Companion Tools and Seductive Temptations: New Technologies and the Visual Anthropology Debate

2Nonetheless, a significant number of researchers still believe in visual anthropology—a discipline, defined at the end of the last century, that establishes both a core thematic area and a distinct methodology centered on the visual. Yet the field established in the last century is now challenged by the ongoing development of new modes of producing and consuming images globally. These new technologies challenge how visual ethnographers position and practice audio-visual research in the field.

3In this Special Issue, we intend to address how current technologies may shape a new visual habitus of image-making/consumption and, consequently, affect methodological choices and positioning for ethnographers.

4We find a dialectical tension between two orders of phenomena. On one hand, the availability of new technologies (e.g., 360° cameras, Virtual Reality -VR, and Augmented Reality -AR) enlarges the range of options for producing images, creating new pathways for non-linear forms of ethnographic representation (Grasseni 2014; Biella 2025; Collins et al. 2017; Favero 2018; Favero and Lehmuskallio 2025). On the other hand, their use in anthropology raises questions about the ‘ethnographicness’ (Franco 2025) of a movie’s entire life cycle, from filming to editing and, later, screening.

5As Paolo Favero (Favero 2018) and Mark Westmoreland (Westmoreland 2025), among others, have highlighted, these visual devices challenge the hegemonic structure of the frame, a paradigm established with the invention of perspective in the Renaissance. It is undeniable that the availability of these technologies and their widespread use on social media, and by extension in our everyday lives, are influencing our perception of the image, both aesthetically and epistemically. Thus, insofar as these new technologies shape our relationship with images, creating new aesthetic canons, their application to ethnographic cinema presents significant technical and conceptual challenges. For instance, what kind of storytelling can we build with a technology that mirrors an immersive vision? Should we film in 360° and then flatten the images for screening in conventional venues? These are not merely technical issues. The entire cinematic apparatus—from filming to projection—is imbued with a very precise, Cartesian, Western notion of being in the world (Favero 2018: 52). When filming, the camera is positioned between the filmmaker and the subjects, separating the two physically and ontologically.

6As Paolo Favero notes, this way of seeing—which entails a specific relationship with the images it produces—is not inherently human. Instead, it is connected to an ontological position of dominance within Western colonial thought. By examining examples from Byzantine icons to Etruscan paintings and Buddhist ways of interpreting images, Favero demonstrates how VR, AR, and 360° media are not new in suggesting ways to transcend frames and blur the gap between viewers and the viewed (Favero 2018).

7While the problematization of positionality is part of a long theoretical debate in visual anthropology, much of the production in this field—with a few brilliant exceptions—remains anchored to the classic frame-projector relationship. This suggests that we may still need time to develop a completely different vision of the world. In contrast, a new possibility may be offered by drawing and animation that move beyond portraying reality as it is and engage in diverse practices of knowledge-making (D’Onofrio 2025; Meloni 2025; Theodossopoulos and Bonanno 2025). In other words, the possibility of going beyond the image as a testimony of ‘having been there,’ (see Grimshaw 2002) and engaging with a form of non-linear, imaginative storytelling that may enhance the ethnographic aspects that, for various reasons, cannot be filmed or pictured.

8In this context, ethnographic and documentary film festivals seem to be welcoming a new wave of non-fiction cinema imbued with a particular sensory and aesthetic dimension. We see these tendencies directly connected to the above-mentioned circulation of new technologies in the mundane visual world. Hence, this new wave aims to look at daily life practices with an intimate gaze. But without a solid and skilled ‘ethnographic eye’ (Grimshaw 2002), they risk reproducing an ‘exotic gaze’ towards the people it works with. It is in this particular form of cinematic representation, connected to new technologies, that we see traces of what we call a new ‘habitus’ of visual production. An ‘habitus’ that is strongly influenced by aesthetic canons established through new digital media practices and television programs.

