Virtual Reality: Viewership and Ethnographic Film

This article deals with the numerous difficulties in locating accuracy in representation. It expands C.S. Peirce's notion of the phaneron as applied to production and reception to the question of viewing of ethnographic flims. It revisits Wilton Martinez's seminal work on interpretation and ethnographic spectatorship critically. Keyan Tomaselli's model of the Phaneroscopic Table, derived from C.S. Peirce, is applied to the viewing situation itself. This article uses the metaphor of “virtual reality” to discuss the nature of iconic representation in relation to the viewer context. It examines some approaches of a variety of film theorists and reception scholars who have conducted empirical studies on reception.