Tag Archives: Graphic Adventures in Anthropology

Fieldwork Cartoons Revisited

In 1989 when conducting fieldwork in Masset, Haida Gwaii, I complemented my standard social anthropological toolkit of camera, cassette tapes (before the days of digital), and field notebooks with a small black sketchbook—my cartoon book. This proved to be a rewarding and useful means to tell an immediate story about fieldwork, drawn late at night, and before any photographs could be developed. I used the cartoons to start conversations with Haida community members, and we shared perspectives on the events I depicted—from the ordinary to the celebratory. read more…

  • dateMarch 23, 2015
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  • posted byGillian Crowther
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Teaching Comics in a Medical Anthropology and Humanities Class

True or false: Stick figures effectively convey complex emotions and experiences.

If you were to ask me this question a year ago, I would have confidently replied “false.” That was before I stumbled across Allie Brosh’s web comic “Hyperbole and a Half.” Brosh chronicles her adventures with cleaning, dogs, and depression through a crudely drawn pink stick figure with a strange yellow triangle atop her head. The triangle is supposed to be a ponytail, but it is open to interpretation. read more…

  • dateMarch 16, 2015
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  • posted byColeman Nye
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Reflections on Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Culture

Who is the man behind Superman’s cape? It depends on where you read superhero comics! In Lebanon, he is Nabil Fawzi, and he was so well adapted as an Arab character, that most comic fans did not realize that he was a translation of the Anglophone Metropolis’s Clark Kent.

Brown University’s Middle East program hosted a symposium on February 27 entitled Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture—a title that co-curator Mona Damluji, a historian of visual culture, described as a “provocation” to raise questions about what is Arab or not about this rich archive. read more…

  • dateMarch 9, 2015
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  • posted bySherine F. Hamdy
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Learning Graphic Novels from an Artist’s Perspective

About five years ago, I was hit by a bolt of lightning. It happened on an otherwise normal workday, while I was struggling to tame what was becoming an increasingly unwieldy project. In a single bright flash, I pictured the entirety of my project in the form of a graphic novel. Establishing shots that parachute the reader into a specific place. Close-ups that bring the reader into the mind of a person. Simplifications that focus attention. Relationships among people inscribed in gestures, pose, action. Panels whose very internal composition and arrangement on a page move the reader through multiple perspectives. Pages whose layout make an implicit argument about how one thing is connected to another. In my mind’s eye, the exaggerated staging of sequential snapshots could lift my story out of the sticky slowness of explanation. read more…

  • dateFebruary 27, 2015
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  • posted byStacy Leigh Pigg
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“You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it”: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method

My teacher Linda Schele said those words to me years ago when teaching me about the iconography of ancient Maya sculptures. She’d given me an assignment: to make sense of the carved stone monuments from the ancient site Quirigua, in south-east Guatemala. All I had were photocopies of Alfred Maudsley’s 1880s photographs, and I was having trouble distinguishing meaningful elements from the convoluted Baroque tendrils and curls on these elaborate carvings. I brought my photocopies to her house, and the first thing she did was put one on a light-box, taping a sheet of tracing paper on top, saying, “You’ll never see a thing just staring at it on paper! You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it.” read more…

  • dateFebruary 20, 2015
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  • posted byAndrew Causey
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