Film Festival or: Those with a Loaded Gun and Those Who Dig

9In building this thematic section, we emphasized the role of ethnographic film festivals as sites for the construction and accreditation of good filmmaking practices, as well as for the very conception of anthropological-visual artifacts, a core problematic issue (see Piault 2007). That is, we discerned a tension between what festivals proclaimed regarding new experimentation and the demands emanating both from the academic sphere of anthropology and from the results of concrete fieldwork.

10In recent years, there has been extensive debate about the reshaping of ethnographic film festivals (see Piault 2007; Vallejo and Peirano 2017). Some contributions have focused on the history of festivals (Alexander 2017; Crawford 2017; Henley 2017; Vasileva Chistyakova and Trushkina 2017), others on the challenges of curatorial and programming work (Cubero 2017; Engelbrecht 2017), and still others on film festivals as an ethnographic field (Vallejo 2017) and the construction of disciplinary boundaries (Dickson 2017).

11Carlo Cubero (2020) has conducted a reflection that helps us properly problematize the issue. Cubero argues that the curators of ethnographic film are not direct managers or evaluators of anthropological content, nor do they personally define the category ‘anthropological cinema.’ In most cases, they must handle a growing number of film submissions that often do not align with the ‘orthodox’ expectations for anthropological films.

12Simultaneously, they must face an audience that is not solely academic in anthropology. Their challenge is to coordinate highly diverse sources into a coherent event (Cubero, 2020: 314). In practice, festivals are a space where ‘anthropological cinema’ is framed and reformulated.

13Discussing one of the most essential French festivals, Les Regards Comparés, Cubero observes that festivals generally welcome filmmakers from a wide range of disciplines. Through their selection, the curator confronts, juxtaposes, and discusses all types of films from an anthropological perspective.

14As Cubero put it:

‘I would also suggest that they illustrate an emerging trope in anthropological film festival programming where the event is (1) generated as a response to another event, (2) concerned with the articulation of anthropological cinema as a distinct cinematic practice, rather than a method to illustrate anthropological theory, (3) networked across disciplinary fields, and (4) responsible for articulating an agenda through screenings in a film festival, rather than through conference proceedings.’ (Cubero 2020: 316).

15The knowledge produced in these events, Cubero concludes, is an event-based and experience-centered theory, developed from the experience of screenings and the discussions they generate.

18By analyzing the biographies available online, we infer on the ethnographic and anthropological training or activities of these directors. Only 13 directors had received anthropological training (BA, MA, PhD, or other specialization). Six directors, despite lacking formal training, have developed strong ethnographic projects over the course of their careers—either because they come from a closely related disciplinary background (sociology, cultural studies…) or because they have been involved in long-term ethnographic projects with anthropologists or sociologists. The remaining directors have backgrounds in fine arts, visual arts, photography, or cinema. Although we are aware that ethnographic methods are not necessarily learned (or applied) exclusively through specific academic training, this information help us reflect on how anthropology and ethnography shape participants’ know-how.

19Carlo Cubero argued that ‘the film festival format is more consistent than the conference format for the production […] of an audiovisual ethnography project’ (Cubero 2017: 112). But if we take a look at the impressive program of the conference held alongside the 16th edition of the RAI Film Festival, a Clint Eastwood’s well-known line comes to mind: ‘You see, in this world there are two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig’ (Leone 1966). There could be a lot of discussion about who, between filmmakers and anthropologists, has the loaded gun and who digs. But scrolling through the program, it seems that anthropologists discuss visual ethnography, while others produce the ethnographic films screened.

20These elements invite reflection, on the one hand, on how much (and what kind of) ethnography underlies the productions presented at ethnographic film festivals. On the other hand, whether the new habitus of visual production based on ethnography is still developing primarily in the form of film.

Cinema of the Real and Anthropology

21Answering the first question (about festivals) would deserve a detailed analysis of the film productions, a task that goes beyond the limited space of this introduction. Questioning how much a new habitus of visual production is still developing primarily in the form of film implies drawing attention to the epistemics of filming and its development over time and through technologies.

