Editorial

Visual Anthropology, as its name implies, is primarily an anthropology journal, although we do from time to time present articles in cinema studies or art history. So far as its anthropological content is concerned, we have seen a sea change of sorts, as articles on “the primitive”—which for so long was our bread-and-butter—are perhaps no longer so numerous as articles based on fieldwork in modern Western societies, lands such as Israel, Argentina, Canada, and all parts of Europe; or else in rapidly modernizing nations such as Egypt, India or Vietnam. Recent issues of our journal have included several articles on refugees and other migrants (including one in this issue), alongside articles on imprisoned mothers, colonial policing, health in indigenous communities, political prisoners in a totalitarian state, and fraught issues that surround the development of what were at least notionally indigenous lands and traditional cultures. There is no point in labeling such studies applied visual anthropology: they are straightforwardly approaching biting issues of our own times. And to the extent that they often concern people who have no effective political representation in their own or else their host countries, we anthropologists can at least pinpoint socio-economic issues faced by those people that otherwise tend to go unacknowledged in London, Washington, Brussels or Beijing. No matter what news media we consult, we learn of daily events arising from a panoply of global problems that are forming the constant background to life in the early 21st century. These issues are parsed in a variety of ways depending on political convictions, and all too many aspects are conveniently glossed over or ignored completely by so-called “leaders”: witness the utter silence about climate change and expanding desertification, with the consequent depopulation, in the lead-up to most recent presidential elections. But what is going to happen when northern Africa has to empty much of its populace into Europe or elsewhere? Do Muslim-dominant countries adequately aid their benighted co-religionists? Are United Nations agencies still relevant? At the present moment the outstanding global concern is with overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, which has rightly been compared to the equally destructive Spanish flu epidemic of a century ago—which, by the way, was only “Spanish” in the rhetoric of a U.S. president who was at pains to “pin the blame” for it overseas (and so took his cue from a baseless French accusation), exactly as ex-President Trump did for what he called the “China virus.” In our own time in a host of “advanced” countries that included Britain, France, Germany, Australia and the United States we have seen large public demonstrations of opposition to the reasonable public health strategies of mask-wearing and vaccinating against COVID-19. It is extraordinary to find that nearly half of all Americans claim a “right” not to wear face masks.