Visual Culture

The readings were very interesting. It struck me how often visual metaphors were unintentionally evoked in the reading and even in my mind as I read. The isolation of visual aspects of "reality", culture, and other aspects of or issues addressed by ethnography does indeed some problematic.

For my project, I do not see (no pun intended) the analysis of visual culture playing a prominent part. While the images produced and used by the staff and their bosses have entered my observations, taking photographs or videos would not be appropriate and probably not very helpful given my focus.

The idea to "shar[e]...agency" between the researcher and "the researched" (a problematically structured sentence, I realize) struck me as at once novel and then as a incredibly obvious. (Such a consideration delves into the purpose of anthropology, which seems even more nebulous than the definition of "ethnography", "culture" or "visual culture". In any case, I do hope to include the wishes and needs of my subjects. I feel as if I am working for them, telling their story. I hope that is not an improper angle.

Trying to pin-down visual culture may prove problematic to the point of being unproductive. As with any other source of information about this grander, truer reality (which seems the aim of all academic study to elucidate without suffering the blindness of the man that became wise in Plato's Allegory of the Cave). While reflexivity and ethical issues must be addressed, the author made a great point: the utility of image-capturing tools depends on everything from the projected identity of the researcher to the culture that is being studied.

More on this later after some mulling.

DISCIPLINE & PRACTICE: "The Field" as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology (Gupta & Ferguson)

T H E F I E L D

"As a metaphor we work by, "the field" thus reveals many of the unspoken assumptions of anthropology (11)."

• Be critical and thorough of your choice of field. Do not settle for a "chance" site.
  G&F warn of chance sites: "The very significant premisis and assumptions built into the anthropological idea of "the field" are in this way protected from critical scrutiny, even as they are smuggled into the discipline's most central practices of induction, socialization, and professional reproduction (11)."
  
• "A "good" field site is made, however, not only by considerations of funding and clearance, but by its suitability for addressing issues and debates that matter to the discipline (10)."
  
• "Our focus on shifting locations rather than bounded fields is linked to a different political vision, one that sees anthropological knowledge as a form of situated intervention. Rather than viewing ethnographic intervention as a disinterested search for truth in the service of humanistic knowlegde, we see it as a way of pursuing specific political aims while while simultaneously seeking lines of common political alliance with allies who stand elsewhere- a mode of building what Haraway (1988) has termed "web-like interconnections" between different social and cultural locations (38-9)."

E T H N O G R A P H Y & P E R S P E C T I V E

• The strengths of ethnographic contribution
  "Ethnography's greatest strength has always been its explicit and well-developed sense of location, of being set here-and-not-elsewhere. This strength becomes a liability when notions of "here" and "elsewhere" are assumed to be features of geography, rather than sites constructed in fields of unequal power relations (35)."
  
• Ethnographic location is less about physical geography than power relations
  "... ethnography has always contained at least some recognition that knowledge is is inevitably both "about somewhere" and "from somewhere" and that the knower's location and life experience are somehow central to the kind of knowledge produced (35)."