Visual Anthro:Ways of Seeing

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The role of vision and the visual in ethnographic research, anthropological scholarship, and pedagogy is easy to take for granted. Visual anthropology critically examines how we see, what we see, and why we see what we see. A prominent anthropologist of the late 20th century, Mary Douglas, noted that “in perceiving the world, we do not perceive passively. In seeing the world, we create the world.” The key ethnographic methodology of “participant observation” itself indicates the importance of watching, surveying, and searching for clues to the meaning of human interaction. “Being there” is crucially a matter of seeing there. But do we see in the same ways, or perceive the same things, that our communities of research do? Does anthropology approach the act of seeing from a different perspective than disciplines such as cognitive psychology, art history, and media studies? What is the importance of unquestioned assumptions, choice of frames, and power imbalances between the observer and the observed? This class will examine visual anthropology historically, beginning with the visual spectacles of other, exotic societies as depicted in travel literature, prints, photography, and early films. We will then survey the development of visual anthropology as a defined subfield of the discipline, the types of questions visual anthropologists have asked, how they’ve studied the visual, and how they have used new technologies of photographic and video technologies, and how these new technologies have reframed the questions we ask and the politics of research. The final project of this course will be the production of 10-minute ethnographic films