Vol. 5 No. 9 (2022): Sense Rendered Obtuse: Visuality and Ethnographic Practice

For Barthes, the obtuse sense exposes the limits of the world of representations. It occurs when certain elements underlying the image emerge surprisingly to mark accents or changes of intonation in the visual message. This collection takes up the notion of the obtuse to reassess the weight and potency of the image for ethnography. Each contribution to this volume analyzes the notion of the obtuse to probe the ethnographic possibilities of the image considered from its most common, diverse and unexpected expressions. The contributions attend to the "third" or "non-obvious" meanings that emerge through empirical encounters.