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This article reflects on the notion of urban democracy through a video-ethnographic study of the conflicts that followed the 2007 riots in Milan’s Chinese neighborhood. I explore how the theoretical and methodological union of critical urban ethnographies with social documentary techniques can contribute to praxis for more democratic urbanization. Through selected video-ethnographic vignettes, I discuss how such an approach involves issues of ethics, voice, form and politics. The documentary exposes the material effects of inequality and domination in a unique and vivid manner; it also offers alternatives and encourages the ethnographer to assume a clear position in intervening on hegemonic practices. The conclusion explains how the production and consumption of such video-ethnographies affect the social, moral and, most importantly, political perception of a particular urban setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents discussion on various topics related to visual anthropology. These include limitations of doing fieldwork using ethnographic filming and field photography techniques, the dynamics between ethnographic filmakers and subjects in documenting indigenous culture in Arunachal in northeastern India, and filming the local traditional beliefs and rituals to Naples, Italy. The actual fieldworks of ethnographers in southwest China and at Indian Customs are detailed.

The exploratory discussion in this article starts from the fact that it is the realism of photographic representations which enables them, in an indexical sense, to point back to a reality beyond themselves as images. In the same vein, it is as a metonymic space-time fragment that the photograph can indicate a continuation of reality beyond its own framing of the visible. Or, putting it differently, rather than constituting transparent representations, presence in photographs is evoked through absence of the real. What is not problematized in photographic theory and visual anthropology is that photographs thus depend on imagination for their interpretative connection to reality. My argument sees photographic practice as interference, which pushes the medium past the implicit positivist premise for visual knowledge production in anthropology. Furthermore, when understanding the ability to imagine as movements in reason, the separation between imagination and reason, presumed necessary for the scientific production of knowledge, is also challenged. Concerned with rethinking photography in visual anthropology, imagination's role in knowledge production will be explored through my photographic art project, Houses/Homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes Georgii and Ekaterina Prokofiev's expedition to the Bol'shezemel'skie Nenets and their experience in filming documentary chronicles. Their records form a unique part of the visual anthropology of the Samoyedic peoples. From extant archival documents it is assumed that the chronicles were filmed with funding from the cooperation agreement that was signed by Franz Boas and Vladimir Bogoras in New York in 1928. The article offers a reconstruction of Prokofiev's fieldwork experience and his accounts of the early history of collectivization. In this regard the filmed chronicles and a collection of photos taken in the field are treated as a visual conceptualization. Available studies of visual anthropology in the USSR suggest that the documentary chronicles by the Prokofievs, made in 1929–30, are the first cinematic records to be produced by ethnographers in the Soviet Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on a photographic image that has become iconic of the journey of AIDS patients in Kenya: the representation of a young man's emaciated body “before treatment” with antiretroviral therapy (ART), and another of the same man “after treatment” and the restoration of his health and life. Showing one of his patients in Haiti and taken by the medical anthropologist and activist Paul Farmer, the photograph traveled to Kenya where it was made into an AIDS-education poster and used as a key tool in ART programs. With its strong “conversion” narrative, the poster seeks to convert viewers to a biomedical way of seeing, and experiencing, disease and infection. I explore the production, circulation and reception of this image, its social history and its agency, as it entered into local moral economies concerning HIV, visibility and value, and drew globalized connections, discourses and practices into novel forms of self-fashioning. In being stretched across different scales, and in being displayed in public as well as domestic spaces, this photographic object creates new relationships between these spaces and the actors who inhabit them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A 1962 photomicrograph of a mosquito taken in what was then a Tanganyikan mountain laboratory offers a prompt to consider the social salience and affective power of scientific images. Drawing inspiration from anthropological work on photographic practices, this article excavates the diverse geopolitical and domestic contexts of the image's production, consumption and circulation, so as to grasp the relationship between scientific labors and lives. As much souvenir as “epistemic thing,” the photomicrograph provides new directions in thinking about the materiality of memory in tropical medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology and photography explores key issues arising out of recent work in the area. While reviewing the contributions of history, STS and photographic theory to the study of medical visual cultures, regimes and economies, we explore what a distinctively anthropological approach—through its ethnographic and comparative scope—offers to the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses views of several authors on the problem of visuality in early times. Topics discussed include identification of classical concepts of visual using critical judgment of ancient philosophy, museum collections and monumental sites in Greek and Rome, difference between interdisciplinary studies and visual anthropology from visual cultural studies, and trans-regional comparison.

