Reflecting Visual Ethnography

Visual anthropology has many faces. One of them is using the camera in anthropological fieldwork. It is this application that we prefer to call Visual Ethnography. Essential to this approach is its direct connection to anthropology as an academic endeavour. Although visual ethnographers situate their practice within anthropology as an academic discipline they have, for long, complained that writing anthropology neglects the theoretical and ethnographic value of their contributions. In this volume, the complaint was turned into a challenge, and the encounter between the two approaches is displayed on its pages. Renowned writing and filming anthropologists engage in a dialogue by which they explore new understandings of aspects of specific realities, that visual representation has made possible. Examples are: the relation between vision and reliving passed experiences through film, visibility as an existential feature of identity, sociality as embodied practice, ritual space and its representation in text, by means of maps or in the image, and the inherent narrative of lived experience. The visual ethnographers in this volume discuss the methods they have applied and the choices they have made during the production process of particular films and explore the ethnographic value of their projects. Ethnographic filmmakers and anthropological writers, in addition, question the impact of cinematographic form on ethnographic content. The film fragments that are discussed in the various chapters have been added to the volume on a DVD. Contributors to this volume are (in order of appearance): Dirk Nijland, Jos Platenkamp, Erik de Maaker, Yasuhiro Omori, Jan van Bremen, Jean Lydall & Ivo Strecker, Carla Risseeuw, Rossella Ragazzi, Bert van den Hoek, Bal Gopal Shrestha, Karl Heider, Nadine Wanono, Sabine Luning, Peter I. Crawford, Metje Postma, Colette Piault, and Paul Henley. (In English, 428 pp. ill. with DVD. This DVD is designed for stand-alone players (MTSC/PAL/SECAN); PC: Windows Media Player)