Directions and Diversions
CC BY-NC-SA 2024 Isaac Marrero Guillamón10. Visual Anthropology Beyond the Visual
This lecture explores how multimodality may be understood as an invitation to push (visual) anthropology beyond established boundaries, working methods, forms of representation and relation with its publics. It will enable us to return to the mapping exercise conducted in lecture one, and revisit these first impressions in light of the experience of the module.
- Required reading:
- Dattatreyan, E. Gabriel, and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. 2019. “Multimodal Anthropology and the
Politics of Invention.” American Anthropologist 121 (1): 220–228.
- Varzi, Roxanne. 2018. “The Knot in the Wood: The Call to Multimodal Anthropology.” Multimodal
Anthropologies (blog). June 5, 2018.
http://www.americananthropologist.org/2018/06/05/the-knot-in-the-wood-the-call-to-
multimodal-anthropology/.
Part 1/3 (24’): beyond the visual: multimedia, multisensorial and multimodal anthropology; multimodality and experimentation.
Part 2/2 (21’): the politics of invention: examples in anthropology, art and film.
- Activity: explore one or more of the following multimodal projects:
- Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou. Feral Atlas. https://feralatlas.org/
- Alisa Lebow, Filming Revolution. https://www.filmingrevolution.org/
- Isaac Marrero Guillamón, Tindaya Variations. https://tindaya.img79.net/
Key films/projects:
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong. 2000. Mysterious object at noon. Thailand, 83 min.
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong. 2008. Primitive. https://www.animateprojectsarchive.org/films/by_project/primitive/primitive
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Further reading:
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Chio, Jenny. “Guiding Lines.” Dispatches, Cultural Anthropology Website, May 2, 2017.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1118-guiding-lines
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Cox, Rupert, Andrew Irving, and Christopher Wright, eds. 2016. Beyond Text?: Critical Practices
and Sensory Anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
- Collins, Samuel Gerald, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. 2017. “Multimodality: An Invitation.” American Anthropologist 119 (1): 142–46. doi:10.1111/aman.12826.
- Marrero-Guillamón, Isaac. 2018. «The Politics and Aesthetics of Non-Representation: Re-Imagining Ethnographic Cinema with Apichatpong Weerasethakul». Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, n.o 33 (octubre): 13-32. world. https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda33.2018.02.
- Marrero-Guillamón, Isaac. 2018. “Making Fieldwork Public: Repurposing Ethnography as a Hosting Platform in Hackney Wick, London.” In Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices, edited by Adolfo Estalella and Tomas Sanchez-Criado. Berghahn Books.
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Pink, Sarah. 2011. “Multimodality, Multisensoriality and Ethnographic Knowing: Social Semiotics
and the Phenomenology of Perception.” Qualitative Research 11 (3): 261–76.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794111399835.
- Savransky, Martin. 2021. Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse. Duke University Press.
- Vidali, Debra S. 2016. “Multisensorial Anthropology: A Retrofit Cracking Open of the Field.”
American Anthropologist 118 (2): 395–400. doi:10.1111/aman.12595.
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Vidali, Debra S., and Kwame Phillips. 2020. “Ethnographic Installation and ‘The Archive’: Haunted
Relations and Relocations.” Visual Anthropology Review 36 (1): 64–89.
https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12197.