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Visual communication is a part of everyone's daily existence. It is a ubiquitous mode that shapes not only the environment that individuals inhabit, but the very identity of the individual. Graphic designers, who create the vast majority of the visual communication encountered, play a crucial role in the production of cultural identity. It is a necessity that designers understand that role, as agents of cultural production.[ethno]graphic design is an ever-evolving approach to graphic design which utilizes anthropological methods in the creative process. This document presents a collection of projects which take an anthropological approach to the design process, utilizing techniques developed by cultural anthropologists to aid the design process — primarily ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, collaboration, multivocal representation and reflexivity.

English Summary This dissertation primarily aims to synoptically place the theme of audiovisual representations of indigenous cultures within the context of cultural studies. With its interdisciplinary overlapping, the cultural studies approach is well suited to understanding the complex significance of visual representations of culture, which are both cultural artefacts and cultural interpretations and have an impact that is as artistic as it is scientific and political. The first part of the work describes the manner in which native cultures are audio-visually represented, especially in ethnographic photographs and films which emerged in the North American and European context. The mapping of "exotic others" intensified with the first modern overseas discoveries, first by means of exhibitions of living natives, illustrations and figurines, later through photographs, films and videos. These representations were significantly influenced by the socio-cultural conditions in which they arose. As late as the turn of the 20th century, there was a dominating conviction about the capability of photographs to present an objective record of reality. This technology was therefore used as an instrument for recording and classifying physical and cultural differences. The widespread acceptance of the doctrine of...

As a medium of modernity, film has always been entwined with the energy regime sustaining it. This thesis is interested in the interrelation between film and oil, and approached as a piece of petro-fiction, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear (1953) is subject to a close, ecocritical analysis. A selection of four additional oil-films are used as points of comparison. By looking at a variety of representational and aesthetic aspects, the study explores how the film visualises the Anthropocene and negotiates the oil culture in which it exists. By reading the film in terms of oil, this thesis finds that the film in various ways expresses an entanglement with oil culture, while also criticising the same dependency. From the five oil films that have been analysed, catastrophe is an inherent motif, and part of the attraction of oil as subject matter, mirrored in broader culture of exuberance. In contrast to the other films, The Wages of Fear plays less into spectacle but opens to a critical examination of the various exploitations involved at the hands of the oil industry.

Over centuries, Hmong people have moved from mountain to mountain, home to home, country to country, crossing rivers and valleys in search of an escape from oppression. The Txiv Xaiv (Plig) ritual and chant has survived serial exodus and diaspora that Hmong people have experienced. This ritual encodes Hmong historical and cosmological understandings as an oral text, passed down from master to student, and performed at funerals to apply that understanding in the management of souls--ultimately to send them home. The Txiv Xaiv (Plig) serves as a glue, connecting the past generations to the generation of today and the generations of tomorrow. A funeral without a Txiv Xaiv is like a tree without its roots. Its ability to preserve Hmong history, morals, and traditions is unparalleled, but the dispersion of Hmong communities across a now global diaspora threatens the vitality of this oral text. An ethnographic film constitutes a critical and central empirical element of this thesis. This film, entitled Returning Home, draws on the affordances of visual and sonic mediums to both depict this oral text and the practices associated with it, and to unpack the cosmology of personhood encoded in the text, which Hickman (2014) calls "ancestral personhood". The film centers on a particular form of the Txiv Xaiv Plig that was preserved by a paramount Master, Shong Ger Thao, who passed down a critical version of the ritual to the director of Returning Home (and author of this thesis) before he passed away. This version of the ritual has the unique capacity to manage the soul of a person who did not receive a complete funeral and proper burial when they passed away, such as the post-1975 exodus from Laos, when Hmong families had to flee for their lives and many people were killed in the jungle along the way. By fate or coincidence (most Hmong would err on the side of fate), the first time that the director of this film was called upon to perform this Txiv Xaiv Plig was for an ex-post-facto funeral for Master Shong Ger's wife, Kia Yang, who had passed away during the lock-down phase of the Covid-10 pandemic, when large gatherings (necessary for a proper Hmong funeral) were not permitted. This film draws on this poetic circle of the passing down of knowledge and putting it into practice, in order to demonstrate the value of the knowledge that Master Shong Ger had preserved, specifically through the use of that knowledge to manage his own late wife's soul, thus completing the circle from one generation to the next in Master Shong Ger's family. This project--the written thesis in conjunction with the film--advances a "Hmong Oral Knowledge" approach that is critical to both understanding and preserving Hmong cosmology. This approach puts Hmong cosmology and philosophy into dialogue with scholarship being produced about Hmong communities across the world which tends to treat Hmong ideas as mere data-to-be-analyzed. The thesis focuses on the substance of Master Shong Ger Thao's philosophy (derived from Hmong oral ritual), in order to "look" and not just "see" (MacDougall 2019) human experience from a Hmong theoretical perspective. Given the primacy of oral and physically performative ritual practice, this thesis employs the medium of film in order to engage with Hmong ritual knowledge and practice in its own terms. The film provides a 'thick depiction' of these practices, and seeks to explicate the cosmology of the 'three souls' model of personhood that underpins these practices, while also focusing on the legacy of Master Shong Ger Thao, who cultivated and preserved the details of this cosmology and the oral texts that encode it.

