Visual Literacy through Cultural Preservation and Cultural Resistance: Indigenous Video in Micronesia

Visual anthropology is an exciting field, one where the ideas of anthropology can be expressed in a way that is accessible to people both within and outside academia. Visual anthropology is also a refreshing exercise in creativity because it is a method that allows for the creative exploration of images and ideas. The equipment of visual anthropology, including still cameras as well as video cameras, demands a different kind of mastery than the conceptual and technical tools of anthropology. The field is also interdisciplinary, touching on sociology, documentary and art photography, media studies, and journalism. With the renewed interest in how people are represented and the contested authority of representations, the field also touches on literary criticism and culture studies.

Visual anthropology demands that one develop visual literacy (Becker 1975; Berger 1982), or the ability to describe as well as create images. In an ethnographic sense, visual literacy means developing a vocabulary and analytic framework for content analysis as well as the evaluation of images, representations, photographs, and videos in anthropology. This means developing a way to discuss the images that indigenous people produce themselves, be they in the form of graphic art and design or in the form of broadcast television productions. The vocabulary of visual literacy is based on skills in observation. The ability to look at, judge, and understand the components and totality of images is a skill that is learned, just like any other observational skill in the social sciences.

That skill is not an easy one to learn, especially for people who have learned to view pictures and films as illustrations and to look for meaning only in texts. Margaret Mead pointed this out in her manifesto titled "Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words." She noted that anthropologists are so oriented toward the written word that they tend to dismiss visual documentation as an interesting supplement to written descriptions and theory, even though in some ways visual documentation has the capacity for more scientific validity through creating an unambiguous record of events, interactions, or material culture. This is in contrast to the physical sciences, where visual documentation through mass spectrometry, remote sensing and satellite imagery, and electron microscopy is taken for granted as basic to the sciences and not considered illustrative.

This skill in learning to look at an image for a long time and explore the relationship of visual content, composition, and communication is one aspect of visual literacy. The second aspect of visual literacy is the ability to create images. This means organizing a visual production that is informed by anthropology. This framework includes a process whereby the activities of making a film, photographic project, or video are seen in a context involving who makes the decisions about the stage of production, where each stage takes place, and what equipment is used in each stage. A project begins with planning what to photograph, videotape, or film. Planning decisions include who is involved in the planning (an individual, a team, the people being photographed, or a client) as well as where and when the planning is done. The second step is operating the equipment in the field.

This step also includes deciding what equipment is best for a given project and the division of labor involving the use of the equipment. Who sets up equipment, who decides what to photograph or film, and the skills needed both behind the camera as an operator and in front of a camera as the subject are activities of the operation step. The third step in the process, structuring the product of the photography, film, or video, includes such things as processing the materials and determining the times when this is done. It also includes the analysis and editing of the images, either as a series of photographs or, in the case of film and videotape, through conceptually and physically editing a program. Like the other steps, the structuring of material is something that can be done by an individual, a hired technician, the subjects who were in front of the camera, or some combination of these. The final...