From March 2020 to May 2021, several lockdowns have modified field access for anthropologists observing professional spaces. If professional work was rather slowed down than fully suspended, the ...amount of people in working spaces was regulated by sanitary measures. I was only able to carry on my ethnographic fieldwork in leather workshops by observing a young Parisian brand that received me in one of the two co-founders’ flat, where both had set their workshop. The participant observation of private life and professional work in this hybrid space raises the following question : is there a border isolating personal life from work ? Working at home is both faithful to the historic tradition of crafts and illustrates new forms of professional activity as reshaped by Internet since the 1990’es.By trying to overcome the hurdle of identifying what belongs to work and what belongs to private life, a visual anthropology’s method has been set. Using pictures (drawings based on photographs) and texts, a hybrid format close to comics has been adopted. Working on the layer boards gather the visual notes taken during the field study, the analysis of the data and is used to return the ethnographic survey.
This article explores TikTok's impact on the aesthetics of visual anthropology's methods and highlights epistemic implications. TikTok engenders new inquiries regarding the position and role of ...researchers, and the spatiality and temporality of digital research. This article offers a reflection on the specific aesthetic characteristics that shape ethnographic investigations on, and with, TikTok. Further, we argue that the influence of algorithms on digital creations necessitates critical reflection on the researcher's engagement and analysis of visual data. Finally, we suggest that the figure of the anthropologist as "curator" might inspire a creative navigation of these complex digital waters.
Dr William Crocker began field research with the Canela (Maranhão state, Brazil) in 1957 and continued to do so intermittently until 2011 - a total of more than 54 years in an unprecedented long-term ...commitment to a field research programme in social anthropology. As soon as he arrived among the Canela, he began intensive documentation of their life. Photography and film played a major part in his observations and his use of these media proved extremely innovative in ethnographic study. Crocker produced one of the most detailed and accurate sets of visual documents about Lowland South American community life ever collected. This visual essay surveys this important ethnographic archival data (film footage, fields notes and photographs) and briefly analyses his visual enterprise, discussing the circumstances under which the images were taken, the ideas which informed them, and the general methods employed in making them. An interview I conducted with Crocker (2015) enriches our understanding of the collection.
Este artículo explora los inicios de la Antropología visual y sus vínculos con los Andes; y, al mismo tiempo, subraya la reproductibilidad de la fotografía, característica que posibilita nuevos ...emplazamientos en lo que denomino álbumes comunitarios móviles. La Antropología visual propone a John Collier Jr. como uno de sus fundadores. Su contribución al establecimiento de este campo se sostiene en trabajos visuales realizados en distintos lugares de las Américas y Europa y en obras colaborativas con antropólogos y fotógrafos locales. El artículo documenta, a través de fuentes publicadas, su experiencia en los Andes y sugiere que esta novel área se constituye de cara a las disputas sobre la modernidad hacia mediados del siglo XX. Este escenario incluyó la expansión geográfica y temática de la Antropología norteamericana, así como las necesidades de un nuevo orden imperial que requería conocer, registrar e interpretar las transformaciones de distintos grupos humanos del mundo, en especial obreros y nativos. Los trabajos de Collier Jr. en los Andes contribuyeron a elaborar varios conceptos asociados a la visualidad: narrativas fotográficas, energía cultural y entrevista con fotografías, todos ellos dispuestos para comprender el cambio social en contextos interculturales de mayoría indígena. Hacia la década de 1940, la fotografía antropológica se mantiene como un modo de conocer el mundo de los pueblos nativos; pero ya no con el deseo eugenésico y de clasificación racial o de exotización, sino para dar cuenta del dinamismo de la indigenidad. Este dinamismo adquiere un nuevo ribete al constatar en el campo, a través de observación y entrevistas, que la fotografía antropológica de autor de mediados del siglo XX ha sido apropiada por la población de Otavalo (Ecuador) para conformar un álbum comunitario móvil, que otorga nuevos sentidos a las mismas imágenes. La materialidad de la fotografía y su apelación a los afectos propician estos desplazamientos y nuevos emplazamientos que conectan al público con ancestros otavaleños.
Carlos Javier Ortiz - whose images (figs. 1-6) won the 2021 Current Anthropology Visual Anthropology Prize and appear on this year's journal covers - grew up moving back and forth between Puerto Rico ...and the US mainland. Echoes of his biography can be seen in the stories he tells through his images: tales of a people's plight for self-determination and democratic government but also sagas of migrants and displaced peoples in search of stability and a place to call home. His photographic works, like his own biography, flow from the interdependence of residents of "America" - a colonial name yet a name still used today to refer to the whole of the continent, South, Central, and North America. In the tradition of much Latin American photography, his works form part of an enduring effort to bear witness to that America - namely, an America characterized by shared histories of colonial rule, of imperial intervention, and of the economic domination of Indigenous peoples.
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