Visual anthropologists have seldom discussed audience reactions, and those that have done so have tended to focus on the reactions of informants featured in their films. This article shows that collecting and examining responses from a wider range of audiences, and broadening the discussion on the subject of the audience, are useful in further exploring film as a tool in anthropological research. Research on responses elicited by the filmLiving like a Common Man[2011], which was screened to varied audiences across India and Europe, produced additional insights on the social position of the film characters and suggested new directions for further studies on ambivalent and contradictory aspects of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual representation is vital to the study of craft. Craftwork takes place in dynamic social contexts in which a multitude of often interdependent activities occur simultaneously between actors, materials, tools and other objects. This article traces and critically engages with my own efforts to represent visually the masons of Djenné. As recording technologies become more user-friendly and the means to disseminate images and sound become more widely available, the individuals and communities we study have growing agency to engage critically with, and to co-produce, their own discourses about them. There is a need therefore to make a shift from the “studyof” to “studieswith” our ethnographic subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This special issue is based on the proceedings of an anthropological workshop organized at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. It took the unique approach of reflecting on the intersection between the subdisciplines of visual anthropology and the anthropology of craftwork. Still and moving images are routinely used by anthropologists of crafts and techniques, yet the literature investigating such images critically is scarce. Arguably images of craft-making have certain characteristics that make them stand out as special cases of visual data derived from ethnographic research. Contributors here reflect critically on their own image-making practices in the field, and address a range of issues relating to fieldwork methodology, images of craft as objects in their own right, and participatory image-making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the use of film and photography in studying crafts associated with kastom (custom or tradition) in Manus, Papua New Guinea. It is argued that by engaging local people in directing our cameras we might produce images that are non-representational, images that will in their own right participate in social life, much like the artifacts whose making is discussed here. Rather than pointing to the limitations of still and moving pictures as compared to human perception, I argue that an image has the potential to synthesize and offer to its audience a multiplicity of meanings, precisely by not being anything like a perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I compare video footage I recorded during two separate studies on craft ceramics, in China and Taiwan respectively, to reflect on the way images might contribute to theoretical reflections on embodied practice in craftwork. In the first, key moments captured by the camera illustrate, and help us to understand, local conceptions of craft and ethics of skilled practice, yet these moments are fleeting and their value unlikely to be recognized by a casual viewer. An analysis of the second video footage, in which a Taiwanese master ceramicist is brought to “unpack” his skilled knowledge when in the role of a teacher, reveals another way in which images can bring viewers to access otherwise “invisible” dimensions of skilled practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This continues the discussion that was launched in 2014 in Visual Anthropology, 27(5): 436–456. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a real theoretical underpinning for visual anthropology? Or are we just borrowing theoretical concepts, as needed, from other disciplines? Here eight visual anthropologists offer their thoughts on this fundamental question succinctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting-point of this article is the cinematographic and photographic production made by Hermic Films in Equatorial Guinea (1944–46). Thirty-one short documentaries and 5,500 photos were the product of a two-year expedition in the Spanish colony, partially funded by the Francoist Government. Even if these films and photos are among the most important visual documents of Spain's only sub-Saharan colony, they remain largely unknown. In this research note, considering Hermic Films’ corpus as an archive open to new paths for investigation, we provide a methodological proposal by tracking the social biography of images and placing them in their production and consumption context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay traces the relationships between photography, migration and image-politics of work and labor in Ghana in the era of abolition. Concerns over who could move and work on their own behalf informed shifting senses of personhood and class; these were negotiated changes that inform the rapid proliferation of photographic audiences. In this case the fragmentary photographic records are expanded by oral history accounts and other public memories of migration. Though this narrative is rooted in Ghanaian diaspora to other parts of Africa, the implications for the social and historical senses of photography's relation to personhood provoke much larger questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Senegalese urban centers of Saint Louis, Gorée and the new port-town of Dakar were frequent destinations for itinerant studio photographers plying their trade along the west coast of Africa. By the 1870s consistent economic growth and increased patronage enabled Blaise/Félix Bonnevide to establish Senegal's first permanent photographic studio. His photos record the heterogeneous urban population and document the era of the final conquest of the surrounding Wolof kingdoms. Through a series of studio partnerships and purchases, a direct line of succession originating with Bonnevide culminated in 1900 with the prolific photographer and postcard editor, Edmond Fortier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been an unprecedented surge of interest among scholars, curators and collectors in early photographic material from West Africa, galvanizing new multidisciplinary networks