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The Tadamon Massacre: Archiving Violence through the Perpetrators’ Gaze Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Uğur Ümit Üngör
On 16 April 2013, the Assad regime’s Military Intelligence Branch 227 committed a massacre of over 300 civilians (including women and children) in Damascus, by driving them to a secluded part of Ta...
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Re-Collections: Images beyond the Archive Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Andreas Bandak, Christine Crone, Nina Grønlykke Mollerup
In visual terms the ongoing war in Syria has been one of the most well-documented that the world has ever witnessed. Accordingly Syria has for long been established as a topos for global reflection...
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The Syrian Archive Digital Memory Project: Archiving as Testimony, as Evidence, as Creative Practice Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Dima Saber, Abdul Rahman al-Jaloud
Founded in 2014, the Syrian Archive is a collective of human rights activists dedicated to curating visual documentation of human rights violations and other crimes committed during the conflict in...
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The Beginning of an Idea about an End: On Digital, Diasporic, Syrian Archives Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Stefan Tarnowski
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two Syrian organizations, the Syrian Archive and Bidayyat, both founded in exile but operating at different ends of the archival scale, this article theorizes the...
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Video Archives of the Syrian Revolution: A Media Experiment Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Chad Elias
This article builds on ongoing debates in archival theory that point both to the democratic potential of digitization and to its dangers (mass deletion, de-contexualization, algorithmic bias). It c...
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Afterword Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Thomas Keenan
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 37, No. 1, 2024)
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A Future Horizon for Restitution in a Film on the Argentinian Puna: Rubén Guzmán’s The Noise of Time Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Arnd Schneider
This article offers a detailed discussion of the film The Noise of Time by Rubén Guzmán (Argentina, 2021). The essay film is a poetic reflection on the morally questionable excavations and anthropo...
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Cultural Globalization and Transnational Cinema: On Intersectionality and Ethnoscapes in Hermine Huntgeburth’s Die weiße Massai Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Addamms Songe Mututa
This article is an interdisciplinary critique of Hermine Huntgeburth’s Die weiße Massai (The White Masai; 2005)—a transnational film—as a text that enables a reflection on the peculiarity of North-...
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The Skyline is Changing: Editing Space and Discourse in Nuclear Decommissioning Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Petra Tjitske Kalshoven
Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork at and around the nuclear facilities at Sellafield in Northwest England, I engage with a ubiquitous turn of phrase that describes the material, visually...
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Probing Issues of Indigeneity and Contemporaneity in a Collection of Rorke’s Drift Ceramics Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Mathodi Motsamayi, Phindile Dlamini
In 1988, the art collector Mark Bernstein donated to the University of KwaZulu–Natal a collection of seven vessels, produced by potters at the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Center at Ro...
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Music, Dance, Anthropology Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Najwa Adra
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 5, 2023)
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Too Many Stories Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Paul Hockings
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 5, 2023)
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Volume 36—Author Index Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 5, 2023)
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Volume 36—Titles Index Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-01
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 5, 2023)
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“Today, We Are All Ukrainians”—Visual Responses in Georgian Cities to Russia’s War in Ukraine Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Michael Cole
This article explores visual responses in Georgian cities, during April and May 2022, to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Combining visual discourse analysis of “zeitgeist cultural objects” with insights f...
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Peace and War in Our Bodies and Minds: Public Subversion vs. Mass Totalization Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Tatiana Romashko
This article explores the political impact of street art and symbolic creativity in challenging official hegemony. It focuses on the Russian case of social conflict around the 2022 war, specificall...
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Visual Biopolitics of Multiple Insecurities: Anthropological Inquiries in Eastern Europe Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Yuliia Kurnyshova, Andrey Makarychev
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 4, 2023)
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Personal Epistemology on the War in Eastern Ukraine in 2021: Constructing and Deconstructing Knowledge Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Evija Djatkoviča
I enact the personal epistemology standpoint to illustrate how my ontology and personal experience transformed my knowledge about the war in eastern Ukraine. Guiding the reader through my visual an...
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Photography as Testimony: Insecurities, “Bareness” of Life, and Resilience during the War in Ukraine Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Andrey Makarychev, Sami Siva
This article is written on the basis of the visual material collected during field trips to Ukraine in 2014, 2016, 2017 and in February–March 2022. The analysis is built on three concepts that have...
