Serenading Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” to a prostitute in the Red Light District, playing a tribute rendition of “Light My Fire” at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris and singing “Take Me to The River” while standing in a river are only some of the performances of Gory Bateson, a burned-out rocker from the band Ethnogs, available on YouTube.
If you haven’t heard of Bateson or the Ethnogs, it’s probably because neither of them actually exists.
The man with the guitar is actually Nick Trujillo, a tenured professor of communication studies at California State University, Sacramento, and these performances are his academic research.
“It started as kind of a lark,” Trujillo said. “We were talking about the movie ‘Spinal Tap’ and were wondering if there was ever a book written about a mythical band, and we decided to create a whole history for this band and the concept would be interactive, so that other people could define their identity with the band.”
The point of his research is to study participant observation, Trujillo said, by trying to understand the topic from a participant perspective in conjuncture with new media like YouTube.
Trujillo said his study has caused controversy, adding a colleague filed sexual harassment charges through CSU’s Human Resources Department based on a video that depicted a dog licking a person’s toes. The charges were dropped, however, because there was not substantial evidence.
“If you do research that nobody thinks is controversial, then you’re not pushing the boundaries very much,” Trujillo said.
While Trujillo’s study has stirred up some debate over appropriate guidelines for scholarship research, University of Wisconsin’s own professor of anthropology Neil Whitehead’s provocative work leaves others questioning research ethics.
Three years ago, Whitehead created the band Blood Jewel, whose MySpace page is filled with violent, sexual, dark imagery that, to some, is quite disturbing, Whitehead said.
“The methodology of anthropology stresses the importance of direct experience,” Whitehead said. “Before the Blood Jewel thing, my work had been on sorcery and real killings, and it became very problematic because observation is not a kind of neutral situation — if someone is getting killed [in front of you] you can’t just look and not do anything.”
Whitehead studies society’s reaction to depictions of sexual violence, and while he said his audience is inherently limited due to the vulgarity of his imagery, he hopes to eventually draw a greater crowd.
In one of Whitehead’s videos, “Speedkilla,” still images of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, are flashed along with violent, bloody imagery from movies such as “Taxi Driver” and “Crash,” as well as photos involving sexual bondage, sadism and masochism.
