Course description
Knowledge of cultures and societies beyond the boundaries of Europe was and is created by texts and images. The impact of images tends to be underestimated. Compared with studies of texts, studies of photography and films have been neglected for a long time. Both media were invented in the 19th century when European colonial expansion had reached its peak. Mechanically produced images contributed to the legitimation of the colonial project and created collective phantasies and misconceptions with astonishingly long lives. In the social sciences, especially in anthropology, photographs have been used for the documentation and analysis of races and cultures around the world. With the development of moving pictures, debates about the “nature” of mechanically produced images and their relation to reality came up: Do photographs and films represent empirical realities or are they primarily products of imagination? This question continues to be discussed. Although pictures are subject to various kinds of manipulation, they are nevertheless still considered to be proof of specific external realities. The discussion of visual representations of the cultural other adds the dimension of power. What kind of power relations existed at the time the pictures were taken? Who owns, manipulates and distributes the images today? These and other questions are discussed from a historical perspective in an attempt to discover continuities and trace changes in the general approach to images. Modern print media, TV-coverage and representations of other cultures in Hollywood movies are included in the corpus to be discussed.

Themes
The seminar addresses the following themes: visual technologies and evolutionary thought in the 19th century; images produced by the colonized; visual representations of independence movements; the anthropological study of the cultural other; the ontology of images from a transcultural perspective; photography and film in the social sciences; visual versus textual representations; images, power and the construction of social realities.

Course organisation
Every week, one text from a reader will be read to prepare for the next session. All students will be expected to fulfil each of the following tasks once during the semester: (1) write the minutes of a single session, (2) read one additional text on a specific theme and make a 10 minutes presentation in the classroom, (3) write a 10-12 pages paper on a chosen topic. In the second half of the seminar, students will visit public places in Venice in small groups (2-4 persons), search for visual representations of the cultural other, make photographs of the objects found, and present their interpretations in the seminar.

Last updated: January 28, 2025