This text brings together a collection of essays by leading anthropologists, covering an entire range of visual representation and including discussions on the anthropology of art, the study of landscape, and the history of anthropology.

This text brings together a collection of essays by leading anthropologists, covering an entire range of visual representation and including discussions on the anthropology of art, the study of landscape, and the history of anthropology.

This bold agenda-setting title continues to spearhead interdisciplinary, multisensory research into experience, knowledge and practice. Drawing on an explosion of new, cutting edge research Sarah Pink uses real world examples to bring this innovative area of study to life. She encourages us to challenge, revise and rethink core components of ethnography including interviews, participant observation and doing research in a digital world. The book provides an important framework for thinking about sensory ethnography stressing the numerous ways that smell, taste, touch and vision can be interconnected and interrelated within research. Bursting with practical advice on how to effectively conduct and share sensory ethnography this is an important, original book, relevant to all branches of social sciences and humanities.

There has been an explosion of interest in visual culture - coming largely from work in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies and while there are a number of practical and technical manuals available for film, photographic and other visual media, there is a dearth of writing that combines both the practical and the technical. This book redresses this with a balanced approach that is written primarily for students in the social sciences who wish to use visual materials in the course of empirical, qualitative field research. It should also be of interest to experienced researchers who wish to expand their methodological approaches.

There has been an explosion of interest in visual culture - coming largely from work in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies and while there are a number of practical and technical manuals available for film, photographic and other visual media, there is a dearth of writing that combines both the practical and the technical. This book redresses this with a balanced approach that is written primarily for students in the social sciences who wish to use visual materials in the course of empirical, qualitative field research. It should also be of interest to experienced researchers who wish to expand their methodological approaches. Visual methods provides empirical approaches to both image creation and image analysis, drawing on a wide range of examples: from research conducted on Egyptian television soap opera, to the sale of ethnographic photographs in London auction houses, to pornographic images on the Web. New technologies are also included, with image digitization and computer-based multimedia extensively covered. There are sections on using film and photographic archives, and useful practical advice on publishing and presenting the results of visual research. Marcus Banks stresses the material nature of visual media, as objects that are entangled in social relations and argues for a humanistic, engaged and reflexive approach to social research. This book will be an indispensable guide for the use and study of social images.

For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.

The sociology of art is now an established sub-discipline of sociology. But little work has been done to explore the implications not of society on art, but of art on the nature and principles of sociology itself. Vision and Society explores the ways in which art (here mainly understood as visual art) structures in fundamental ways the constitution of society, the relations between societies and the ways in which society and culture should be theorized. Building initially on an unfulfilled project by the French sociologist of art Nathalie Heinich to derive a sociology from art, this book pushes this idea in unconventional directions. Rethinking the relationships between the study of art and the study of sociology and anthropology, this book explores how this rethinking might impact sociological theory in general, and certain aspects of it in particular – especially the study of social movements, social change, the urban, the constitution of space and the ways in which human social relationships are mediated and expressed.