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An Authoritarian Spectacle: Visual Biopolitics and the Dramaturgy of the Poland-Belarus Border Migration Crisis Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Aliaksei Kazharski
This article analyzes the 2021–22 migration crisis at the EU-Belarus border through the conceptual lens of visual biopolitics. Based on data available from the regime-run media in Belarus it demons...
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When Women Speak Phallocentric Positionalities: Biopolitics of Female Loneliness in the Russian Cinemascape Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Sergei Akopov
This article approaches an emerging archipelago of visual biopolitics from two grounds: ontological security studies, and black feminist existentialism. The first perspective deals with visual repr...
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Amateur Film, Cultural Memory and the Visual Legacy of the 1920s Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Alison Griffiths
This essay considers amateur cinema as a site of Indigenous history and counter-memory, one capable of activating meanings that challenge notions of home movies as being films without public value. The amateur films were made by an American geologist, William Wrather, at the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico, in the late 1920/1930s, and they interweave footage of Wrather’s family
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Mumiani Season: Visual Aspects of a South Coast Kenyan Rumor Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Zebulon Dingley
This article analyzes visual aspects of an otherwise verbal communicative genre: rumor. The focus is an episode of public panic in southern coastal Kenya in 2013, about “mumiani”—politically connected gangs said to murder children for their eyes. I argue that widespread defacement of public images during the panic expressed dimensions of mumiani imaginaries that went unspoken in the verbal spread of
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(In)visibility, Mediated, and Sporting Perceptions: Bollywood, Biopics, and the Epistemic Turn in Mary Kom Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Payel Pal, Goutam Karmakar
In recent years several Hindi films have been produced that delineate the difficulties and challenges faced by Indian athletes and boxers, and highlight their sociocultural struggles in asserting their pursuit of and passion for their sport. Mary Kom (2014) is one such Hindi-language biographical sports film based on the life of the eponymous boxer Mary Kom, a film that brings to the foreground the
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A Creative Ethnography Approach: Reconstructing the Socio-Material Remains of the Ghost Ships of Suva Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Emit Snake-Beings
Drawing on visual elements, this article uses creative ethnography as a method of visualizing imaginative elements and observations. Generating improvised dialogues based on the visual prompts of the author’s video entitled Ghost Ships of Suva, the technique explores and speculates on the imagined lives of sailors and workers who once inhabited the abandoned fishing vessels that were filmed in the
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Reframing Africa? Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Addamms Mututa
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 3, 2023)
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Ethnography and Volumography: Drawings of Theory on the Blackboard Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Albert Piette
The author presents drawings made on the blackboard in front of his students at the university. This article aims to show the heuristic value of drawing in view of a human-oriented anthropology, i.e. focused on a human being, as detached as possible from other humans, situations or contexts. The drawings aim to illustrate the differences between ethnography and what he calls volumography, which focuses
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The Male Householder and the Hypermasculine Deity: Malayalam-Language Films Based on the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-04 S. S. Sooraj, K. R. Kavya Krishna, Ajit Kumar Mishra
The Sabarimala Temple in the South Indian state of Kerala garnered national and global attention following violent protests against the Indian Supreme Court’s verdict in September 2018, allowing the entry of women of menstruating age to the temple. By studying popular Malayalam films released over the years, this article examines how beliefs around Sabarimala are intrinsically linked to the notion
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Delinking “The Gentleman’s Game”: Visual Epistemic Representations in the Film Shabaash Mithu Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Goutam Karmakar, Payel Pal
Indian Hindi language sports drama films centered on cricket function as performative documentaries depicting the lives, accomplishments, and trajectories of cricketers playing for the India men’s national cricket team, also known as Team India or the Men in Blue. These films, as cultural artifacts, are embedded in the establishment of a homogeneous episteme that consistently fails to offer alternatives
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Photographic Practices among Albanian Families in Kosovo Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Zanita Halimi
Photography records “the cultural inventory” not only of material culture but also of relationships between people. As John Collier Jr. wrote, “the photographic inventory can record not only the range of artifacts in a home but also their relationship to each other, the style of their placement in space, all the aspects that define and express the way in which people use and order their space and possessions”
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Making Sense of Research Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Addamms Mututa
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 2, 2023)
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Introduction Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Olga A. Suleimanova, Irina V. Tivyaeva
