Dr. Matthew Rosen
Dr. Matt Rosen, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, presented a paper on “Visualizing the Ethnography of Reading: Literary Anthropology in a Sub-Discipline of Images” at the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., in November.
The American Anthropological Association is the world’s largest association for professional anthropologists, with more than 10,000 members. Based in Washington, D.C., the association was founded in 1902, and covers all four main fields of anthropology (cultural anthropology, biological/physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology).
The theme of this year’s meeting, Anthropology Matters!, was a call across the field to unite in diversity, to embrace difficulty, be vibrant messmates, and promote the relevance of what anthropology is and does.
Abstract: Reading is visual—but can there be a visual anthropology of reading? In the interest of “reevaluating the word–image relationship” (Campbell et al. 2017) that historically positioned the sub-field of visual anthropology in opposition to the wider anthropological emphasis on verbal descriptions, representations, and interpretations (see, e.g., Mead 1975; Taylor 1996), this paper introduces a method for “visualizing” literary anthropology. Building on filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s (1982) notion of “speaking nearby” (see also Chen 1992), I call this method “reading nearby.” Applying Minh-ha’s notion of indirect representation, or making visible without objectifying, to an ongoing ethnography of reading, translation, and publication practices in Tirana, Albania, this paper discusses how reading creates links—social, spatial, and literary—to other readers, other places, and to new ideas, aspirations, and forms of imagination.
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