Twenty Years of Visual Anthropology

I recently invited my colleague Gareth Davey to do a content analysis of the first 20 volumes of Visual Anthropology, to mark a milestone that we reached at the end of last year. Dr. Davey is a British psychologist who was also trained in biology and holds a Ph.D. from Bolton University in Environmental Psychology. It seemed to me—to avoid bias—that it was important not to have the survey done by an anthropologist, and especially not by an American one, as 48 percent of all contributed articles originated in the United States.

I am particularly grateful to Dr. Davey for the heavy work he has put into this report. Occasional content analyses have been done before in the field of communication studies for journals in other fields, but so far as I know this is the first thorough attempt to evaluate what went into an anthropology journal that we are justified today in considering as a mainstream one. Your discussion of Davey's findings is invited.

—Paul Hockings

Editor-in-Chief

During the past 20 years, visual anthropology has been transformed from its neglected and marginalized presence to an established and respected subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology. As one of only two peer-reviewed journals in the field, Visual Anthropology has played an important role in this development. The present study analyzed the original articles published in Visual Anthropology (since its inaugural issue in 1987 to the end of 2007) in order to understand their characteristics. The findings showed that a diverse range of topics had been reported, classified into five main areas. Public presentation and specialized applications were the most salient areas, which seems to reflect their increasing popularity in the discipline. The articles published in the journal covered more than 80 countries, authored by scholars in 25 countries. Book and film reviews came from dozens more countries; altogether, 475 authors have contributed to the journal so far. This confirms that the journal has met its goal to serve the global community of visual anthropologists. However, the United States received the most attention, indicative perhaps of renewed interest there by the academic community. The contributors were based in a wide range of occupations; not surprisingly, the majority was university faculty in anthropology and media studies departments, although others were spread across a wide range of disciplines, representative of the field's interdisciplinary nature. The findings discussed in this study are important as the journal represents a large proportion of the discipline's research output.     

Visual Anthropology: Reviews

Democracia Indígena. 1999. 35 minutes, color. video by Bruce "Pacho" Lane. Ethnoscope Film and Video, http://www.docfilm.com.     

Anthropology and Education in Canada, the Early Years (1850–1970)

The subfield of anthropology and education has developed differently in Canada from the path it followed in the United States, even though the discipline of anthropology shared individuals and research topics across the border. Anthropology and education in Canada is distinctly Canadian and is a peripheral version of the central subdiscipline found in the United States.     

Images,Senses and Applications: Engaging Visual Anthropology

In this article I discuss how visual anthropology methods are advancing in a present-day environment where applied, activist, public and interdisciplinary anthropologies are increasingly central. In earlier work [Pink 2004 Pink , Sarah 2004 Applied Visual Anthropology, a guest edited issue of Visual Anthropology Review, 20(1) . [Google Scholar], 2006 2006 The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses . Oxford : Routledge . [Google Scholar], 2007a 2007a Visual Interventions: Applied Visual Anthropology . Oxford : Berghahn . [Google Scholar]] I outlined the field of an applied visual anthropology, and discussed the potential of visual methods and media in the production of a public anthropology [Pink 2006 2006 The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses . Oxford : Routledge . [Google Scholar]]. Here I build on this to suggest how recent visual anthropology practices might both contribute to and resolve issues relating to contemporary debates in applied and public anthropology and the relationship between scholarly research and social intervention.     

Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology

This paper explores the use of repeat photography as a powerful method to produce knowledge about place. I use examples from research in Waterton Lakes National Park, Canada, to describe the process of making a repeat photograph, from locating images in archives, to the embodied act of locating a historic vantage point, to the production of a new photograph. This act brings art and anthropology into a shared space to recreate photographs, an act that goes beyond looking at historical images in archives to move our thinking onward about how we relate to images.     

Arctic plant diversity in the Early Eocene greenhouse

For the majority of the Early Caenozoic, a remarkable expanse of humid, mesothermal to temperate forests spread across Northern Polar regions that now contain specialized plant and animal communities adapted to life in extreme environments. Little is known on the taxonomic diversity of Arctic floras during greenhouse periods of the Caenozoic. We show for the first time that plant richness in the globally warm Early Eocene (approx. 55-52 Myr) in the Canadian High Arctic (76° N) is comparable with that approximately 3500 km further south at mid-latitudes in the US western interior (44-47° N). Arctic Eocene pollen floras are most comparable in richness with today's forests in the southeastern United States, some 5000 km further south of the Arctic. Nearly half of the Eocene, Arctic plant taxa are endemic and the richness of pollen floras implies significant patchiness to the vegetation type and clear regional richness of angiosperms. The reduced latitudinal diversity gradient in Early Eocene North American plant species demonstrates that extreme photoperiod in the Arctic did not limit taxonomic diversity of plants.     

中国法医人类学三十年

法医人类学在上世纪80年代开始引起中国法医学界的重视。改革开放后, 经济发展人口流动增加, 全国范围内无名尸体案件增加, 对骨骼个体识别的需求日益迫切。为了满足案件侦察的需要, 国内学者开始引进国外的有关研究结果, 并开始使用国人的材料对中国人骨骼个体识别的方法进行了广泛深入的研究。本文对中国学者近30年来在中国人骨骼年龄、性别及身高等方面的研究进行了回顾, 对相关研究与国外情况进行了比较,对有关问题的未来研究方向进行了讨论。