Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal

Anarchival Materiality in Film Archives: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal

“…How could acknowledging the impermanence of media change the impulses through which we use them? A consideration of this question connects to our third proposition (see Takaragawa et al 2019). It is crucial to keep considering how power, inequality, patriarchy, and white supremacy, for example, are imbricated in and throughout our documentary tools and media we use, and in the institutions and technologies tasked with storage and preservation.…”

“…Therefore, as our discipline(s) increasingly advocates for the multimodal in the service of anthropology, there is a need for deep engagement with the multimodal’s position as an expression of technoscientific praxis, which is complicit in the reproduction of power hierarchies in the context of global capitalism, “capital accumulation” (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017, 144), and other forms of oppression. (Takaragawa et al 2019)…”

“…To Lomax, documentation in anthropology is future‐oriented with a belief in technology’s power to describe and store the world. The belief in technology to support anthropological practices has not abated; this is evidenced in the recent reframing of the Visual Anthropology section in the journal American Anthropologist , which is premised on the inclusion of new forms of media to support anthropological practice (Collins et al 2017; Takaragawa et al 2019).…”

“…In a recent coauthored article, we call for an anthropology of the multimodal that “is premised on what we believe should be an ongoing obligation to try to make sense of the technologies and inheritances on which multimodal practices depend” (Takaragawa et al 2019, 522). The project that we undertook at the British Columbia Provincial Archives, and continued in collaboration with Documentary Educational Resources, builds on this article and is an attempt through research‐creation to actualize an anthropology of the multimodal both by making the material legacy of archival and anthropological documentation the focus of our work, and by engaging in multimodal art practice as a generative expression of our research.…”

The Uncertain Present and the Multimodal Future

“…Our colleagues brought that into sharp relief by warning that multimodal work could also be “bad habitus” (Takaragawa et al. 2019).…”