Visual Anthropology
I am planning to experiment a bit with doing ethnography-like research and presenting it on the web using a mix of media (video, audio, text). There is a history of using video and images in anthropology, but there is still little work being done (that I know of) on using the web to what I think is its potential in presenting ethnographic research.
I'm looking for examples - tips welcome. visualanthropology.net seems a good starting point. Visual studies seems an interesting publication as well - you can see a sample online but you have to get a free login. (They're good about providing linking options with each article.)
I have a documentary photography background, so I am all for using visual techniques. What I also want to do is to publish interviews and such, and annotate them, online. I want to publish unfinished, not-very-interpreted results of the study, so they can be re-interpreted by other people. I haven't seen examples of this online yet. I say not-very-interpreted because I am well aware of the problems with trying to be objective - I won't even try to be that.
A nice example of having extensive source material online and reinterpreting it through an ethnography is Looking at discipline, looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools (PDF, 3M). (I think this direct link should work.) The ethnography looks at the documentary pictures of Indian boarding schools. A fascinating read, check it out. (A lot of classic documentary photography was commisioned by the USA and is freely available online.)
Photographs have the strange property of gaining meaning over time - the older they are, the more we can easily re-interpret them. Video may have the same properties.
More:
- Visual Anthropology Papers
- Understanding What We See: Subject, Author, and Audience in Visual Anthropology, which includes this quote:
"All over the world, on every continent and island, in the hidden recesses of every industrial city as well as in the hidden valleys that can be reached only by helicopter, precious, totally irreplaceable, and forever irreproducible behaviors are disappearing, while departments of anthropology continue to send fieldworkers out with no equipment beyond a pencil and a notebook. (Hockings 1975: 4)"
Also (this nicely illustrates the reluctance anthropologists seem to have with visual media) : ""Ethnographers worship a terrifying deity known as Reality, whose eternal enemy is its evil twin, Art. They believe that to remain vigilant against evil, on must devote oneself to a set of practices known as Science. Their cosmology, however, is unstable: for decades they have fought bitterly among themselves as to the nature of their god and how best to serve him. They accuse each other of being secret followers of Art; the worst insult in their language is 'aesthete'." - Eliot Weinberger, The Camera People".
Here are some more thoughts on the same issues. A brilliant explanation of the history and issues in ethnographic filmmaking.