Visual psychological anthropology is informed by two streams of thought and practice: the visual methods of popular documentary and ethnographic film heritage, which have sometimes been quite disparate, and the theory and methods of anthropology—specifically, the developments of the subdiscipline of psychological anthropology. Yet these streams have only occasionally flowed together. In the rich history of innovative methods and techniques employed by documentary filmmakers there is little direct engagement with the findings of psychological anthropology. This is unfortunate. Today, most people are navigating a multimedia landscape of written text, audio, video, and interactive content. Moving images are now a ubiquitous and expected part of information sharing, and their impact cannot be understated. It will be argued in this book that psychological anthropology, which aims to provide a contextualized, nuanced, and in-depth view of human experience, can benefit from an engagement with visual methods. This engagement could be helpful in meeting the goal codified in the American Anthropological Association’s “Statement of Purpose” which promotes “the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems.”

The digital revolution and the profound changes in how information is accessed and understood point to the increasing salience of visual forms of narrative and storytelling. As David MacDougall noted, “images and written texts not only tell us things differently, they tell us different things” (1998, 257). By reviewing the different historical, theoretical, and technological movements that have led to the present opportunity for a visual psychological anthropology, it becomes clear that visual psychological anthropology offers a synergistic practice that extends the toolkit of psychological anthropologists and fulfills the goals of their discipline while offering an engaged approach toward ethnographic film.

1 Historical Precedents and Prospects for a Visual Psychological Anthropology: A Review of Relevant Filmography

There are numerous excellent works describing and analyzing the history of ethnographic film (Asch et al. 1973; Barbash and Taylor 1997; Heider 1976; Rony 1996). This section overviews and explores the history of ethnographic films and related research with an orientation relevant to the concerns and domains of visual psychological anthropology.

In the realm of popular cinema, before the genre of ethnographic film was even conceptualized, there were early precedents for making films “about culture”—indeed, some have drawn direct parallels between the histories of early film and early ethnography, which shared overlapping concerns and even field practices despite not being in direct communication with one another (Ruby 1980). The silent film Nanook of the North (Flaherty 1922), now universally recognized as one of the first ethnographic or documentary films, was produced for a popular audience and achieved commercial success. Other films from the dawn of the “talky” era were made with the technical and narrative cinematic conventions of the time. For example, Legong, Dance of the Virgins (De la Falaise 1935) was shot on location in Bali with an entirely native cast by one of the most well-known Hollywood cinematographers of that era, Howard Green. The film extensively recorded Balinese ritual and social activities, showcasing several dance performances and elements of betrothal and funerary customs. At the time of its release, it was praised for including many details of anthropological interest, yet the character-driven story, which revolved around a romantic love triangle, was scripted.

During the years following these early experiments, concurrent with the explosion of film for news, entertainment, and educational purposes, interest in the documentation and representation of “culture,” or at least the depiction of what was believed to be the cultural “other” continued. Colonial-era newsreels highlighted popular conceptions of “the native.” There were more evocative visual explorations of non-Western settings, such as the beautifully shot Grass (Cooper and Schoedsack 1925), which depicted transhumance migration in what-is-now Iran. There were “adventure” films depicting Western explorers in foreign lands, such as the technically groundbreaking, visually amazing and profound The Epic of Everest (Noel 1927) portraying the tragic Mallory and Irvine expedition of the 1920s. During the same period, adventurer couple Martin and Osa Johnson contributed to the popular allure of the “exotic savage” by showing their footage of peoples during their travels around the world, from Borneo to Africa, depicting them as headhunters and cannibals (Talley 1937).

In the years after these early experiments in documentary film in non-Western settings, there was an explosion of visual forms of representation. The documentary form was used for many purposes, such as propaganda in the service of nation states, as the massive amount of material produced on all sides during World War II attests to. Many documentaries made for education and entertainment purposes were set in “foreign lands” and were in the service of multiple agendas of colonialism, imperialism, and corporate promotion. Others were made for sheer visual spectacle, such as the first films in the “exploitation” or shockumentary genre. Of these, the memorable Mondo Cane (“A Dog’s World” [Jacopetti et al. 1962]) featured a montage of graphic footage collected across the globe—from drunken Germans to Taiwanese butchering dogs to cargo cults in the Pacific to bull fights in Portugal—juxtaposed for prime shock value.

