Twenty years of visual anthropology

I recently invited my colleague Gareth Davey to do a content analysis of the first 20 volumes of Visual Anthropology, to mark a milestone that we reached at the end of last year. Dr. Davey is a British psychologist who was also trained in biology and holds a Ph.D. from Bolton University in Environmental Psychology. It seemed to me - to avoid bias - that it was important not to have the survey done by an anthropologist, and especially not by an American one, as 48 percent of all contributed articles originated in the United States. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Davey for the heavy work he has put into this report. Occasional content analyses have been done before in the field of communication studies for journals in other fields, but so far as I know this is the first thorough attempt to evaluate what went into an anthropology journal that we are justified today in considering as a mainstream one. Your discussion of Davey's findings is invited. Paul Hockings Editor-in-Chief During the past 20 years, visual anthropology has been transformed from its neglected and marginalized presence to an established and respected subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology. As one of only two peer-reviewed journals in the field, Visual Anthropology has played an important role in this development. The present study analyzed the original articles published in Visual Anthropology (since its inaugural issue in 1987 to the end of 2007) in order to understand their characteristics. The findings showed that a diverse range of topics had been reported, classified into five main areas. Public presentation and specialized applications were the most salient areas, which seems to reflect their increasing popularity in the discipline. The articles published in the journal covered more than 80 countries, authored by scholars in 25 countries. Book and film reviews came from dozens more countries; altogether, 475 authors have contributed to the journal so far. This confirms that the journal has met its goal to serve the global community of visual anthropologists. However, the United States received the most attention, indicative perhaps of renewed interest there by the academic community. The contributors were based in a wide range of occupations; not surprisingly, the majority was university faculty in anthropology and media studies departments, although others were spread across a wide range of disciplines, representative of the field's interdisciplinary nature. The findings discussed in this study are important as the journal represents a large proportion of the discipline's research output.