Cirrus@Austlit

This collection of essays and video contributions both focuses and relies on interactions between texts and images. AnthroVision – as an online journal aiming to “include audiovisual material and to promote innovative ways of writing within an academic framework” – is therefore an ideal publication avenue for this volume, which also addresses the strategies, choices, and constraints that shape research that is conducted with these two media (texts and visuals). The articles do not only unveil the “epistemological backstage” (Olivier De Sardan 1992: 185) of visual documents; they question the dialogic relationship between images and texts. Magali McDuffie, Rosita Henry and Daniela Vávrová, as well as Flora Aurima-Devatine and Estelle Castro-Koshy, for example, chose a two-tool writing process. In their articles, the film questions, completes, and gives more depth to the written text; it does not “double” it. In all the contributions, the film and/or the photographs and the text are mutually enriching. This is also the case in Barbara Glowczewski’s book, Totemic Becomings. Cosmopolitics of the Dreaming/Devires Totêmicos. Cosmopolitica do Sonho, which is reviewed by Gerko Egert: Egert stresses that the bilingual book “composed as a rich assemblage of images and text […] charts the complex cartographies of Warlpiri Dreaming cosmologies” – a mapping that Glowczewski also explicates and gives examples of in her video contribution to this issue.

Source: Introduction