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2023)
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Visual and Verbal Semiotics in the Moscow-vs.-Paris Métro Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Olga A. Suleimanova, Daria D. Kholodova
This paper compares the principles of naming métro stations in Moscow and Paris. The database covers 234 Moscow and 305 Paris métro station names. We analyze the station names along different axes. In the case of Moscow, the development of the métro is referred to the periodization of socio-economic national development. This makes it possible to distinguish naming principles and build their hierarchy
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QR Codes on Moscow Sites: Invisible Visibility, or Keeping Pace with the Changes? Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Olga A. Suleimanova, Marina A. Fomina, Natalia A. Chekmaeva
This article focuses on the small-format multimodal text “embedded” in Quick Response (QR) codes on Moscow’s historical buildings, which aims to reveal what means this city uses to translate the national legacy to the awareness of the general public via QR codes. Despite their continuing proliferation and omnipresence in all city domains the information power and mind-framing potential of QR codes
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Memorial Plaques in Multimodal Urban Discourse: A Visual Narrative Reflecting Moscow’s Glorious past Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Irina V. Tivyaeva
This article discusses the potential of memorial plaques to be a means of transmitting collective city memories—understood to include the depersonalized spatially motivated commemoration of events and people. The study analyzes such plaques as location-attached material testaments of Moscow’s most outstanding historic and cultural phenomena. Memorial plaques are examined within the city’s semiotic
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City-to-Resident Communication: Speaking with Seniors and Youth Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Natalia N. Beklemesheva, Natalia A. Chekmaeva
Social changes bring shifts in our way of life. This article offers insights into how the city addresses its residents of different social and age groups, to deliver messages on a variety of issues (such as health, safety, or environment). Then an overview related to anti-COVID measures in Moscow is given. The methodology involves multimodal and interdisciplinary approaches, and analysis of the city
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“Children of the Soil” to “Dark Wind”: Nature, Environment and Climate in Indian Films Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Pankaj Jain, Shikha Sharma
India is widely known as the biggest producer of films, now globally known with the portmanteau “Bollywood.” India also grabs the media attention for another reason—climate change. In 2015, The New York Times published an op-ed with a cartoon showing India as the proverbial “elephant” blocking the progress at the Paris Climate Change Conference. With the staggering number of films India produces and
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Karoo Cosmos Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Luan Staphorst
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2023)
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Expanded Visions Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Alyssa Grossman
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2023)
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Volume 35—Author Index Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2023)
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Volume 35—Title Index Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-04-04
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 36, No. 1, 2023)
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The Horror/Beauty of the Harga: Midsommar as Western Imaginary of a Screen-Free Life Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-12-21 David Sutton
The “highbrow horror” film Midsommar was released in 2019 to an engaged critical and popular reception Featuring several anthropologists as main characters, this film explores the culture of the fictive Harga and their midsummer festival in Sweden. While critics have focused on the genre-bending aspects, the exploration of a cult, and the racial politics of the film, in this article I argue that they
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“There Was a Time of Dancing”—Visual Memory of the Maya Uprising in Guatemala, 1980–1981 Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-12-21 Sergio Palencia Frener
Guatemala’s imagery of the war has been mostly construed from the standpoint of state militarism and violence. In the 1980s photos of rebellious Maya villages scarcely appeared in international publications, all of which were forbidden in Guatemala. Using a historical anthropological approach, visual memory, and ethnography of the Maya highlands, this essay delves into the photography of Megan Thomas
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Portraits, Gifts and Exchange Valuation in Xlendi Bay, Malta Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-12-21 Paola Juan
This article explores gift exchange and valuation based on a fieldwork experience in Xlendi Bay, Malta, during which the author gave strangers portrait drawings of themselves for free. Participants systematically gave back more than what was expected (money, drinks, etc.). What does this case study say about the valuation and performativity of (portrait) gifts? By subjecting classic anthropological
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Shadow Traces Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-12-21 Sawa Kurotani
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 4-5, 2022)
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Celluloid Colony Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-12-21 Nadi Tofighian
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 4-5, 2022)
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Images of the Mountains: Touristic Consumption and Gendered Representations of Landscape and Heritage in Gilgit-Baltistan Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Anna-Maria Walter