of scholarly research and exhibition practices. The transfer of photographs and even whole archives from the African continent to Europe and the United States has continued to increase as a consequence of the research and market demand, posing new questions about rights to access, preservation, public awareness and scholarship of these photo collections. The photographic, film and related archival material that remains in West Africa is found in profoundly fragile conditions: rarely centralized, often in private hands, and often totally inaccessible to communities. The conditions of disintegration and other threats compound these circumstances, and can only partially be met by digitization technologies and improved capacity for circulation online. It is within this contextual framework that our authors frame the creative histories of photography in West Africa, their social and aesthetic dimensions and their political subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some fifteen years, Mali and more specifically Bamako, its capital city, host to an international photography festival since 1994, have been acting as a “laboratory” for several projects showcasing Africa's photographic heritage. This article looks at the more recent projects, initiated in whole or in part by Malian players, while pointing out that these projects follow in the footsteps of the recognition of the works of the Bamako studio photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé, initially supported by the Western art market. This article thus attempts to trace the main outline of this movement for recognition which, having its origin in initiatives coming from outside in the 1990s, gradually led the political and cultural authorities of Mali to consider the heritage value of the photographic archives preserved in the country as part of a democratic revival. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late 19th and early 20th century many images were taken showing members, rituals and objects of West African men's and women's associations known as “secret societies.” This research project explores the history of the production, dissemination and reception of the visual record of the Poro and Sande associations of Liberia and Sierra Leone and the regulatory societies of the Cameroonian grassland around 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes a closer look at photography's use and reception during its introduction in West and Central Africa, in the era of European imperial conquest. It considers patronage as well as the most popular forms and circulation of early photography. The latter part focuses on one of the first African photographers, Francis Wilberforce Joaque. His biography vividly illustrates a professional acumen in the dynamic markets where he met the demands of such a heterogeneous clientele, responding by providing a generalized supply of images, as well as getting individual and institutional commissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps Robert Flaherty's most insignificant film, Elephant Boy [1937] was made during a commercial partnership with Alexander Korda in the Mysore jungles. It starred Sabu and countless elephants, and was reminiscent of Cooper and Schoedsack's Chang [1927]. Both films are unmentioned in visual anthropology textbooks. Only the two film historians, Calder-Marshall [1963] and Rotha [1983], discuss this Flaherty film. It is based on a short story by Kipling, which in turn was based on a 19th-century autobiography of an elephant-catcher. Little could Flaherty have imagined that half a century later the forest locale where he filmed was to be the haunt of a notorious brigand who successfully kidnapped a top Canarese filmstar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the debate surrounding concepts of objectivity and reality within the discipline of visual anthropology, but more specifically ethnographic film. Three criteria are listed as key parameters in the functioning of an ethnographic film, and these are used to contrast differences between the standard mode of conveyance in ethnographic film, namely the documentary, and a novel genre known as the “docudrama.” In doing this the author highlights the potential of the docudrama to convey what could be argued to be “reality,” and in support of this a case study is presented on the filmGhosts[Broomfield 2006]. A review of that case study provides evidence for the argument that the genre of docudrama may hold weight within the arena of ethnographic film. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The substantive focus of this article is a small collection of image-based case studies of significant criminal acts of interpersonal cruelty that are now in the public domain. In all instances those engaged in criminal acts of violence record and document aspects of their own behavior. The case studies range from military personnel and terrorists to examples from popular culture. Self-created images have the potential to serve as evidence of criminal behavior. For the viewing public recorded images are attributed with a “commonsense” evidential documentary potential. The article looks at the documentary method and the rationale behind recorded images serving evidential purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how subtitles are applied in ethnographic film editing. Based upon doctoral research and accompanying films, I will illustrate how the key ideas in the writing could be re-addressed and re-interpreted in the films through certain ways of subtitling. I argue that appropriate subtitling not only presents the individuality of the subjects directly, but also allows the filmmaker to pronounce his/her own voice indirectly, which responds to as well as differs from written anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the unexpected trajectories of media production under the conditions of neoliberalism in India. Focusing on the Hindi-language film industry (better known as “Bollywood”), the article describes how the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in state policy has produced conditions within the film industry that make it possible for concerns about prestige, symbolic capital, and global distinction to take precedence over ideologies of comparative advantage and branding that are more commonly associated with neoliberalism. It illustrates how Hindi filmmakers regard their cinema's cultural distinctiveness as alienating and limiting rather than as an asset within the larger global cultural economy. The article argues that the