Alison L. Kahn – författare

This volume reorients visual anthropology beyond its historically Western vantage point through a collaborative, cross-cultural editorship. With contributions from anthropologists with cultural connections to the Indian subcontinent, it presents contemporary ethnographic practice as it unfolds across both analogue and digital media. It examines representation across multiple forms—from film and photography to social media ethnography, immersive virtual and augmented realities, and the emerging horizons of artificial intelligence.Visual anthropology itself emerged from the intellectual ferment of the late 1960s, shaped by debates across literature, visual arts, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, alongside the political reckoning of the post-colonial moment. For students of social and cultural anthropology, its catalytic technologies were the hand-held camera and synchronised sound—tools that allowed ethnography to move, speak, and circulate beyond the written text. Yet the field has always extended beyond cinema. Visual and digital anthropology encompasses photography, art, ritual performance, and material culture, recognising that visual knowledge emerges through diverse representational practices. In the age of the Internet, social media, and mobile devices, images circulate globally and instantly, transforming how ethnographers document, interpret, and share social worlds.The book will be of value to students, researchers, and teachers of visual anthropology and sociology, as well as to visual ethnographers, documentary filmmakers, and scholars in museum studies. It will also serve as an important resource for practitioners working with artificial intelligence, curators, filmmakers, and general readers interested in photography, video creation, and the expanding visual worlds of the twenty-first century.

This volume reorients visual anthropology beyond its historically Western vantage point through a collaborative, cross-cultural editorship. With contributions from anthropologists with cultural connections to the Indian subcontinent, it presents contemporary ethnographic practice as it unfolds across both analogue and digital media. It examines representation across multiple forms—from film and photography to social media ethnography, immersive virtual and augmented realities, and the emerging horizons of artificial intelligence.Visual anthropology itself emerged from the intellectual ferment of the late 1960s, shaped by debates across literature, visual arts, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, alongside the political reckoning of the post-colonial moment. For students of social and cultural anthropology, its catalytic technologies were the hand-held camera and synchronised sound—tools that allowed ethnography to move, speak, and circulate beyond the written text. Yet the field has always extended beyond cinema. Visual and digital anthropology encompasses photography, art, ritual performance, and material culture, recognising that visual knowledge emerges through diverse representational practices. In the age of the Internet, social media, and mobile devices, images circulate globally and instantly, transforming how ethnographers document, interpret, and share social worlds.The book will be of value to students, researchers, and teachers of visual anthropology and sociology, as well as to visual ethnographers, documentary filmmakers, and scholars in museum studies. It will also serve as an important resource for practitioners working with artificial intelligence, curators, filmmakers, and general readers interested in photography, video creation, and the expanding visual worlds of the twenty-first century.

This book reveals the history of the Vatican’s ethnographic collections by exploring the imperial, scientific, technological, and religious agendas behind its collecting and curating practices in the early twentieth century. It focuses on two principal contributors: the academic, priest, and ‘Pope’s Curator’, Father Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, and the missionary and linguist, Father Franz Kirschbaum, SVD. Their narratives are embedded in a unique set of comparisons between the ‘liberal humanist ideals’ that underpinned the 1851 Great Exhibition, mid-nineteenth-century German museology, and the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition. It relates to the period of high colonialism and rampant missionary activity worldwide. It unravels the complicated political and ideological stance taken by the Catholic Church and its place within the science/religion debates of its time. Establishing an essential link between the secular and catholic practices of collecting and curating ethnographic objectsfrom non-Western traditions, the author proposes a broader framework for post-colonial approaches to scholarly studies of ethnographic collections, including those of the Catholic Church. This book appeals to students and scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history, art history, religion, politics, and cultural studies.