Touristic advertisements, development reports and government sources in Pakistan readily use the natural beauty of Gilgit-Baltistan, above all lavish shots of mountain peaks, to promote the country’s hospitality and global appeal. Since the public sphere is full of promotional material for this region, local people have also started posing in front of newly discovered sights for photos. While men often
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The Visual Anthropology of Migration Histories: Discovering the Mobility of Nepali Women through Visuals Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Sanjay Sharma
This article uses visual anthropology to bring forth the migration histories of Nepali women, especially those related to Gurkha soldiers. Using personal and archival photographs and videos of migrants and their families, this article uncovers mobility patterns and migration histories of some Nepali women. The article uses visuals to build a narrative that deals not just with migration histories and
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Everest, Everestland, #Everest: A Case for a Composite Visual Ethnographic Approach Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Jolynna Sinanan
Arguably Mount Everest has always been mediatized: its appeal as an idea has existed in part through technologies of visual cultures. Exploring the digital media practices of tourists and the tourism workers, this article considers how imaginaries of Mount Everest that appear through technologies of visual culture relate to experiences of Everest in Nepal. I argue for a composite visual ethnographic
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Rooted in the Uprooted: Material Memories of Migration from Kashmir Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Prateeksha Pathak, Goutam Karmakar
Studies that prioritize verbal sources of information over other nonverbal sources to retrieve the past often overlook the entirety of what transpired. Documents do not encompass the lives of people, particularly those who were victims of traumatic events such as the insurgency of 1989 in the Kashmir valley. Minority communities from Kashmir were then forced to flee as a result of violence and brutal
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Mesoamerican Indigenous Youth in the United States Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Lynn Stephen
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 3, 2022)
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Filmmaking for Fieldwork Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Christine Moderbacher
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 3, 2022)
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Why Muslim Women and Smartphones? Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Navid Darvishzadeh
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 3, 2022)
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“We Felt That the Country Was in the Stage of a Rough Cut…”: Vernacular Documentation, Political Affects and the Ideological Functions of Catharsis in Ukraine Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Nataliya Tchermalykh
In March of 2014, I attended the first screening of Euromaidan: Rough Cut—a collective documentary chronicle of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution. Quite unexpectedly the event ended with an improvized mourning ritual for deceased Maidan protesters. Observed in the film, this ritual then transcended the screen and spread through the audience, stimulating an experience similar to a “collective catharsis.”
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Does Ethnographic Film (Still) Matter? Reflections on the Genre in a World of Multimodality Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Anna Grimshaw
For almost a century ethnographic filmmakers liked to think of their work as the radical alternative to a hidebound textual anthropology. Such claims are now increasingly challenged. On the one hand, the rise of “experimental’ or “multimodal” scholarship has changed the existing terms of debate about alternative modes of anthropological practice. On the other hand, debates about the decolonization
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Ethnography in Contemporary Thai Cinematic Practices: A Case Study Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani
Expanding on the nexus of art and ethnography in contemporary Thailand, I take a case study approach in this paper to apprehend the film Din Rai Dan (Soil Without Land) through an ethnographic framework. Completed in 2019 by Nontawat Numbenchapol, Din Rai Dan was shot at the Shan State Army camp, at the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Straddling compelling visual aesthetics and thorough, on-site
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Shadow Animism and Ontological Xenophobia: An Anthropology of Horror Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Joshua Sterlin
By examining the Western strain of the Horror genre, I explore the dynamics that define its central character as an ontological xenophobia that must be perpetually cleansed. Beyond a sociological account I suggest we take what it contains seriously as ontological explorations. With a focus on predation as case study, I analyze the genre as conforming to the gazing relation of the Naturalistic West
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Pandemic Art: How the Virus Has Revolutionized Art Today Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Babitha Justin
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2022)
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Cinemas of Isolation, Histories of Collectivity: Crip Camp and Disability Coalition Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Emma Ben Ayoun
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2022)
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The Objectification of Women in V. Shantaram’s Films Visual Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Pankaj Jain, Nandini Bhasin
Published in Visual Anthropology (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2022)