ABSTRACT
Visual anthropologists have recently argued for a (re)integration of the visual into mainstream anthropology and the incorporation of anthropological aims into ethnographic film-making. This would give the visual a critical role in revising the categories through which anthropological knowledge is produced (MacDougall 1997:292, Grimshaw 2001:173) by introducing the visual as an alternative way of understanding and route to knowledge about social phenomena. Moreover it suggests a new agenda for ethnographic film-making to produce films according to anthropological, rather than broadcast television, agendas (MacDougall 2001; Ruby 2000a). Two other chapters in this book suggest how departures from observational film (Henley) and a collaborative film-making endeavour (Martínez et al.) might achieve this. Here I suggest that to close the divide between visual and mainstream anthropology requires not simply new ethnographic film forms but also anthropological texts that combine and mutually situate visual and written ethnographic materials with anthropological theory. Hypermedia offers one route towards such an anthropology that allows the visual to make critical insights that inspire us to rethink the way anthropological arguments are conventionally constructed. Such texts would aim to combine visual and written knowledge and representations so each might communicate in the way it is best at. In doing so anthropological hypermedia texts might intervene in the debates and theories of mainstream anthropology in ways ethnographic film cannot.
