Anthropology, Visual

The Need for Visual Anthropology

Since the advent of modern photographic technology (still and moving), the use of visual methods for anthropological documentation and inquiry has been an integral part of the discipline, although it was not formally known as visual anthropology until after World War II. Visual anthropology has been used to document, preserve, compare, and illustrate culture manifested through behaviors and artifacts, such as dance, proxemics, and architecture. As well, archaeologists and primatologists have respectively employed visual methods in their research to capture images of elevations and excavations, and individuals and their behaviors. While critics of visual anthropology cite that it is unscientific in method, only serves to illustrate written ethnography, and does not propose theoretical positions, visual anthropology today is a means for seeing and presenting anthropological thinking in its own right. Over time, visual methods have evolved to foster new research questions and analysis, redefining how visual researchers approach the study of culture.

Visual anthropology, whether photographed, taped, filmed, or written, is a method of observation, but more important, it is a means for developing questions and analyzing data. Visual anthropologists provide their observations for other anthropologists and social scientists to consider in their own work, presenting an alternative way of seeing culture through the lens, which instigates only further inquiry, not certainty. By embracing collaboration between observer and observed and recognizing the relationship between the visual and textual, visual anthropologists have created theoretical objectives that redefine the boundaries of the subdiscipline, exploring new ways to study and understand culture, society, identity, and history. These are the characteristics that separate visual anthropology from documentary film, photography, and journalism; and these are the issues that will promote the use of visual methods in the anthropology of the future.

This entry will discuss several facets of visual anthropology, noting its origins, its significant influences, its current status, and given new innovations in technology, where it will be in the next decade. While important to the evolution of the subdiscipline, this entry will not discuss, analyze, or compare in detail ethnographic films, filmmakers, or their histories and instead will suggest a number of books dedicated to this subject at the end of the piece. Two examples from my own research serve to illustrate different types of photo-elicitation methods, recognizing that these techniques would be impossible to conduct without significant developments in technology and analysis. Inexpensive cameras, faster films, ubiquitous photo-minilabs, more powerful laptop computers, and the digital revolution have facilitated the use of photography and video in the field. Not only can researchers accomplish more, but they can place technology in the hands of the subjects themselves. Furthermore, with Internet access, researchers can immediately distribute data and edited material from the field to share with colleagues, students, and the mainstream public.

Visual Methods

In the late 19th century, anthropologists employed photography and filmmaking as tools to augment their research, as a means for illustration, description, and preservation of people they observed. Although rudimentary, bulky, clumsy, and sometime dangerous, [Page 188]photographic equipment found its way to the field with the express purpose of quickly gathering accurate information about the local population. Baldwin Spencer, Alfred Cort Haddon,Félix-Louis Regnault, and the Lumière brothers were among the first ethnographers to employ photographic cameras in their research. From 1922 through 1939, government anthropologist Francis E. Williams made thousands of glass plates and negatives of the people in 18 different cultural groups in the Australian colony of Papua (New Guinea). Although Franz Boas had used a still camera since the 1890s, it was not until late in his career, 1930, that he employed filmmaking to capture various activities of the Kwakiutl for documenting body movements (dance, work, games) for his cross-cultural analysis of rhythm. Similarly, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson relied on photographs and film as visual tools in their research, because they felt that their images could explain behavior more clearly than they could describe it. Bateson shot hundreds of photographs and hours of film, which they analyzed and published, arguing that their anthropological understanding of the cultural context in which the images were made recognized the linkages between the action and the deep cultural meaning of the images.

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