Doing Field Projects

12 Visual Anthropology

Visual anthropology is a specialization within cultural anthropology that has a long and storied history. Visual anthropology remains an active area of research and practice and contributes to anthropological knowledge and methodology in numerous ways. The project in this chapter builds on a number of fieldwork skills you have developed in past projects. Here you will focus on the visual nature of the subject or topic you are documenting using either still photography or videography. The goal of this project is to tell a story in pictures: either crafting a portfolio of still images or producing a sequence of raw video footage.

Learning Goals

1. Improve observational acuity to enhance visual ethnographic documentation.
2. Use either a still or a video camera, or both, as ethnographic tools.

The anthropological study of the visual arts and the use of visual documentation of ethnographic data in general– film and still photography plus drawing and painting – have been around since the nineteenth century, but until the latter part of the twentieth century they were not seen as particularly central to the discipline. Nowadays visual anthropology is a recognized branch of cultural anthropology, and this project sensitizes you to the many possibilities of visual ethnography. Before getting into the specifics of the project, it is useful to begin with a brief history of the early use of still photography and film in ethnographic documentation so that you are aware ...