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Anthropological Ethics and the Communicative Affordances of Audio‐Video Recorders in Ethnographic Fieldwork: Transduction as Theory
Author(s) -
Black Steven P.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.12823
Subject(s) - affordance , ethnography , sociology , scholarship , psychology , anthropology , political science , law , cognitive psychology
This article contributes to the development of professional anthropological discourses about audio‐video recording technologies in ethnographic research. Synthesizing scholarship on ethnographic partiality, doing ethnography in sound, and multimedia technologies, the article reflexively applies the concepts of transduction and affordance to analyze how recorders may be theorized as part of fieldwork encounters. This is based on fieldwork with a Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa. Here, I discuss how research participants guided my use of recorders amid inequality and HIV stigma. I analyze the ethical‐communicative affordances of recording technologies, examining how the design of audio‐video technologies intersects with cultural and communicative conventions for use and evaluation of use of these technologies. This analysis suggests that the ethical‐communicative affordances of transducers yield both an extension of an ethnographer's social self and a disconnect from that self in ways that can be productively navigated during fieldwork. [ ethnographic methods, technology, stigma, ethics ]