Publications of the Area of Visual Anthropology

This volume brings together the results and research advances carried out within the framework of the UBACyT 20020170200180BA project of the Visual Anthropology Department of the University of Buenos Aires. This project takes up the advances of its predecessor to address the analysis of the relationship between images, media and the body. Although the chapters compiled here address different themes, they are united by a working hypothesis that maintains that the current “virtual world” is presented to us as a place where images remain linked to the body, and that makes it evident that the body continues to be the place of images. Although the much-talked-about disembodiment confronts us with new carrier media, which offer users experiences that can only be with their own body, medial (digital) disembodiment, instead of erasing the body, places it at the center of their experience.

Download

Study guide for the subject Art and Culture of the Master's Degree in Heritage and Culture in Colonial South America. University of Buenos Aires. Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.

Download

Carmen Guarini

Visual Anthropology of Absence is an insistent exercise on memory, a territory where both visual anthropology and cinema meet. The essays that make up this volume understand that memory is work, time and body. They expose the making of a visual practice that is aware that the image belongs to a universe whose own logic is crossed by time, by the fragment, by the fleeting threads that fuse these mobile pieces, which can be activated or erased by the forces of oblivion. An aesthetic of the fragmentary belongs to memory, just as it does to cinema or personal memory.

Editorial: SANS SOLEIL EDICIONES ARGENTINA
Paginas: 188
Edición: 2017
ISBN 9789873923104

Buy

This volume brings together the research papers presented at the III Anthropology and Image Conference held in September 2014 at the Juan B. Ambrosetti Ethnographic Museum in Buenos Aires and organized each year by the Visual Anthropology Department (AAV) of the Institute of Anthropological Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. The decision to convene this meeting annually responds to the need to advance in the development of approaches that propose updated perspectives for the study of the image from anthropology and in open dialogue with other disciplines such as Art History.
Este volumen recopila una serie de trabajos que se proponen el análisis de las imagen como objeto de reflexión antropológica.

This volume brings together the research papers presented within the framework of the II Anthropology and Image Conference, organized each year by the Visual Anthropology Area (AAV) of the Institute of Anthropological Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. The decision to convene this meeting annually responds to the need to advance in the development of approaches that propose updated perspectives for the study of the image, from anthropology and in open dialogue with other disciplines such as Art History.

The image has been and continues to be one of the most slippery terrains within the social sciences and humanities. The history of its conceptual confusions, marked by the dominant theories of each era or academic fashions, not to mention the extensive debate within the field of philosophy, have turned it into one of the great challenges for the humanities disciplines. Curiously, the difficulty of addressing it is accompanied by a growing use by the social disciplines as well as by its proliferation, boosted by digital media.

The book is organized in two parts. The first compiles a series of works that propose diverse approaches, both from the field of visual anthropology and image, and were presented in the framework of the II Jornadas de Antropología e Imagen (2nd Conference on Anthropology and Image) held in September 2013 at the Museo Etnográfico Juan B. Ambrosetti in the city of Buenos Aires, as well as in the Working Group coordinated by the AAV at the VII Jornadas Santiago Wallace de Investigación en Antropología Social (7th Santiago Wallace Conference on Social Anthropology), November 27-29, 2013.

The second part is based on a series of reflections on the documentary El etnógrafo (2012) by Ulises Rosell, through studies that address, from different perspectives, the critique of the representation of cultural stereotypes of otherness. The image is not independent of the conditions of production of knowledge, but rather forms part of processes that allow the construction of both an image and relationships involving researchers, filmed subjects and audiences. The image is a dimension of meaning that forces us to investigate its forms of production, its relationship with thought, reception, gaze, interaction with filmed subjects or the anthropologist's own experience.

This first volume seeks to initiate a path of reflection on the image, understood not only as a methodology but also as an experience whose definition cannot be other than anthropological.

Can images provoke an abdication? Do they have the power to establish or overthrow monarchies through their existence and dissemination? Images are powerful artifacts, difficult to handle and capable of inspiring the most diverse reactions in people. Throughout history, rulers, perfectly aware of this, have managed to master the production of a visual culture skillfully constructed to modulate thought, create wars or unite a nation. However, in the era of Visual Culture 2.0, the rules of the game have changed and citizens can produce, distribute and consume photographs generating reactions never before imagined. The latest generation of mobile phones or smartphones, social networks, the logic of Web 2.0, instant messaging applications, etc., draw the broadest lines of new times in which the image takes on a prominent place.
Under these premises, this book will delve into the complex relationship that has always linked images to the monarchy. Taking as a starting point the famous photograph of King Juan Carlos I hunting in Botswana, an investigation is initiated in which the past and the present are intertwined, showing the survival of the symbolic gestures that define royalty. As art historian Hans Belting would say, “images are nomads of their media”, jumping from one to another through time and adopting a different form in each case to define a visual genealogy that reaches to our days. This unique iconographic atlas will reveal many of the controversies that have arisen around this institution in the form of satires, defamations, iconoclasms, censorship… and that today question its legitimacy in a world dominated by digital images.