Visual Anthropology: the Social Lives of Images

Abstract

A cultural practice with no fixed outcome, making images occupies an intriguing place in our world. Not only do many of us make images daily but we are surrounded by them and consume them on smart phones, computers and television screens, in books and magazines, and on clothing, buildings and museums. We also exchange them through social media, e-mail and postcards. Ubiquitous in our social lives, too often we take images, and their making, for granted. In this seminar we will explore what still and moving images do in different cultural contexts, their social lives as they circulate and how they are transformed as objects and a technology in diverse settings. Examining vision as part of our culturally embodied sensorial experience, we shall also explore methodological and ethical questions emerging from visual anthropology, and the long history of image making in the discipline and the political and ethical issues emerging from those histories. Analyzing these cultural understandings, methods, ethics and histories the seminar will develop tools for deconstructing our own ways of seeing and thus engaging the world. In addition to reading theory, and charting out the changing understandings of images in anthropology and we will read several monographs focused on the social lives of images in Australia, Indonesia, Denmark, and the United States. Students will also engage in a final image focused project.