Visual Anthropology Flashcards
What does Allison Griffiths (2002) argue in ‘Wondrous Difference’?
- The encounter with the “Other” is a source of “both amazement and unease”
- Iconography of savagery: e.g., nudity, spears, decorative feathers, animated dancing
What does the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898 show?
Power dynamic where researchers impose their act of documenting
- Zwaardemaker’s olfactometer
- anthropometry and photography: people as specimen for scrutiny
- Nicolas Peterson and film crew documenting restricted men’s ceremonies
What does the Enlightenment’s “truth-to-nature” consist of?
Combination of scholar’s multiple observations and artist’ skillful drawing
- four-eyed sight
-> visual materialisation of an objective taxonomy
What does the 1830s “mechanical objectivity” consist of?
Technological ideal of depicting individual “facts of nature” (specimen) without interference
- blind sight
What does the 1880s structural objectivity consist of?
Mathematics favoured over “trained judgement”
- mistrust in the capacity of judgment to visually distinguish members of “races” on the basis of “physiognomic sight”
What are the three key anthropological approaches of seeing according to Anna Grimshaw (2001)?
- Enlightenment
- Modernist
- Romantic
What does the Enlightenment anthropological way of seeing consist of (Anna Grimshaw, 2001)?
Classificatory method:
- accumulation of data organised into comparative schema
What does the Modernist anthropological way of seeing consist of (Anna Grimshaw, 2001)?
Genealogical approach:
- progress, science, knowability of the world, interrogation of traditional understanding
What does the Romantic anthropological way of seeing consist of (Anna Grimshaw, 2001)?
Experimental techniques:
- visionary experience, intense emotions
What characterises Visualism and the observational gaze?
- Ocularcentristic
- Epistemological bias
- Eurocentric
- Reductive
- Surface-level appearances
- Epistemic violence
- Gaze
- Binary
What makes Visualism and the observational gaze ocularcentristic?
Vision as privileged sensory register
What is the epistemological bias in Visualism?
Equates vision with understanding
What makes Visualism eurocentric?
Ignores other forms of perception than vision
What makes Visualism reductive?
It is static, unchanging and timeless
In what way does Visualism focus on surface-level appearances?
It ignores in-depth meanings
What is the epistemic violence present in Visualism?
It erases the cultural context
What characterises the observational gaze in Visualism?
- Voyeuristic
- Panoptic (panoramic view)
- Male
- Colonial
What makes Visualism binary?
Reifies the duality of observer and observed, ignoring their interconnections and entanglements
What is the process of Robert Flaherty in Nanook of the North (1922)?
- Flaherty and Nyla Allakariallak (“Nanook”) fully collaborated in the filmmaking process, though her contribution was not noted
- Several scenes were based on a mise en scène and performance
- Flaherty brought an aesthetic engagement
What does Eliot Weinberger (1992) argue in ‘The Camera People’?
- Ethnographic filmmakers as a “tribe” that thinks “they are invisible”, “hunting and gathering information”
- they “worship a terrifying deity named Reality”
-> science and art dichotomy in ethnographic films
What does Peter Fuchs (1988) argue about scientific films?
Whatever the film produces, it has to respect the spatio-temporal dimensions of reality
What are the rules of Filmic Ethnography according to Jay Ruby (1975)?
- Major focus must be on a whole culture or some unit of culture
- Must be informed by an implicit or explicit theory of culture which orders the statements in the ethnography
- Must contain statements that reveal the methodology of the author
- Must employ a distinctive lexicon, an anthropological argot
What makes films ethnographic according to Marcus Banks (1992)?
- Intention (to make a film)
- Event (film process)
- Reaction (audience response)
What are the seven categories of ethnographic film according to Peter Ian Crawford (1992)?
- Ethnographic footage (unedited)
- Research films (highly specialised)
- Ethnographic documentary (public audiences, cinema)
- Ethnographic television documentary (public audiences, TV)
- Education and information films (classroom and/or public audiences)
- Other non-fiction films (journalistic repost, newsreels, travelogs, …)
- Fiction films and drama documentaries (dealing with ‘typical’ anthropological topics)
