What's coming

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The blog is new and will fill up gradually. For now, I’m starting with a series of visual-diary posts produced as part of Vlad Naumescu’s CEU course Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Filmmaking - short reflections on ethnographic films and course readings.

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Imagining the Atom: From a Techno-Modernity Star to a Radioactive Bogeyman [draft]

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(Visual Anthropology Diaries #3) Google Search: “Nuclear energy old posters” If you search for “nuclear [old] energy posters” on Google, you will soon find yourself in an endless spiral of atoms dancing around hundreds of slogans: from such promising technological progress and labour prosperity, though sinister ones condemning nuclear energy and its “victims”, to assuring there’s a “peaceful atomic” future awaiting, and contemporary AI-designed such praising the atomic energy as “cleaner” and “safer”. It’s strangely addictive to pick one object and follow how the images it produces, and the images produced for it, changed across time and space. This is the task I have for this week for my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic filmmaking class at CEU. So I thought, why not use this opportunity to look at different representations of how this one peculiar substance that has always fascinated me –  nuclear energy – has travelled through visual culture in the past and present, in the Un...
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Beginnings: Cinematography, Anthropology, and Nanook of the North

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Beginnings: Cinematography, Anthropology, and Nanook of the North For the first week of my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Filmmaking class at CEU, we watched Nanook of the North (1922) , a silent documentary filmed and produced by Robert J. Flaherty, following the everyday lives of Nanook and his Inuit family in the Canadian Arctic in northern Quebec. Often pointed to as “the first documentary,” the film emerged in an early cinematic moment when the boundary between fiction and non-fiction was not yet settled, even as cinema was beginning to claim a privileged relationship to “reality.” Encountering it today, therefore, can be oddly fascinating, as beyond the particular story it tells about “Inuit life”, Nanook is also an important archive of a broader early twentieth-century Euro-American epistemic project to capture and visualise “social actualities”, whether via the ethnographer’s notebook or the camera’s lens. Watching it now from the perspective of a field that has spent ...
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AnthropoLogica: anthropology + social theory in conversation

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