Sarah Pink: Visual Culture, Internet and Sapnish Migrants

This paper explores some of the ways in which anthropological research is conducted in a social and technological context at the end of the C20. Both anthropologists and heir informants are treated as consumers of photographic, telephonic and electronic communications technology, living in a consumer society. The notion of the rational autonomous individual has been problematized by both post-modern theory and recent anthropological research (eg Strathern), thus both anthropologists and their 'informants' are viewed as partial or 'dividual' selves. The paper explores how then identity is negotiated, and expressed by researchers and informants and how indentities are invested in them and their material culture/technological artifacts.

This paper draws from photographic, telephonic and electronic research in Southern Spain, and England and speculates about the ways in which technology will be woven further into the personal and professional biographies and experiences of both researchers and their informants.

Dr Sarah Pink is currently a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Derby. Her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology (University of Kent), MA in Visual Anthropology (University of Manchester), BA in Social Anthropology (University of Kent). She is also Director of 4th and 5th International Festivals of International Film, 1994 and 1996 University of Kent Canterbury. Her research interests and publications are mainly in the areas of: Visual Anthropology and Sociology; ethnographic research, Spain, gender and bullfighting, Spanish migrants, new communcations technology.