I find this article crucial for thinking through any ethnographic work, but especially for visual representations of toxicity. The question of representation in visual material is just as important, if not more so in some instances, than that in text. There is a certain "excess" to visual material, the likes of which can either powerfully evoke ethnographic questions or else perpetuate a violent ethnographic gaze. It also requires thinking through how visual materials produced by the ethnographer has the risk of engaging in what Todd defines as supranthropology, the likes of which results when a "scholar forgets the consequences of speaking of/for/about people rather than focusing on our responsibilities, always and everywhere, to build relationships with time, place, stories people." Without building these relationships and getting to know the people we are working with, how can we hope to visualize the places in which they reside and work? Any visualization, whether a camera, map, graph, etc. is a very political and selective tool: it zooms in on what the anthropologist preferences while excluding multiple other angles, objects, landscapes, numbers, contours, geographies, etc. Without these relationships, what business do we have visualizing? How are we to determine where the toxicities lie for the people we work with, as opposed to imposing our own assumptions about what toxicity means to them? Toxicity for whom? How do we avoid engaging in what Todd critiques as the propensity for anthropologists to presume that they know more than the people they are working with, and how do we risk reflecting this in our visualizations?
For Grimsahw, various “ways of seeing” have structured anthropological thought and practice. She argues that vision operates differently in anthropology depending on conversations of technique or knowledge production. Ultimately, Grimsahw asks what’s the relationship of vision to ethnographic methods/techniques and epistemological inquires?
In the early European projects of ethnography, seeing was the central mode of the practice. Grimshaw states there was an ocularcentric bias. Ethnographers were encouraged to go “see” for themselves (7). Grimshaw wishes to show how the ethnographer’s eye is always “partial” (8). In this book, we’re encouraged to “see anthropology as a project of visualization rather than read it as a particular kind of literature” (9).
Throughout the book, Grimshaw traces the rise and fall of various moments in the visualization of anthropology moving from British to where visual anthropology really developed in American Anthropology, especially with the work and photography of Margaret Mead.
Visualization in anthropology, our seeing, is much like the lens of a camera, we must zoom in and out-- “the movement of ethnographer's eye, always tracking between panorama and close-up in much the same way as the camera itself” (12).
Varzi’s “The Whole World Blind” is particularly stirring for thinking about how to engage in visual and multimodal work. As she asks regarding war photographs, “What will we do with this visual information? If we do nothing, are we then simply guilty of voyeurism?” Much of the work that ethnographers engage in and with is embedded in some form of political, social, and patriarchal violence, and the resultant images and theoretical imaginings they produce can possibly contribute to this violence. Her text calls for ethnography that seeks to question the ways in which visual information is used, and how engaging the senses and the body in new ways might shed light on the taken-for-granted. In the case of Varzi’s project, she asserts that “There is an immediacy, an authenticity that is lacking in what is supposed to be the most real medium—the visual medium—that can only be overcome by the voice." What is the role of the body and senses in regarding visual material, whether in a text or in an installation? How is the notion that "seeing is believing" used at times to cause more harm than good? How can we see and/or visualize without becoming guilty of voyeurism? Such is particularly crucial to ask in the context of a project aimed at visualizing toxicities.