History
Photos and moving pictures have been used by ethnographers since soon after they were invented. The first ethnographic film occurred in 1895 by Felix-Louis Regnault who filmed a Senegalese woman making pots. Film was used among many researchers however it was Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson who first used methods of visual ethnography such as photos and film as scientific instruments. They opened up the potential of photography and film as analytical tools and data repositories. Visual anthropologists became very interested in the use of video on the 1980s for its convenience, durability, economy and utility. Since the 1990s researchers from different disciplines began to engage with videos as distinct from ethnographic films. This involved the reflexive use of the video as a medium to create knowledge and not just to store data. Technological developments, such as the use of digital video, continue to offer new possibilities for the use of videos in ethnography.
Read more about this topic: Video Ethnography
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)