ABSTRACT
In the first collected volume of essays on the use of visual representations in the social sciences, Principles of Visual Anthropology edited by Paul Hockings in 1973, Margaret Mead remarks that the “hazards of bias, both in those who film from their own particular cultural framework and in those who see their own filmed culture through distorting lenses, could be compensated for … by the corrective of different culturally based viewpoints” (p. 8). Having pioneered the use of visual anthropology with cyberneticist Gregory Bateson in the late 1930s, her article challenges anthropologists to change their research practice. Her fear was that cultures would disappear with the spread of modernity and that valuable knowledge of cultural performance in worlds still untouched by industrialization would be lost forever:
Those who have been the loudest in their demand for “scientific” work have been least willing to use instruments that would do for anthropology what instrumentation has done for other sciences—refine and expand the areas of accurate observation. (p. 10)
