Image-Based Research

A sourcebook for qualitative researchers. (1998). Jon Prosser (Ed.). Bristol, PA: Falmer Press.

Visual Anthropology: Image, Object and Interpretation (Marcus Banks, 9-23)
"It is the materiality of the visual that allows us to group together a diverse range of human activities and representational strategies under the banner of visual anthropology and to treat them as visual systems" (p. 12).

An Argument for Visual Sociology (Douglas Harper, 24-41)
Finding roots of visual sociology in visual ethnography and documentary photography, Harper asserts that new ethnography, in other words, post-modern ethnography, is partial true rather than complete document, thus ethnographic knowledge should bring the reader to the cultural world rather than report on it from a distance. He supports his argument with statements written by Marcus and Fischer (Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 1987, p. 135):

"Post-modern ethnography...does not move toward abstraction, away from life, but back to experience. It aims not to foster the growth of knowledge but to restructure experience; not to understand objective reality, for that is already established by common sense, nor to explain how we understand, for tha is impossible, but to reassimilate, to reintegrate the self in society and to restructure the conduct of everyday life"(quoted on page 31).

Film-making and Ethnographic Research (Paul Henley, 42-59)
According to Henley, those who deny the objectivity of cinematographic images see "the camera as a catalyst, provoking events, situations and relationships that are revealing precisely because of their atypicality" and "as the medium of a trance-like state whereby the film-maker becomes fully engaged in the lives of the films' protagonists and thereby achieves an understanding that is inaccessible to those who insist on remaining neutral and distant" (p. 43, quoted from Rouch).

Henley states that Rouch, who regarded Flaherty and Vertov as "the inspired precursors of ethnographic film-making", with Flaherty, shared a commitment to active participation with the protagonists in the creating of his films and fictionalization of their lives; with Vertov, shared a belief in the camera as a means of insight beyond everyday observable reality. Grounding in these influences, Rouch introduced documentary conventions into ethnographic documentation.

Henley finds the difficulty of theorizing documentary film in anthropology in film's communicative nature: while the dominant theoretical paradigms were grounded in generalization and abstraction until 1980s, film is concrete and particular such that it is most effective at representing the performative aspects of culture defined in the broadest sense, such as political events, religious rituals, symbolic aspects of everyday life. Recent the paradigmatic change from the positivist tradition to interpretative approaches in anthropology shed light on roles of ethnographic film-making to its strengths, Henley argues. In this paradigm, social life is not a mere expression of underlying structure but idiosyncratic and contingent to day-to-day basis of social performances of many kinds. Thus, Henley writes, "Ethnographic description thus becomes a process of describing and elucidating these performances rather than demonstrating their function or role in an abstract system" (p.51). He elaborates the strength of this shift in emphasis from general schemas to the understanding particular cases: "when greater emphasis is laid on the individual ethnographic case, contextualization can emerge from within the film, often in the form of comments made by the protagonists themselves. Over time, such comments will retain their cultural integrity and be less vulnerable to fluctuations in theoretical fashion" (p. 51).

Henley traces ethnographic film-making that involves protagonists' participation to the anthropologists at the University of Philadelphia who gave cameras to Navajo Indians and inner city teenagers in 1960s (Worth & Adair, 1972, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology). Henley notes that whereas these early experiments were motivated exclusively by academic research interests, recent collaborative ventures between researchers and indigenous film-makers tend to be more political and ask social justice.

The Status of Image-Based Research (Jon Prosser, 97-112)
Prosser overviews this article by briefing the history of visual anthropology and visual anthropology, where he finds 'fragmentation' as the root cause of its limited status in academia. He argues that fragmentation represents part of the shifting landscape of contemporary qualitative research. He quotes Ruby's penetrative argument about the reason for the peripheral status of visual anthropology:

When engaged in ethnography, the researcher must convert the complex experience of field work to words in a notebook and then transform those words onto other words shifted through analytic methods and theories. This logocentric approach to understanding denies much of the multisensory experience of trying to know another culture. The promise of visual anthropology is that it might provide an alternative way of perceiving culture-perception constructed through the lens (1996, Visual Anthropology, in D. Levinson and M. Ember (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, vol. 4, 1345-51. NY: Henry Holt and Co.)

To him, reflexivity attempts to reveal explicitly the process by which data and finding were produced. His criticism lies in that reflexivity, of which the emphasis is given to the process, is only partial in many cases: for example, The Ax Fight (1975), misses reflexive insights of inter-personal reactivity, he mentions. [He points out a very important aspect of the discourse of reflexivity, which has been so much formalistic. What about the insights of the researcher or the researched? These should be explored.]