22During the golden age of ethnographic cinema, between the 1960s and the 1970s, filmmakers used Éclair camcorders or similar devices and recorded sound with portable Nagra recorders. This set-up gave the filmmaker the impression of grasping the freedom of the Vertovian’s kino-eye. With his shoulder-mounted camera, Jean Rouch moved freely through his environment, deciding instantly when, how, and whether to film. Sensitive, selectively directed microphones and, above all, the filmmaker’s immediate choice of focal length contributes to adherence to contexts. Details, close-ups, and long shots were composed and balanced in the viewfinder simply by operating the 10x or 16x zoom lens with the left hand, ranging from wide-angle to extreme telephoto.

23This versatility enabled a more nuanced engagement with the subject’s bodies and movements, resulting in a permeating sense of empathy and participation in the footage (see MacDougall 2006). In contrast, the current filming habitus is dominated by fixed-focal-length lenses, which prioritize exceptional image quality and definition over corporeal engagement with filming participants and the environment. This type of filming favours extensive use of a tripod for fixed frames. It is as if the technological shift has conditioned filmmakers’ gazes, directing them toward a new, polished, digital world. This world is constructed from pre-established—that is, ‘pre-thought’—images and frames, which in turn replicate and legitimize a detached, contemplative relationship between observer and observed. We will see later how Julie Peruch addressed the influence of technology on the cultural connotations of images as an aspect of visual modernity. Instead, these processes lead us to rethink here from a new perspective, the debate on the relationship between documentary cinema and visual ethnography developed since the late 20th century (Ruby 1975; 2000; Banks and Morphy 1999; Piault 2007; Banks and Ruby 2011; Chiozzi 1993). The questions we raise here continue that debate, now extended to encompass the complexity of current filming practices from both theoretical and methodological standpoints. Here, a tension emerges between purely artistic and cinematic disciplines and the social sciences (including cultural anthropology), as each claims the autonomy and legitimacy to define its own audiovisual trajectory. This tension, we argue, is now influencing academic and scientific practices, with potentially crucial outcomes. Further, it is within this tension that the notion of the ‘cinema of the real’ was born (Bertozzi 2007; Nichols 2010; Dottorini 2018). This notion provided the foundation for and mutual enrichment among different perspectives. Yet it produced misunderstandings and ambiguities about the ‘ethnographicness’ of movies (Franco 2025).

24As Daniele Dottorini noticed, the notion of ‘Cinema of the real’ refers to ‘...a form that gathers in a wholly peculiar way the instances of the tradition of the documentary gaze, as well as the innovative capabilities of experimental cinema, and the storytelling desire of narrative cinema’ (2018: 12). In our opinion, the concern with how to represent reality leads many to interpret the ‘Cinema of the real’ as a form of ethnographic filmmaking. As Carlos Tobón Franco already pointed out, this aspect becomes problematic in visual ethnography (Franco 2025).

25The critique of cinema’s industrial hypertrophy that emerged in the late 1950s represented a decisive turning point for both documentary cinema and visual anthropology. Theoretical and technological innovations enabled a more humanized filmmaking that, in turn, facilitated greater proximity between filmmaker and subject and the exploration of the duration of gestures, space, and time. In sum, it allowed cinema to move ‘together with bodies’ (Dottorini 2019: 18). Yet these developments played out differently in anthropology and in documentary cinema. In anthropology, they were connected to broader discussions of methodologies and fieldwork ethics. In contrast, the availability of new technologies led to experimental and creative explorations within the Cinema of the Real. While legitimate, these outcomes also require critical engagement.

