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Visual anthropology

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Visual anthropology is a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that developed out of the theory and practice of ethnographic photography, film and since the mid-1990s, new media. It also encompasses the anthropological study of representation, including areas such as performance, museums, art, and the production and reception of mass media.

History

The origins of visual anthropology are located in the invention and application of photographic technologies to the study of human culture and diversity (Ruby 1996). Some of the earliest photography and filmmaking was trained on traditional anthropological informants. Anthropologists and non-anthropologists conducted much of this work in the spirit of salvage anthropology or attempts to record for posterity the ways-of-life of societies assumed doomed to extinction (see, for instance, the Native American photography of Edward Curtis [1]).

The history of anthropological filmmaking is intertwined with that of non-fiction and documentary filmmaking. According to film historian Erik Barnouw (1993), some of the first motion pictures of the ethnographic other were made with Lumière equipment (Promenades des Éléphants à Phnom Penh, 1901). Robert Flaherty, probably best known for his films chronicling the lives of Arctic peoples (Nanook of the North, 1922), became a filmmaker in 1913 when his supervisor suggested that he take a camera and equipment with him on an expedition north. Flaherty focused on “traditional” Eskimo ways of life, omitting to that end any signs of modernity among his film subjects (even to the point of refusing to use a rifle to help kill a walrus his informants had harpooned as he filmed them, according to Barnouw; this scene made it into Nanook where it served as evidence of their "pristine" culture). This pattern would persist in many ethnographic films to follow (see as an example Robert Gardner's Dead Birds).

By the 1940s, anthropologists such as Hortense Powdermaker (Hollywood, the Dream Factory, 1950), Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (Trance and Dance in Bali, 1952) were bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on mass media and visual representation. The work of Bateson and Mead as well as that of anthropologically-minded filmmakers such as Tim Asch, Robert Gardner [2] and John Marshall [3] led to the realization there existed a need to systematically study, understand and produce ethnographic films in a scholarly manner. Visual anthropology first found purchase in an academic setting in 1958 with the creation of the Film Study Center at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography (Ruby 2001).

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

Ethnographic and anthropological films

A few influential ethnographically-minded films and filmmakers include:

  • Jean Rouch
    • Chronique d'un été (Chronicle of a Summer), 1961
    • Jaguar, 1954-1967
    • Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters), 1954
  • John Marshall
    • A Kalahari Family, 1951-2000
    • The Hunters, 1958
  • Robert Gardner
    • Forest of Bliss, 1986
    • Dead Birds, 1963

Visual anthropology programs

  • Temple University: Temple has had a program in visual anthropology in some form since the late 1960s. At present, it offers a graduate course of studies leading to a doctorate in anthropology and an undergraduate track in the anthropology of visual communication.

See also

References

  • Barbash, Ilisa and Lucien Taylor. Cross-cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
  • Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A history of the Non-Fiction Film. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • Powdermaker, Hortense. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Studies the Movie Makers. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950.
  • ---. Picturing Culture: Essays on Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
  • ---. "Visual Anthropology." In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, editors. New York: Henry Holt and Company, vol. 4:1345-1351, 1996 [5].
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