Anthropologists had been using visual methods since the late 1800s, graphically documenting dress, physical behavior, art, textiles, and vernacular architecture—and more problematically race and ethnicity (Rony 1996)—with drawing, photography, and film (Banks and Ruby 2011; Muybridge 1979; Edwards 2001). “Salvage ethnography”(Gruber 1970; Haddon et al. 1901) in particular sought to collect a visual and material archive of lifeways and aesthetic culture that were feared to be lost soon, such as Edward Curtis’s massive, if problematic, documentation of Native American societies (Curtis and Adam 2014; Curtis and Hodge 1970). Yet, for decades, for the most part, anthropologists did not make films. The few that did sought to create a supposedly “neutral” depiction of the culture in which the anthropologist/filmmaker was embedded. Ethnographic film further distinguished itself from commercial film of this era by presenting some exegesis and analysis, rather than blatantly exoticizing or exploiting its subjects, as the colonialist project had. Some of these films were relevant to psychological anthropology, whether or not consciously identifying as such. A brief review of some of the most significant projects follows.

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson went to Bali in the mid-1930s to explore (Curtis and Adam 2014; Curtis and Hodge 1970) among other things the “configuration” (Erickson et al. 2013) of Balinese culture, the relation of Balinese child socialization to adult “character” (Jensen and Suryani 1992), and the relationship of Balinese cultural practices to the development of a “schizoid character.” As part of their methodology, they chose to experiment with emergent photographic and film technologies, becoming some of the first ethnographers to explicitly integrate visual and psychological anthropology. They produced both monographs and films. Their main monograph, “Balinese Character,” though today somewhat underutilized and perhaps underappreciated, was groundbreaking in its ethnographic description and analysis paired side by side with photographs illustrating particular subjects and domains. They also made a series of influential films: Trance and Dance in Bali (1952), Bathing Babies in Three Cultures (1954), and Karba’s First Years (1950). Mead became an advocate for integrating visual approaches into psychological anthropology proper. This pioneering work is still useful for teaching anthropology and anthropological methods, though some of the overarching conclusions of the research (Jensen and Suryani 1992) and films (Rony 2006) have been roundly criticized.

While not an anthropologist, Maya Deren, the avant-garde filmmaker and artist, explored her interests in culture and subjective psychology by making films about voodoo trance dancers in Haiti. She was inspired by Bateson’s Bali material, and her Guggenheim grant renewal called for a “cross-cultural fugue” of visual productions (Deren and Bateson 1980) between Bali and Haiti. Deren took her first trip to Haiti in 1947, and over the course of six years took multiple trips to complete her ethnographic film on ritual possession, The Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953). As an early film exploration of the self and personality in relation to possession, alternative states of consciousness, and their cultural contexts, this film is quite relevant to psychological anthropology’s interests (Nichols and Deren 2001).

Subsequent to Mead, Bateson, and Deren, and following a dearth of ethnographic films relevant to psychological anthropology in the 1940s–1950s, three American filmmakers stand out as giants of ethnographic film: John Marshall, Timothy Asch, and Robert Gardner. Marshall’s work was carried out primarily with the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari, for a remarkable fifty years (1951–2002). Over the span of Asch’s noteworthy career, he most famously collaborated with Napoleon Chagnon in the Amazon (The Yanomamo Series, 1968–1971) and Linda Connor in Indonesia (the Jero Tapakan series, 1979–1983). Asch’s integration of ethnographic films with supplemental teaching materials is a useful pedagogical model. Gardner’s groundbreaking and evocative films about the Dani in highland New Guinea (Dead Birds, 1963), the Nuer in Sudan (The Nuer, 1971), the Hamar of Ethiopia (Rivers of Sand, 1973), and the city of Benares, India (Forest of Bliss, 1986) exposed several generations of college students to a diverse range of topics and cultures.

