I met Ahmet, a disabled young man, during a visual ethnography I conducted in Istanbul, Turkey (2009), where I worked with people with disabilities related to rheumatoid arthritis – a chronic, painful disease, affecting the joints. During our interview, I ask Ahmet what type of toilets he prefers, knowing that in Turkey, toilets are typically squat and hardly ever accessible. …
I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of evidence. Mostly what I collect are words (interviews, quotations, or notes) that I then use to make various kinds of word compositions (descriptions, analyses, arguments, and articles). But words do also have …
This month’s Web Roundup is focused loosely around the theme of the visual. How do we use photography and other mediums to tell stories, and what stories do those technologies tell about us?
The New York Times Magazine did a feature on travel photography, called Voyages. The online version of the 6 highlighted pieces is both interesting and visually …
Anand Pandian’s Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation is a fascinating and truly inspired inquiry into questions of experience and the media through which experience is rendered (word, image, and sound) in and about Tamil cinema and beyond. Pandian walks a path where visions are realized between seen-ness and feltness, between openness and the limits of the frame. Much …
In recent anthropological film practice we see a shift from established visual ethnographic paradigms focused on discursive representation (Crawford 1992), towards the realm of interdisciplinary cooperation and experimentation. Working with filmmakers and artists has a long history in visual anthropology, however recent theoretical debates open up new terrains for cooperation with various fields like science and technology studies, bio-medical sciences, …
Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev, editors
Afterword by George E. Marcus
Berghahn Books, 2013. 300 pp.
Transcultural Montage contains an abundance of fresh ideas in many sub-disciplines of anthropology such as medical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, cultural and economic anthropology, but also semantics, museology and knowledge production not to mention visual anthropology, the main sub-discipline to which …