Nepali and American Weddings: A future research project idea

This morning I had brunch with Deborah Winslow, an anthropologist who works for the NSF and coordinates the review process for research grants. She's visiting our department right now and has been giving lots of useful advice to grad students about the NSF grant application process (in addition to presenting her own very interesting work on kinship and technological innovation among potters in Sri Lanka). This morning during brunch, she was talking about innovative research methods in anthropology and mentioned the work of Joe Tobin, whom I met at the AAA conference in New Orleans in 2010. He's published a book and ethnographic video on a cross-cultural comparison of pre-schools in the US, China, and Canada; he's also headed up a similar project that involves a comparison of deaf schools in the US, Japan, and France.

During our talk, it sparked in my head that Tobin's methodology (or some variation thereof) would be a great way to study weddings. Last summer, my Nepali host family went to at least six weddings during the time that I was staying with them; we had lots of conversations about what weddings in Nepal are like, and they were very curious to know what American weddings are like. I'd love to do a project that went something like this:

1) Pick a wedding in Nepal, and a wedding in the US, and get permission from the people involved to do an ethnographic film-making project on their weddings. Ideally, I would love for the people involved in the weddings to be members of my Nepali host family and my own American family.
2) Do video interviews before (and after) the wedding with relevant people (the bride and groom, parents, members of the wedding party, etc.) in which they tell the stories of how the marriages came about, what weddings "should" be like, how this wedding was planned, etc.
3) Videotape the weddings themselves.
4) Edit the interviews/wedding videos into fairly coherent videos: one for the American wedding, one for the Nepali wedding.
5) Show each video to the family in the other country (the American wedding video to the Nepali family, and vice versa) and record the people watching it; interview them about their thoughts and reactions.
6) Edit the whole thing together into one great big ethnographic documentary (and write a book about it).

I don't think I will do this as a dissertation project, but I would love to do it as a post-doc/second book sort of project. There are a few main things I like about it:

- The project has the potential to highlight the very personal nature of anthropological fieldwork, since I'd be working with members of my own family(ies). And though the weddings won't necessarily be "representative" of Nepali or American weddings in general (after all, what would a "representative" wedding be like, anyway?), the family-connections element provides a nice rationale of selection.
- It's got a classic "thick description" feel to it, since it will be focusing in-depth on a small data set.
- It has a nice reciprocal element to it. Ethnography isn't just about studying "the other", but also about realizing the ways in which "the other" are studying "us".
- I've been thinking a lot lately about how to produce anthropological work that's accessible and interesting to people outside of anthropology and the "general public". I think ethnographic video can be a really great way to do that. I want to learn more about the film-making process myself. I also have a friend who lives in Nepal who has a background in documentary film-making; ideally, I'd get a grant that would allow me to hire him as a film-maker/consultant to the project. 

This is all a bit disjointed and fragmentary, but I just wanted to write down the idea 1) so that I don't forget it and 2) so that other people can use it and/or give me recommendations on resources I should check out. (And 3), maybe just to procrastinate a little bit from the work that I should be doing right now! Sigh... back to work...)