While Marshall, Asch, and Gardner’s foundational works in visual anthropology were not explicitly made under the rubric of psychological anthropology, there are parallels in their methodology and main concerns. For example, Marshall and Asch initially aimed to capture sequences of spontaneous interactions, and tried to film “integral” or “real” events from their natural beginning to their natural conclusion without what they considered to be disruption from non-essential editing (Connor et al. 1986; Marshall 1993; Asch 1979). This “sequence” method aimed to present “whole single units of behavior” which anthropologists could then study (Asch et al. 1973). Such a focus on daily life and routines connects well with basic tenets of psychological anthropology methodology, such as “ecocultural pathways of development” (Weisner 2002).

The films of all three anthropologists explored core issues for psychological anthropology. Marshall was fascinated by the intersection of personal experience with history, political economy, and cultural change, both in his shorter studies (e.g., N!ai, Story of a!Kung Woman [1980]) and in his deeply moving six-hour magnum opus A Kalahari Family (1951–2002). The latter remains a unique contribution to ethnographic film because of its longitudinal focus on one family transitioning from subsistence family-level hunting and gathering to forced resettlement and integration into state-level society. All of the filmmakers were interested in interpersonal conflict (e.g., Asch’s The Ax Fight [1975]), healing, and extraordinary states of consciousness, evident in Marshall’s Num Tchai: The Ceremonial Dance of the !Kung Bushmen (1969b) and A Curing Ceremony (1969a); Asch’s Jero Tapakan series and several of his Yanamamo films; and Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1969a). All the filmmakers produced work in classic anthropological areas of gender, kinship, child development, ritual life, and cosmology (Connor et al. 1979–1983, 1981, 1986; Fox et al. 1989; Lewis et al. 1992; Gardner 1971, 1974; Marshall 1969b, 1980).

Although the ethnographic films of Marshall, Asch, and Gardner offered breadth and depth, disciplinary concerns with “visual evidence” often precluded a more intimate—and, some might argue, accurate—look into their subjects’ internal worlds. By the mid-1970s, ethnographic film was exploring elements of narrative and artistry outside of purportedly “scientific” documentation (Banks 2001; Banks and Ruby 2011); however, these were often critiqued as too subjective, raising debate over what criteria of content, structure, and intent needed to be fulfilled in order to be appropriately considered “ethnographic” (Ruby 1975; Heider 1976). Gardner, the most experimental of the three, was criticized for emphasizing the aesthetic, sensory, and symbolic aspects of his work rather than the lived realities of the people in his films (e.g., Ruby 1993).

Responding in part to these critiques, Asch came to question the objectivity of events and grew interested in his subjects’ interiority; by the time he made his later film Jero Tapakan: Stories from the Life of a Balinese Healer (1986), he was more concerned with the respondent’s use of cultural narrative conventions than in the factual validity of her autobiography (Acciaioli 2003).

Marshall, too, exhibited a move toward individual subjectivity through the course of his filmmaking career. It was apparent that he was concerned with experiential or subjective aspects of Ju/'hoansi individuality from the beginning; the first film he released, The Hunters (1957), focuses on the leader of the small band of bushmen the Marshall family had been working with, a man by the name of Tsoma Tsamko, who would ultimately reappear multiple times in other films and become the chief protagonist of his magnum opus, as well as his good friend. In this early film, while much of the voice-over Marshall wrote focuses on the landscape, ecological, and cultural contexts of the giraffe hunt (the ostensible raison d’être of the film), it also renders Tsoma’s experiences and those of his small band of hunters, while refraining, unlike Gardner in Dead Birds (1963), from intuiting what the main characters are thinking. Decades later, Marshall moved beyond voice-over to include the voices of his subjects. He interviewed Tsoma about that hunt in 1953 on camera. Tsoma, now an older man, beautifully recollected and narrated the hunt, including reflexive elements about Marshall’s behavior and the experience of shooting it. Marshall artfully interwove this new narration into the original film to render a fully fleshed-out, complex, relationally and reflexively presented account of an individual (A Kalahari Family [1951–2002]).