Esta pesquisa tem como principal objeto de estudo os repertórios de ação e mobilização utilizados durante e ao redor da Ocupação da Câmara de Vereadores de Porto Alegre (10-18 de julho de 2013). A partir da experiência etnográfica e do engajamento militante no Bloco de Lutas pelo Transporte Público, busca-se compreender de que formas o Bloco se organizou e quais são os valores que nortearam esta organização. Ao mesmo tempo, atenta-se para os sujeitos responsáveis por essas práticas e por esses meios, procurando identificar as redes sociais que os aproximam e suas trajetórias de vida. Assembleias, atos, comissões, ocupações, redes sociais e cine-debates servem para analisar as disputas dentro do Bloco de Lutas e ao redor da Ocupação da Câmara de Vereadores de Porto Alegre. É priorizado o recorte etnográfico e o diálogo com outros autores que pensam as práticas de governo e os sentidos das políticas nesses tempos e nesses espaços. Finalmente, identificam-se as divergências estratégicas como o principal problema do Bloco, as ocupações como uma forma de ação coletiva integral e a potencialidade da antropologia pública e das camadas de autoria. / This research has as its main object of study the repertoires of action and mobilization used in and around the Occupation of the City Council of Porto Alegre (10-18 July 2013). From the ethnographic experience and militant engagement in the Fight Block for Public Transportation, we seek to understand what this Block was organized like, and what values are the ones that guided this organization. Meanwhile, we focused on the subjects responsible for these practices and means, trying to identify social networks that link them and their life trajectories. Meetings, acts, commissions, occupations, social networks and cine-debates served to analyze disputes within the Fight Block and about the Occupation of the City Council of Porto Alegre. It is prioritized the ethnographic research and dialogue with other authors who think government practices and senses of policies in these times and spaces. Finally, it identifies the strategic divergences as the main problem of the Block, the occupations as a form of full collective action and the potential of public anthropology and authory layers.

ANTROPOLOGICKÝ SERIÁL - Kognitívne a semiotické modely kultury Abstract /english version/: The author of the thesis has developed a methodological framework of visual anthropology by collecting relevant information concerning the subject and by verifying this knowledge practically in an authentic living environment. This interconnection represents the main twist in the methodology, which turns away from the informative and interpretative version of ethnographic (anthropological) film and moves towards its functional, socio-cultural analysis. The subject of the thesis is an interdisciplinary research and possibilities of applying cognitive and semiotic analytical schemes into the process of directing an anthropological series. The entire project of an authentic ethnographic research and the film tumenge (I., II., III.) attempt to display the interethnical relations in the village Palota in the North-East of Slovakia, particularly bringing the life in the local Roma settlement and its individual members into sharp focus.

Esta pesquisa tem como principal objeto de estudo os repertórios de ação e mobilização utilizados durante e ao redor da Ocupação da Câmara de Vereadores de Porto Alegre (10-18 de julho de 2013). A partir da experiência etnográfica e do engajamento militante no Bloco de Lutas pelo Transporte Público, busca-se compreender de que formas o Bloco se organizou e quais são os valores que nortearam esta organização. Ao mesmo tempo, atenta-se para os sujeitos responsáveis por essas práticas e por esses meios, procurando identificar as redes sociais que os aproximam e suas trajetórias de vida. Assembleias, atos, comissões, ocupações, redes sociais e cine-debates servem para analisar as disputas dentro do Bloco de Lutas e ao redor da Ocupação da Câmara de Vereadores de Porto Alegre. É priorizado o recorte etnográfico e o diálogo com outros autores que pensam as práticas de governo e os sentidos das políticas nesses tempos e nesses espaços. Finalmente, identificam-se as divergências estratégicas como o principal problema do Bloco, as ocupações como uma forma de ação coletiva integral e a potencialidade da antropologia pública e das camadas de autoria. / This research has as its main object of study the repertoires of action and mobilization used in and around the Occupation of the City Council of Porto Alegre (10-18 July 2013). From the ethnographic experience and militant engagement in the Fight Block for Public Transportation, we seek to understand what this Block was organized like, and what values are the ones that guided this organization. Meanwhile, we focused on the subjects responsible for these practices and means, trying to identify social networks that link them and their life trajectories. Meetings, acts, commissions, occupations, social networks and cine-debates served to analyze disputes within the Fight Block and about the Occupation of the City Council of Porto Alegre. It is prioritized the ethnographic research and dialogue with other authors who think government practices and senses of policies in these times and spaces. Finally, it identifies the strategic divergences as the main problem of the Block, the occupations as a form of full collective action and the potential of public anthropology and authory layers.

