Visual anthropology
Visual anthropology studies visual culture and uses images, film, and other visual media to conduct ethnographic research and represent social life.
Ethnographic film: Film that documents or interprets social and cultural life through ethnographic research. It is visual anthropology’s most established form of audiovisual research and representation.
Felix-Louis Regnault: A French physician and anthropologist who used chronophotography and film to study human movement and behavior. His late nineteenth-century experiments are early examples of cameras used for anthropological inquiry.
Jean Rouch: A French filmmaker and anthropologist whose films explored collaboration, performance, and reflexivity in ethnographic cinema. His cinéma-vérité practice treated filming as an encounter that could alter social action.
Indigenous media: Media created by Indigenous people to express community concerns, sustain cultural practices, and address outside audiences. It shifts visual representation from documenting communities toward supporting their media-making.
Visual sociology: The sociological study of visual images and the use of visual methods to investigate social life. It shares many methods with visual anthropology but develops from sociology’s disciplinary questions.
Photovoice: A participatory research method in which people use photographs to document and discuss their lives. It gives participants control over which images and interpretations enter an ethnographic account.
Margaret Mead: An American cultural anthropologist known for fieldwork, public scholarship, and experiments with visual documentation. Her collaboration with Gregory Bateson helped establish film and photography as tools for studying social interaction.
David MacDougall: An Australian filmmaker and anthropologist known for observational ethnographic films and writing on visual anthropology. His work examines how film communicates embodied and sensory knowledge.
Collaborative ethnography: Ethnographic research conducted through sustained collaboration with the people and communities involved. It offers a framework for sharing decisions about filming, interpretation, and publication.
Documentary film: Nonfiction film that represents actual people, events, or conditions through audiovisual recording and construction. Documentary film may share its forms while lacking visual anthropology’s ethnographic research commitments.