After the invention of portable 16-mm cameras with sync sound in the early 1960s, which allowed for greater freedom and spontaneity in filmmaking, documentarians explored issues of relevance to psychological anthropology in innovative ways. In the 1960s and 1970s in North America, filmmakers explored Direct Cinema, an observational style fascinated with the subjective nature of truth. Allan King filmed “actuality dramas” (Feldman 2002) featuring content from therapies for emotionally disturbed children (Warrendale [1967]) as well as the psychodynamic intricacies of married life (A Married Couple [1969]). D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and Albert and David Maysles created dynamic, “fly on the wall,” “Direct Cinema” films on politics such as Primary (1960) and Crisis (1963), analyzed the social context for emerging musical trends in films such as Don’t Look Back (1967) and Gimme Shelter (1970), and portrayed other aspects of contemporary American life. The Direct Cinema approach was certainly in line with early ethnographic filmmakers, such as Margaret Mead, who emphasized the importance of an unobtrusive “objective” approach, where the camera was merely documenting factual reality.

In related developments, Barbara Kopple, who worked for the Maysles, captured the personal toll of corrupt corporate policy on the lives of mine workers in Harlan County, USA (1976). Frederick Wiseman captured human behavior in institutional settings such as welfare offices (Welfare [1975]), schools (High School [1968]), and most relevant for this volume, a hospital for the criminally insane in Titicut Follies (1967)—interestingly enough shot by John Marshall. An American Family (1973) was groundbreaking when aired on public television, documenting the personal life of a California family as they negotiated divorce and their son’s homosexuality. Across different contexts, the subjective and experiential focus of Direct Cinema proved a useful model for capturing “life as lived” (Bruner 1984, 7).

Outside of North America, other notable filmmakers were investigating similar ideas and topics. From France, Louis Malle evocatively captured ritual life in India (Calcutta [1969]), and interestingly, applied the insight he gained from working in ethnographic film to his fiction films. Paralleling the rise of French New Wave Cinema and the American Direct Cinema approach were Jean Rouch’s experiments with Cinema Verité and “Ethnofictions” (Stoller 1992; Henley 2010), which touched on topics relevant to psychological anthropology, from trance and possession (Les maitres fous [1954]) to autobiography (Moi , un noir [1968]) to the complexities of memory and daily and work routines in his masterpiece “Chronicle of a Summer” (Chronique d’un été [Rouch and Morin 1961]). In Japan, Kazuo Hara directed intimate documentaries about physical disability (Goodbye CP [1972]), obsessive love (Extreme Private Eros: Love Song [1974]), and the lingering traumas of war (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On [1987]).

The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in genres of “new autobiography” (Renov 1989) and “experimental ethnography” (Russell 1999). Following an earlier venture by Saul Worth and John Adair, who taught filmmaking techniques to a group of Navajo in order to explore film’s potential to reveal an indigenous structuring of reality free from the “unconscious domination” of the anthropologist (Worth and Adair 1972), these genres further blurred the lines between documentary, storytelling, and ethnography. While some of these films used post-modern methods to critique colonialist ethnography rather than advancing psychological anthropology per se, their overarching investment in indigenous and transnational viewpoints opened new avenues for representing unique subjectivities (Behar 1993). In parallel, the advent of inexpensive digital technology in the late 1990s and early 2000s led to an explosion of mainstream personal documentaries (Borshay Liem 2000; Poeuv 2008; Orgeron and Orgeron 2007), some of which could also crossover as ethnographic film (MacDonald 2013), such as Ross McElwee’s Time Indefinite (1993).

The filmmakers discussed above were, to variable degrees, influenced by methodologies or insights derived from anthropology theory and practice, whether or not these were drawn from psychological anthropology per se. Yet, many contemporary psychological anthropologists seem relatively unaware of the contributions of these different filmmakers to anthropology and, other than showing a few ethnographic films in their classes, rarely reference or utilize this body of work in their own studies. But this may be changing.

In the past fifteen years, there has been a growth of interest in film approaches in anthropology, largely following the technological advances in shooting and editing technologies. Cameras have gotten smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more powerful. The 4 K video cameras now taken for granted on a $200-smart phone would have cost tens of thousands of dollars even five years ago and would not have been technologically possible ten years ago. Video editing systems, restricted to professional editors and costing $100,000 or more twenty years ago, now come included not only in laptop and desktop computers, but also in tablets and smart phones. These advances over the past few years, which cut the costs of production by many multiples, have made filmmaking much more affordable. However, few psychological anthropologists are making films, because training and education in the field have not kept pace with these technological advances, and many are perhaps unaware of the benefits of a visual approach. There are meaningful reasons for this deferment, and yet, the time has come to rethink these and orient toward visual methods.