Esta pesquisa tem como principal objeto de estudo os repertórios de ação e mobilização utilizados durante e ao redor da Ocupação da Câmara de Vereadores de Porto Alegre (10-18 de julho de 2013). A partir da experiência etnográfica e do engajamento militante no Bloco de Lutas pelo Transporte Público, busca-se compreender de que formas o Bloco se organizou e quais são os valores que nortearam esta organização. Ao mesmo tempo, atenta-se para os sujeitos responsáveis por essas práticas e por esses meios, procurando identificar as redes sociais que os aproximam e suas trajetórias de vida. Assembleias, atos, comissões, ocupações, redes sociais e cine-debates servem para analisar as disputas dentro do Bloco de Lutas e ao redor da Ocupação da Câmara de Vereadores de Porto Alegre. É priorizado o recorte etnográfico e o diálogo com outros autores que pensam as práticas de governo e os sentidos das políticas nesses tempos e nesses espaços. Finalmente, identificam-se as divergências estratégicas como o principal problema do Bloco, as ocupações como uma forma de ação coletiva integral e a potencialidade da antropologia pública e das camadas de autoria. / This research has as its main object of study the repertoires of action and mobilization used in and around the Occupation of the City Council of Porto Alegre (10-18 July 2013). From the ethnographic experience and militant engagement in the Fight Block for Public Transportation, we seek to understand what this Block was organized like, and what values are the ones that guided this organization. Meanwhile, we focused on the subjects responsible for these practices and means, trying to identify social networks that link them and their life trajectories. Meetings, acts, commissions, occupations, social networks and cine-debates served to analyze disputes within the Fight Block and about the Occupation of the City Council of Porto Alegre. It is prioritized the ethnographic research and dialogue with other authors who think government practices and senses of policies in these times and spaces. Finally, it identifies the strategic divergences as the main problem of the Block, the occupations as a form of full collective action and the potential of public anthropology and authory layers.

The research project 'This is my Face: Audio-visual practice as collaborative sense-making among men living with HIV in Chile' is an interdisciplinary project that explores 'collaborative mise en-scène' as a method to further understand the sense-making processes around the biographical disruption caused by HIV. It combines Anthropology and Arts methods as part of the PhD in Anthropology, Media and Performance, a practice-based program that fosters interdisciplinary approaches to the production of original knowledge, based on self-reflexive and critical research practices (The University of Manchester, 2018). Relying on the specific competences of photography and film and the co-creation of an ethnographic context based in hermeneutic reflexivity, the collaborators on the project created and explored representations of critical life events, in order to make sense of the disruption HIV brought to their lives. The collaborators were highly stigmatised individuals living with HIV, which hindered their possibilities for sharing narratives and for reflection, and as such, made it more difficult for them to come to terms with a diagnosis they described as a 'fracture' in their lives. This project analyses the creative process of 'collaborative mise-en-scène' as a way to provide further opportunities for reflexivity and sense making, a method that departs from their everyday face-to-face encounters as means of understanding what they are going through. Representations of life events emerged from our practice, as well as evocations, which provided a means by which to understand their experiences with HIV, and opened up ways to resignify their past experiences and projections of the future. Photography and film offered their specific expressive competences to the project, but also gave the possibility of making visible the collaborators' experiences in order to promote a dialogue with others, moving beyond our creative encounters. Therefore, their evocations became 'statements' of what it means to live with HIV in Chile, and at the same time, by taking part in its creation, it provided access to the particularities of the sense-making process in which those images were embedded. This collaborative creative process opened up ways to highlight the relevance for sense-making in face-to-face encounters, demonstrating that hermeneutic reflexivity as a practice-based form of mutual questioning can promote a critical engagement with life trajectories and with others beyond our practice.