contemporary moment of Hindi filmmaking is marked by efforts to erase, rather than highlight, the signs of cultural difference in order to circulate and accrue distinction globally. However, the article relates the challenges faced by Hindi filmmakers in trying to fashion a “global” and culturally unmarked cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite a broad and growing devotee base for the transnational Sathya Sai Movement, little research exists on Sai sacred objects: their meanings, their patterns of circulation and their production and exchange in the world of Sai devotion. This article offers a meditation on these Sai sacred artifacts, their visuality, their modes of acquisition by devotees and their multiple biographies in various realms. I analyze the hermeneutics of quiddity to demonstrate how ideas of transcendence and transformation are embedded within and shaped around the Sai objects, thereby creating a language and disciplined practice of material piety that shapes the ontology of Sai devotion. I examine how the sacred objects act, and are acted upon, to shape a “politics of visual materiality” in three ways: (1) as iconic magical devices to legitimate Sai Baba's long-distance charismatic authority for the transnational devotee base, through innovative “strategies of affiliation,” (2) as desirable objects that devotees cherish for their beauty and scopophilic value, creating a normative “devotional aesthetic,” and (3) as symbols of devotional status signifying “value” based on their mode of acquisition, engaging a “narrative of affect.” These maneuvers and devices invest the objects with a “strategic ambiguity” aiding in the construction of a global moral economy. The article is part of a larger project on the expansion of constructed religious experience in emergent transnational religious movements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the popular Indian cartoonist R. K. Laxman's daily newspaper “pocket cartoon” as a visual narrative of the modern nation, and a space to think through the place of corruption in democratic politics. In his cartoons the figures of the politician and the ordinary citizen, as well as the trope of air travel, picture a nation where the anomalies of a developmental agenda are evident every day. Despite this gloomy image, newspaper readers celebrate Laxman's cartoons, eagerly awaiting their daily dose of political humor over breakfast. The Indian state too signaled its appreciation by awarding Laxman national honors. This disjuncture between the cartoons’ discontent and the evocation of pleasure and appreciation offers remarkable insight into corruption and humor as part of everyday life in India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 1990s with the liberalization of the Indian economy and a new emergence of wealth, this domesticated alien visual symbolic system has been revived and deployed to advance the status of individuals and groups [Appadurai 1986]. The agency of the heraldic device has grown, demanding a presence at social, religious and political events, seeking legitimacy in the public imagination. Appropriation and acquisition [Jhala and Powell 1995] and patronage and nationalism [Jhala and Grumbkow 2011] as pedigree and privilege are contending debates in contemporary western India. Who may deploy the heraldic symbol, and how, are important issues in local society. Visual symbols have agency in the world and are actors, even as it is equally true that individuals, groups and institutions manipulate the symbols to advance agendas. This article explores and illustrates these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New advances in spatial technology enable ethnographic data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to be integrated in innovative ways. These include mapping and virtual reconstruction of buildings no longer standing, of routes used for transportation and hunting, and other spatial ethnographic data, visualized in three dimensions (3D). Representation in 3D allows for a more complete understanding of landscape relationships, and can be used as a learning tool to convey information quickly. This article applies these techniques to the reconstruction of the now-abandoned village of Belkofski, Alaska, for presentation in a video ethnography produced by the Aleutian Pribilof Island Association in coordination with the Belkofski Tribe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss how visual anthropology methods are advancing in a present-day environment where applied, activist, public and interdisciplinary anthropologies are increasingly central. In earlier work [Pink 2004, 2006, 2007a] I outlined the field of an applied visual anthropology, and discussed the potential of visual methods and media in the production of a public anthropology [Pink 2006]. Here I build on this to suggest how recent visual anthropology practices might both contribute to and resolve issues relating to contemporary debates in applied and public anthropology and the relationship between scholarly research and social intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an experience of shared anthropology, of Rouchian inspiration, in which video is offered as a form of expression to a young girl whom the author met when the girl was the first violinist of a youth orchestra which was part of a social project teaching music. The interest lies in the possible cross-over between Alessandra's musical experience and her first steps into the world of sound and image. The article highlights the construction of a relationship through the video, marked by the shared production of images and knowledge, which (dis)oriented the previously established relationship between researcher and subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text and image, silence and sound: different ways that express equally different facets of humankind's understanding of the world, and that also express our anthropological reflection of these human processes which give meaning to experience. This article focuses specifically on the kind of depth offered by considering other forms of understanding than conceptual forms and that, through cinematographic anthropology, open up an under-explored field that is very fruitful in analyzing various topics related to this discipline, such as the processes of constructing identity and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article briefly examines visual anthropology's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, in the form of a SWOT analysis. The aim is to comment