Multimodal Anthropology

I understand multimodal anthropology as a new form of ethnographic research that incorporates various modes, such as written text, sound, video, photography, as well as multimedia websites, social media, artistic, curatorial, and performative practices. An important moment for the multimodal turn in anthropology was the renaming of the “Visual Anthropology” section of the important journal American Anthropologist to “Multimodal Anthropologies” by the section’s editors (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017). This renaming was accompanied with an invitation to publish not only audiovisual research but also other forms of media practice. Multimodal anthropology was defined as “anthropology that works across multiple media but also one that engages in public anthropology and collaborative anthropology thorough a field of differentially linked media platforms” (Collins et al. 2017:142). Multimodal anthropology often emerges from the diverse data that anthropologists produce or collect during their field research – often in collaboration with their research participants: notes, photos, videos, found materials.

The invitation in the form of a manifesto carried a normative character. Multimodal anthropology is not only seen as collaborative but also inherently reflexive and political. Technological determinism and power dynamics in global media economies should be considered and disclosed. Even (cultural) scientific practice itself is critiqued. For example, multimodal anthropology entails a rupture with traditional formats of scientific publication, such as books, journal articles, or films. In this context, multimodal anthropology is not primarily interested in a polished end product but often showcases the unfinished and fragmentary. The fusion of text and audiovisual products can be found in journals like Sensate or Anthrovision. This website has been inspired by multimodal works such as the Feral Atlas and Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology, amongst others.  Anthropologists Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan and Isaac Marrero-Guillamo (2019) highlight the close connections between multimodal and sensory anthropology:

Multimodality has also been taken up to think more carefully about the multisensory worlds we coinhabit with our interlocutors and the ways in which creative means can enliven our approach to engaging with them (Dattatreyan and Marrero‐Guillamón 2019, 222)

At the same time, the authors are not so much interested in a phenomenological take on the senses, which they see as being based the notion of a knowing (or feeling) subject. Accordingly, their primary interest is not how anthropological knowledge is represented and disseminated alone, but the question of what happens when anthropologists „utilize a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues, and others” (Dattatreyan and Marrero‐Guillamón 2019: 220; original emphasis).