Photography, Ethnography and Representation - Research Seminar in Anthropology of Material and Visual Culture - Detailseite

This course critically addresses critical topics in material and visual culture studies through applied museum research. Through empirical cases of visual Orientalism, the course will explore representational practices, power relations and inter-imperial histories. Working within an applied context with dr. Hanin Hannouch, Curator for Analog and Digital Media at the Weltmuseum Wien, and the visual artist Ilit Azoulay, the student group will develop research-based perspectives on the Weltmuseum collection of Middle Eastern photography. The goal of the project is to reanimate a photographic collection as a critical resource for reframing visual culture in the museum. Through museum and art collaboration, the students will test the potential of disrupting and unlearning historical legacies.

The block seminar with deploy a range of methods drawn from critical heritage studies, social anthropology, art history, artistic research, and curatorial studies. The classes will provide applied skills in collection research ranging from biographical approaches to discourse analysis and decolonial archival methodologies to develop the participants’ historical, ethnographic, and museum research skills. Students will be encouraged to work in a range of hybrid settings between the university, the artist’s studio, and the museum’s digital archive to develop their individual research and contribute to a forthcoming, wider curatorial and artistic intervention in the museum.

The seminar will be in English as will be the readings. However, students are welcome to speak German in class as well as submit their course requirements as well as their MAPs in German. Lecture slides and notes will be available to course participants.                

Students are encouraged to contact the lecturer about additional learning needs: Magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.de

Abu-Lughod, L. (2016). The Muslim woman: The power of images and the danger of pity. In Everyday Women's and Gender Studies (pp. 46-54). Routledge.

Banks, M., & Vokes, R. (2010). Introduction: anthropology, photography and the archive. History and Anthropology, 21(4), 337-349.

Çelik, Z., & Eldem, E. (Eds.). (2015). Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914. Koç University Press.

Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography. Sage.

Pinney, C. and Driessens, J. A. (2003). Photography's other histories. Duke University Press.

Roberts, M. (2015). Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and nineteenth-century visual culture. Univ of California Press.

Sheehi, S. (2021). The Arab Imago. In The Arab Imago. Princeton University Press.

Todorova, M. (2009). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford University Press.

Walton, J. F. (2019). Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies. History and anthropology, 30(4), 353-365.

Participation in the first class is required to join the course.