This seminar explores the recent efflorescence of interest in the image across anthropology and associated disciplines. At the core of our concerns will be the ways that some images come to matter more than others, the ways that some images impose themselves on anthropological projects, on ethnographers and/or their interlocutors. This is to ask of images not just what they represent, but what they ask, demand, or accomplish in relation to ethnographic research. The seminar will build upon recent anthropological research on “image-events” (Strassler 2020), images as “formative fictions” (Gürsel 2016), and as forms of life (Stevenson 2020) to explore the concealing, revelatory, and singular facets of images as ethnographic interlocutors. We will consider an imagistic anthropology in very broad terms, asking what kinds of things (e.g. pictures, sounds, figures, or memories) count as ‘images,’ and how do such images arrest or afford particular lines of thinking? What constitutes their depth, resonance, or ‘response-ability’ (Thomas 2020)? What makes images demanding, imposing, or compelling to ethnographers and within the sites and social worlds we traverse?

Repeat Rules