Visual Anthropology

Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java . Edwin Jurriëns. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. 213 pp.     

Visual Anthropology: Reviews

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

"Visual Anthropology Is Dead, Long Live Visual Anthropology!"

Rethinking Visual Anthropology. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy. eds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 306 pp.
Principles of Visual Anthropology. Paul Hockings. ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. 562 pp.
Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 362 pp.     

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.     

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.     

Birdwhistell,Hall, Lomax and the Origins of Visual Anthropology

This commentary' calls for an appreciative but rigorous, critical analysis of three pioneering figures in the anthropology of human movement and visual aspects of human communication. I maintain that their many theoretical and methodological contributions require historical contextualization, taking into account earlier paradigms, subsequent developments, and alternative approaches. The essay makes a number of suggestions for developing a more satisfying historical framework and raises topics for further discussion.