on the subdiscipline's current status, raise awareness of challenges faced and identify possibilities for the future. Visual anthropology's strengths and opportunities include its increased acceptance by mainstream anthropology; a diverse and interdisciplinary research agenda; synergy between academic and applied perspectives; and the potential of new visual methods. Weaknesses and threats include difficulty defining the subdiscipline; limited collaboration (for many research articles are single-authored); and dominance of American scholars. The implications of these factors for the future of visual anthropology are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay suggests affinities between contemporary changes in classic research practices of anthropological ethnography and forms of research built into projects of conceptual, performance and installation art. The scene of fieldwork encounter is transformed by the challenges of new objects and conditions of research in anthropology. These challenges are thought through the description of an exemplary conceptual art project produced at the Tate Modern Museum, while allowing for the differences between the aims and ethics of anthropology and those of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Anthropology of the Senses [Howes 1991], I try to understand the visual and textual biases of the Western episteme that goes along with a certain closure of the eyes when social scientists have to look at images. I am not discussing perception or cognition, which have been dealt with by Psychology. My interest, as Howes says, is “the modes of knowing, and the place of the body in the mind”; how are our five senses hierarchically represented, socially and culturally appreciated? We know that none of the senses operates autonomously. As Merleau-Ponty [1969: 105] has already said, perception is not the sum of visual, tactile and auditory data: perception has a joint property, it is my self as a whole that perceives a single unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, that speaks simultaneously to all my senses. Having these premises in mind I will try to understand the way we social scientists differently value each of the senses and how we perceive the senses in our scientific activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses three questions: (1) What happens to information that cannot be recorded on film or videotape? (2) Is the “visual image” conceived to be an autonomous, universalized object of study, as if it exists prior to and independent of conventional human languages? (3) Who are the much-talked-about viewers of ethnographic films, and what is their relationship to visual anthropologists' investigations? The essay's focus is on Grimshaw's statement about visual anthropologists who “seek legitimation by turning away from the mainstream textual tradition” [Grimshaw 2001: 172]. I have attempted to submit evidence that such a move weakens visual anthropologists' capacity to provide “mainstream anthropology” with a vital, growing and legitimate contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I recently invited my colleague Gareth Davey to do a content analysis of the first 20 volumes of Visual Anthropology, to mark a milestone that we reached at the end of last year. Dr. Davey is a British psychologist who was also trained in biology and holds a Ph.D. from Bolton University in Environmental Psychology. It seemed to me—to avoid bias—that it was important not to have the survey done by an anthropologist, and especially not by an American one, as 48 percent of all contributed articles originated in the United States. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Davey for the heavy work he has put into this report. Occasional content analyses have been done before in the field of communication studies for journals in other fields, but so far as I know this is the first thorough attempt to evaluate what went into an anthropology journal that we are justified today in considering as a mainstream one. Your discussion of Davey's findings is invited. —Paul Hockings Editor-in-Chief During the past 20 years, visual anthropology has been transformed from its neglected and marginalized presence to an established and respected subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology. As one of only two peer-reviewed journals in the field, Visual Anthropology has played an important role in this development. The present study analyzed the original articles published in Visual Anthropology (since its inaugural issue in 1987 to the end of 2007) in order to understand their characteristics. The findings showed that a diverse range of topics had been reported, classified into five main areas. Public presentation and specialized applications were the most salient areas, which seems to reflect their increasing popularity in the discipline. The articles published in the journal covered more than 80 countries, authored by scholars in 25 countries. Book and film reviews came from dozens more countries; altogether, 475 authors have contributed to the journal so far. This confirms that the journal has met its goal to serve the global community of visual anthropologists. However, the United States received the most attention, indicative perhaps of renewed interest there by the academic community. The contributors were based in a wide range of occupations; not surprisingly, the majority was university faculty in anthropology and media studies departments, although others were spread across a wide range of disciplines, representative of the field's interdisciplinary nature. The findings discussed in this study are important as the journal represents a large proportion of the discipline's research output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an intriguing link between modernity, colonialism, and an aerial visual perspective. The collection of J.S.P. Bradford, an archaeologist who employed aerial photographs as part of his academic work, provides a case study for the investigation into this distinctive visual practice. Aerovisualism appears to act as a persuasive means of knowing the world: "Seen from high in the air, a district holds few secrets." A close analysis of images from the collection explored here demonstrates a variety of underlying concerns, which often conflict with Bradford's textual rhetoric. The relationship between aerial visuality and modernity is thus ambiguous and ambivalent, and further investigations on this practice should be undertaken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]