The Image of Ethnography: The Use of Photography in Fieldwork

• Autor(a) principal: Eleder Piñeiro Aguiar
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Carlos Diz
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: spa
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.36367/ntqr.9.2021.355-363
• topic: Visual Anthropology; Image; Culture; Otherness; Antropología Visual; Imagen; Cultura; Otredad

In this essay we expose a relationship between images and anthropological theory that responds to some contemporary debates in social anthropology, focusing on the so-called crisis of ethnographic authority. We understand that such an analysis contributes to the discussion on the ethical and epistemological commitment of fieldwork. Our main objective is to discuss various historical approaches to fieldwork through the use of images, interrogating the relationship between the use of photography in research and the image of ethnography as method and practice. Through the interpretative-hermeneutic analysis of various photographs and images from classic anthropological texts, we propose, secondly, to clarify the relations of identity/alterity and the repercussions that anthropology has had in understanding the "other," understanding this relation as an ethical-political relation, as well as a scientific-epistemological one. The results allow us to observe, through these images, how the death of the author and the crisis of classical ethnographic fieldwork generate new ways of understanding reality that entail an invention, an emotion and an ethnographic imagination different and in line with the new times. It is in that sense that we propose our concept of ethnographic visual blur, opening ourselves to new theoretical-methodological debates, underlining the potential of visual anthropology, and decentring and pluralising our research gaze. In conclusion, this work criticises any essentialism, remarking that there is no such thing as a pure gaze and that all research is vulnerable to the gaze of others.