Panos for the Brancus

Abstract

This article represents an attempt to develop a reflexive approach to the question of how material and visual elements of culture are involved in the practices through which anthropological meanings are constructed. Implicit to this approach is a critical perspective on some existing approaches to the visual, material and conversational within visual anthropology and an attempt to relate the anthropological practice of photographing technological process and artifacts to more recently articulated epistemological and representational issues in anthropology. I focus on different visual, material, textual and conversational narratives produced during field work with a Manjaco weaver in Guinea Bissau in 1997 to explore how these may be usefully situated in the processes of anthropological research and representation. In doing so I discuss how photographic images and technologies, traditional weaving technologies, woven cloth, field dairies and conversations become the sites at which diverse and sometimes competing realities are constructed, represented, negotiated and interlinked.