Beyond Jay Ruby’s Theories

26In the 1970s, Jay Ruby critiqued a genre of ethnographic-themed documentaries, often produced for television, such as the BBC’s Disappearing World series (Moser et al. 1970-1977). He contended that most anthropologists did not regard ethnographic film as filmic ethnography (Ruby 1975: 104), thereby relegating cinema to the margins of the discipline without acknowledging its full potential to ‘be anthropology.’ Rather than being viewed as a medium capable of conveying an anthropological standpoint or theoretical claim, film and photography were often reduced to mere observational tools. This tendency evaded a central epistemological question: how can cinema serve as a medium through which anthropologists present an ethnography—that is, construct an ethnographic narrative? (Chiozzi 1993: 73).

27Ruby proposed two foundational criteria: a. Ethnographic film should be evaluated as an ethnographic narrative, subject to the same scientific scrutiny as any ethnological text, b. The ethnographic filmmaker must adhere to the demands of anthropological inquiry and narration, akin to the author of a written anthropological study.

28This framework sought to identify, from a visual anthropology perspective, the core attributes of ethno-anthropological practice. For Ruby, ethnography constituted ‘a specific style or group of related styles of scientific representation’ (Ruby 1975: 107), wherein anthropologists make syntactic and lexical choices informed by an acquired tacit model. Consequently, it became essential to determine which ‘discourse styles’ could apply to both verbal and visual ethnography. To answer to this question, Ruby proposed four elements:

29A style enabling the holistic description of a culture or its components;

30A style that permits reference to an implicit or explicit theory of culture, thereby acknowledging the impossibility of ‘pure’ description;

31Explicit articulation of the methodological approach employed;

32The development of a distinctive audiovisual lexicon.

33As we see, this period in visual anthropology was characterized by a persistent unresolved tension between image and text. As Ruby observed, in films, ‘there is a tendency to resort to an anthropological lexicon only in the oral narration accompanying the images’ (Ruby 1975: 107). He concluded that a specifically visual anthropological lexicon remained underdeveloped.

34Today, a critical engagement with these issues cannot consist of merely reiterating Ruby’s earlier question about what qualifies a film as ‘ethnographic.’ The subsequent evolution of the discipline has not yielded a definitive set of lexicons or procedures uniquely characteristic of a distinct ethnographic-visual methodology. Indeed, Ruby’s later work evolved toward web-based projects in the early 2000s, oriented toward visual anthropology practice not confined to film (e.g., Oak Park Stories). This shift reflects the increasing ramification and complexity of ethno-visual pathways, driven by contemporary anthropology’s reconfiguration of relationships between centers and peripheries, urban and non-urban ecologies, and human and non-human actors (See Ruby 2008; Banks and Ruby 2011).

35Nevertheless, our proposal retains one of Ruby’s central concerns: positioning visual ethnographic practice at the core of the researcher’s intentions and competencies. The questions framing this thematic section thus emerge from a contradictory landscape of partly debatable and often conflicting proposals, trends, and forms of recognition. For instance, what challenges and solutions do new technologies present for contemporary visual ethnography? How do visual ethnographic practices align with or challenge audience expectations in film festivals, academic settings, and digital platforms? In what ways do new technologies and non-linear representations contribute to the redefinition of the ethnographic gaze? How can visual ethnography distance itself from the exoticizing gaze prevalent in much contemporary non-fiction cinema? What cultural and academic policies reinforce the aforementioned trends within film festival circuits?

36The contributions included here do not provide exhaustive answers to these questions. Instead, they aim to propose pathways and stimulate further inquiry, thereby advancing critical discussion on each of these pressing themes.

New Habitus of Visual Production: Four Contributions

37Julie Peruch’s contribution proposes reflecting on the notion of knowing how to see in anthropology, with a focus on the cultural connotations of new digital visual technologies.

