Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 98

Although anthropology has long made use of visual sources of information such as photographs and film footage, sociology has tended to be a subject focused on written texts (Harper 2010). That is not to say that sociologists do not produce their own visual materials. Representations of numerical and statistical information are turned into easy-to-read pie charts, tables and graphical representations, while ethnographic research is often presented with photographs included. However, these visual elements are almost always ancillary to the main text, which is the more significant part of the articles and books through which the sociologist’s arguments are made (Chaplin 1994).

In more recent years some research studies have made use of digital technologies and devices to document areas of social life that are hard to access. For example, Bancroft and his colleagues (2014) recruited female students into their project aimed at exploring young women’s drinking culture in Edinburgh, Scotland. The students effectively became participant-researchers, using smartphone cameras to document their own pleasureseeking activities in the night-time economy. We can probably expect this kind of approach to become more commonplace in certain types of research project in the future.

Some sociologists have become increasingly interested in a ‘visual sociology’, in which photographs, film, television programmes, video, and so on, are objects of study in their own right (Tinkler 2013). Hence, family photograph albums can be treated as key resources in understanding the passage of generations, while the history of film or art can tell us something of the social norms, dress codes and manners of earlier times. But the process of production through which visual materials come into being also forms a field of study, and we can ask some familiar questions about them. Who produced them? For what reason? How were they produced? What has been included and what omitted? Studying the production of visual materials forms one part of the broader field of the production of culture, through which we gain a better understanding of how different societies represent their ways of life to their members.