visual ANTHROPOLOGY competition
2024 WINNERS ANNOUNCED!
Every year, ANSA holds a visual anthropology competition open to all ANSA and AAS members. Our aim is to celebrate creativity in anthropology, and give space for emerging scholars to showcase their work. Winners received a cash prize and had their work displayed at the AAS conference at University of Western Australia.
For the 11th annual competition, we asked for entries that reflected on the ways in which creativity and visual practice aided in the production of anthropological knowledge.
WHAT IS VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY?
In short, this type of anthropology seeks to use the visual as a means of understanding the world.
Mediums include photography, film, drawing, painting, and any other forms of visual and creative expression.
SOME QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
What are the visual aspects of a society or culture?
How can anthropological data be expressed in a visual way?
How can knowledge and experience be expressed creatively?
2024 visual anthropology competition winners
FIRST PLACE
Sebastian Antoine Salay
“Yumi fasem taet (We hold on tight)”
The photographs show some of the techniques used by migrants to establish relationships to land in their new home in the city. When man kam from elsewhere in Vanuatu come to town, they are building homes and gardens on someone else’s customary land. The land cannot be bought or sold, and formal leases are rare. Instead, most man kam make formal customary agreements with man ples for access to land.
Establishing connections to place in the city is the way to make a good life in town and maintain customary agreements. The techniques documented here help man kam maintain good relationships with man ples customary owners, including by inscribing agreements into the landscape. Becoming connected to place is important to migrants’ self of self and sense of community, although they retain affiliation with their island.
(CONTD BELOW)
The photographs offer new way of understanding anthropological concerns about land and kastom in Vanuatu, and Melanesia more broadly, by showing how cultural practices operate, endure, and change in the expanding city. For example, many of the images show how plants with kastom significance take on new meanings and new roles in urban areas. Other practices, like gardening and cooking particular foods, are ways of connecting back to the island and connecting with other people in the city. They also chart how physical markers of customary tenure become increasingly important in preventing evictions and ensuring agreements are upheld in a context where the value of urban land for development is rapidly increasing.
This photovoice project is happening within a larger program of research about customary land in the city, with a focus on why and when traditional tenure systems that have long provided non-owners with security of access for hundreds of years, usually work and sometimes fail. The photographs sit alongside interview data and archival research collected as part of the broader project, offering visual insight into the everyday practices, material worlds, and subjective landscapes of man kam in Port Vila.
For the people involved in this project, being able to tell their story is important and is an important reciprocal offering of the project. The images show how man kam respect the land, their culture and the customary owners. At the request of the people involved, the images will be displayed in an exhibition in Port Vila. The hope is that the exhibition will encourage other people in town to understand the perspectives and experiences of man kam.
They will invite politicians, local chiefs, and landowners to see the images to encourage dialogue about the issues of urban growth, migration, and evictions. More broadly, these stories about establishing relationships might be a useful comparative example for other studies of migration and urbanisation. These photographs and stories show that it’s possible to create a sense of belonging in a new place. As mobility increases around the world, including migration increasingly driven by climate change, these stories show how it’s possible to make a home in a new place by making place in a new home.
runner up
Ngaire Dowse “gaslight”
runner up
Diana Tung “cycling in the Amazon”
This photo series captures the experience of 'doing fieldwork' during the Covid-19 pandemic. On March 15, 2020, the Peruvian government announced on television that strict lockdowns would begin that very evening throughout the entire country, and enforced by the military and police. Over the next twenty months, I was stuck in Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon and the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by car.
As "la cuarenta" or lockdowns slowly eased, the government encouraged cycling as a form of exercise that would still allow for social distancing. Unable to conduct fieldwork related to my actual PhD topic on the commercialisation of the aguaje (Mauritia flexuosa) palm, I joined cycling groups in Iquitos out of desperation to escape the maddening confinement of my small and stuffy apartment.
By accompanying cyclists in and around Iquitos, I was able to learn about the vastly differing microclimates that exist within lowland Amazonia in an embodied way, and better understand how residents interact with and experience ‘nature’ in a wider context. The vast distances of the Amazon and the frequent impassability of the roads gave new meaning to the notions of time, scale, and distance. In addition, and as these photographs demonstrate, I learned to appreciate the centrality of waterways to social and economic life in the Amazon, both as highways and in radically transforming seasonally-flooded landscapes.
