Drawing

2015

In this article I present the results of a teaching experience called “Laboratory of Anthropology and Drawing,” which proposes drawing as an important tool in ethnographic research. Students with no prior training in the area were introduced to drawing as a way of knowing the world. During the workshops, conventional conceptions of drawing were deconstructed and new narrative forms encountered, which graphically evoked ideas, encounters, conversations, observations and insights into social life. During the exercises, we trained researchers to dialogue and interact with their research universe, collect data and communicate their research results. The experience continued outside the classroom to explore public spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro, trying to understand the city and the multitude of possible viewpoints offered by an urban space. The analysis of the produced material aimed to address central issues in the praxis of anthropological research, exploring questions and answe...

Participatory visual methods are becoming the new hype in anthropology. Researchers tend to present participatory visual methods as attractive approaches to not only promote innovative research that engages informants in original and collaborative ways but to engage students eager to find bridges between the academic world and a world progressively addicted to visual consumerism. But while still and moving image-capturing devices are being democratized as anthropological tools thanks to their recent wide availability and ease of use, some view the practice of drawing (participatory or not) as a more serendipitous niche activity. Unlike photographing and filming, doodling-sketching-drawing – participatory or not – is more about linear image mental processing and communicating (and thus somewhat akin to handwriting, lack of linguistic encoding and propositionality notwithstanding) than an " objective " visual method. Drawing thus elicits a completely different kind of comprehension of the " field " , as well as new forms of social interaction, such as the " public and open spectacle of recording " that anthropologist-draftswoman Carol Hendrickson describes (2008: 119). Based on discussions from a workshop dedicated to "drawing” in the University of Aberdeen, we propose to tackle some of the features of the drawing practice, hoping that its much-misunderstood potential as a knowledge tool helps us reconsider what anthropological understanding is.

Paper provides a short history of the use of visual imagery in social science. Delineates three categories of use: illustrative or demonstrative; film-as-artifact; ethnographic research. Each of these uses of filmic resources is placed in historical (and technological) perspective. Challenges the scientific character of most anthropological films as merely illustrative of views derived by anthropological methods that rely upon verbal discourse which embody western linguistic biases.

Frontiers of Visual Anthropology (Special Issue, Visual Anthropology Vol 20: 2-3), 2007

This special issue of Visual Anthropology is the product of a workshop organized by members of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). In September 2005, eight speakers came to Oxford University. The papers had been selected om more than 40 proposals for papers dealing with a hugely diverse range of theoretical and practical applications of visual anthropology that we had received in response to our call. What follows is a brief outline of the four themes we proposed to our participants, and the questions we considered most important to discuss. Next follows short introductions to the papers themselves, written by the persons responsible for working with the authors to produce the versions that are being published here. THE AGENDA As we enter the 21st century, visual anthropology has increasingly expanded om the emphasis on ethnographic filmmaking that dominated in the latter part of the 20th century, and has taken on a more diverse identity, one encompassing uses of documentation and elicitation and other visual research methods. Photographic and filmic research methods as well as the analysis of visual texts have been important in visual anthropological practices, om the work of Bateson and Mead [1942] through to Collier [1967, 1973] and beyond, as has been repeatedly emphasized [Ruby and Chalfen 1974; Morphy and Banks 1997]. However, until the end of the 20th century, visual methods of research and analysis were largely undiscussed or taken for granted in a subdiscipline dominated by and identified with ethnographic film production (at the levels of both university training and practice). Currently visual anthropology is engaged in a series of transformations, which to a large degree involve making links with other disciplines, testing how it might be more closely integrated with mainstream anthropology and examining its applied potential outside academia.

2016

This article seeks to valorise and understand the potential of ethnographic drawings for anthropological fieldwork, exploring their relations to ways of making records and visual research. I argue that drawing contributes positively to anthropological research and vice-versa: researching anthropologically contributes to drawing the world about us. After a brief review of the literature, I present eleven benefits of using sketchbooks and drawings in ethnography, discussing topics related to the methodological challenges of fieldwork, such as accessibility, memory, temporality, spatiality, visual perception, forms of recording, dialogue with informants, participatory methods and the sharing of results.

Tracey, Journal of Drawing and Visualisation Research, 2012

This essay is an exchange, describing drawing as dialogue. We are two researchers-a social anthropologist (Jen Clarke) and an artist (Kate Foster)-who use 'drawing in the field' as a way of knowing. Our case studies arise from ongoing studies of forestry and land-use. We consider field drawing in relation to ecological awareness by discussing drawing as recognition, as communication-aspects of knowledge understood in terms of awareness, and familiarity, and their opposites. In the turns of our conversations, we encounter 'impact', and, by rethinking it, approach the possibility of a way out, or beyond, the 'ivory tower' of academic or 'scientific' knowledge practices and of the impasse experienced in contested territories. Our references include philosophy, anthropology, cultural geography and nature-writing. This essay-exchange allows us to review-and hence revise-the place of drawing within our respective enquiries.

Athens Journal of Social Sciences, 2021

In its development of one hundred years, anthropology evolved from travelogues of explorers to in-depth exploration of human from all possible angles. In its every venture, anthropologists were/are always in try to get closer to cultural affairs and dive deeper into human subjectivity. To achieve these purposes a series of theories and methods were developed, which served a lot, but with time it was also felt that readers idea of a research is anchored with and limited within the textual analysis written by the researcher. This dependency on the text was (and still) restricting the researcher to convey an actual image of the studied phenomenon, and also confining the readers from exploring their subjective self in finding meaning. The emergence of using visual aids in anthropology during the 90s opened a pathway for the researcher to make their researched visible to the audience. This visibility opens up many scopes of interpretation that are hitherto invisible. Though, researchers of other disciplines started the use of visual way before anthropologists. But its efficiency in transmitting meaning soon pulled the attention of anthropological social researchers. Since then, visual in anthropology has evolved in its use and presently one of the frontrunning methods in anthropological research. This article is systematically reviewing the history to present of visual anthropology with reference to theoretical development and practical use of the same.

American Anthropologist, 2011

Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA15), 2015

The rapid expansion of visual anthropology has evolved through new social networking technologies, which have contributed to the widening of the ethnographic scope, but at the same time, limiting ethnographic film-making to a technique without a substantiated anthropological vision or theoretical aim, raising the question of relevance of contemporary anthropology to the rapid changes in world history. Furthermore, the visual turn inwards, towards subjectivity and self-reflection as the new metaphysics of anthropology, unearthed old methodological issues regarding representation and interpretation, manifested in the widening gap between anthropological theory and ethnographic practice (Asad 1973, Bourdieu 1977, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Grimshaw and Hart 1996, et al). This raises further questions regarding the ethnographic authority in respect to realism and the ethnographer's presence in the field (Foster 1990, Grimshaw 2001, et al). Since visual anthropology has lost its 'objective' claim to reality, which has been traditionally the source of anthropological authority, where does this leave our discipline, particularly in relation to the current changes in world history? Furthermore, how and where are the boundaries of visual anthropology defined in relation to art film-making and the avant-garde, and how can visual anthropologists reclaim their ethnographic authority? This panel invites papers that will contribute to the investigation of the boundaries between visual anthropology and visual arts, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and on the other, by re-examining their historical and social relevance to world history.