Visual anthropology

The aim of this chapter is to explain what visual anthropology is and to demonstrate her and her sister's, visual sociology's, uses in understanding the increasingly sophisticated competition for our (un)divided attention. This fierce, mostly visual and iconic, competition underpins systematically mobilized and individualized interactions and communications. These intense, passionate, individualized, mobile communications happen under our very eyes-otherwise known as processes, ebbs and flows of social life, they accelerate with the mobile multimedia connectivity. Navigating our increasingly complex social worlds (real, fictitious and virtual), comprehending these increasingly sophisticated cultural realities (real, virtual and interactive), requires skills, access to sociocultural capital and empowerment to employ the above-mentioned resources. Hence the growth of interest in visual communications, which facilitate learning outside of the range of control status gatekeepers.