Search

Susan Sontag, a controversial political activist and philosopher, interrogated ways of seeing photographs, taking photographs and depicting the pain of others. Her system of thoughts teaches how to ask relevant questions before and during any fieldwork where an anthropologist examines configurations of realities and meaning-making processes around visual mediums. She uses them to examine operations of representations without limiting images to either frames or contents. Furthermore, she pushes the definition of frame beyond the limits of the rectangular borders around each photograph or image. Therefore, this chapter explores Tehran, the Iranian capital and visual representations of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) along Susan Sontag to locate and unpack the universe of meanings which is produced by Iranian propaganda machinery and received in various ways by Iranians. The main argument stresses a photograph can represent at best if only its photographer does not try to report or to transfer assumptions about reality but instead allows a photographic composition to emerge from the encounter with others. This chapter follows such encounters through ethnographic stories and fieldworks in Iran and demonstrates what Susan Sontag calls a mystic receptivity between viewers and visual representations turns photographs into the beginning of fieldwork rather than its end.

1. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen 2. Improvisation and the Art of Making Things Stick Karin Barber, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham I. Art, Intellect and the Attribution of Creative Agency Section Introduction Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen 3. Design, Innovation and Agency in Pattern Construction Amar Mall, Department of Anthropology, University College London 4. Creating or Performing Words Visually Fuyubi Nakamura, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford 5.Creativity, Subjectivity and the Dynamic of Possessive Individualism James Leach, King's College, University of Cambridge II. Creative Appropriations and Institutional Contexts Section Introduction Melissa Demian, Department of Anthropology, Emory University, and Sari Wastell, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London 6. Creating Ethnography: Differing Notions of Creativity in Anthropological Knowledge Production, a Maori/European Example Elizabeth Cory-Pearce, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London 7. Just Like the Greek Polis: Creativity, Authenticity and Political Legitimacy in Kabylia Judith Scheele, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford 8. 'You Knit me in my Mother's Womb': Creativity and Creation in English Baptist Understandings of Assisted and Assisting Conception Jeanette Edwards, Social Anthropology, University of Manchester III. Creativity and the Passage of Time: History, Tradition and the Life-Course Section Introduction Sharon Macdonald, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, and Eric Hirsch, Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University 9. Tradition and the Individual Talent: T.S. Eliot for Anthropologists Felicia Hughes-Freeland, School of Social Sciences, University Wales, Swansea 10. Back to the Future: Temporality, Narrative and the Ageing Self Catherine Degnen, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle 11. Performing the World: The Imaginative Link between Action and History Kirsten Hastrup, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen IV. The Creativity of Anthropological Scholarship Section introduction Mark Harris, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews and Clara Mafra, Anthropology, State University of Rio de Janeiro 12. From Documenting Culture to Experimenting with Cultural Phenomena: Using Fine Art Pedagogies with Visual Anthropology Students Amanda Ravetz, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University 13. Creativity in Anthropology and Fiction Writing Trevor Stack, Hispanic Studies, University of Aberdeen, and Robey Callahan, St Austell, Cornwall 14. 'Radio Elicitation': New Directions in Radio Research Richard Vokes, School of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Epilogue 15. A World Without Anthropology Clara Mafra, Anthropology, State University of Rio de Janeiro

List of Figures Acknowledgments Contributors 1. Experimental Film and Anthropology Caterina Pasqualino, CNRS, France and Arnd Schneider, University of Oslo, Norway 2. Stills that Move: Photofilm and Anthropology Arnd Schneider, University of Oslo, Norway 3. Experimental Film, Trance and Near-death Experiences Caterina Pasqualino, CNRS, France 4. Contemporary Experimental Documentary and the Premises of Anthropology: The Work of Robert Fenz Nicole Brenez, University of Paris-1/Pantheon-Sorbonne, France 5. Our Favorite Film Shocks Rane Willerslev, University of Oslo, and Christian Suhr, University of Arhus, Denmark 6. Do No Harm - The Cameraless Animation of Anthropologist Robert Ascher Kathryn Ramey, Emerson College, USA 7. Asynchronicity: Rethinking the Relation of Ear and Eye in Ethnographic Practice Jennifer L. Heuson, New York University, USA, and Kevin T. Allen, New School University, USA 8. Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues: Common-sense Experiments in Visual Anthropology Alyssa Grossman, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 9. Beyond the Frames of Film and Aboriginal Fieldwork Barbara Glowzcewski, CNRS, France 10. Visual Media Primitivism: Toward a Poetic Ethnography Martino Nicoletti, University of Derby, UK 11. From the Grain to the Pixel, Aesthetic and Political Choices Nadine Wanono, CEMAf: Centre D'etudes des Mondes Africains / CNRS, France Index of Names

How do videos, movies and documentaries dedicated to indigenous communities transform the media landscape of South Asia? Based on extensive original research, this book examines how in South Asia popular music videos, activist political clips, movies and documentaries about, by and for indigenous communities take on radically new significances. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia shows how in the portrayal of indigenous groups by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ imaginations of indigeneity and nation become increasingly interlinked. Indigenous groups, typically marginal to the nation, are at the same time part of mainstream polities and cultures. Drawing on perspectives from media studies and visual anthropology, this book compares and contrasts the situation in South Asia with indigeneity globally.

