Salak Yom

#collaborativeethnography #multimodalanthropology #photography #interviews #virtual reality #drones #thailand

About

Salak Yom is a traditional Buddhist festival of the Yong minority in Lamphun, Thailand, during which community members and organizations make offerings to the local monks, and some of these offerings take the form of large, colorful, and elaborately decorated structures. Over the years I have been working local community members along with Dr. Alexandra Denes at Chiang Mai University, researcher Linina Phuttitarn, and Dr. Kate Hennessy to understand the impressions of 360° video and drone documentation in the community's ongoing work in safeguarding the Salak Yom festival and to explore the shifts cultural safeguarding practices given cultural and societal changes and the popularization of social media and new media technology.

Role

I have returned to Lamphun over the years as a visual ethnographic researcher, photographer, and videographer. I filmed using 360° video and drones, working with Linina as well as local officials, monks, documentarians, and community members in the filming process. Linina and I returned to share the footage with the community and to interview people to understand their impressions of 360° video and drones for cultural safeguarding of the Salak Yom Festival.

Outcomes

I have created 360° videos on the Salak Yom festival and shared them with the community, and I plan to continue working on the films with community members to ensure they are useful and accessible longterm. I also shared my photographs and film documentation with a local historian to include with the local archive, and a selection of the photos were included as a photo essay in my dissertation. I published acamdemic writing on this work in the form of a case study in my dissertation and a conference paper reflecting on ethical issues of research and representation using immersive media.

Read More

Muntean, Reese. 2024. Sustainable realities: a visual multi-sited exploration of sustainability in and of virtual reality and immersive video. [Doctoral dissertation, Simon Fraser University].

PDF

Muntean, Reese, Kate Hennessy, Alexandra Denes, and Linina Phuttitarn. 2019. On research ethics and representation in virtual reality. In the Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEEVR), pp. 1493-1496.

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