This course explores the role of the audiovisual within ethnographic research and vice versa. Through a combination of assigned readings, film screenings, site visits etc. we will critically examine the making of documentary and ethnographic media. What has been the history of photography, sound-recording and film within the discipline? Which theoretical frameworks informed anthropologists behind the camera? And how did media made by non-anthropologists influence ethnography? In answering these questions, we will discuss resultant practices of sound and image-making such as salvaging, categorization, surveillance, erasure etc. We will also consider how the very material used in creating these media e.g. Kodachrome film stock and Shirley cards, wet plates, shellac records etc. impacted framings of “the self” and “the other.”
