Corpo e tecnologia nel film etnografico: la videocamera da strumento a corpo intraneo

In this article, I aim to explain how the use of audio-visual tools in the ethnographic research is not separable from the action of the researcher’s body and, therefore, also thanks to the “turns” that anthropology has taken in the last decades, the contemporary visual ethnography cannot longer be conceived merely as “work of the eye”. Moreover, in the history of the practices of visual ethnography the author’s subjectivity, embodied and expresses by his/her body, has been more and more evident and used to sensorialize the vision, moving from the “objectifying” gaze of the positivist approach to the “subjectivated” gaze, and to the employment of an anticartesian and ecological perspective in which “subject” and “object” are intertwined and connected to the environment. In the final part of the article I try to show how the recent “wearable technologies” emphasize the ecological approach and modify the statute of the video camera from tool to intraneous body.