Inspired by discussions we had in class about ethnographic videos, I want to reflect upon and offer an extension to Geertz’s description of ethnography and of ethnographic media that we haven’t explicitly discussed yet. Geertz says that ethnography consists of writing down or inscribing social acts and behaviors. He doesn’t mention other forms of anthropologic description, like photos or the films we’ve been watching. To me, films and photos are another way of inscribing, or recording, behavior and events, and can be considered to be part of the anthropologist’s toolset.

Considering that Geertz was writing in 1973, and that anthropology has incorporated more technology since then, how do pictures and video recordings serve the anthropologist’s task of inscribing social interaction so that it can be analyzed and picked apart? And, how do visual forms of anthropology differ from written accounts?

My first instinct was that a video is different from a written account because a video is edited, and thus the editor imposes their own bias on the content. However, this definitely falls into the western trap of authenticity that we clarified in class, and the anthropologist also applies their own lens onto events through their writings and descriptions.

After extricating myself from the trap of the “really real”, I think I’ve managed to pin down one difference between anthropological media like photos and videos and anthropological descriptions. Photos and videos are wider – they show more than words. In the case of written accounts, we only get access to whatever phenomenon the writer chooses to inscribe; incidentals, like colors, facial expressions, or background objects, for example, are recorded or not recorded on the whim of the anthropologist. Photos and videos are also focused on whatever the anthropologist is trying to capture, but they also contain incidental information like the aforementioned clothing colors or facial expressions, that the anthropologist doesn’t have to choose to include or not include. This phenomenon allows for even more layers of description, because anthropologists can then attempt to inscribe their observations from video, rather than from real life.

To paraphrase a trite saying, a photo (video) can be worth a thousand words.