VM 616 - Visual Ethnography

Credits: 4
The aims of this course are three-fold: to introduce students to the anthropology of visual communications through photography, films, documentation of performance, and texts; to help them evaluate how sites of exhibition (museums, theaters, television, cinema and the web) are also sites of cultural and social reproduction; and to help them incorporate ethnographic methodology, specifically participant observation and field writing into their artistic practice. To do this we will spend the first half of the semester analyzing ethnography in visual productions and scholarship and the second half designing and conducting our own research projects.