As an anthropologist long engaged in unpacking post-violence memory politics and the role that images play in these contexts, I have often used trace as a concept, indeed, metaphor for describing the complex ways in which the past is made present through diverse material and visual forms. Emphasising the mercurial and circuitous ways in which the past haunts the present, trace is a generative analytic that speaks to how the incomplete and the partial—the fleeting and the obscure—can powerfully shape, alter, and bring into being particular social worlds. In visual terms, it also alludes to the malleable ways—indeed, the very technologies—through which things, people, and histories may be rendered visible or invisible. Trace, after all, is the very concept used to describe the point of origin for many imaging technologies: light’s ability to imprint on photo-sensitive surfaces mechanically produced images of “the real.”
Drawing on my ethnographic research as well as my recent writing on trace as “substance” (Douglas, Buchczyk & Joyce, forthcoming), I consider how an approach to trace, not merely as an evocative analytic, but rather as an epistemological, methodological, and ethical provocation might contribute to recent debates on multimodality and forms of multimodal experimentation. Recent literature on multimodal methods and forms has emphasized the generative role that experimentation and invention can play when producing and circulating anthropological knowledge through non-textual means. However, for many practicing visual and multimodal anthropologists, these debates do not address how often these experiments must be made legible to the field through processes of translation that explain these projects and their outcomes into textual forms. Through an exploration of case studies and examples, this paper explores how thinking with trace might also encourage us to reflect more seriously about how experimentation beyond text might shift the very contours of what anthropological knowledge we produce, how we produce it, and the very non-textual forms it might take.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2026
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Chihab El-Khachab and Paola Esposito.
