Routledge International Handbook of Visual Research Methods in Anthropology

Routledge International Handbook of Visual Research Methods in Anthropology approaches the question of method through conceptualisations of the visual world as light, sight, images and technologies of imaging, that can be analysed and described through a range of visual practices, in the course of anthropological research.

The aim of the book is to move beyond making a case for the importance of “the visual” via its notional arrangement as a subject and means of study in anthropology, by showing how it is applied as a way of doing anthropological research through the explication of a series of examples. Employing an innovative structure for a handbook, each contribution is orientated around a single distinguishing concept and addresses the following three issues: How to see through images, by treating the visual as a form of knowledge made visible. A second group of entries are concerned with how to see through time, by approaching the visual as a modality for representing duration and rendering legible what may no longer be available to vision. Finally, a third group of entries deal with the visual at a phenomenal level, as a medium that we see in.

The Handbook is a timely and useful resource for both students and researchers of anthropology at this time because the disciplines long standing, theoretical, as well as empirically rich practical engagements with visual methods provide valuable insights for the social sciences into current transmutations of “the visual” into “the multimodal”, the non-representational’ and “the sensory”. The importance of these areas as well as of digital research more generally makes visual methods ever more important for social scientists, hence the Handbook is also valuable for those on general Research Methods courses and in related fields such as Sociology, Health Studies and Social Work.