2 Psychological Anthropology’s Move Toward Subjectivity

Parallel to these developments in methods and approaches in ethnographic film are the changes in psychological anthropology proper. One of the directions in the last several decades in the history of the field has been a movement toward subjectivity, phenomenology, experientialism, and in a more contemporary turn of phrase, “what is at stake,” in the ethnographic enterprise and, more specifically, in the understandings and perceptions of the main form of “data,” which is a complex human being in a specific cultural setting.

When looking at the understanding and representation of “subjects” in the differing decades of psychological anthropology’s history, what is noticeable in the early decades, from the 1930s to 1970s, is the lack of a particular subject as an individual in a cultural setting. Certainly in the work of Mead, Dubois, Kardiner, and even Irving Hallowell (Mead 2001; Bateson and Mead 1942; Du Bois et al. 1944, Kardiner and Linton 1974; Hallowell 1955), there are rarely individuals’ portraits or voices per se, just representatives of a “modal personality” or its opposite, the “deviant.” With the discarding of the culture and personality movement, configurationalism and national character studies, and the subsequent rise of more behaviorally oriented comparative approaches such as the Whiting’s psychocultural model (Whiting 1963), there remained a similar lack of individualized subjects, even in the form of textured case studies.

Since this foundational ethnographic fieldwork, psychological anthropologists have been free to move away from the broad theorizing of the earlier schools and develop a more specific and discrete focus on the subtle and textured complexities involved in the study of individual subjectivity. It is now rarer to find a contemporary ethnography or a psychological anthropology that doesn’t have textured and individualized accounts of specific subjects rather than more generalized, broader stroke depictions of cultural types, such as “The Javanese” or “The Balinese.” More recent psychological anthropology introduces us to individuals—Wikan’s Suriati, mourning her lover with a bright face (Wikan 1990); Crapanzano’s complex and disturbed character Tuhami (Crapanzano 1980); Biehl’s Catarina, creating a dictionary of personal meaning even though left abject in the zone of abandonment (Biehl 2005); or Behar’s raging but powerful street peddler, Esperanza (Behar 2003). Even anthropological work that is not strictly psychological per se is concerned with individual biography and subjectivity (see Chernoff’s books about Hawa the Ghanaian bar girl [2003, 2005] and more recently Michael Jackson’s work on migration, The Wherewithal of Life (2015)).

These ethnographies have helped to sow a fertile field, allowing for an ethnographic film to engage in similar exploration and analysis of individual subjectivity. It also created an audience primed to watch a film with such structure and direction, meaning psychological anthropologists can explore many directions and topical domains in their visual research and tell compelling stories to not only their colleagues but also the wider world. Without these developments, making films focused on individuals would be an unlikely, if not impossible, prospect. But in order for psychological anthropologists to move forward in their attempts to integrate their research with film, a number of key issues need to be addressed.

3 Issues Confronting a Visual Psychological Anthropology

Outside of visual anthropology proper, most anthropologists from the other subdisciplines have not tended to make films, and many even avoided visual methods of any kind. In his work “Iconophobia,” Taylor (1996) has tracked a history of distrust of the visual within the field, showing how anthropologists have often rejected visual methods of research presentation. One persistent argument is that film images are decontextualized and make totalizing decisions 1 for the viewer—foreclosing multiple interpretations rather than letting them come to their own conclusions, therefore becoming simplistically “thin” rather than appropriately complex and “thick” (e.g., Hastrup 1992).

The viability of ethnographic film, as a subfield of a more inclusive visual anthropology, continues to be debated within the field of anthropology, which is, as Margaret Mead noted, “a discipline of words” (Mead 1995). Take, for example, how most anthropologists present their data at conferences. While there is an increasing use of presentation software like PowerPoint or Keynote that allows for a visual component, many presentations involve reading papers. This can be seen most clearly at multidisciplinary conferences; when researchers from diverse disciplines such as neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, history, and anthropology come together, it is usually anthropologists who still maintain the practice of directly reading from a written document, often without any supporting visuals. If the piece is well written, evocative, and powerful, then this form of presentation can be profound. At the same time, anthropology should reconsider its elevation of the written word above all other modes of representation to integrating and raising the status of visual elements in respected research.