Video Ethnography provides a thought-provoking, guided framework to ethnographic filmmaking. It examines how this kind of filmmaking can be a means of approximating, mediating and evoking lived experience. Functioning as a kind of sensory extension of the videographer, video ethnography arises directly out of lived experience as a process of dynamic encounters, mobile situations, and embodied approaches that include senses and choices of the videographer, and the participants of the ethnography. The book will help describe and develop students‘ sensibility and awareness of this crucial aspect of video ethnography, so they can craft their own video ethnographies with a fully conscious awareness of how certain skilled and attuned approaches to audiovisual techniques can help facilitate the fullest and most dynamic encounters possible. This book is suitable for classes in ethnographic filmmaking, video ethnography and visual anthropology / sociology.

This chapter explores the features, which comprise the epistemological basis of the author's anthropological research studying popular photography in/of Iran – physically in the country, in the UK, and remotely, online. It suggests that topic-specific research quandaries and established ethical schema should reflexively inform methodological choices made in digital research. The chapter suggests that methodological potentials in digital and visual anthropology offer broader insights into ways of designing and conducting ethically rigorous qualitative digital research via mobile digital technologies and the web, particularly where transnational, Internet and image-related work is concerned. It conducts author's research within the established ethical code of conduct in anthropology, which chiefly considers the protection of research participants and their data, along with the researcher's ethical conduct in the field – however physical or virtual. The chapter conceives of the project as being carried out for the most part in Iran, while conducting digital ethnography, online, simultaneously.

Visualizing Theory is a lavishly illustrated collection of provocative essays, occasional pieces, and dialogues that first appeared in Visual Anthropology Review between 1990 and 1994. It contains contributions from anthropologists, from cultural, literary and film critics and from image makers themselves. Reclaiming visual anthropology as a space for the critical representation of visual culture from the naive realist and exoticist inclinations that have beleaguered practitioners' efforts to date, Visualizing Theory is a major intervention into this growing field.

Part 1: A theoretical overview of image-based research 1. Visual anthropology: image, object and interpretation Marcus Banks 2. An argument for visual sociology Douglas Harper 3. Film-making and ethnographic research Paul Henley 4. 'The Camera Never Lies': the partiality of photographic evidence Brian Winston 5. Psychology and photographic theory Orla Cronin 6. Visual sociology, documentary photography and photojournalism - it's (almost) all a matter of context Howard S. Becker 7. The status of image-based research Jon Prosser Part 2: Images in the research process 8. Photographs within the sociological research process Jon Prosser and Dona Schwartz 9. Remarks on the visual competence as an integral part of ethnographic fieldwork practice: the visual availability of culture Michael Ball 10. Photocontext Clem Adelman 11. Media convergence and social research Rob Walker and Ron Lewis 12. The application of images in child abuse investigations Hollinda Wakefield and Ralph Underwager Part 3: Image-based research in practice 13. Picture this! Class line-ups, vernacular portraits and lasting impressions of school Claudia Mitchell and Sandra Weber 14. Interpreting family photography as pictorial communication Richard Chalfen 15. Pupils using photographs in school self-evaluation Michael Schratz and Ulrike Steiner-Loffler 16. Cartoons and teachers: mediated visual images of data Terry Warburton 17. Images and curriculum development in health education Noreen M. Wetton and Jennifer McWhirter 18. Making meanings in art worlds: a sociological account of the career of John Constable and his oeuvre, with special reference to 'The Cornfield' Homage to Howard Becker Elizabeth Chaplain

1. Introduction: Situating Visual Research Section 1: Visual Fieldwork Methods 2. Video and Ethnographic Knowledge: Skilled Vision in the Practice of Breeding 3. Photography in the Field: Word and Image in Ethnographic Research 4. Picture Perfect: Community and Commemoration in Photographs 5. New Graphics for Old Stories Representation of Local Memories Through Drawings 6. Imagework in Ethnographic Research Section 2: Representing Visual Knowledge 7. Putting Film to Work: Observational Cinema as Practical Ethnography 8. Revealing the Hidden: Making Anthropological Documentaries 9. Drawing the Lines: The Limitations of Intercultural Ekphrasis 10. In the Net: Ethnographic Photography 11. Conversing with Anthropology: Words, Images and Hypermedia Text 12. The Representation of Cultures in Digital Media Epilogue 13. Working Images

This paper focuses on the advantages of drawing as a complementary tool both during ethnographic research and in the development of anthropological analysis. It proposes to direct the field of "visual anthropology" in such a way that brings it closer to the valued craft-quality of anthropological discourse, by freeing it from a current technological obsession. Drawing is intimately linked with the act of observing and interpreting human actions. In fact, a trained eye and a skilled hand are basic requirements for proper documentation of both material culture aspects and varied instances of social life, during fieldwork. Also, drawing is an important and creative tool to interact and relate with human beings of different cultures and languages. On the other hand, organizing and integrating information and ideas in graphic terms enables the anthropologist to explore more deeply the complex relational nature of words and images (from opposition tables and kinship schemes to analytical diagrams, drawings and photographs), in order to develop a more encompassing view of the possibilities of anthropological production.