Even after lockdowns were lifted, I continued cycling to improve my mental health and to maintain my level of fitness to be able to travel into the jungle for fieldwork. As city residents joked, "a la vueltita" or “just around the corner” in the jungle could mean several hours of trekking in boot-squelching mud in the sweltering humidity, and I didn’t want to become a liability for my interlocutors.
Through developing friendships and contacts in the cycling community, I was also gained access to a cross-section of middle-class Iquiteños. As so often happens with the serendipitous nature of anthropological fieldwork and the snowball method, when cyclists learned about my research I was generously put in touch with their contacts. This included aguaje entrepreneurs as well as government officials starting a multi-million dollar aguaje commercialisation project in Iquitos.
Cycling had not featured in my fieldwork plans, but it became a defining feature of my experience in the Amazon. Not only did cycling inform my fieldwork in multiple ways, it also provided an outlet to cope with the immense stress and anxiety of being stuck far away from home during the global pandemic. Cycling in the Amazon helped me to appreciate the unexpected, reimagine the possibilities of ethnographic fieldwork, and fundamentally revamp my understanding of landscape, infrastructure, and place in the Amazon.
What usually comes to mind when thinking about resource extraction usually cogitates around tangible, material elements – be they economic growth, infrastructure, or environmental damage. Yet, fracking and gas extraction are firmly steeped in predictions of growth and development, speculative market values, and the forecasting of futures.
Risks and repercussions are likewise discussed as future events.
Instead, I argue that it is in the present that the affective elements emerge, from climate and environmental anxieties, risk to livelihoods, and the social disruption that have already surfaced – even before the commodity has materialised. My artwork, "Gaslight" reflects my participants experiences of the nascent gas industry in the Northern Territory. It is informed by the intangible, affective, and embodied elements that I witnessed and shared. Namely, the anxieties, the sense of loss, uncertainty and even cynicism that my participants were experiencing and coming to terms with that I feel needs to be rendered visible. I sought not to simply portray the physical consequences of fracking; but rather reveal the feelings of anxiety, sacrifice, and loss associated with it. This anxiety is not an abstract concept but a lived reality for many communities facing the growing fracking industry. Of course, traditional ethnography provides invaluable insights, yet artistic renditions offer a powerful complementary approach to translate complex anthropological concepts in a visceral and emotional way, not just intellectual.
The artwork challenges viewers to consider the sacrifices made in the name of development and who bears the brunt of these sacrifices. The visual representation of loss in the artwork is not merely about the loss of land or resources, but also the loss of culture, livelihood, well-being, and the emotional connection to a place that provides a sense of identity and belonging. Depicted are a flared fracking well, cattle being exposed to toxic waste water from a storage pond, fish lying belly-up in a local waterway, and stylised quotes from Countrymen who I met in the field. The ambiguity and unknowns are represented by bold undefined shapes and colours that clash and intersect with ochre, reminiscent of earth pigments. This reflects the fusion of the current and future unknowns embodying the emotional turmoil it generates. While the incorporation of collage newspaper text illustrates the larger developmentalist narratives that are deployed to attract multi-national corporations and distract voters from the lived experiences of locals. The gas pipeline map that overlays the entire image symbolises the prioritization of resource extraction over established ecosystems and the overlaying of extractivist narratives on existing places.
The abstract nature of the work invites viewers to connect with these themes on an emotional level, seeking to foster a deeper understanding of the human cost of resource extraction. The artwork explores how resource extraction disrupts and transforms not only physical landscapes but also the intricate web of relationships that come to define a sense of place. Fracking, with its potential for long-lasting environmental damage and displacement of communities, fractures the bonds between people and their environment, humans and animals, and even within communities themselves. The anxiety depicted reflects the growing climate anxiety felt by vulnerable communities throughout the Northern Territory. Therefore, inviting the viewer to reflect on our precarious relationship with the natural world and our fear of an uncertain future.