Ethnographic filmmakers often struggle to balance the need to let people to speak for themselves with the need to create a coherent presentation-through their own creative hand. Ethnographic writers face similar challenges in choosing to approach their subjects through expository versus evocative prose. This article brings out some of the common concerns of ethnomusicology and visual anthropology through an analysis of the author's own processes of learning music, creative writing, and filmmaking. The discussion concerns the role of the ethnographer's creativity in generating and communicating knowledge; and issues of representing and accessing the "real."
Sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) remains a serious and expanding form of violence in Papua New Guinea. The issue is most acute in the Highlands, where accusations intersect with gender inequality, social precarity and shifting media environments. At the same time, smartphones and social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube have become increasingly significant in the circulation of violent imagery and accusation narratives. This article examines whether these same platforms can be used to circulate alternative anti-violence narratives. Drawing on collaborative video production undertaken with young people in Goroka in 2024 and 2025, I analyze the co-design, production, circulation, and reception of the short-form series Stap Isi Wantaim. I argue that collaborative short-form video production functions not only as a communication strategy but as a form of performative and narrative intervention. The production process enabled participants to critically reflect on sorcery accusations, rehearse nonviolent responses, and develop media literacy, while the videos reached a substantial online audience within the intended demographic. The article contributes to visual anthropology by showing how co-created digital video can operate simultaneously as ethnographic practice, public pedagogy, and anti-violence intervention in contemporary Papua New Guinea.
Until his death, South Africa's Sam Nzima was known for his iconic photograph of the 1976 Soweto Uprising on 16 June. This photo, capturing the fatality of the 13-year-old Zolile Hector Pieterson, heralded the representational turning point in the global community's commitment to opposing apartheid. While Nzima was never memorialized as an anti-apartheid hero, the subject of his photograph is honored with the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum in Soweto. This article discusses this omission in post-apartheid South Africa's commemorative enterprise. While the article's theoretical foundation is trauma photography, it applies ellipsis as a viable theory for the photographer-photograph disconnect. The idea of structured absences is also applied to explain the way that the photograph's author is elided from the public mind. This gap is argued to significantly offer a new approach to critiquing the practice of visual memorialization. The article argues that the photograph's full historical significance cannot exist outside the context of the photograph-photographer relationship.
This article examines Semesta (2020), a documentary directed by Chairun Nissa that explores the relationship between seven ecological initiatives and religious commitments in Indonesia. The study is significant because the film's structure integrates diverse eco-theologies into a coherent sensory narrative. Through cross-modal coding-based visual analysis, the study reveals mechanisms of associative identity, doctrinal condensation, and montage rhythm that generate ecological intelligibility-a condition in which religion is understood as ecological ethics through sensory perception. These findings contribute to anthropological cinema by demonstrating how visual-verbal configurations transform normative knowledge into embodied experience.
This study examines participatory photography as a feminist and decolonial praxis with 18 migrant women in Granada, Spain. Through collaborative workshops, participants produced visual narratives regarding home, belonging, and identity. Intersectional analysis revealed four key themes: memory, empowerment, solidarity, and identity navigation. Findings demonstrate that this method fosters participant agency and critical reflection. Ultimately, the research confirms participatory photography as a vital tool for democratizing knowledge, centering migrant voices, and creating a political space for marginalized perspectives. This study explores how participatory photography can serve as a feminist and decolonial research praxis when engaging with migrant women. A series of collaborative photography workshops were conducted with 18 migrant women (aged 20-45) from diverse backgrounds in Granada, Spain. Participants created and discussed their own photographic images to reflect on themes of home, belonging, care, and future aspirations. Drawing on an intersectional feminist and decolonial lens, the analysis focuses on how image-making and collective narration fostered agency and critical reflection among the women. The findings reveal four primary themes-"Memory, Belonging, and Home"; "Self-expression and Empowerment"; "Community and Solidarity"; and "Navigating Intersectional Identities"-which highlight the participants' lived experiences and social positions. Within each theme, visual symbols were used to articulate aspects of identity, belonging, and resistance. These results are discussed in relation to feminist theories of empowerment and decolonial critiques of representation. Participatory photography is presented as a method that can center migrants' own perspectives and create a political space for marginalized voices. The article contributes to the literature on visual methods in migration studies and offers practical insights for researchers and activists engaging with migrant communities.
