Drawing with our feet (and trampling the maps): walking with video as a graphic anthropology

In this chapter I consider the potential of ethnographic video-making for a graphic anthropology. Departing from existing treatments of the (audio)visual in anthropology as either irrelevant or a challenge to the mainstream, I will argue that video can facilitate an alternative form of ethnographic note-taking and description. By resituating ethnographic video practices within the paradigm of a graphic anthropology, and thus understanding them in terms of lines and movement, I suggest an understanding of video-recording as a form of inscription. I explore this suggestion through the example of a series of video walks, which in themselves highlight the themes of lines and movement. Yet the principle is more widely applicable, and opens up the possibility of using video in ethnographic research in ways that support, and might be combined with, other methods for developing a graphic anthropology.