P03 Visual anthropology in the New World society

The rapid expansion of visual anthropology has evolved through new social networking technologies, which have contributed to the widening of the ethnographic scope, but at the same time, limiting ethnographic film-making to a technique without a substantiated anthropological vision or theoretical aim, raising the question of relevance of contemporary anthropology to the rapid changes in world history. Furthermore, the visual turn inwards, towards subjectivity and self-reflection as the new metaphysics of anthropology, unearthed old methodological issues regarding representation and interpretation, manifested in the widening gap between anthropological theory and ethnographic practice (Asad 1973, Bourdieu 1977, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Grimshaw and Hart 1996, et al). This raises further questions regarding the ethnographic authority in respect to realism and the ethnographer’s presence in the field (Foster 1990, Grimshaw 2001, et al). Since visual anthropology has lost its ‘objective’ claim to reality, which has been traditionally the source of anthropological authority, where does this leave our discipline, particularly in relation to the current changes in world history? Furthermore, how and where are the boundaries of visual anthropology defined in relation to art film-making and the avant-garde, and how can visual anthropologists reclaim their ethnographic authority? This panel invites papers that will contribute to the investigation of the boundaries between visual anthropology and visual arts, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and on the other, by reexamining their historical and social relevance to world history. The disinterested eye: a subjective return to Kant's universal vision Paper authors: Michelangelo Paganopoulos (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Paper short abstract: This paper discusses observational cinema in relation to Kant's disinterested perspective in 'high' art and ocular-centrism, using comparatively extracts from Herb di Gioia and Flaherty, Gardner, Mulvey, and the MacDougalls. Paper long abstract: This paper focuses on the pure gaze of observational cinema and the notion of disinterestedness as the higher moral mean of recording and reflecting upon a subjective reconstruction of reality. As an ideal, the pure gaze is rooted to Kant's writings on judgement and the a priori feeling of beauty. However, as Bourdieu has noted, the pure gaze is in itself a product of history, rooted to an 'ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world' (1984). In this context, its 'innocence' (as in Grimshaw 2001) and invisibility cover its historical, ideological, and economic condition. This paper argues that the paradoxical perspective of the pure gaze echoes the historical predicament of anthropology and the ethnographic practice in the colonial and post-colonial context. It further raises questions over 'modernity' and 'science', particularly in respect to ocular-centrism as a form of ethnocentrism. By comparing the various appropriations of the Camera Eye in a number of ethnographic films, the paper returns to Kant's Copernican vision (Hart 2003) as the means of re-evaluating observational cinema in respect to the loss of an anthropological vision in a highly professionalized and indifferent academic world.