Abstract

FLORES, Carlos Y.. Visual Anthropology: Away or Close to the Anthropological Subject?. Nueva antropol [online]. 2007, vol.20, n.67, pp.65-87. ISSN 0185-0636.

This article aims to provide a critical analysis of the role that photography and cinema/video have played throughout the development of anthropology as a discipline. Given the origins and practices of anthropology in general, and visual anthropology in particular, it argues that the power relations at play when one social group represents another should be understood within the broader context of colonial and neo-colonial processes, and of internal colonialism. In such settings, representation of the "anthropological Other" has rarely been more than a monologue by dominant social groups, characterised by the absence of voice or self-representation of the anthropological subject. Nonetheless, the article also considers forms of visual production generated within an anthropological framework, which have managed to escape or at least subvert the logic of the socioeconomic and cultural inequalities generated by colonialism and its consequences. In the post-colonial, globalized world, despite -or perhaps because of- the contradictions this entails, new spaces have been generated which allow peoples and individuals subject to different kinds of cultural domination to reaffirm their power, and articulate their own narratives of identity. In this context, some anthropological practices have engaged in efforts to support and accompany such processes, and more dialogic, horizontal and shared experiences of production and consumption of visual images have been generated.