Getting the Make: Japanese Skateboarder Videography and the Entranced Ethnographic Lens

Using Jean Rouch's concept of the cine-transe, this essay argues that the camera transforms tie relations between the anthropologist and the field site through movement and the filmic encounter. Critical focus on the camera/body assemblage shifts attention from the fetish of the recorded image and onto the subject and researcher's haptic experience with and through visual technology. This essay specifically examines how movement, media, and visual ethnographic methods intersect around the video practices of Japanese skateboarders. With cameras as the primary tools and the subjects of the research, the cine-transe is reimagined as a mode of social being and anthropological data.