ABSTRACT
A concrete and undisputed definition of video games has proven remarkably elusive, due to the many conflicting views on what their defining characteristics are, both from secular and academic observers of the phenomenon. The main criticism of visual culture in the singular is that it is too constrained to represent the cultural diversity of the Americas; as an epistemological legacy of Eurocentrism, it blinds us to the social principles of vision and division embedded in the dominant regimes of visuality. The photo archive of the Mexican Instituto Nacional Indigenista provides us with a paradigmatic example of the history of the anthropological photography of indigenous peoples. Social communication studies was established at Latin American universities in the 1970s and 1980s, at about the same time as visual anthropology. The effect of hybridization is of particular importance to visual studies of the Mexican-American borderlands.
