Participatory visual methods are becoming the new hype in anthropology. Researchers tend to present participatory visual methods as attractive approaches to not only promote innovative research that engages informants in original and collaborative ways but to engage students eager to find bridges between the academic world and a world progressively addicted to visual consumerism. But while still and moving image-capturing devices are being democratized as anthropological tools thanks to their recent wide availability and ease of use, some view the practice of drawing (participatory or not) as a more serendipitous niche activity. Unlike photographing and filming, doodling, sketching, drawing – participatory or not – is more about linear image mental processing and communicating (and thus somewhat akin to handwriting, lack of linguistic encoding and propositionality notwithstanding) than an “objective” visual method. Drawing thus elicits a completely different kind of comprehension of the “field”, as well as new forms of social interaction, such as the “public and open spectacle of recording” that anthropologist-draftswoman Carol Hendrickson describes (2008: 119). (...) We propose to tackle some of the features of the drawing practice, hoping that its much-misunderstood potential as a knowledge tool helps us reconsider what anthropological understanding is (Azevedo & Ramos, 2016). Because we are so fascinated with this game (orality + writing), we forget that a large chunk of the knowledge acquired “in the field” is actually non-verbal, i.e. it is not the result of linguistic processing. Worse, we usually fail to value and use these non-verbal cognitive capacities. Worse still, we become entrapped by the very verbal categories we use to “translate” orality into writing, and a language that is foreign to us into our won and into what is acceptable in the academic jargon → we end up believing that the semantic limitations of our categories are an advantage and not a constraint. As a research tool, it’s the production aspect that is paramount, as a form of acquisition of information, as an integrative and dialogical process, working in tandem with writing, talking, mapping, photographing, filming etc. It can also be helpful for eliciting information, interpretation, etc, from the “informants” - [it could then form part of] so-called participatory or collaborative sketching. It can, of course, be a means for communication if the researcher is confident enough to share his or her sketches.

--

Anthropology,Development,Grpahic anthropology,Drawing,Methods