Graduate study in visual anthropology

I often get approached by undergrad or graduate students interested in pursuing graduate study in visual anthropology. Here are some of my standard replies.

What kind of visual anthropology?

• Lately there is a lot of interest in various topics, such as “multimodal anthropology” “sonic ethnography” and the like, so this advice is already a bit out of date, but when I was starting out there were basically two kind of visual anthropologists:
  • those who were primarily interested in thinking about and making ethnographic documentary films
  • and those who were interested in conducting ethnographic research on visual media and culture.
  • See this 2006 blog post I wrote about these options
• Which are you? Knowing which kind you are is essential for deciding how to proceed. (Even if you are doing sonic or multimodal work, etc. you will generally want to focus either on scholarship or production, so the choice is the same.)
• In terms of choosing where to go for graduate school, the study of visual culture is much easier, since your final product will be a written dissertation and most graduate programs would accept such a project. See my blog post on picking a graduate program in anthropology for how to proceed.
• Things are much more complicated, however, if you want to be a producer and practitioner of visual (or multimodal) works….

Producing Visual Ethnography

• There are basically five paths you can take if your main interest in visual anthropology is a desire to become an ethnographic filmmaker.
  • Note 1: some of these paths can be combined.
  • Note 2: I’m just going to focus on filmmaking, but some of the advice is generalizable to other kinds of multimodal ethnography.
• The holy grail: a graduate degree in anthropology based (at least in part) on a visual work
  • See this 2017 special issue of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association newsletter devoted to MA programs in Visual Anthropology around the world: PDF
• Get a graduate degree in anthropology that is not based on a visual work, but you make a film at the same time as you do your research, relying on previous training or seeking training outside
• Attend a short-term program focused on filmmaking from an anthropological perspective.
  • There is a good one at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
• Go to film school and study anthropology on the side.
• Just go and work in industry, developing your talents without attending school. Read anthropology. Talk and collaborate with anthropologists.