The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses

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Preface
During the last five years I have been thinking through, writing on, and exploring
through practice a series of issues related to how visual anthropology is situated
(and mis-situated) in relation to mainstream anthropology and in wider inter- or
multidisciplinary contexts across the social sciences and humanities. This has
involved exploring four key themes: the interdisciplinary context of the use of
visual methods, the implications of an anthropological theory of sensory experience
for visual anthropology, the application of visual anthropology outside the
academy, and digital media and the development of hypermedia anthropology. In
the course of these explorations I came to see these themes as being unavoidably
interconnected, both embedded in and constitutive of the contemporary context
that a visual anthropology for the twenty-first century both shapes and is shaped by.
This book aims to make these connections and interdependencies explicit by
drawing together new work with rewritten versions of articles published elsewhere
and unpublished conference papers. Not initially conceived as part of this wider
interwoven argument, these ideas were pitched originally according to the aims of
each individual project. In contrast this book draws together a set of related ideas
and discussions into one project, making explicit the continuities and connections
not evident in the separate publications.
The inspiration to do this has come from two sources. First, as I have more
recently been working on the question of an applied visual anthropology I have
realised that many of the issues I had already raised in my discussions of anthropological
theory and visual representation, on experience and writing, and on new
digital media and anthropological hypermedia continued to be pertinent in this
apparently ‘new’ topic. Second, in November 2003 Stan Schectman invited me to
contribute a paper to the WAVA conference in the USA, on the Future of Visual
Anthropology. I was at the time on study leave and had just arrived in Malaysia so a
trip to the USA was not possible, but I was kindly invited to contribute by e-mail.
This paper, fuelled by the thoughts I had already had about the interrelatedness of
the themes I had been developing in my existing work, gave me the impetus to
tentatively suggest that the future of visual anthropology would depend on how
visual anthropologists of the twenty-first century develop their use of new digital
media, anthropological theory and applied visual anthropology. The positive
Preface