Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, Editors
Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, Editors
Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, Editors
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Ruby, Jay
1996 Visual Anthropology. In Encyclopedia of
Cultural Anthropology, David Levinson and Melvin Ember, editors.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, vol. 4:1345-1351.
VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Visual anthropology studies on how culture is manifested through
visible symbols embedded in gestures, ceremonies, rituals, and
artifacts situated in constructed and natural environments.
Culture is conceived of as manifesting itself in scripts with plots
involving actors and actresses with lines, costumes, props, and
settings.
The cultural self is the sum of the scenarios in which one participates.
If one can see culture, then researchers should be able to employ
audiovisual technologies to record it as data amenable to analysis and
presentation.
Although the origins of visual anthropology are to be found
historically in positivist assumptions that an objective reality is
observable, most contemporary culture theorists emphasize the
socially constructed nature of cultural reality and the tentative nature
of our understanding of any culture.
Conceptually, visual anthropology ranges over all aspects of culture
that are visible-from nonverbal communication, the built environment,
ritual and ceremonial performance, dance, and art to material culture.
Given the fragmentary nature of contemporary theorizing, it seems
unlikely that such a grand theory will ever become commonly
accepted. The field may be conceptually wide-ranging, but in practice
visual anthropology is dominated primarily by an interest in pictorial
media as a means of communicating anthropological knowledge, that
ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM
Ethnographic film is the dominant interest and practice among visual
anthropologists. There is no standard agreed-upon definition of the
genre, and the popular assumption is that it is a documentary about
"exotic" people, thereby broadening the term "ethnographic" to stand
for any statement about culture. Some scholars argue that all film is
ethnographic
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(Heider 1976), whereas others (e.g., Ruby 1975) wish to restrict the
term to films produced by or in association with anthropologists.
The value of film in the teaching of anthropology; the relationship
between a written and a visual anthropology; and collaborations
between filmmakers and anthropologists and the native production of
visual texts are the topics of debate.. Theoretical explorations are
consequently limited to arguing about whether or not a particular film
is objective, accurate, complete, or even ethnographic.
The earliest ethnographic films-one-reel, single-take episodes of
human behavior were indistinguishable from theatrical actualities.
Anthropologists, like everyone else, were fascinated with the
technology and its promise to provide an unimpeachable witness.
Felix-Louis Regnault, perhaps the first anthropologist to produce
researchable footage, proposed in 1900 that all museums collect
"moving artifacts" of human behavior for study and exhibit.
The lack of a method for extracting researchable data about cultural
behavior from film footage continues to inhibit the use of the camera
as a research tool.
In the 1930s Mead and Bateson extended Regnault's ideas. The results
of their fieldwork were such published films as Bathing Babies in
Three Cultures (1941), which were designed to make their data
available for other scholars.
In the 1950s the Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film in Gottingen
launched its Encyclopedia Cinematographica project, which included
an archive and center for the study of filmed behavior.
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