ABSTRACT
The rising popularity and accessibility of 360° video makes immersive experiences a new frontier for ethnographic research. While “immersive journalism” and other forms of “immersive witnessing” have gained significant attention through high-profile productions by major news outlets and the United Nations, there has been very little work in what could be called “immersive ethnography.” This chapter aims to explore ways to think beyond these grammatical conventions and grapple with the affordances inherent in the technology itself. For generations of visual anthropologists, audio-visual technologies have enabled very detailed depictions of ethnographic contexts; however, their objectifying qualities have often disguised racist assumptions as truthful science. The deferral of stitching the two hemispheres together due to high technical requirements materializes spherical image-making in halting steps, each producing another perspective. Separately, the two hemispheres reveal the extreme fisheye distortion at the edge of the lens.
