Institutionalizing the unruly: Charting a future for visual anthropology

This essay explores the history of visual anthropology as a field that straddles the academy and the world. I argue for sustaining the links between theory and practice, connecting the production and study of ethnographic documentary work on the one hand, and research on the social practice of media on the other, with particular attention to the spread of film and electronic media throughout the world, especially in indigenous and subaltern communities, a process that is resituating the ‘looking relations’ that take place between and among cultures and across boundaries of inequality.