How do anthropologists work with images of art and popular culture?
In recent times, the discipline of Anthropology faces a new urgency in approaching an extensive transcultural and transnational migration of visual items. This urgency results from an increasing flow of visualities across the globe caused by diverse forms of usage and exhibition practices as well as different kinds of new media and technologies. This seminar shall show how anthropologists engage, for example, with visual items from Indian contemporary art and popular culture in order to investigate the questions of how these visualities are used in transcultural and transnational negotiation processes of culture and identity in a global context.
Not all images are as famous to the public as for example the Danish Mohammad cartoons but have still an important role within cultural exchange processes. What is exactly happening in these transformation processes? How and by whom are aesthetic images or popular products used or even exploited for identity creation and/or in engaging with other social groups?
Cathrine Bublatzky 