Essay On Visual Anthropology

Nowadays mobility, through and within borders, has been seen as a challenge to customary definitions of societies, nations, cities and regions. It does not mean free movement in a ‘flat world’, but rather index a complex of actual, potential, uneven and disabled possibilities that are unequally actualized across multiple domains and fractures of social life (D’Andrea, Ciolfi and Gray, 2011). It has been related to two concepts. On one side some academics talk about ‘transit migration’ which means “heterogeneous array of migration processes, migrants, potential migrants and countries around a limited series of largely un defined commonalities involving illegality, high risk, lack of control and above all an assumed desire to certain territory” (Collyer, Duvell and Hass, 2012). The second concept is ‘circulation’ understood as an

It has to do with creating new knowledge through the systematic collection and analysis of sensory evidence and other forms of real world data (Wagner, 2007). The name ‘visual anthropology’ was coined by Margaret Mead in the 1960s when, complaining that the references to ‘non-verbal’ anthropology that were bandied at the time were unfortunately negative, she proposed that a more positive title would be ‘visual’ anthropology (Pink, 2006). It has a history that impact on how we understand the visual, the question of vision, and the methods of research and representation we engage in, but it still needs to rethink and attend some issues in order to be redefined as not simply the anthropology of the visual and the use of visual methods in research and representation, but as the anthropology of the relationship between the visual and other elements of culture, society, practice and experience and the methodological practice of combining visual and other media in the production and representation of anthropological knowledge (Pink