In the diagram of anthropology, culture, sociology, political science, society and politics. In summary, what does the diagram tell?

The ongoing use of diagrams in anthropology has its roots in the emergence of the discipline itself. Ever since the work of Malinowski and a number of notable predecessors, diagrams (along with maps) have become a customary feature of ethnographic monographs – with some more standardised and familiar than others. A two-dimensional, often schematic, arrangement of lines drawn to show the organisation, appearance, arrangement, mechanisms or interactions within an area or action of analysis, the diagram has appeared in many different forms.This introductory review focuses first on two particular kinds: those used to convey information regarding kinship, and those depicting different forms of exchange.

Critiques and Challenges

Compared with other practices that rely on the visualisation of ideas and data, and which also operate within an interdisciplinary context, diagrams in anthropology have received less critical scrutiny than, for example, cartography and visual research methods. Photography and film – within Visual Anthropology – have become established forms of both presentation, and of method. They also provide objects of analysis in and of themselves. Interrogating the pitfalls and potential of their display via digital media has led to the development of ‘hypermedia anthropology’ (Pink 2006: xi) – enabling novel combinations of the visual, aural and textual. For some, this counteracts a previous rejection of the ‘visual, sensory and applied’ that coincided with social and cultural anthropology establishing itself as ‘a scientific discipline’ – a rejection of the ‘subjectivity of photography and film’ in favour of adopting ‘visual metaphors such as diagrams, grids and maps to synthesise and objectify knowledge’ (Pink 2006: 8; Grimshaw 2001: 67).Framed this way, diagrams lack the sensory transmission that multimedia forms of presentation seek, in part, to address.

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