Multimodal Anthropology
Multimodal Anthropology is an emerging subfield of social cultural anthropology that encompasses anthropological research and knowledge production across multiple traditional and new media platforms and practices including film, video, photography, theatre, design, podcast, mobile apps, interactive games and web-based social networking. As characterized in American Anthropologist, multimodal anthropology is an “anthropology that works across multiple media, but one that also engages in public anthropology and collaborative anthropology through a field of differentially linked media platforms” (Collins, Durington & Gill)[1]. A multimodal approach also encourages anthropologist to reconsider the ways in which they conduct their research, to pay close attention to the role various media technologies and digital devices plays in the lives of their interlocutors, and how they these technologies redefine what fieldwork looks like.
History and Background[edit]
Multimodal anthropology is not a new concept. It has been a fundamental part of anthropological research from the early days of the disciple. Anthropologists have been experimenting with different forms media technologies throughout the twentieth century whenever confronted with the limitation of text-based ethnography. Multimodal is a term that has readily been used since the 1970s in varied disciplines as psychotherapy, phonetics, genetics, literature and medicine to characterize different approaches to carrying out scientific research that involves to a certain degree, thinking outside of the box. In the early 1990s, semioticians used the terms to discuss different forms of communication across different media, eventually including digital media.
Technological advances in the later part of the twentieth century, the accessibility to photography, film cameras and audio recorders led to the emergence of visual anthropology as a sub discipline dedicated to the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and media. Building in this legacy, multimodal anthropology seeks to expand the boundaries of visual anthropology to incorporate emerging technologies of twenty-first century including mobile networking, social media, geo-mapping, virtual reality, podcasting, interactive design, along with other traditional forms of learning and knowledge production that were often sidelined within visual anthropology, such as interactive gaming, theatre, performance, graphic novels, ethnofiction and experimental ethnography. As Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington and Harjant Gill note in their introductory essay on title “Multimodality: An Invitation,” published in American Anthropologist, “multimodal anthropologies does not attempt – or desire – to supplant visual anthropology. Rather it seeks to include traditional forms of visual anthropology while simultaneously broadening the purview of the discipline to engage in variety of media forms that exist today.” [1]
External links[edit]
Multimodal Anthropologies (American Anthropologist)
Examples of Multimodal Projects[edit]
Anthropological Airwaves Podcast
Lissa: A Story About Medial Promise, Friendship and Revolution
Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology
Further Readings[edit]
Multimodality, Multisensoriality and Ethnographic Knowing by Sarah Pink[2]
Minecraft Multimodal by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington and Harjant Gill[3]
With Smart Phone as a Field Assistant by Paulo Favero and Eva Theunissen[4]
Repurpose, Remix, Bend by Casey Anderson[5]
On Multimodal Anthropologies From the Space of Design by Elizabeth Chin[6]
The Knot in the Wood by Roxanne Varzi[7]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Collins, Samuel Gerald; Durington, Matthew; Gill, Harjant (2017-01-12). "Multimodality: An Invitation". American Anthropologist. 119 (1): 142–146. doi:10.1111/aman.12826. ISSN 0002-7294.
- ↑ Pink, Sarah (2011-06-01). "Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception". Qualitative Research. 11 (3): 261–276. doi:10.1177/1468794111399835. ISSN 1468-7941.
- ↑ "Minecraft Multimodal". Retrieved 2018-08-31.
- ↑ Favero, Paolo S. H.; Theunissen, Eva (2018-02-19). "With the Smartphone as Field Assistant: Designing, Making, and Testing EthnoAlly , a Multimodal Tool for Conducting Serendipitous Ethnography in a Multisensory World". American Anthropologist. 120 (1): 163–167. doi:10.1111/aman.12999. ISSN 0002-7294.
- ↑ "Repurpose, Remix, Bend: Piloting A Locally Defined Technology Curriculum". Retrieved 2018-08-31.
- ↑ Chin, Elizabeth (2017-08-14). "On Multimodal Anthropologies from the Space of Design: Toward Participant Making". American Anthropologist. 119 (3): 541–543. doi:10.1111/aman.12908. ISSN 0002-7294.
- ↑ "The Knot in the Wood: The Call to Multimodal Anthropology". Retrieved 2018-08-31.
This article "Multimodal Anthropology" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Multimodal Anthropology. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
