Alternative Media for Visual Anthropology - check out the Graphic Ethnography in Anthropology News (especially Signs in ‘Toons)

URL: https://www.anthropology-news.org/issue/graphic-ethnography/

Image borrowed from Erich Fox Tree's "Signs in ‘Toons." URL and citation below.

Signs in 'Toons

For one anthropologist comic-style graphics provide a means to document, study, and strengthen Indigenous Mesoamerican sign languages. Linguistic ethnography within (non-tactile) sign language communities is almost inherently visual. Without images, how would one capture and convey how signers communicate?

Photography and video are not always acceptable for disseminating visual data and findings, let alone conducting fieldwork itself. Photos add expense to printing, and photocopied photos become undecipherable blurs. More problematically, cameras may be forbidden in ritual contexts, or participants and researchers may negatively associate them with witchcraft, exploitation, distraction, wealth, or past trauma. In rural Guatemala, where I work, many find electricity, phones, and Internet access costly and unreliable.

My solution for preserving data is to draw cartoon-style caricatures. For research on Mesoamerican sign languages, cartoon graphics are not just a means of documenting signed linguistic discourses; they can reiterate and embody some of the ancient techniques that Indigenous artisans used to represent ancestral signs or gestures.

Read the entire article:

Fox Tree, Erich. 2021. “Signs in ‘Toons.” Anthropology News website, October 15, 2021.
URL: https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/signs-in-toons/