ABSTRACT
Visual psychological anthropology incorporates and adapts the evolving priorities, methodologies, fieldwork techniques, topics, and insights of psychological anthropology to the production of ethnographic film. Despite the dearth of visual ethnography by psychological anthropologists, the field’s orientation toward internal struggles, motivations, desires, emotions, dreams, fantasy, sexuality, phenomenological and subjective individual experience can provide a vibrant guide for making films that tell absorbing and moving stories. Visual psychological anthropology is unique in ethnographic film in its utilization of “person-centered ethnography” (PCE), a core methodology of psychological anthropology developed between the 1970’s and the 1990’s by Robert Levy and Douglas Hollan. One natural extension of PCE principles when planning a film project is to select a single or few “main characters.” The person-centered approach of visual psychological anthropology sees emotional meaning as crucial to character and narrative development, just as important as the explication of cultural material.
