Directions and Diversions
CC BY-NC-SA 2024 Isaac Marrero Guillamón1. Introduction: Mapping the Field
This lecture situates the course within key contemporary debates (and tensions) in the field; it aims to provide a first image of visual anthropology, as practiced and theorised in the present. We will focus on how visual anthropologists are grappling (or not) with the multiple afterlives of colonial anthropology.
Part 1/3 (11’): two redacted images and some questions to start with; outline of the course.
Part 2/3 (20’): the visual as method and object; coming to terms with the discipline’s colonial legacy; the agency of images.
Required reading:
- Bonilla, Yarimar, and Deborah Thomas.
2020. “An Interview with the Editor of American Anthropologist about the
March 2020 Cover Controversy.” Public Anthropologies (blog). Accessed
July 10, 2020. http://www.americananthropologist.org/2020/06/29/an-interview-with-the-editor-of-american-anthropologist-about-the-march-2020-cover-controversy/.
- Morphy, Howard, and Marcus Banks. 1997.
“Introduction: Rethinking Visual Anthropology.” In Rethinking Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks and Howard
Morphy, 1–35. New Haven: Yale University Press.
And part 3/3 (7’): on the possibility of working ethically with colonial-era images.
Further reading:
-
Banks, Marcus, and Jay Ruby. 2011. “Introduction:
Made to Be Seen. Historical Perspectives on the History of Visual
Anthropology.” In Made to Be Seen:
Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks
and Jay Ruby, 1–18. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
- Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel, and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. 2021. “Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology.” Visual Anthropology Review 37 (2): 267-89. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12248.
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MacDougall, David. 1997. “The Visual in
Anthropology.” In Rethinking Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks
and Howard Morphy, 276–95. New Haven: Yale University Press.
-
Pink, Sarah. 2006. “Engaging the Visual.” In The
Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses, 3–20. London; New York:
Routledge.