Graphic Anthropology

Abstract

Graphic anthropology, broadly construed, approaches drawing as a mode of anthropological inquiry. Most commonly, drawing and sketching have been employed by cultural anthropologists as visual research methods during fieldwork. This practice, which can include sketching fieldnotes and inviting research interlocutors to create or respond to drawings, has developed as a way to document the process of coming-to-know during research and to visually explore the different perspectives at play in an ethnographic encounter. In archaeology, technical drawings, field drawings, and the analysis of drawings from the archaeological record have been central to the research process. In recent years, anthropologists across the sub-disciplines have begun to more actively explore the conceptual and critical potentials of drawing as a process (to draw) and product (a drawing) that is open-ended, multidimensional, and attuned to bodily practice. The creation and analysis of graphic arts in anthropology has fostered cross-disciplinary affinities and overlaps with medical and digital humanities, public health, visual culture studies, and the visual and literary arts. Of particular interest to many cultural and medical anthropologists is the genre of comics, as its unique blend of text and image arranged in sequence allows for the layering of different times, spaces, bodies, and perspectives within a single page in non-linear and non-hierarchical ways. While comics have long been a tool in public health campaigns, the early 2000s saw the growth of the field of “graphic medicine,” which explores how comics about illness and healing can provide unique insights into the cultural, personal, embodied, and epistemological contexts of medicine. Similarly, the fields of anthropology, literature, and visual studies have recently witnessed renewed interest in the social and aesthetic dimensions of drawings and there has been an upsurge in the creation of comics, zines, and graphic novels as major research outputs across academic disciplines and anthropological sub-disciplines. Graphic anthropology can also be situated in relation to the subfield of multimodal anthropology, which expands the domain of visual anthropology beyond its historical focus on film and photography to include engagement across multiple media technologies, platforms, producers, and publics. While graphic anthropology is connected to visual anthropology, the strong interdisciplinary articulations of drawing as a mode of research, practice, and creation combined with a focus on comics as site of cultural production mark the “graphic” as a rich domain of anthropological inquiry in its own right.