On the Compositional Relationship of Text and Image in Graphic Anthropology: The Promise of “Sequential” and “Unrestrained” Perspectives for Unsettling Representation

Abstract

Graphic anthropology has grown to become a distinctive subfield at the intersection of anthropology of drawing, visual anthropology, and multimodal approaches to social research. We assess this development and identify two emerging styles of graphic anthropological practice. While some anthropologists follow the representational language of comic books and graphic novels—known as sequential art—others evade sequential framing, arranging images and text in a variety of nonsequential combinations. We compare and evaluate the two styles and outline their common analytical aspiration to unsettle static textual representation. Such a representational unsettling, we argue, can be realized productively—not by accentuating the text-image dichotomy or by treating the emerging styles as mutually exclusive—but through benefiting from the hybrid (pictorial and textual) qualities of graphic anthropology, which shape each other in a coproductive relationship that defies typological boundaries.