Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology: Anthropology of Media and Visual Culture
In this specialisation we are interested in the ways in which images, sounds, objects, and more abstract forms of ‘information’ circulate and shape perception and experience.
This specialisation brings together subfields such as the Anthropology of Media, Visual Anthropology and Material Culture studies. It explores questions regarding the circulation of media, objects and technologies, the economic and political infrastructures and conditions thereof, their inflection within everyday life worlds, and the ideological understandings of diverse forms and processes that turn them into one thing in one place and something different in another. We are interested in the ways in which images, sounds, objects, and more abstract forms of ‘information’ circulate and shape perception and experience.
How do media form part and parcel of social movements and cultural and political practice, including that of today’s heritage politics? What role do new, allegedly democratizing, media technologies play in providing access to some while excluding others? What kind of ‘worlds’ are conjured via commodity displays in malls, museums and on internet sites? Of interest, too, are the publics called forth by diverse mediations as well as the constraints—ideological, cultural, political, economic, financial, governmental, technological—that contour the possibilities and effects of such forms in particular places and times.