Anthropology, Visual culture and Representation
Survivor Giorgos Dimopoulos shows me the photographic portrait of his father on the wall of the victims of the 1944 massacre at the “Municipal Museum of the Kalavrytine Holocaust”, Photo by K. Kalantzis, 2018.
Courses and studio classes in the department that employ an anthropological perspective aim at acquainting students with the fundamental themes and debates in social anthropological analysis and to further give them a grounded sense of ethnographic methods and their potential. Students learn the basic terms and debates surrounding themes such as exoticism, “art”, kinship, power, politics and social imagination. Through engaging these issues, students also explore “the problem of representation” particularly as it concerns its ethical, aesthetic and wider political dimensions. Representation is a common thread that informs the department’s anthropological courses and it is approached both as a theoretical issue as well as a methodological challenge in the context of producing knowledge about Others in texts, but also in film, and other visual media. Students are further introduced to different visual idioms (e.g., observational film) and learn how cameras can be used so as to communicate cultural analysis and convey their interlocutors’ experience.
