Abstract
The last decade has seen a sustained debate about the limits and biases of traditional fieldwork practice. The same period has also seen the launch and adoption of a range of new digital information and communications technologies (ICTs), including CD-ROMs, the internet, digital photography and film, and multi-function mobile phones. Investigating how these emerging media are encountered and worked with in a range of everyday settings has opened up a range of new areas and questions for anthropological research, while underlining the central challenges currently facing ethnographic practice. Visual anthropologists are particularly well placed to explore the possibilities opened up by innovations in multimedia technologies since their investigative and presentational practices have, from the outset, sought to use photography and film alongside written text and recorded speech. Their patchy, but nonetheless important, efforts to encourage subjects to take their own photographs and make their own films have also introduced more participatory modes of investigation. Drawing on a range of recent work, this paper explores how visual anthropologists are currently using both the multimedia and interactive properties of emerging media to develop new forms of practice across the three key moments of research: ethnographic investigation, analysis and interpretation, and presentation. In particular, it looks at how varying combinations of digital media are being employed to assemble ‘thicker’ accounts of everyday practices and beliefs that incorporate participant as well as researcher productions, develop modes of analysis that are more self-reflexive, collaborative and participatory, and construct hypermedia archives and research presentations that are open ended and interactive.
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