Bio Brief Biography and Academic Orientation Curriculum Vitae Education Positions Publications: Books Publications: Journals, Articles & Book Chapters Reports Invited Lectures and Colloquia Grants Received and Fieldwork Visual Production Media Participation Professional Activity Association Memberships

Brief Biography and Academic Orientation
The numbers in this bio refer to entries from the publication section of this CV.

I took my graduate degrees at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Also studied graduate anthropology at Tulane Univeristy in New Orleans and film production at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe New Mexico. For the past 30 years, I have worked in an interdisciplinary manner at Temple University, combining interests in Communication, Cultural Anthropology, American Studies and more recently, Asian Studies. Within the past ten years, I have focused interests on Asian Studies, specifically the visual culture of modern Japan. Some of this work is mentioned on my home page:

My orientation and perspective have been grounded in a framework abbreviated as the “How They Look” paradigm. This includes the dual perspectives of attention to look/appearance and to see/perception-worldview. One underlying tenet stresses the need to understand visual culture as intimately connected to other codes and modes of human communication. In turn, my objective has been to combine “a cultured eye with an eye of culture.” This pervasive model of visual culture has been generated from a framework of “culture and visual communication” and an “anthropology of visual communication.” Within this context, I have developed and offered courses comparing American and Japanese visual cultures (Anthro. 64 and 238) and I have been able to contribute entries to three encyclopedias, in communications (40), in cultural anthropology (55) and in American Studies (82).

I have consistently advocated the need to undertake fieldwork – to examine a particular visual phenomenon in situ, as it exists and operates among ordinary people living their daily lives. Examples of fieldwork include middle class American families (see Snapshot Versions of Life (1987), Navajo in Pine Springs, Arizona (see Through Navajo Eyes (1997), 38), groups of teenagers in Philadelphia (1, 2, 26, 44), Japanese American families in San Francisco and Gallup, New Mexico (see Turning Leaves (1991) 37, 52, 54), Japanese living in Tokyo (78. 81, Book Manuscript in Progress), and most recently, asthma patients at Boston Children’s hospital (69, 72, 86). All of these examples focus on the production of visual/pictorial expression within contexts of culture and communication.

My conviction is that studies of visual culture should not be limited to domains of public display such as mass media and fine art. In this regard, my work has been more inclusive than most. I have published on a broad range of topics within visual culture including examples of mass media (13), indigenous media (44) and home media. I have examined a variety of pictorial forms including ethnographic films (57, 70), feature films (68, 79), children’s filmmaking (1, 2, 12, 26), family snapshots (25, 28, 31, 58, 64), home movies (4, 9, 27, 33, 34), tourist photographs (18, 22), and home video (35). Recently, I have initiated a cross-cultural examination of family home pages and camera-phone usage. In addition, I have reviewed books about postcards (76), documentary films (8, 24, 42, 73), visual research methods (80, 84), photojournalism (43), anthropological photography (51), photography (30, 74) and photo therapy (5).

Between 1993-95 and in the Spring of 1999, I joined the faculty at Temple University Japan – and will be offering a summer session in 2004. Japan presents us with a wonderful array of topics and problems in visual culture. Here I initiated studies of Purikura (Japanese Print Club photo-stickers (78, 81)), personal snapshots used in Japanese pet cemeteries (59), and currently, Japanese ghost photography and “sha-mail” (pictures mailed through mobiles). Some of my own photography done in Japan e.g. “Traditional Views, a photographic exhibition from Japan,” can be seen at: http://astro.temple.edu/~rchalfen/visprod.htm. In addition, I am two-thirds through writing a new monograph on Japanese Home Media.

Finally let me say that I feel visual culture is an extremely important area for new research and writing. Three areas stand out for me. First, past work with Navajo and recent Japanese experiences have convinced me of the need to further our cross-cultural understandings of visual culture. Generating ethnographies of visual culture while mediating logocentic and pictocentric perspectives should have priority in the exploration of non-Western settings. Questions of how and why the visual is significant in people’s lives need a fresh start by addressing how various aspects of visual environment are understood and valued in ways that may be quite different from our taken-for-granted assumptions and interpretations. Perhaps more attention is needed to the problematic meanings generated in response to a broader range of visual representations.