38Peruch points out how the gaze is a socially constructed practice, and anthropologists, too, construct their own scientific gaze through the use of visual devices during research. It is crucial to examine the relationship between these practices and technical innovation, and to consider the agency ascribed to a visual tool (outil). Since the mid-twentieth century, filming technologies have advanced to the point of granting researchers extraordinary freedom of action and the capacity to perceive reality through the sensorial dimension. The knowledge about these media, or the knowledge of their related techniques, ascribes an intentionality to the object: the technologies themselves produce a gaze that operates beyond—or preter—the observer’s own intentions. How is this intentionality constructed? What does it reveal about scientific representation in visual anthropology?

39It is therefore essential to study the relationship anthropologists establish with visual media to understand how and why they use it. Throughout the history of visual technologies, recording devices have been designed to perceive the environment according to different action plans: a) to organize the visible; b) to acquire knowledge about the environment; c) to act upon it in order to control and normalize it.

40Following Donna Haraway (1988), Peruch argues that in the past, despite the presence of specific technologies, the observer’s gaze was embodied—it resided within a subjective sensory system. In modern scientific discourse, this gaze detaches from the socialized human body to become positivist, objective knowledge capable of representing even what the human eye cannot perceive. It is therefore necessary to reclaim vision, that is, to abolish the separation between subject and object and reconstitute it as an embodied and situated action. This can be achieved by introducing a reflexive dimension that questions our knowledge of visual technologies and the status of the visual tool in human interactions. ‘This reflexive position,’ Peruch concludes, ‘would allow for the implementation of an investigative and data-gathering apparatus capable of making visible the operational modalities of the inquiry as it is practiced in the field.’ A portion of contemporary ethnographic video production, however, seems reluctant to ‘reveal the game’—that is, to integrate a deep critical reflection on the technological conditions of its production into the final work.

41Some of these problematic knots reappear under a different light in Greca N. Meloni’s contribution. Meloni presents a personal account of a complex, multi-sited ethnographic experience during the filming of a movie about nomadic beekeeping across three locations in Europe. The author delves into a dense reflection on the significant theoretical and strategic implications of the viewer’s expectations in shaping filming practices and technologies. A tension emerges between expectations for the quality of the film’s images and sound and the need for greater adherence to lived ethnographic experience. According to Meloni’s analysis, designing a ‘good movie’ destined for festivals and communication/recognition circuits risks sidelining the demands for deeper ethnographic understanding. This logic is not driven solely by professional filmmakers but also by the production conditions of this form of documentary practice. As she put it ‘The more my partner and I engaged with the challenges of the fieldwork, the more a sense of discomfort took over me. A third, uninvited partner seemed to steer our technical and theoretical choices toward them, shaping our approach to filming and our response to these challenges. Max and I were not simply negotiating our expertise and expectations with the beekeepers. I found ourselves negotiating our gazes with the potential viewer whose expectations generated tensions over different understandings of the camera’s role in conducting a visual ethnographic investigation in beekeeping.’

42Furthermore, Meloni’s contribution highlights a decisive cognitive problem in the human-nonhuman relationship: the search for terms of a visual language capable of ‘seeing with the bees, not just looking at them…’ This also implies the possibility of seeking expressive alternatives outside the cinematic frame. We are confronted here with a crossroads: facing a set of communicative demands inherent to the cinematic form (following a series of implicit rules) or constructing a gaze capable of ‘representing more-than-human realities.’

