This paper is a photographic essay focusing on how people navigate the demands of visual citizenship in both virtual and physical spaces. It posits that theories of digital attention often overlook the bodily and specific material worlds where digital attention and distraction occur. Using photos and ethnographic data from public gatherings in Bangkok, Thailand, following the death of King Bhumibol, the paper examines how moral citizenship practices in virtual communities both intersect with and diverge from public manners of the body. The paper argues that while virtual citizenship practices may sometimes take precedence over in-person social practice, enduring manners and modes of attention in public urban spaces nonetheless shape and inform online citizenship behaviors. The paper argues scholars of visual nationalism and digital attention should focus more on physical modes of attention, including rituals and manners expressed through the body.
A review of a multimedia library exhibition, which was made with the collaboration of librarians and artists. The result reflects the ecology of knowledge within institutions.
Impossible Realism is a conversation, a textual counterpoint, that was triggered by some “difficult” archival photos Mollona found during his field research in a Brazilian industrial town. He asked Clifford to discuss these images, and the exchange soon revolved around the challenge of representing cultural and class differences in situations of rapid change. How to engage, non‐reductively, with multiple post‐Western histories? The authors discovered a shared commitment to ethnographic complexity and reflexivity, an approach developed in their different, but complementary, attempts to understand working‐class and Indigenous socio‐cultural formations. They explored a common debt to Marxism and an appreciation for the work of Stuart Hall. (Im)possible Realism represents this conversation in the form of alternating voices. This Dialogue will continue in the next issue of VAR.
This article uses Actor‐Network Theory to analyze mining infrastructures in Chile and develop a concept of “extractive infrastructure networks.” Focusing on the port of Punta Chungo and its connection to the Los Pelambres mine, we explore how these infrastructures, along with human and non‐human actors, create networks that sustain the extractivist economy while hiding environmental and social risks. Through a photographic essay, we show how these infrastructures are both visible and forgotten in everyday life, and how they often hide the long‐term dangers they pose to nearby communities. This paper introduces a new way to understand the complex relationships between infrastructure, environment, and society in Chile's mining industry.
The significance and representation of seaweed in Éire (Ireland) is remediated through a complex historical and sensory discussion that situates seaweed as biocultural heritage. The deeply sensory stories of seaweed in Ireland foreground highly localized efforts to use seaweed- based traditions to support local practices that emerge from longstanding agro-ecologies in the Islands of western Ireland, known as the Gaeltacht region. This discussion brings the sensory experiences of seaweed beyond the shoreline and into the tourism space of baths on the west coast of Ireland through narrative and the visual work of Stephen G.S Foster.
This review engages with Rebecca Louise Carter's mixed media animation work, “Life Ain't Gonna Be Like You Always Wanted,” exhibited as part of Sonder: The Black Biennial . Curated by Amadi Williams and Isaiah “Prophet” Raines, the Black Biennial was on view from April 19 to June 2, 2024, at the Rhode Island School of Design's Gelman Gallery in Providence RI. Carter's animation was excerpted from The Weight of the Heat: A Meditation on Black Aliveness from New Orleans , 2023, screened at KolajFest New Orleans (2023), Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival (2023, official selection), and the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival (2024, under consideration).
The significance and representation of seaweed in Éire (Ireland) is remediated through a complex historical and sensory discussion that situates seaweed as biocultural heritage. The deeply sensory stories of seaweed in Ireland foreground highly localized efforts to use seaweed‐ based traditions to support local practices that emerge from longstanding agro‐ecologies in the Islands of western Ireland, known as the Gaeltacht region. This discussion brings the sensory experiences of seaweed beyond the shoreline and into the tourism space of baths on the west coast of Ireland through narrative and the visual work of Stephen G.S Foster.
This article uses Actor-Network Theory to analyze mining infrastructures in Chile and develop a concept of "extractive infrastructure networks." Focusing on the port of Punta Chungo and its connection to the Los Pelambres mine, we explore how these infrastructures, along with human and non-human actors, create networks that sustain the extractivist economy while hiding environmental and social risks. Through a photographic essay, we show how these infrastructures are both visible and forgotten in everyday life, and how they often hide the long-term dangers they pose to nearby communities. This paper introduces a new way to understand the complex relationships between infrastructure, environment, and society in Chile's mining industry.
