Paper short abstract

How might visual anthropology refract, as a question of its own media, the claim of fieldwork that "I saw this"?

Paper long abstract

For Deleuze, what distinguishes art is its resistance to "communication", in foregrounding means that are not reduced to the service of ends. The visual medium is not simply a transitive engagement with a subject understood to exist beyond it, being "represented", but rather concerns the very act of seeing - as conceived of (as its subject) by the film. In the form of tourist photographs taken of museum collections, what is being appropriated and then circulated? What testimony to a (perhaps latent) cosmology is offered in the relation between technics and imagination here? What kind of "voice" is evoked - as the supposed "subject" - by this ubiquitous practice of image making? What kinds of "ethno-fiction" (Augé) become possible in the guise, then, of an essay-film thanks to digital media? For Bazin, the voice in an essay-film is in reflexive dialogue with the image, rather than being identified with it - exposing an anthropological dimension to the visual medium itself. In this presentation, I will reflect on these conceptual histories of practice, using some examples of my own work, and attempt to explore what it might mean to say (with Taussig) "I swear I saw this" in an anthropological context.