Anthropologists are generally aware of what the visual brings to data collection, analysis, and research presentation. However, visual forms of narrative and storytelling, as opposed to written ethnographies that accomplish the same goals, are generally not as well recognized. Yet different mediums influence the way stories can be discovered through fieldwork and the way anthropological research is presented. Film and photography can provide valuable counterpoints in certain kinds of visual, occupational, and material ethnography and have fairly long histories in these subfields. Since its inception, ethnographic film has historically been biased toward what David MacDougall calls “the filmable” (1992), documenting topics with an explicitly visual progression and appeal, from the mundane, such as a house construction (Heider’s Dani Houses [1974]), to the spectacular, such as a ritual warfare (Gardner’s Dead Birds [1963]).

The catalog of the best-known ethnographic film distributor, Documentary Educational Resources (DER) (http://www.der.org/), has very few films based on psychological anthropology. This is not to say that many of its films are irrelevant to the discipline; quite the contrary. For example, Kildea’s Celso and Cora intimately portrays a poor Filipino couple struggling to support themselves and their infant when the mother becomes depressed, thematically addressing the possible sequelae of structural violence in the form of mental illness. Identity, masculinity, and mourning are all explored in Hoskins’ beautiful film Horses of Life and Death (Hoskins 1991), shot on the island of Sumba in Eastern Indonesia. Transgenderism, ritual life, and possession are explored in Merrison’s Friends in High Places (Merrison 2001) on Nat Kadaw spirit mediums in Burma. Clearly, numerous filmmakers and anthropologists, while not self-identified specifically as psychological anthropologists, are making films relevant to the subdiscipline’s concerns. But these films are rarely utilized or referenced in contemporary practice in psychological anthropology.

The deferment of visual methods in psychological anthropology may be because its subject matter is by definition psychological, and therefore not thought of as being conducive to visual representation as material culture, art and performance (Fruzetti et al. 2005), ritual life (Getzels and Gordon 1985; Hoskins and Whitney 1991), or festivals (Willis 2009; Zemp 2001–2002) would be. Psychological anthropology often explores topics such as subjectivity and phenomenology, and other internal and intersubjective processes that are more challenging to portray on screen.

Out of the numerous topics psychological anthropology explores, mental illness in particular presents unique representational challenges in film regarding chronology, interiority, alternative states of consciousness, psychoanalytic domains such as defense mechanism and conflicts, and multiple vectors of difference. The experience of mental illness is significantly caught up in those aspects of experience that John Marshall called “reality-invisible content” (1993), that is, content not immediately visually apprehensible, including subjective states, hallucinations, flashbacks, memories, and subtle changes in perception or sensation (Csordas 2004; Hinton and Kirmayer 2013; Hollan and Wellankamp 1994; Jenkins and Barrett 2004; Kirmayer and Sartorius 2007; Luhrmann 2012). Perhaps paradoxically, these elements of experience do often have observable physical and behavioral counterparts—such as physical dysregulation or amplified affect—but these have made the visual representation of mental illness an even more sensitive issue. Representations of neuropsychiatric disorder and disability in the mainstream media, including both journalism and fiction film, have been well critiqued, with the general consensus that for the most part depictions have contributed to stigma by their mobilization of stereotype, myth, and misinformation (Anderson 2003; Klin and Nemish 2008; Wahl 1995).

One area where psychological anthropologists have utilized film is as a useful tool for raw data collection in the field. Visual methods are increasingly included in a fieldworker’s toolkit as a pneumonic and a source of data to be analyzed. With the new ubiquity and ease of video technology, even edited video footage—pieces that go beyond simple field notes and audio recordings—is now frequently used in accompaniment to all kinds of ethnographic research in many subfields, and there are a number of good recent texts providing instructions on how to do so (Marion and Crowder 2013; Barbash and Taylor 1997; Heider 1997; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009).

