Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
Sir John Rankine Goody was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.
Cultural memory is a concept that draws heavily on European social anthropology, especially German and French. It is not well established in the English-speaking world. It posits that memory is not just an individual, private experience but also part of the collective domain, which both shapes the future and our understanding of the past. It has become a topic in both historiography and cultural studies. These emphasize cultural memory’s process (historiography) and its implications and objects, respectively.
Sherry Beth Ortner is an American cultural anthropologist and has been a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004.
Vytautas Kavolis was a Lithuanian sociologist, literary critic, and culture historian.
Juan Francisco Salazar is a Chilean anthropologist and filmmaker. He has lived in Sydney, Australia since 1998. He is professor of media studies at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Fellow of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS). From 2020 he is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.
Biocultural anthropology can be defined in numerous ways. It is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. "Instead of looking for the underlying biological roots of human behavior, biocultural anthropology attempts to understand how culture affects our biological capacities and limitations."
Thomas P. Riccio is an American multimedia artist and academic. He received his BA from Cleveland State University in English Literature in 1978, his MFA from Boston University in 1982, and studied in the PhD program in Performance Studies at New York University from 1983 to 1984. Riccio has directed over one hundred plays at American regional theatres, off-off and off Broadway and has worked extensively in the area of indigenous and ritual performance conducting research and/or creating performances in: South Africa, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Europe, Russia, Siberia, Korea, India, Nepal, China, and Alaska. In 1993 the People's Republic of Sakha declared him a “Cultural Hero”.
Sir John Akomfrah is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator of Ghanaian descent, whose "commitment to a radicalism both of politics and of cinematic form finds expression in all his films".
Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar is a Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also Executive Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues based in Chicago and New York. Gaonkar was closely associated with the influential journal Public Culture from the early 1990s, serving in various editorial capacities: associate editor (1992-2000), executive editor (2000-2009), and editor (2009-2011).
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Naeem Mohaiemen uses film, photography, installation, and essays to research South Asia's postcolonial markers. His projects on the 1970s revolutionary left explores the role of misrecognition within global solidarity.
William M. Maurer is an American academic scholar of legal and economic anthropology. He currently serves as the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has conducted research on money, finance, economy, and law, including the off-shore financial services industry in the Caribbean, alternative currencies, Islamic finance, mobile money, and traditional and emerging payment technologies, as well as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and related blockchain technologies. He has been called the “doyen” of the subfield of the anthropology of finance. Maurer is also the founding director of the Institute for Money Technology and Financial Inclusion, a research institute at UC Irvine funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a fellow of the Filene Research Institute. He was previously the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing, also at UCI.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is an art historian, curator, and professor of American art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has curated major exhibitions and published several books on African American art. In 2019, she became director of history, research and scholarship and senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Milica Tomić also known as Milica Tomic, is a Serbian-born contemporary artist and educator. Her artistic practice is research-based and includes working in the mediums of photography, video, installation art and discursive, educational art, performance, and socio-political engagement. She serves as the Chair of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology in Austria. She has lived in Berlin, Belgrade, and Graz.
Zoe Todd is a Métis anthropologist and scholar of Indigenous studies, human-animal studies, science and technology studies and the Anthropocene. She is an associate professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University and a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University during the 2018–19 academic year.
The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an independent research group that examines the biotechnology and biodiversity of human food systems. The Center was founded in 2010 in Portland, Oregon and currently has research nodes in Bergen; Santa Cruz, CA; Porto; Dublin and Chennai. They are sometimes described as an artist-led think tank.
Dominic Boyer is an American-born cultural anthropologist, writer, filmmaker and podcaster whose work focuses on relationships between energy and environment, media and politics. He is the son of historian John W. Boyer.
Cymene Howe is a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States. Her research has focused on environment, inequalities and the anthropology of climate change. She has also been active in multi-modal approaches to knowledge and public anthropology through podcasting, documentary filmmaking and installations, most notably the Okjökull memorial.