This article examines the prominence of infographics within the contemporary visual culture of global maternal health advocacy, exploring their aesthetic, narrative and semiotic power. Infographics are a ubiquitous sensory and aesthetic feature of the global health space, filling the pages of annual reports and websites of United Nations (UN), Non-Governmental organization (NGO) and government agencies and on display in the exhibition halls and power point presentations at international conferences. I focus on the social and political work that infographics do, observing the ways in which they go beyond their remit of conveying information and rendering complex numerical data in a neutral and accessible way. I begin by describing two key historical precedents in data visualization, highlighting the pioneering work of Florence Nightingale and W.E.B. Du Bois who used data visualizations as tools in their advocacy projects of social and institutional change. Infographics in the global maternal health advocacy space, I argue, are likewise calculated appeals, combining numbers with color and compelling imagery to move the viewer to awareness and action. Further, they tend to follow a contemporary neoliberal script that frames maternal survival in terms of investment, empowerment, and economic potential. In this way they shape how we understand the problem of maternal mortality and they legitimize solutions that can be taken up by policy makers and funders. This analysis contributes to broader anthropological conversations about visuality, biopolitics, and the humanitarian logic and procedural aesthetics of the contemporary global health enterprise.
Human-water relationship is one of the most fundamental relations between humans and nature. To contribute to ongoing discourse on building sustainable relationships with waters, I explore how photography as an artistic practice can bring new perspectives to imagining and conceptualizing human connection to water. As personal human-water relationships are often enacted and constructed through unclear and unseen ways, photography aims to shed light to these potentially personal and hidden instances. In this study, I examine the biophilic connection between humans and water, through art-based action research: through my own and study participants' explorative photographic engagement, I aim to answer the research question "How may we imagine and conceptualize the biophilic connection between humans and water?" To answer this question, I conducted art-based action research, where the participants and I explored our relationship with water through photo diaries. The human-water entanglement and its various aspects are illustrated through photographic examples from the data, and further described in short textual vignettes, that assume reflective and personal forms.
This methods article explores how multimodal anthropology can enrich ethnographic engagements with contemporary environmental issues by extending research practices beyond conventional fieldwork settings. Focusing on a group of trash scuba divers in Sweden, the article examines their creation of a submerged installation - an imagined version of the lost city of Atlantis - constructed entirely from recovered marine debris. Situated off a beach outside Stockholm this underwater dive park offers both an immersive sensory experience and a material commentary on water and participating in the embodied, multisensory experience and a material commentary on marine pollution, urban futures, and ecological imagination. By following the divers into the water and participating in the embodied, multisensory practice of underwater ethnography, the research highlights how knowledge is generated not only through observation and conversation, but through movement, immersion, and affect. The article reflects on the methodological implications of engaging with environments that are fluid, unstable, and mediated by technologies such as scuba gear and cameras. In doing so, it argues that multimodal anthropology offers tools for more ethically attuned and ecologically responsive research practices - ones capable of capturing the complex entanglements between humans, waste, and watery worlds.
This research highlights previously unexplored sites of visual sovereignty in the seal hunt scene from Nanook of the North (1922) by putting it in conversation with Angry Inuk (2016), an Inuit-produced documentary that counters anti-sealing rhetoric. Nanook of the North is commonly criticized for its racist view of Inuit, however these critiques have prevented scholars from seeing clear expressions of Indigenous sovereignty within the text. To highlight these expressions, I rely on a rhetorical analysis of Nanook of the North and Angry Inuk using Michelle Raheja's "visual sovereignty" as my reading practice. Significantly, I have found distinct parallels between the way that Inuit knowledge, joy, and material culture are centered in both films. The centering of Inuit knowledge and culture throughout Nanook's seal hunt scene indicates that further sites of sovereignty may exist in the film, pushing back against postcolonial critiques that see Nanook as an irredeemable colonial product. Consequently, Nanook has potential to be repurposed as pro-sealing rhetoric to counter the same anti-sealers Angry Inuk addresses.
This article discusses the representation of Soweto township youths in Sara Blecher and and Dimi Raphoto's Surfing Soweto (2010) through 1) Sisyphean allegory in the context of laborious and futile existences and 2) train surfing as a township subculture. It argues that the train is a medium to experience Soweto as a fleeting space that can be transposed atop the speeding locomotive and experienced in Johannesburg as a portable subculture. Surfing Soweto is thus a film about the culture of stagnated existence among the Soweto youths and how they translate the futility of their existence into a risky hobby. Through the juxtaposition of train surfing with indulgences in drugs and leisure, the film curates a metaphor of cyclical struggles where township life is experienced as an entrapment in a laborious but purposeless life.
