Commission on Visual Anthropology

About
The Commission on Visual Anthropology (CVA) is a commission of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and, at the same time, an independent network in its own right. It promotes study, research, and collaboration across visual anthropology in its broadest sense: ethnographic film and video, multimodal and sensory methods, visual theory and aesthetics, the cross-cultural study of meaningful visual expression, and the social and cultural impact of media. Its founding task remains its core role today, to act as a network that shares information about visual anthropology work taking place around the world, with particular attention to colleagues and communities outside North America and Western Europe.

Official IUAES commission page: https://waunet.org/iuaes/commission/visual-anthropology/

History
In the early 1980s, Asen Balikci was invited by IUAES General Secretary Cyril Belshaw to set up the Commission on Visual Anthropology. Balikci built the network largely single-handedly, founding the CVA Newsletter in 1988, distributed in print to several hundred recipients, the only standing connection between visual anthropologists worldwide at the time. He insisted that members should come not only from North America and Western Europe but also from the Global South, where the lack of information and exchange in visual anthropology was felt most sharply. He organized the discipline's IUAES sessions, the largest at the XIIth ICAES in Zagreb in 1988.
After Balikci retired in the early 1990s, the printed newsletter was carried on by Peter Ian Crawford (appointed by Rolf Husmann around 1999) until he relocated to the Solomon Islands around 2004. In 2001 Husmann revived circulation with a bi-monthly CVA circular, which in 2005 found a permanent home within the existing newsletter of the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA).
The chairmanship passed from Balikci to Antonio Marazzi (Italy), then to Rolf Husmann (Germany, from 2001), Metje Postma (Netherlands, 2009 to 2019), and Bao Jiang (China, 2019 to 2023). Since 2023 the CVA has been chaired by Mihai Andrei Leaha, with Mouazamou Ahmadou as co-chair from October 2024.
In 2026 the network's publication tradition was renewed with the launch of ZARE: Horizons in Visual Anthropology.

Aims
The CVA works as a facilitating network rather than a formal organization. It:

1.

organizes panels at IUAES Conferences and Inter-Congresses;

2.

encourages discussion of audiovisual and multimodal media in anthropological research, inside and outside academia;

3.

supports the development of visual and multimodal anthropology as a discipline worldwide, especially in regions without established programmes;

4.

publishes ZARE: Horizons in Visual Anthropology and maintains this website as a forum for the field;

5.

fosters collaboration with academic programmes, museums, festivals, and networks, including NAFA and the Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival.

ZARE: Horizons in Visual Anthropology
ZARE: Horizons in Visual Anthropology is a magazine launched in 2026, produced in collaboration with the NAFA network and in official partnership with the Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival. It relaunches and continues the publication tradition that runs from Balikci's 1988 CVA newsletter through the later CVA/NAFA newsletter. Longer-form essays, reflections, and contributions appear in a quarterly magazine, while news flows continuously on the NAFA site. ISSN 0805-1046. Magazine and issues: https://nafanetwork.org/zare-magazine/
Submit a piece: https://nafanetwork.org/contribute/