Mitchell, Mirzoeff and Chapin all offer us important formulations and starting points. But I see the need to assert the contributions of anthropology -- including work in archaeology, biological and linguistic anthropology as well as socio-cultural components. Perhaps visual anthropology and visual sociology have been too narrow in this respect, dwelling in the trees without a sense of the forest. I would like to see an anthropological concern with culture (past, present and even future) play a more important role. In short, I am not at all sure we have been asking the right questions, or that our observational purview has been broad enough; possibly our starting points have been ethnocentric. Clearly people related to visual culture in a variety of ways in part based on socio-cultural backgrounds, experience with mediated forms and the like. As an anthropologist I want to know more about the various ways and means that visual culture is related to culture.

In recent years, several pragmatic concerns have become more central. It occurred to me that certain applied dimensions of visual research were missing. In this context, I have been working at Children’s Hospital in Boston on projects that exploit a fluency and comfort in contemporary visual culture. Here we have been asking patients to take cameras home to make videotapes that teach their medical health personnel what it means to live with a specific ailment – asthma and obesity have been first (62, 69, 72, 2003 in press).

The third and other practical concern relates directly to pedagogy (6, 11, 61). I have been giving more thought to the use of feature films within the social sciences, specifically related to using films in classroom teaching (79, 86), within settings where students are already so embedded in personal and public realms of visual culture. Most recently, I was appointed a Teaching Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts for development of electronic demonstration portfolios for our undergraduate majors in visual anthropology (see 2004, in press)

The visuality of contemporary culture is indeed pervasive. As pictorial symbolic environments become increasingly dense, work in visual culture must be built into notions of media socialization, image acculturation and communicative competence as well as both long term and everyday survival. It is an exciting place to be.

Full references and collateral work can be found on my full cv below.

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Curriculum Vitae

RICHARD M. CHALFEN Department of Anthropology Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 (215) 204-1413 richard.chalfen@temple.edu

RICHARD M. CHALFEN The Mariner, Unit 204 300 Commercial Street Boston, MA 02109 (617) 227-1534

Education

1974 Ph.D. in Communications, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1967 M.A. in Communications, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1964 B.A. in Anthropology, The College, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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Positions

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Publications: Books

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Publications: Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Publications in Press

Publications in Preparation

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Reports:

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Invited Lectures and Colloquia:

Papers have been presented at:
The Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the American Culture Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the Midwest American Culture Association, the International Visual Sociology Association.

Invited lectures have been given at:
Teachers College, Columbia University; Anthropology and Communications Departments, Ohio State University; Visual Scholars Program, University of Iowa; Anthropology Colloquium, College of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Anthropology Clubs, West Chester State College, Pennsylvania and Burlington County College, New Jersey; International Center for Photography, New York; Japanese American Culture and Community Center, Los Angeles, California; Lowie Museum of Anthropology, Berkeley, California; Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania; Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania; Department of Sociology, University of Bologna; Department of Sociology, University of Padowa; Department of Photography, Maryland Institute of Art; Department of Sociology, Boston University; Harvard Graduate School of Education; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL.; Konan University, Kobe, Japan.

Invited papers have been read during:
The Conference on Visual Anthropology, Philadelphia; the Conference on Film as Ethnography, Manchester, U.K.; the Conference on Visual Sociology and Visual Anthropology, Amsterdam; Conference on Culture and Communication, Philadelphia; the Conference on Native American Interaction Patterns, University of Alberta; the Conference on American Indian Images on Film, University of New Mexico; Symposium on Child-Made Films, New Paltz, N.Y., Oberlin Film Conference, Oberlin, Ohio, the Japanese Popular Culture Conference, Victoria, British Columbia, CA.; Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (with Michael Rich), Harvard University,

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Grants Received and Fieldwork

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Visual Production:

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Media Participation:

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Professional Activity:

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Association Memberships:

American Anthropological Association
Society for Visual Anthropology
International Visual Sociology Association
Japan Society of Boston
New England Association of Asian Studies
December, 2003

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