43In Francesco Bachis’s contribution, the pervasiveness of the ‘good movie’ in the festival sense is challenged from a research perspective that, in part, inverts Meloni’s approach: human corporeality and its sensory and auditory presence in the temporal dimension of waiting. Adopting the musical provocation of John Cage (1965) as an epistemological framework, he separates moments of silence from the narrative flow in biographical interviews with elderly miners from Sulcis-Iglesiente (Sardinia, Italy). Silence as an ethnographic object (with significant sounds) forces a reflection on the redefinition of conventions about what can be seen, heard, and conveyed through a filmic artifact. It questions, in other words, the rationale for ‘why we were there.’ In particular, Bachis problematizes and extends the limits of audibility in one of the typical phases of ethnographic fieldwork: listening. The ethnographer has the opportunity to elaborate on the sensory dimension with different nuances, grappling with how to attune listening to the rhythm of the flow of words and the breath of their interlocutors. The memory of the miners thus emerges as a memory embodied in breaths, in lungs, bodies, and voices, evidently marked by work underground. The absence or suspension of words is never an emptiness, but a set of bodily sounds that convey emotional signals, implication, and the social and emotional reception of the encounter. Bachis, in the text and the three ‘silent’ videos that accompany it, thus posits an audiovisual ethnographic practice entirely centered on the interpretation of cultural performance, in a logic that opposes any aesthetic suggestion and any exoticism in the audiovisual language to be adopted.

44Finally, Felice Tiragallo seeks to identify a potential point of convergence between new multimodal, non-linear visual ethnographies and some of the most significant legacies of participatory and transcultural cinema—a tradition that itself marked a decisive stage in the maturation of visual anthropology. Drawing from a special issue of Anthrovision edited by Florian Walter and Cristina Grasseni (2014), Tiragallo juxtaposes recent practices of multimodal and non-linear storytelling—which stem from critical reflections on the participatory aspects of creating ethnographic data with audiovisual technologies—with an innovative analysis of one of David MacDougall’s most renowned works, Tempus de Baristas (1993).

45In his analysis, Tiragallo traces continuities between the production of MacDougall's transcultural cinema and recent practices in visual anthropology. The latter, according to the author, represent a form of engagement with the premises that the debate around participatory and transcultural cinema raised decades ago, embodying an ongoing refinement of visual practice as a direct mode of anthropological inquiry.

46The objective of this analytical pairing is profound. It is not an exercise in nostalgia but rather an argument for a specific kind of continuity and coherence in the ongoing refinement of visual practice as a direct mode of anthropological inquiry. By mapping the ‘densification’ of topoi achieved through MacDougall’s radical empiricism, Tiragallo highlights MacDougall’s commitment to an epistemology of sensory experience and participatory knowledge—one fundamentally opposed to a passive, illustrative, or spectacular relationship with the filmed world.

47In doing so, Tiragallo’s contribution implicitly draws a line between practices that employ new technologies to deepen the anthropological encounter and those that may, perhaps unwittingly, succumb to a logic of illustrative spectacle or a revived exotic gaze, thereby affirming the critical and empirical core of visual anthropology as a research practice.

Conclusion

48The emergence of a new habitus of visual production calls for more than methodological adjustment or technological experimentation; it demands a renewed collective effort to rethink visual ethnography as a core mode of anthropological inquiry. As digital tools, immersive media, and multimodal platforms continue to reshape how images are produced, circulated, and consumed, visual anthropologists are increasingly challenged to articulate their epistemological commitments within environments shaped by cinematic conventions, festival economies, and new formats. Rather than accommodating these forces uncritically, we argue for a visual anthropology grounded in reflexivity, situated sensorial perception, and embodied participation—one that foregrounds process over product, encounter over spectacle, and ethnographic responsibility over aesthetic optimization.

49The contributions gathered in this section point toward the necessity of developing shared analytical frameworks, and evaluative criteria capable of addressing the expanded life cycle of visual ethnography, from fieldwork to post-production, exhibition, and reception. This implies reclaiming authorship as a relational practice, cultivating alternative visual languages beyond dominant cinematic grammars, and strengthening dialogue between anthropological research and new emerging forms of audiovisual expression. Ultimately, advancing visual anthropology today requires embracing its experimental character while reaffirming its critical foundations: resisting exoticization, interrogating technological agency, and sustaining attention to the sensory, political, and ethical dimensions of representation. In this sense, the new habitus of visual production should not be understood as a departure from anthropology’s legacy, but as an opportunity to deepen its engagement with contemporary worlds through rigorously reflexive and participatory visual practices.