Visual Anthropology vs. Anthropology of Visual Communication

Abstract In visual anthropology there are three different directions, overlapping but also competing with each other at the same time: there is the visual anthropology itself, which focuses mainly on the production of ethnographic and folklore film, for promotion and teaching; another kind of visual anthropology aims at the study of pictorial means usually represented by television and film; and the third subcategory is the anthropology of visual communication (anthropology of the visual), the most ambitious of the three, which includes the anthropological study of all forms of cultural visuality, as well as the production of visual media for anthropological purposes. An overview on the epistemological and methodological implications of visual anthropology reveals a whole new direction of research, in which the role of the scientific text must be rethought in the light of nonverbal means.