Short Abstract:

This panel explores amateurism in visual anthropology, challenging distinctions between labour and leisure, professional and hobbyist, and examining how amateurism destabilizes media hierarchies. It aims to theorise amateurism and its impact on visual anthropology and other fields across contexts.

Long Abstract:

Visual anthropologists have long been studying "amateurism" but calling it by other names, in commitments to vernacular art, the everyday, and folk art. In other fields, the amateur has emerged as a significant, if traditionally overlooked, figure who raises important epistemological, methodological, and theoretical questions for these entire disciplines. The amateur calls into questions assumed hierarchies, not only in terms of expertise. Amateurism serves to destabilise historical "centres" of media production and blurs boundaries between maker and consumer. Amateurism often indicates freedom: the freedom of not being disciplined or institutionalised, of holding possibilities to explore alterities.

These alternative media histories would benefit from an anthropological approach examining non-Western contexts. Studies of amateurism in the West often assume easy divisions between labour and leisure time or between the professional and the hobbyist. These become problematic in other contexts. An artist might be highly honoured in their community but without the same concerns surrounding monetary compensation or official recognition. Photography and film clubs in Eastern Europe and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth century reveal amateur cultures that sit in complex tensions with Western consumer cultures, Hollywood film, and European auteurism.

This panel arises with three interrelated goals:

1. To more robustly theorise the amateur using the tools and theories of anthropology

2. To then ask what greater attention to amateurism can bring to visual anthropology

3. To examine ethnographic accounts of amateurism across various cultural contexts and media.

We welcome theoretical papers and ethnographic accounts of amateurism.

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