Theory, articulated through text, is the primary means through which anthropologists understand the communities we engage through our work. It is a critical part of the discipline, but it is also a mode of abstraction, and extraction, that rips us from the immediacy of sensory experience and too often replicates existing power relationships. This article explores the potential of photography to serve as an alternative mode of theorizing. Building on 7 years of learning from, and making images alongside, street photographers in the United States, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia, I argue that the value of photographs to ethnographic work lies precisely in their inability to effectively illustrate ethnographic ideas. It is, rather, the complexity, opacity, and ambiguity of photographs that makes them rich ethnographic material. Perhaps, I conclude, the most valuable thing an anthropological image can do is allow the essential strangeness of the ethnographic encounter to remain strange.
Impossible Realism is a conversation, a textual counterpoint, that was triggered by some "difficult" archival photos Mollona found during his field research in a Brazilian industrial town. He asked Clifford to discuss these images, and the exchange soon revolved around the challenge of representing cultural and class differences in situations of rapid change. How to engage, non-reductively, with multiple post-Western histories? The authors discovered a shared commitment to ethnographic complexity and reflexivity, an approach developed in their different, but complementary, attempts to understand working-class and Indigenous socio-cultural formations. They explored a common debt to Marxism and an appreciation for the work of Stuart Hall. (Im)possible Realism represents this conversation in the form of alternating voices. This Dialogue will continue in the next issue of VAR.
Establishing a reciprocal working relationship with a community for research purposes is the goal of any ethically minded social scientist, yet building trust can be one of the most difficult and time‐consuming aspects of launching a project in a new location. The difficulty should come as no surprise given the sordid history of data collection—especially among marginalized communities. Over the last several decades, awareness of these challenges has led to more inclusive, collaborative, and community‐based approaches to research. I argue here that the sharing of visual media or other material of historical significance with a particular community can be a first step toward potential collaboration. With promising results, I mainly relied on taking older documentaries back to the location where they were filmed, hosting public screenings, and having conversations with community members about the changes they have experienced—thus establishing a strong rapport leading to meaningful engagement and, in some cases, collaborative work.
Anthropologists are showing a growing interest in silence, both as a phenomenon of ethnographic enquiry and as a category for theorizing. Silence manifests in ways that are inherently relational and exerts a force that may be more or less emollient or severe in its effects. Photographs are often deeply implicated in all of this, given that they too are essentially relational, and they too exert an affective force upon their viewers. Photographs may also have a peculiar potential for breaking silences, especially the silences of past injustices. However, research strategies for exploring these potentials have tended to focus around narrative frames, that is, "giving voice" to victim-survivors. This article explores alternative methods for re-sounding photographs through a co-designed elicitation project, using a recently re-discovered archive of 60,640 official photographs from Idi Amin's Uganda-a regime which killed up to 300,000 of its own citizens. This article is part of the Special Section: (Re)Sounding Images.
The article concerns the ethnographic documentary film Hopa lide, which stems from the author’s ten years of ethnographic research among Romani musicians in Slovakia. The film is based on documenting the collaborative making of music videos. Firstly, the article critically reflects on Romani representation in contemporary documentary films, arguing that it is often distorted due to tendencies towards exoticisation, the monopoly of non-Romani gaze, challenges in the representation of poverty and story-driven approaches in contemporary documentary practice. Then, it justifies the film’s main methodological and ideological standpoints by evaluating the process of pre-production, production and distribution. In conclusion, the article highlights the importance of ethnographic film as a counterpoint to market-driven story-telling and as a valuable way of representing underrepresented groups of people.
The first of two special sections exploring the relationships between sound and the photographic image. The section's articles by Darren Newbury, Richard Vokes, and Paul Basu are concerned with issues of sound, voice, and silence in relation to archival photographs. The introductory essay discusses these visual anthropologies of silence and voice, both acknowledging their debt to Elizabeth Edward's theorizing of the “orality of photographs,” but also noting how their analyses extend beyond orality, addressing sonic enmeshments beyond language and the spoken. The editors draw upon theories of diegetic and non‐diegetic sound from film studies, to consider the (re)sounding of images.
