Visual anthropology

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For the academic journal, see Visual Anthropology (journal).
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Visual anthropology is a subfield of

hieroglyphics
, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.

Multimodal anthropology describes the latest turn in the subfield, which considers how emerging technologies like immersive virtual reality, augmented reality, mobile apps, social networking, gaming along with film, photography and art is reshaping anthropological research, practice and teaching.

History

Even before the emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline in the 1880s,

Edward Curtis)[3]

The history of anthropological filmmaking is intertwined with that of non-fiction and documentary filmmaking, although

Dead Birds
).

By the 1940s and early 1950s, anthropologists such as

Tim Asch. By focusing on these four, we can see the shape of ethnographic film" (p. 15). Many, including Peter Loizos,[7] would add the name of filmmaker/author David MacDougall
to this select group.

In 1966, filmmaker Sol Worth and anthropologist John Adair taught a group of Navajo Indians in Arizona how to capture 16mm film. The hypothesis was that artistic choices made by the Navajo would reflect the 'perceptual structure' of the Navajo world.[8] The goals of this experiment were primarily ethnographic and theoretical. Decades later, however, the work has inspired a variety of participatory and applied anthropological initiatives - ranging from photovoice to virtual museum collections - in which cameras are given to local collaborators as a strategy for empowerment.[9][10][11][12]

In the United States, Visual Anthropology first found purchase in an academic setting in 1958 with the creation of the Film Study Center at

John Collier, Jr. wrote the first standard textbook in the field in 1967, and many visual anthropologists of the 1970s relied on semiologists like Roland Barthes for essential critical perspectives. Contributions to the history of Visual Anthropology include those of Emilie de Brigard (1967),[14] Fadwa El Guindi (2004),[15] and Beate Engelbrecht, ed. (2007).[16] A more recent history that understands visual anthropology in a broader sense, edited by Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, is Made To Be Seen: Historical Perspectives on Visual Anthropology.[17] Turning the anthropological lens on India provides a counterhistory of visual anthropology (Khanduri 2014).[18] More broadly, visual anthropology recently involves a call to make visual culture central to the exploration of social and political experience; to give primacy to the visual, against a conventional approach in the social sciences that treats the visual as secondary to written sources and discourse (Pinney 2005; Kalantzis 2019).[19]


At present, the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) represents the subfield in the United States as a section of the American Anthropological Association, the AAA.

In the United States, ethnographic films are shown each year at the Margaret Mead Film Festival as well as at the AAA's annual Film and Media Festival.[20] In Europe, ethnographic films are shown at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in the UK, The Jean Rouch Film Festival in France, Ethnocineca in Austria and Ethnofest in Greece. Dozens of other international festivals are listed regularly in the Newsletter of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association [NAFA].[21]

Timeline and breadth of prehistoric visual representation

While art historians are clearly interested in some of the same objects and processes, visual anthropology places these artifacts within a holistic cultural context. Archaeologists, in particular, use phases of visual development to try to understand the spread of humans and their cultures across contiguous landscapes as well as over larger areas. By 10,000 BP, a system of well-developed

pictographs was in use by boating peoples[22]
and was likely instrumental in the development of navigation and writing, as well as a medium of storytelling and artistic representation. Early visual representations often show the female form, with clothing appearing on the female body around 28,000 BP, which archaeologists know now corresponds with the invention of weaving in Old Europe. This is an example of the holistic nature of visual anthropology: a figurine depicting a woman wearing diaphanous clothing is not merely an object of art, but a window into the customs of dress at the time, household organization (where they are found), transfer of materials (where the clay came from) and processes (when did firing clay become common), when did weaving begin, what kind of weaving is depicted and what other evidence is there for weaving, and what kinds of cultural changes were occurring in other parts of human life at the time.

Visual anthropology, by focusing on its own efforts to make and understand visual representations, is able to establish many principles and build theories about human visual representation in general.

List of visual anthropology academic programs

Appalachian State University offers a BA in Cultural Anthropology with a focus on Visual Anthropology

List of films

Main article: List of visual anthropology films

See also

References

  1. S2CID 147123263
    .
  2. ^ Jay Ruby, Visual Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, editors. New York: Henry Holt and Company, vol. 4:1345–1351, 1996.
  3. ^ Harald E.L. Prins, "Visual Anthropology." Pp. 506–525, In T.Biolsi. ed. A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing].
  4. ^ Erik Barnouw. Documentary: A history of the Non-Fiction Film. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
  5. ^ Hortense Powdermaker. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Studies the Movie Makers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950.
  6. ^ The Study of Culture at a Distance.
  7. ^ Loizos, Peter 1993. Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness, 1955-1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  8. ^ Darnell R. Through Navajo eyes: An exploration in film communication and anthropology. American Anthropologist, Vol 76, pp 890, Oct. 1974
  9. ^ Turner, Terence 1992. Defiant images: the Kayapo appropriation of video. Anthropology Today 8:5-15.
  10. ^ Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1994). Empowerment through Photo Novella: Portraits of Participation. Health Education & Behavior, 21(2), 171-186.
  11. ^ Chalfen, Richard and Michael Rich 1999. Showing and Telling Asthma: Children Teaching Physicians with Visual Narratives. Visual Sociology 14: 51-71.
  12. ^ Riddington, Amber and Kate Hennessy, Co-curators, Project Co-coordinators, 2007.
  13. ^ Jay Ruby. The Professionalization of Visual Anthropology in the United States - The 1960s and 1970s." 2005 The Last Twenty Years of Visual anthropology – A Critical Review. Visual Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, pgs. 159–170.
  14. ^ de Brigard, Emilie 2003 [1967]. The History of Ethnographic Film. In: Principles of Visual Anthropology (3rd ed.). Paul Hockings, editor. Pp. 13-44. The Hague: De Gruyter.
  15. ^ el Guindi, Fadwa 2004. Visual Anthropology: Essential Method and Theory. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press.
  16. ^ Engelbrecht, Beate, ed. 2007. The Origins of Visual Anthropology. Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag.
  17. ^ Banks, Marcus and Jay Ruby 2011. Made To Be Seen: Historical Perspectives on Visual Anthropology Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  18. ^ Ritu G. Khanduri. 2014. Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  19. ^ Kalantzis, Konstantinos 2019. Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete. Pinney, Christopher 2005. “Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does that Object Come?” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 256–272. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
  20. ^ The AAA's annual Film and Media Festival
  21. ^ Newsletter of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association Archived 2014-05-29 at the Wayback Machine.
  22. ^ Jim Bailey, Sailing to Paradise

Bibliography

Further reading

  • Visual Anthropology - Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, article by Jay Ruby
  • Visual anthropology in the digital mirror: Computer-assisted visual anthropology, article by Michael D. Fischer and David Zeitlyn, then both University of Kent at Canterbury
  • Legends Asch and Myerhoff Inspire A New Generation of Visual Anthropologists - article by Susan Andrews [2]
  • Pink, Sarah. "Doing Visual Ethnography:Images, Media, and Representation". Sage, London, 2012
  • Banks, Marcus and Ruby, Jay. "Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology. University of Chicago Press, 2011

External links

Organizations
Publications
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