For example, visual methods are being used in the field to record interviews and other events being ethnographically observed, either in addition to or in lieu of written field notes. There are certainly some advantages to using film in this way. Filmmaking can enhance and advance the process of taking field notes since with film one can not only record complete interviews, but also visually capture the gestalt in which interviews took place, as well as other areas of interest in psychological anthropology such as parapraxes, body language, proxemics, kinesthetic, and eye gaze (Prost 2003). Indeed, some of the earliest footage shot by Muybridge (Muybridge et al. 2010) was used for postural and movement analysis in the late 1800s. The ability to visually record a respondent and take field notes about the footage later frees one up during the interview to focus on the respondent, rather than turning away and busily scribbling notes or going off in a corner and writing up observations.

When capturing data in the field, one of the earliest, and still relevant, debates regarding the use and utility of film in psychological anthropology is over how one views the camera—as a neutral observer or a subjective extension of the filmmaker’s perspective. In some ways, the purpose and application of film as understood by people like Margaret Mead—who was very clear that film could provide a rich, eminently descriptive part of a researcher’s armamentarium—typify a certain perspective on how visual “data” should be gathered, interpreted, and utilized. Her position, and the argument against it, can be seen clearly in an at-times contentious conversation between Mead and Bateson (Brand 1976), held long after their divorce and toward the end of both of their lives, as they discussed their Balinese material and debated how to use the camera as a research tool. Mead believed film data could be as objective and “scientific” as possible. In fact, she believed that unaltered footage, such as the kind you might get by setting up a tripod in the corner of a room, would provide the most accurate visual record, unbiased by what the filmmaker/anthropologist might “think” was happening. She believed that “artful” films were useless for research, whereas objective films were useful as “proof” for the claims and hypotheses of anthropologists that would withstand the test of time, as they were available to be examined and re-examined in light of new theoretical developments. She also believed such tripod footage could capture information that the anthropologist did not even know was important at the time of recording, hence revealing key insights when viewed at a future date by the filmmaker, team members, or other researchers.

Bateson held that it was impossible for any visual record to be “unaltered” by the subjectivity of the filmmaker/anthropologist, and therefore believed that “the photographic record should be an art form” (Brand 1976). He was a proponent of the hand-held, interactive, and “responsive” camera, arguing that the camera disconnected from the artful direction of the anthropologist/filmmaker was nothing but “a dead camera [that] sees nothing.”

To this day the basics of Mead and Bateson’s opposing positions remain operative, frequently echoed in critiques of “positivist” positions in visual ethnography that reject the idea that one “truth” of any situation exists, let alone is available to be captured on a video camera (Pink 2001; Ruby 1980) and the waning interest in the “accuracy” of data in favor of the situated perspective that data might illuminate (Holliday 2000). Congruent with the interpretivist and post-modern turn in anthropology, most contemporary cultural anthropologists would be in agreement with Bateson in terms of their approach to their written field notes, seeing these as an obvious extension of the anthropologist’s viewpoint. But when it comes to film, Bateson’s theoretical stance does not translate well, and due to the lack of exposure of most non-visual anthropologists, many would still agree with Mead’s position of the camera as a “naïve observer.” When many anthropologists approach the use and potentialities of film and video, they tend to use these forms essentially as further methods to “objectively” document what is happening, rather than as an expression of what they are subjectively framing and seeing. As has been noted in allied fields of social science, “Visual inquiry has for the large part failed to connect with the wider currents in social theory” which has meant there is a “widespread tendency to use visual materials… in a purely illustrative, archival, or documentary way rather than giving them a more analytic treatment” (Emmison and Smith as quoted in Pink 2001, 587). This disjunction can be rather puzzling and startling, and is most clearly evident in how people both write up field notes and utilize their recordings for that purpose.

Still, there are strengths and weaknesses to using film in the field. When filming, in the past one could not include any of the immediate reflections, personal thoughts, queries, or insights that emerge when writing up field notes, therefore video recordings could not supplant such notes (unless perhaps one also made a video diary). That may be changing; there are now technologies that allow one to write notes as the camera is live, so the notes are linked to a specific time code of the camera. However, without utilizing such emergent technologies, the fresh and immediate generation of ideas that occurs along with taking field notes could be lost if one is relying on recorded footage, waiting until after the day is done and reviewing the footage in the evening—or more likely, another day. However, some of the solitary and reflective activity of written field notes can be mirrored and even expanded later in the video editing process. The process of reviewing footage can return one in some very direct ways to the experience of “being there” and the thoughts and feelings one had during the interview or observation can be re-accessed; in fact filming may actually allow the ethnographer to remember the context and sensory experience of fieldwork more accurately, without the mediation of memory, with all its vicissitudes and distortions.

