Audiovisual Instruments in Ethnographic Research
In 1973, the most renowned researchers in Visual Anthropology met at the ninth International Congress of Anthropology and Sociology to discuss the role of film and photography in ethnographic research and to systematize the almost century-old experiences of bringing together description, ethnography, photography and film. Opening the meeting, Dean Margaret Mead enthusiastically defended the use of audiovisual instruments in research. Considering that Anthropology explicitly or implicitly accepted the responsibility of ‘preserving’ the descriptions of disappearing cultural habits, Mead prescribed the need for an ‘urgent anthropology’ that used photographs and films as supporting research means. She endorsed the view that the camera should be used as a research instrument as well as a means of disseminating a study, conjuring concerns with the film’s stylistic and aesthetic qualities while stressing its documental value. In her own terms, Anthropology should maximize the potentialities of the audiovisual media within its reach instead of being merely a ‘science of words’ (Mead 1995). Mead’s point of view was quickly criticized within a disciplinary field concerned with problems of interpretation of the subject, deep ethnographic description, and the post-colonial criticism of the role of the observer as a political subject and actor. The Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup echoed these concerns when she denounced Mead’s positivist conception of the discipline. For Hastrup, the defence of an urgent anthropology could only be defended within the perspective of humanity as a ‘human zoo’, a collection of immutable and a-historical subjects and social formations that were better described, in their immobility, by pictures. On the contrary, Hastrup states that Anthropology is a form of knowledge made up of subjects engaged in an active relationship (‘observer’ and ‘subject’), historically situated and politically conscious. This interrelationship may