recording will provide anthropologists a rare example of Yoeme family rituals, accessible from anywhere (including classrooms) on the World Wide Web. Additionally, the film can be duplicated onto a variety of formats for community preservation and revitalization, i.e., cassette, VHS, DVD, and CD-Rom. The expected research results are two-fold: 1) exploring the roles that digital technology can play within the contexts of furthering and representing qualitative research; and 2) developing a methodological model by which economically disadvantaged communities benefit from the same data collection and documentary processes as social scientists.