Evoking associations with musty, forgotten archives and spiral notebooks in the field, anthropology doesn’t immediately come to mind as a discipline fully situated in the modern, wired world. On the contrary, anthropologists have been tackling the implications of technologies on ethnography with each new innovation, from handheld 16-millimeter film cameras and cassette tapes several decades ago to the Internet and digital video in more recent times. The information age hasn’t rendered anthropology obsolete, but it has brought with it a host of issues and controversies — as well as injected longstanding debates into new forms of media. At a session Friday at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, scholars and graduate students in visual anthropology discussed projects that harness new media to enrich scholarship, focus the ethnographical microscope on media producers themselves, or both
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