Antropologie... proč vizuální?

Abstrakt

The text is based on an actual problem of the lack of education in critical „reading“ of visual material and on the problem of approach to the potential of visuality through the dominant linguistically based discourse. Limitation of visual material to the „art“ or popular culture and mass media with their roles in entertainment, communication, advertisement, propaganda and promotion (ideological, political, economic or cultural) is not valid and useful in the era of omnipresent pictures, which are playing different roles during their global circulation. Visual modes of representation are entering the philosophical and scientific discourse and are not only informing but also forming the structures of thinking and modalities of behaviour without a direct link to the „primordiality“ of linguistic discoursive structures and scientific practice. The potential of the pure visual discourse and his contribution to the scientific work lies not only in the common critical approach to the visual potential of pictures and their grammar as signs and products, which can be verbally explained, but in the original techniques of „thinking through the pictures“ and „thinking film“ (Deleuze, Petříček). A special attention is devoted to the short overview of the paradigm shifts in the notion of “ethnographic film” in the academic institutions and to the special uses of this filmmaking discipline in applied social anthropology.