VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF (IN)VISIBILITY

What can be seen and shown? By whom? Why? And what happens when these norms are breached? These questions are hard to ask because aesthetic norms so often appear selfevident, but they can be asked by anthropologists. Visual anthropologists have long argued that the integration of visual communication practices in ethnographic research is a way of knowing about practical, performative, and sensory aspects of social life that are otherwise hard to address. Classic instances of shared anthropology and elicitation, and more recent approaches of multimodal anthropology, build on the inherently collaborative character of media production to strengthen participatory research, and to enrich dialogues with research participants. I argue that visual anthropology can also be a productive way of knowing about politics, in particular, the politics of (in)visibility. I will illustrate this approach through my own experiences as an ethnographic filmmaker in India and among overseas Indians. My films have always attempted to make the invisible visible, however, this work has confronted me with the boundaries of what can be made visible. I have learnt to approach filmmaking as well as film screening, therefore, as a mode of learning about the politics of display and displacement. How do some ways of being become more discernible than others?

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