Where are the Colliers in India?

India is what it is touted to be in government of India's tourist ads, incredible!!!. In more ways than one. It is incredible for the visual treasures and experiences it beckons any domestic and international traveller and also the odds it showers on them through its government agencies. I have already written about this particular downside of incredible India in my earlier post.

There are other serious disadvantages, particularly for researchers and academics who are interested in taking cultural, sociological and visual anthropological approaches to the study of the billion+ visual subjects and their countless billions of visual contexts.

One serious disadvantage is the inability of the Indian academia to accord the rightful dues to the fields of visual cultural studies, visual sociology and visual anthropology. We, however, have the dubious distinction of having the largest number of programmes, particularly in the state of Tamil Nadu, in visual communication, which have mushroomed, proliferated and spread like any other seasonal and trade-inspired academic programmes in India. The visual communication programmes are what typifies the birth, proliferation and eventual distortion of their semiotic and semantic planes of the words and their particular assemblages that constitute the peculiarly Indian kind of commodity fetishism in Indian higher education. In this context, the evolution of the BSc and MSc visual communication programmes and the countless number of courses focussed on the exploitation of the aspirations of the subjects and objects of information technology sector in general and the call centre sector in particular share a lot of features of commodity fetishism of the higher education kind. These courses are serving the function of any subject-object relationships in a typical process of commodity fetishism where there are no losers and both the subjects and objects are portrayed as winners.

The assemblages of visual communication, electronic media, computer science and information technology, hence, have to be read as entities that have no native elements that can do justice to the spirit of the words that constitute such assemblages of commodity fetishism and their cultural,sociological, communication and anthropological contexts of the students, teachers, communities and the larger visual landscape and culture of India/Tamil Nadu. Semiotically, these assemblages are empty signifiers (of the meanings they fail to connote and denote).

Now, let us focus on the question of the heading of the post: "Where are the Colliers in India? To the uninitiated, Colliers represent a family of scholars who rejuvenated the fields of visual anthropology as we understand it today. John Colier jr. and his famous son Malcolm Collier have helped visual anthropology and the scores of its practitioners through their nearly four decades long work of painstaking and absolutely awesome research studies of native Indians. For whatever the fields of visual sociology, visual cultural studies and visual anthropology represents today in terms of methodological, conceptual and theoretical directions, we owe it to the classical work of John Collier, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method, first published in 1967. Among the several works of Colliers, the following are noteworthy.

i.Collier, Jr., John and Malcolm Collier. 1986. The Challenge of Observation and the Nature of Photography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

ii) Collier, Jr., John and Malcolm Collier. 1986. Orientation and Rapport. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

iii)Collier, Jr., John and Malcolm Collier. 1986. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

John Collier jr. and his son Malcom made known one of the splendid guiding posts of visual anthropology - The subjects of visual analysis are more visuallly literate and astute than the supposedly visually literate, academically high-brow and culturally superior individuals who seek to act as participant observers of ethnographic field studies that focus on photography as a site of ethnographic documentation and analysis.

There are Colliers among Indians too, probably. But they can be unleashed only by going beyond the empty signifiers (visual communication) that exist as academic programmes with the mask of the commodity fetishism and media trade induced implications in humanities and social sciences.