Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology
Bibliography
Westmoreland, M. R. (2022). Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 51(1), 173–194. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-121319-071409
Abstract
Multimodality offers anthropologists an inflection on the way we do research, produce scholarship, teach students, and relate to diverse publics. Advancing an expanding array of tools, practices, and concepts, multimodality signals a change in the way we pay attention and attend to the diverse possibilities for understanding the human experience. Multimodality recognizes the way smartphones, social media, and digital software transform research dynamics in unprecedented ways, while also drawing upon longstanding practices of recording and presenting research through images, sounds, objects, and text. Rather than flatten out ethnographic participant observation into logocentric practices of people-writing, multimodal ethnographies diversify their modes of inquiry to produce more-than-textual mediations of sensorial research experiences. By emphasizing kaleidoscopic qualities that give shape to an emergent, multidimensional, and diversifying anthropology, multimodality proposes alternatives to enduring and delimiting dichotomies, particularly text/image. These new configurations invite unrealized disciplinary constellations and research collaborations to emerge, but also require overhauling the infrastructures that support training, dissemination, and assessment.
Notes
Notes
Multimodal is so prevalent, that it’s Go to annotation“adjectival descriptor” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 174) might be obsolete. Despite that, it’s usage and meaning is not as clear as it’s distribution would indicate.
Go to annotation“Put simply, multimodal anthropology both attends to the diverse ways of knowing the human experience and advances an expanding array of tools, practices, and concepts to share these understandings.” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 174)
Modes
- field notes and drawings
- snapshots and social media
- audio recordings and transcriptions
- productions of ethnographic films
- photo series
- soundscapes
- podcasts
- gaming apps
- dissemination at festivals
- installations
- exhibitions
- ephemeral events
- workshops, performances, sound walks, pop-up screenings
- remixing
- critical interventions
- circulations of bootlegs
Multimodality in the becoming
- is in danger of prematurely crystallizing
- has radical potential
- has expanding (the anthropological discipline) and incorporating features
Multimodal doesn’t mean multimedia, but the inclusion of multiple Go to annotation“semiotic resources”” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 175). It also has a history of being used in social semiotics/sociology. It challenges the text-based approaches of classic anthropology.
Graphic Foundations
Anthropological discourse believed to stay text-only. Even the critical collection Writing Culture didn’t focus on many other modes.
Go to annotation“Rather than words and images vying for superiority, a multimodal approach encourages kaleidoscopic combinations of objects, text, images, and sounds in ways that unsettle lexical hierarchies.” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 176)
Drawing seems kind of forgotten but already adds a whole other dimensions of perceiving and capturing kowledge.
Expanded Sensorium
Multimodality wants to use the whole of the researchers body as investigative instrument. Tho, vision has troublesome aspects. For example as colonial gaze, where it served for positivist evidence of racial hierarchies. One approach positions sights as something to be learned, and states that most ethnographers are not very good trained at seeing.
Go to annotation““to look with the camera, rather than merely see with it, took ethnographic filmmakers a long time.”” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 178)
A lot of effort went into reflecting on practices of using visuals for ethnographic research. Other senses did not enjoy that much energy put into them.
Reflexive Im/mediacy
Whereas anthropology in the 19th century happen mostly through second-hand research, todays technologies support an immediacy. Multimodality, analogue to Drucker, sees data not as a objective given thing, but as a capta, generated by the researcher. Multimodality also means, as the senses are always entangled, media are also always intermixed.
Disciplinary Reconfigurations
Go to annotation“I have argued that while multimodality became introduced from external frameworks, the term helps anthropologists address an array of contradictions inherent in the ethnographic enterprise. By infinitely expanding the forms of ethnography, multimodality challenges the primacy of textual representation without abandoning the many articulations of voice. By attuning an expanded sensorium to specific research contexts, multimodality challenges the assumptions about observational clarity without dismissing the multifaceted and embodied ways of seeing. By reflexively recognizing the indeterminant additive qualities of mediation, multimodality challenges the authenticity of immediacy without denying the technocentric shadow cast across our research pathways.” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 180)
Dichotomies for the Unruly
There seems to be two different streams of development in visual anthropology. On is about institutionalizing and the other is dissidenting, crossing borders to art practice. The later saw visual anthropolgy as a field in it’s own right, with it’s own way of knowing. They proposed three principles
Go to annotation“(a) methodological frameworks that utilize “the distinctive expressive structures” of audiovisual media, rather than approaches derived from verbal or quantitative modes of inquiry; (b) epistemological frameworks open to more perceptual and affective forms of knowledge, rather than propositional and logical principles; and (c) conceptual frameworks engaged with topographical, temporal, corporeal, and personal aspects of human experience.” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 182)
Multimodality for an Anthropological Otherwise
Multimodality gained institutional backing of late. That also enabled a better definition of it as well as critique. Multimodality calls for a reschooling of our senses.
Infrastructures for a Multimodal Messiness
Go to annotation“There is a growing recognition that the analytic labor of a “thinking body” needs the contemplative freedom to oscillate between confusion and clarity (Ballestero & Winthereik 2021).” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 185)
Multimodal is rooted in tech-saviness, needed technological infrastructure. It should allow for an amateur approach, but gadgets and skills are nonetheless necessary.
- Not many places can accomodate multimodal work
- Traditional evaluation anthropological work falls short with multimodal approaches
- Photography is a good case of how difficult a multimodal approach can be
The Shape of a possible Anthropology
Go to annotation“By recognizing modes of communication beyond or in addition to text, reflexively engaging the research tool kit, corporeally interfacing with sensory modalities, and enacting relationships across multiple media platforms, multimodalists have prioritized alternative ways of knowing, decolonizing the discipline, reconfiguring research and peer relationships, imagining the ontological otherwise, and giving shape to a “possible [[Pandian 2019).” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 187
Questions/Thought
- What exactly constitutes a “mode”?
- How does multimodality relate to para- and intertextuality?
- Go to annotation“a sensuous, interpretive, and phenomenologically inflected mode of inquiry” (Westmoreland, 2022, p. 178) > Drucker’s discourse of capta