Photoethnography

Photoethnography has been around since cameras could be shlepped up the trecherous, deserted paths of backcountry villages in those glorious colonial ethnographic years of anthropology. But recently, photoethnography has made its way into the marketing and global domination fields of business. Not wholly unknown to me, this world is fast becoming the only plausible way for some visanthers to make a living. And, ignoring their best taught ethics classes at the university, they make their way to the corporate side, some with heads held high and others with a defeated glance back over their shoulder in true cinema verite style, at their colleagues who can still reasonably expect to obtain a job in education or research. (okay, I'm guilty of a little glossing over of the hardships of today's Ph.D's but really! VisAnth is worse off! and even more so with that damn degree, so vile, I will not type the letters again.) **wow! I apologize for the whining! But, take a look at this group blog post that supports my concerns.

Anyway, back to the topic, well, the first topic I mean. Visual Anthropology, wondrous in its efforts to bring anthropology to the silver screen, the forefront of the general public media, to the quickened pace of the average viewer's attention span, the frenetics of keeping up with changing demographic viewing behaviors, is now *gasp* losing its already scarce FUNDING!! We are being forced to compete for funding with other anthropologists and their more "legitimate" hands-on, community development research projects while this pool of money is drying up at rates never seen before. How can my hour long special on a stay-at-home dad's possibly compete and give the results grant sources demand? What results can you measure from a feature film? And, who really thinks visanth should be tied down to the rules and obligations of applied anthropology anyway? It's not as if archaeologists have to answer how their digs are going to help anyone, other than in the interest of "science"? Well, where is my science then? Where is the science for science's sake of the 60's?

My answer folks: It's gone and never to return. VisAnthers have no where else to go but the mainstream. They'll head off in droves to Hollywood or big business, sell themselves for commercials or product jingles, reap the rewards of our capitalistic media market and never think again about ethnographic film that is, until Mel Gibson decides to tackle the religiousity of Aboriginal Australia and he decides he needs some more colonialistic images to go with his particular brand of marketing.

***I apologize for the pessimism that is just dripping from this, my first post. But they are the particular worries on my mind as we approach that moment when the institution of higher learning declares us at once, liberated, educated and mostly, poorer than when we started.