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Visual regimes have been analyzed by a number of cultural philosophers and historians from about the late 1980s to the present, generating much talk about a "visual turn" (or "pictorial turn" [Mitchell 1994]) that has at least matched the "linguistic turn," as Roland Barthes coined it, which took place in the mid-1980s, when hermeneutics was forwarded as the academician's newest playing field. The result has been a rash of visual "readers' and expositions of visual culture (as a limited example: Bryson et al. 1994; Lister 1995; Jencks 1995; Brennan and Jay 1996; Walker and Chaplin 1997; Mirzoeff 1998; Heywood and Sandy well 1999; Mirzoeff 2000). This is a sure sign that a "field" has emerged, namely, the controversial development of visual cultural studies, especially as theorized by the contributors to the Journal of Visual Culture. In this regard, Mieke Bal's (2003) strong statement concerning the presiding "essentialism" that demarcates most of the research in the field of visual culture needs to be noted. Her complaint: vision is isolated from other senses, as if images can stand on their own, a common assumption of idealist philosophy. The image's figurality is reduced to dis-cursivity. Images become simply texts, reduced to codes. There is a further indiscriminate understanding of the visual environment as a mixture of kitsch, high and low, avant-garde, and academic art that can be investigated, critiqued, and understood through common ethnographic methodologies. Unfortunately, much of anthropological visual studies falls into this morass of semiotic simplification, which I address in the next chapter.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230113602_5

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