This article contributes to a visual anthropology of the future by introducing an innovative methodology based on coproduction of ethnographic animation-animated films that blend people's lived experiences with imaginary scenarios informed by their desired futures. I developed this methodology collaboratively with animation practitioners and Indigenous artists, and I apply it ethnographically to explore how young people in Amazonia imagine the future amidst critical challenges they face in the present. In this article, I examine ethnographic animation both as a research method that uncovers young people's under-represented needs and voices; and as an impact strategy that enables the participants to envisage alternative lifestyles and, in the process, to identify tangible pathways toward them. I demonstrate that by producing films on their ideal futures and then animating them-literally, "bringing them to life"-young people can begin to make these futures a reality, insofar as they are encouraged to think critically about the livelihoods they desire and how to build them. I thereby propose a shift toward an applied anthropology, one where coproduction of ethnographic knowledge can actively shape new ways of seeing the world and forge sustainable pathways toward inclusive futures.
In this short account the authors present the filmic experiment they carried out in 2016: it was an uninterrupted film lasting for 11 hours 38 minutes, unedited and accessible in its entirety. Of the two authors, one was the filmer and the other was filmed. They use the notion of extraction to understand the whole process: i.e. the film itself, the decoding of the images, and the text description. The aim is to present the human being as a unit extracted-what they call a "volume of being"-from its contexts and situations in order to be considered in itself.
Sustainability and regeneration for an urban context have reached general notice in the environmental debate of recent years. In this context, in observance of section 11 of the 2030 schedule of the Sustainable Development Goal, to make cities and other settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable; several limits have been promoted for a system of mass tourism that creates situations of over-tourism every year were highlighted. This may result in an overcrowding of historic attractions, raising several issues in the use of cultural heritage; while at the same time new challenges tied to heritage preservation arise too. The necessity of communicating and valorizing potential secondary tourist routes, such as peripheric areas and landscape heritage, has stimulated a search for new methods for the narration of cultural heritage. To find innovative approaches allows for the rebuilding of a collective identity based on history, tradition and territory, in contexts particularly rich in immaterial and identity heritage features that are difficult to communicate. Focusing on a case study of Ravenna, in Italy, where over eight UNESCO sites are located, this paper will present the tasks performed as part of the REMEMBER project there.
This paper proposes an emergent set of methods for Visual Anthropology through which to generate new encounters with and knowledge in possible and uncertain futures. These methods are grounded in 'computational polyphony', a mode of practice that the authors have developed to facilitate emergent and relational ways of engaging with fieldwork recordings that are orientated around an appreciation of multi-perspectivity. The paper explains the concepts behind these methods and their alignment with diffractive ethnography. It traces their development through experimental practice enabled by the Polyphonic Documentary project and applies insights gained from this project to a place-based ethnographic study of energy futures. The argument is made that computational polyphony is a valuable tool through which to consider preferred futures in ways that take into account a multiplicity of perspectives across both the human and the more-than-human.
Based on 12 months of practice-based photography and filmmaking workshops carried out with deaf children and young people across six schools in Soweto and Durban, this article investigates the educational, practical and cognitive possibilities of using photography and film as means for deaf children to engage with the world in which they live and the future that is yet to come. Aligning visual anthropology with deaf young people's visual capacity offers a starting point to inquire into a diversity of issues-from the most playful to the most challenging of subjects-that would be difficult through language based approaches and ethnography. By using the camera, with its documentary, co-creative and storytelling potentials as an extension of eye, mind and body, I advocate for a use of photography and filmmaking that proceeds from deaf children and young people's sensory lifeworlds and embodied ways of being, including their visual forms of socialising, understanding and relating to others. From this perspective, vision is not simply a means of "seeing" or of "sensory perception" but a mode of worldmaking and understanding that opens a unique ethnographic and methodological window onto deaf young people's perceptions and anticipations of the future.
In this article I introduce visual design anthropology as a practice of workshop filmmaking. I explain the interdisciplinary intersections between the theory and practice of visual, design and futures anthropology, to suggest an anticipatory blended practice and explore how this might be supported by the concept of storying. In doing so I draw on examples of my own reflexive practice, built through filming a series of design anthropological futures workshops, developed across three different projects. I suggest that workshop filmmaking may support us in decentering dominant future visions, foreground new generative and shared senses of hope, and in developing an expanded anthropology which is better able to account for possible futures.
