• In the official blurb that accompanied its screening (link), Workers! is described as being co-authored by the artist and filmmaker Petra Bauer and sex worker-led organisation SCOT-PEP.  In the PRODUCTION DOSSIER and in article “Workers! A Conversation”, can you find other ways that this working relationship is described?

Linking sex workers and artists through the means and medium of interviews, documentation and filmmaking. So this “Conversation” is very important, and there are also forms of recording through emails, images, letters, interviews, etc.

• Based on watching the film and looking at the PRODUCTION DOSSIER, do you think this film takes an anthropological approach?

I think the method of anthropology was adopted, first of all, fieldwork and participant observation were adopted, integrated into the collective of workers, interviewing a specific group of people, observation and interviews.

• Were ethics considered in the development, production and release of this film?

This is a movie that can have a conversation. During the whole process, I think the artist considered many factors and was very contradictory. Of course, moral issues must be considered. Regarding sensitive topics such as women’s rights and sex workers, sex work is obviously difficult to be recognized as work.

For sex workers, there is no other Vision or a more abstract, anti-work struggle. However, there is no contradiction in wanting to give up rights when you are not recognized as a worker, and at the same time wanting to dismiss the work itself, it comes back to short-term and long-term goals. Beginners in personal anthropology reflect on what they have thought since their fieldwork.For female sex workers, they are a sensitive group in society, and society draws an invisible boundary with them.
This kind of pre-program training, they know what to say and what to say when they are confronted with people outside their “boundary”.🔗 Fieldworkers and respondents are always in cultural interaction, and no one can be absolutely objective and true. How do fieldworkers determine that a piece of soil is a vase? They are classifying and labeling these actions and objects.The act of classing and labeling reflects not only his own situation and perception, but also that of those “actors”.

• Do you think that the PRODUCTION DOSSIER can be considered to a form of field notes?

YES✅Anthropology Marshall Sahlins, with a book “Historical Metaphor and Mythological Reality” that discusses the history of contact between Westerners and Native Hawaiians headed by Captain Cook, shows how the materials dug up in the archives can be used as The main object of analysis is discussed from the theoretical perspective of “culture” and “structure” in anthropology. In 2004, he published “I’m Sorry, Thucydides”. The main chapter of the book is about how “culture” can help us understand the war between the two chiefdoms of Fiji in the nineteenth century. One time all is from the archives.
✨A 1993 essay in the American Ethnologist aimed to rebut a scholar’s contention that the  “kerekere” tradition was a British colonial construct and not clearly documented prior to 1860. I saw that he took the time to disassemble it from a theoretical point of view, and occasionally praised the other party, and then presented in the middle that there were records of “kerekere” in various files before 1860.
🎬In the movie “The Name of the Rose”, the protagonist exclaims: “So the library is not a tool to spread the truth, but a place to delay the truth?” These examples are enough to demonstrate the importance of producing archives.
Anthropologist Geertz’s famous “Cockfighting” article mentioned that when he first entered the field, he was “like the wind” and no one wanted to talk to him, which made researchers extremely frustrated. However, my scene was replaced by an archive That’s all. But fortunately, I also encountered my “cockfighting” moment, which completely reversed the fate afterwards. Seemingly contradictory terms like “archival fieldwork”. The reason for this name is probably because the problems that anthropologists bring into the archives often come from the field, that is to say, the archives and the field are basically a continuum.

Feb 13, 2023