Drawing with a camera? Ethnographic film and transformative anthropology
- Submitting institution
-
Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 133981
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.1111/1467-9655.12161
- Title of journal
- Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 255
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1359-0987
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.12161
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research advances recent anthropological accounts of drawing made by leading anthropologists Tim Ingold and Michael Taussig, challenging their suggestions that the special knowledge practices of drawing are necessarily opposed to those of film and video. It argues that knowledge practices linked to drawing must be rethought in social anthropology as a more credible basis for the newly occurring expansive dialogues happening with other kinds of image-based media, and by extension, between textual and filmic research, with the outcome being to progress other key debates in and beyond anthropology. Underpinning current approaches to drawing by theory-led anthropologists is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between ‘making’ and ‘taking’, between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. The research challenges such assumptions, arguing for a dialectical rather than polarized relationship of these elements. It highlights the insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film-based anthropologies and links these to broader debates on ways of knowing and being, imagination and skill, and the central purpose of anthropology itself, which it argues is social and ecological transformation. The research presents reflective analysis by both authors of their observational filmmaking practices, embedding hyperlinks within the article to the films cited. The outcome of the research is to enable better understanding of image-based technologies within a wider discipline that for many decades has tolerated iconophobic discourses that at their most extreme have cast audio-visual technologies and their operators as agents of voyeurism and surveillance, traces of which are found in the thinking of Ingold and Taussig, otherwise highly innovative world-leading anthropologists. By providing common conceptual ground, in part from within filmmaking practice, the research clarifies how cameras and imaged-based technologies share many of the knowledge practices of drawing, communicating these insights for those without first-hand filmmaking experience.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -