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Listening to Images, Participatory Pedagogy, and Anthropological (Re‐)Inventions
Author(s) -
Shankar Arjun
Publication year - 2019
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.13205
Subject(s) - active listening , performativity , performative utterance , sociology , embodied cognition , citizen journalism , premise , aesthetics , narrative , pedagogy , perspective (graphical) , ethnography , epistemology , anthropology , visual arts , linguistics , gender studies , art , computer science , philosophy , communication , world wide web
In this article, I provide examples of how listening to images produced the possibility for anthropological reinvention. I base my analysis on fieldwork conducted in Karnataka, India, and the participatory photography project we initiated together. I focus my attention on the pedagogic basis of listening and build on the premise that a multimodal anthropology of invention can “facilitate a pedagogy of engagement and performativity” (Dattatreyan and Marrero‐Guillamon 2019). I argue that listening is made possible through pedagogical methods that foreground an experience of teaching and learning in the field that, in turn, produces the kind of embodied recognition that revealed my participants’ many “practices of refusal” regarding their ruralness and who rural people are and what they do (Campt 2017). In taking these refusals seriously, I was forced to see from a perspective not already overdetermined by narratives of powerlessness, dispossession, and lack of will. In other words, a pedagogy of listening actually led me towards radical anthropological reinventions. [ participation , multimodal , pedagogy , youth , India ]