The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses

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widijanto judono e-Library collection - widijanto.wordpress.com As I have noted for some of the critiques of visual anthropology discussed above, such analyses are not completely incorrect in that unreflexive work and uses of images as objectifying illustrations can be found in (especially earlier) visual anthropology. Their problem is that they have failed to recognise that leading visual anthropologists have already developed an established critique of such work. Ruby in particular has been offering an alternative vision since the early 1980s, which the critics of visual anthropology cited above have bypassed (see Ruby 2000a). Moreover, a review of the literature indicates there are many visual anthropologists in Europe and the USA who are working with video and photography in ways that are clearly reflexive and subjective (for example, Ferrándiz 1998; Lutkehaus and Cool 1999; Pink 1999; Pink, Kürti and Afonso 2004). More recently that the art/science dichotomy is being truly broken down is clearly evident in collaborative work between visual anthropology and arts practice (see Afonso 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005; Ramos 2004; Silva and Pink 2004). To sum up, reflexivity is a key theme in recent texts on visual research. However, while authors agree that it should be a fundamental element of any project, academics from different disciplines tend to have different takes on how reflexivity might be achieved and on the ethical implications of it. Across the different approaches reflexivity has commonly been coined as a need for understanding ‘where the researcher is coming from’ and how this impacts on the knowledge produced. Some leave this at a question of validity and research quality control. However, most visual anthropologists take a quite different tack to argue that reflexivity should be integrated fully into processes of fieldwork and visual or written representation in ways that do not simply explain the researcher’s approach but reveal the very processes by which the positionality of researcher and informant were constituted and through which knowledge was produced during the fieldwork. Observation or collaboration: the objectivity/ subjectivity debate revisited? Interdisciplinary agendas 35 The objectivity/subjectivity debate forms an important stage in the history of visual anthropology but has, to some degree, now been left behind in visual anthropology texts. However, recent visual methods texts revive subjectivity/objectivity as a question that an interdisciplinary field of visual methods would need to account for. In this section I review these developments. Van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s (2000) edited Handbook of Visual Research is not critical of visual anthropology. They refrain from being critical at all, with the worthy intent to represent a range of different disciplines and their approaches. In doing so, they neglect to represent the differences, debates, and historical developments in theory and methodology that affect visual practices in those disciplines. They represent visual anthropology by Malcolm Collier’s chapter ‘Approaches to Analysis in Visual Anthropology’, which describes different methods of visual analysis encompassed by the approach, developed in Collier and Collier’s (1986) Visual Anthropology – which, as I noted in chapter 1, has been criticised as a manual of
widijanto judono e-Library collection - widijanto.wordpress.com 36 Engaging the visual ‘method and analysis working within a largely unmediated realist frame’ (Edwards 1997: 53; see also Biella 2004). Such realist approaches to visual anthropology have encouraged both critiques of the discipline as an objectifying practice and characterisations such as van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s description of visual anthropology as ‘concerned with the use of visual records for the description of the present and past ways of life of specific communities’ (2000: 2). Emmison and Smith use ‘voyeuristic’ and ‘pornographic’ to describe the serious work of social scientists working within a positivist paradigm (see page 26). Such sensationalist terminology seems unnecessary. Analysis of both the processes by which these images were produced and their intended audience situates them as part of academic production rather than for the popular audience of pornography. Instead, to be useful, any critique of such positivist work should be directed at the observational, realist approach to the visual that informed such work. However, this critique on methodological rather than ethical grounds would be impossible within Emmison and Smith’s argument because their own methods are based on an observational approach. Emmison and Smith are concerned with observable human interaction as visual data, seeing the study of interaction as ‘a study of people as bearers of signs which mark identity, status and social competence’ (2000: 190). They suggest that researchers use unobtrusive observational methods as ‘the great bonus of these visible sources of information is that they allow us to explore social life covertly’ and thus mean that ‘the normal problems of normative responding (telling the researcher a socially acceptable answer) are not present’. They propose that ‘we can often get by without it [interviewing]’, although it might be advisable to allow informants ‘to explain the significance of objects and their locations, permitting the researcher to augment explanations and test whether speculative inferences are valid’ (2000: 110). This method prefers note-taking to visual recording methods (in other words, photography and video are considered unnecessary). For example, in one exercise they recommend that researchers approach strangers in the street and try to strike up conversation with them, while a second researcher takes notes on their response. The researcher–informant interaction here is not designed to account for the informant’s point of view, but to test her or his response. Such qualitative methods are very different from visual anthropological approaches to the production of knowledge (they contrast directly with the video ethnography methods discussed in chapters 3, 4 and 5). Although they may be suitable for practitioners of unobtrusive research, from an anthropological perspective they appear naïvely unappreciative of the idea that things become visible because of how we see them rather than simply because they are observable. It is in this sense that it is inappropriate for Emmison and Smith to propose that theirs should be the way forward for visual research and claim it is superior to their out-of-date and inaccurate portrayal of visual anthropology. In contrast to the approach proposed by Emmison and Smith, visual anthropologists have long since departed from pure observation to emphasise the intersubjectivity and collaborative aspects of the production of photography and video. As Banks notes, ‘All image production by social researchers in the field,
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The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses

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