ANTH 3034 - Visual and Media Anthropology

This course is about visual representations of culture and cultural difference. It looks at a wide variety of visual media, including art, photography, film, video, and digital technologies, to explore the ways in which these shape both the perception, and the experience, of cultural difference. Throughout the course, an emphasis is placed on the inherent power of images: Their ability to shape our own cultural experiences, to cast cultural 'others' in particular ways, and to act as a mode of resisting other people's stereotypes. In pursuit of these ideas, a particular focus is placed on so-called ethnographic 'contact zones', those domains in which different cultural groups most frequently come into contact with each other. It is in these zones - which include such diverse settings as colonial frontiers, international film festivals and tourist encounters - that groups most frequently engage in constructing visual images of both themselves, and cultural others.