Of course, this is not to say that what one gets on video is at all a totalistic account, and the issue of the camera’s presence shaping, distorting, or closing off certain forms of data or expression is always operant. But video or film does yield a wealth of contextual information that would be almost impossible to replicate in its entirety with written field notes. Footage can be viewed multiple times, concentrating on different aspects, and it also can be slowed down and coded. It can be played for interview subjects to elicit further information and insight (Collier and Collier 1986; Harper 2002), and this elicitation can be used to bridge visible, tangible, or external information with internal or conceptual worlds (Connor et al. 1981).

Given the affordability of videotapes and the lightness and ease of use of video cameras, it seems an obvious choice to incorporate at least some amount of filming into fieldwork and even minimally edited recordings can be used to enhance the presentation of anthropology projects for classroom, fundraising, and translational purposes.

In addition to the potential ways film or video can enhance data collection in the field of the subject proper of ethnographic inquiry is the way it might enhance the depiction of the complex interactions between film participants, the anthropologist, and the filmmaker. Within the psychological anthropology corpus, there is relatively little material about the direct nature of the responses of a subject or informant vis-à-vis their reactions to their representation in a written ethnography, particularly among non-native English-speaking populations. Within a standard written ethnography, there are multiple levels of mediation of direct experience, particularly as it is filtered through the anthropologist’s writing process; even then it is not a given that the subject will access the final product, depending on whether they are literate or fluent in stylized academic prose in which a typical ethnography is written. In any case, time and space intercede so that the participant’s direct and immediate reaction to and understanding of the material and their representation are often lost or greatly truncated. This is not the case when the subjects watch themselves onscreen or in a film, where there is an opportunity for a more direct reaction that could be profitably analyzed for insights.

In the field of ethnographic film, interestingly enough, right from the beginning there was an interest in including a representation of how the subjects engage with the film recordings of themselves in the finished product. In Nanook of the North in the title cards at the beginning of the film, there are notes about how Nanook’s family enjoyed watching the “moving pictures” of themselves as they went about their dramatized daily activities. In later decades, while subjects were shown footage and even were filmed commenting on it, it was not until the Jero Tapakan films by Tim Asch that the reaction of the character was made the entire focus of the film, in Jero on Jero (Connor et al. 1981). Since that time it has become commonplace for filmmakers to show a representation of their participants reacting to rough cuts or even finished cuts of the film about them.

For all these reasons, visual anthropology practitioners or would-be practitioners have a sense that visual and multimedia modes of anthropology are the future of the field, best situated to bridge the gap between the academy and the lay person, especially now as most anthropology journals are going completely digital. It is important to note here, though, that visual components are not intended to replace writing, but to complement work in concert with it. Even to some of visual anthropology’s most enthusiastic apologists, visual ethnography is seen as additive. No one considers it a substitution for written ethnography, and people who do not do written ethnography in addition to their visual work are not calling themselves anthropologists, but rather practitioners of ethnographic or documentary film (Tucker 2014).

What is needed, therefore, for a visual psychological anthropology are person-centered, participant- and narrative-driven, emotionally focused films in specific places, contexts, and domains to enhance and complement the outstanding written work being done. Ethnographic methods and the concerns of psychological anthropology have actually paved the way for such films, and therefore they could be a natural extension of the pre-existing ethnographic repertoire. Finally, it is in the integration of visual and written forms, as explored and enacted in this book, that should be the future goal of visual psychological anthropology.

Note

  1. 1.

    Roger Ebert, in his review of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (Ebert 2009) makes the point that “Kubrick was such a master at getting, there are not multiple ways in which to interpret what Kubrick is trying to say, there is only Kubrick’s interpretation. In other words, we don’t simply see Kubrick’s movie, we see it in the frame of mind he insists on—unless we’re so closed to the notion of directorial styles that the whole thing just seems like a beautiful extravagance (which it is). There is no other way to see Barry than the way Kubrick sees him.”