Visual anthropology
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Contemporary Art and Anthropology Open
Contemporary Art and Anthropology takes a new and exciting approach to representational practices within contemporary art and anthropology. Traditionally, the anthropology of art has tended to focus on the interpretation of tribal artifact…
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Representation and videography in linguistic landscape studies Open
Much Linguistic Landscape scholarship relies on visual data collection, primarily the use of still photography; however, the field has yet to address the theoretical underpinning of such visual and spatial representation. Furthermore, digi…
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Why Do “Good” Pictures Matter in Anthropology? Open
This article explores the relationship between photography and anthropology in the age of digital ethnographies and anthropologies of the future. It focuses on the phenomenological bond between the picture-taking process and the politics o…
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Imaging Knowledge: Visual Anthropology, Storytelling and the Slow Path Toward Wisdom Open
In this article, I suggest that visual anthropology shows us a powerfully ethical way -through sensuous narrative and shared anthropology -to practice slow anthropology in a fast world.In what follows I examine the work and practices of tw…
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Visual Anthropology From Latin America: An Introduction Open
The idea of Latin America as an unified geopolitical entity has been called into question (Mignolo 2005), exposing claims for a specific aesthetics and epistemological modality as romantic fetishism in face of the diverse histories of econ…
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Drawing on Museums: Early Visual Fieldnotes by Franz Boas and the Indigenous Recuperation of the Archive Open
In the first decade of his Northwest Coast fieldwork (1886–1897), Franz Boas made and commissioned a series of research drawings of Kwakw a k a ’wakw (Kwakiutl) objects held by museums in Berlin and elsewhere. Using them as elicitation too…
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What Time is the Visual? Photography and the History of the Future Open
Part of a broader inquiry that asks, “What time is the visual?” this article uses ethnographic observations and recent theoretical work to suggest that photography is as much future‐oriented as it is a zone for the preservation of the past…
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Visualizing urban inequalities: The ethics of videography and documentary filmmaking in water research Open
Visual methods are becoming increasingly popular in social sciences, but are still little explored when it comes to water related studies. Drawing on literature on visual methods and documentary filmmaking, this paper reflects on the role …
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Emotion and imagination: Perspectives in educational anthropology Open
Although systems of education and socialization contribute to educating and socializing the feelings of their addressees, little research is available to date regarding the norms according to which this happens and, in particular, how this…
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Anthropology Museums and Museum Anthropology Open
This entry provides an overview of the history, politics and changing roles of anthropology museums. It explores the developing field of museum anthropology, which encompasses the work that anthropologists do within museums and the anthrop…
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A Present of their Past? Anthropologists, Native People, and their Heritage Open
Most ethnology collections were made by anthropologists at a time when Native People were believed to be dying out. These collections were intended to allow future generations of anthropologists to study traditional Native cultures. Since …
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‘Team ethnography visual maps’: Methods for identifying the ethnographic object in multiple sites of fieldwork Open
Team ethnography is becoming more popular in research. However, there is currently limited understanding of how multiple ethnographers working together actually share their experiences of conducting team ethnography. There is also an assoc…
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Anthropology is good Open
Anthropology does not just study people; it studies with people, drawing them into a conversation, of concern to everyone, about how to live. But this means turning the academic model of knowledge production outside in. As a way of knowing…
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Re-imagining research with children through an engagement with contemporary art Open
This article explores how an engagement with a contemporary art film can foster a different attitude in relation to research with children through the following question: How might an engagement with a contemporary art film inform/disrupt/…
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Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology Open
Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, we coin the term pedagogies of the senses to refer to a series of teaching strategies aimed at unsettling anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacem…
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Ethics and inscription in social robot design. A visual ethnography Open
In this paper, by turning to examples of visual inscriptions adopted within HRI research, and more specifically social robotic interaction, I wish to explore through visual ethnography some of the challenges faced in designing ethical robo…
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Photo-translation Open
This article introduces the concept of ‘photo-translation’ for studying documentary photography as a collaborative practice of visual translation. The visual-translational approach to photo documentation is applied in a novel way to the em…
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A brief introduction to the history of anthropology of photography Open
The paper represents a short historical overview of key anthropological figures in Anglo-American and French anthropology of photography such are Boas, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Mead and Bateson, Levi-Strauss and (John) Collier till the…
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Thinking through the Photo Essay: Observations for Medical Anthropology Open
As photography becomes more prevalent in ethnographic research, scholars should more seriously consider the photo essay as a medium for sharing their work. In this Position Piece, we present guidelines for the creation of ethnographic phot…
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Methods and Aspects of Field Research Open
This chapter lays out the history of ethnography, which began with travel narratives in antiquity and came to be used as a method in anthropology and urban sociology in the early twentieth century. Discussed, among other things, are the re…
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Encountering the Goddess in the Indian Himalaya: On the Contribution of Ethnographic Film to the Study of Religion Open
This paper examines the benefits of ethnographic film for the study of religion. It argues that the exploration of gaps between colloquial descriptions of divinities and their practical manifestation in ritual is instructive of the way rel…
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Visual Anthropology Open
Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the anthropological analyses of media (including film…
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Blurred Boundaries: Ethnofiction and Its Impact on Postwar Japanese Cinema Open
This article explores the use of ethnofiction, a technique emerging from the field of visual anthropology, which blends documentary and fiction filmmaking for ethnographic purposes. From Imamura Shōhei’s A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu, 196…
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Amazonian House-ing: A Visual Anthropology Essay Open
This visual essay documents the house-ing practices of Amazonian river dwellers and urban and peri-urban residents in the face of large-scale development projects. In Altamira (Pará, Brazil), the construction of the third-largest hydroelec…
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Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Photography and the Visual Representation of Sport Open
The sport theme was immediately embraced by the earliest photographers. In its first part, this essay traces the long and influential history of sport photography from its beginnings through the motion studies of the late 19th century to t…
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World Expositions as Time Machines: Two Views of the Visual Construction of Time between Anthropology and Futurama Open
International expositions as representative cultural phenomena which contributed to shape world history in the modern and contemporary age are currently approached from combined spatial points of view (in a geographical, material, and cult…
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How to preserve the visible content of films in visual form throughout the analytical process? Open
This article demonstrates an analytical and arts-based approach using drawings as tools to retain the visual information in a film visual, throughout the research process as well as for thinking. The approach brings in methods and theory f…
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Introduction to the anthropology of photography in Serbia Open
Despite significant strides from the beginning of the 20th century, there was no systematic or institutionalized reflection on photography in Serbian ethnology and anthropology until the 1980s. Until then, photography was mainly used as an…
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"The Kazym revolt': on the history of the first visual anthropology project in Russia Open
КАЗЫМСКИЙ ПЕРЕВОРОТ»: К ИСТОРИИ ПЕРВОГО ВИЗУАЛЬНО-АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКОГО ПРОЕКТА В РОССИИ Елена Сергеевна Данилко Аннотация.В августе 1991 г. в Западной Сибири, в поселке Казым Ханты-Мансийского округа, известным канадским антропологом Асеном …
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Visual sociological research using film and video, on the example of urban studies Open
The use of film and video in sociological research, or social sciences in general, has a long and well-established tradition. Motion pictures have, on the one hand, been the object of analysis, as in the case of sociology of film, and, on …