"There is a tribe, known as the ethnographic filmmakers, who believe they are invisible. They enter a room where a feast is being celebrated, or the sick cured, or the dead mourned, and, though weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed—or, at most, merely glanced at, quickly ignored, later forgotten.
"Outsiders know little of them, for their homes are hidden in the partially uncharted rain forests of the Documentary. Like other Documentarians, they survive by hunting and gathering information. Unlike others of their filmic group, most prefer to consume it raw.
"Their culture is unique in that wisdom, among them, is not passed down from generation to generation: they must discover for themselves what their ancestors knew. They have little communication with the rest of the forest and are slow to adapt to technical innovations. Their handicrafts are rarely traded and are used almost exclusively among themselves. Produced in great quantities, the excess must be stored in large archives.
"They worship a terrifying deity known as Reality, whose eternal enemy is its evil twin, Art. They believe that to remain vigilant against this evil, one must devote oneself to a set of practices known as Science. Their cosmology, however, is unstable: for decades they have fought bitterly among themselves as to the nature of their god and how best to serve him. They accuse each other of being secret followers of Art; the worst insult in their language is 'aesthete.'"
Eliot Weinberger, "The Camera People," Transition, No. 55 (1992)
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