In this issue of Encartes we present a selection of the most recent contributions of the Audiovisual Research Network (riav) of the ciesas,1 as well as researchers who have been linked to it through various collaboration programs and projects and from different latitudes and fields of action. Some of these contributions are the result of years of research, while others are part of projects currently under development.

In this dossier, through photography, diverse image and audiovisual formats, historical and contemporary visualities that problematize the construction of the nation, the visual discourses of modernity, the racialization of the body, the performativity of genders and identity and dissident narratives are interwoven. The dossier places special emphasis on the diversity of methodological approaches that, from anthropological and historical perspectives, allow us to account for the possibilities offered by the image and the audiovisual for social research, as powerful ways to reflect on the production of meaning, the configuration of subjectivities and historical and identity narratives.

As transversal questions to the dossier we proposed: how are images and audiovisual works constructed as sources of knowledge and methodological tools and in what way are they articulated, complemented or enhanced with other non-visual sources in social research? How do audiovisual records operate as forms of knowledge production in social research?

With the revolution of visual technologies in the last century, the xixIn the early days of anthropology, a historical inflection in the ways of recording "reality" and representing otherness took place (Pezzat, 2023: 119). Anthropology began early to use photographic and film cameras and tape recorders as tools for fieldwork. In the beginning, the purpose was to document, archive and exhibit different phenotypes, languages and cultural practices in colonial contexts. It was not until the second half of the century xx when the value of audiovisual techniques is fully recognized not only as means of representation, but also as fundamental methodological tools for research, both in anthropology and in the social sciences in general (Grau, 2012: 162).

Today, although not always sufficiently recognized, the audiovisual remains with enormous potential as a medium and methodological tool for understanding essential aspects of our environment and the multiple ways of conceiving the world, both in the past and in the present. Despite its persistent presence, written narratives and oral discourses have historically been overvalued over other forms of expression or output formats for research. However, in recent decades, imagistic and audiovisual studies have been gaining recognition as legitimate forms of knowledge production and presentation of results, increasingly characterized by collaborative and horizontal approaches.

Reading keys

The contributions of the riav to this issue of Encartes consist of ten papers covering the seven articles of the section of Temáticasone in the Realidades socioculturalesone on the side of Multimedia and two reviews. We propose a reading of these works in different transversal keys:

Self/representations, racialization/racism, and identity narratives.

In this dossier, the racialization of the body (the indigenous, the black and the red), as well as the tensions between exoticization, marginalization and agency, are key themes in the works of Paulina Pezzat, Luisángel García Yeladaqui, Itza Varela and Nahayeilli Juárez Huet. These authors problematize how the image has been (and can be) used to fix or resist racial and sex-gender stigmas. The reviews by Mauricio Sánchez and Ana Isabel León, on the other hand, converge in their interest in presenting examples of Latin American cinema made from historically marginalized and racialized territories and communities, also challenging hegemonic discourses on gender and race.

In her work, Pezzat starts from Deborah Poole's (1997) notion of visual economy to unravel the inequalities and power relations in the production, circulation and consumption of images. The author analyzes how press photography and the print industry actively participated in the construction of a racial paradigm in Guatemala at the end of the 20th century. xix and early xx. One of the challenges of this research was the analysis of photographic types and the formal structure that defines them. The author's methodological proposal involved the organization and classification of a vast corpus of images in documentary bodies, which allowed her to place them in a transnational visual discourse.

In this same period of analysis but in another geographic latitude, García Yeladaqui makes a reconstruction and analysis of the representations of the black and the mulatto in Yucatecan regional theater.2 All of this is framed in processes of wide circulation of people and representations of "the black" between Mexico and the Caribbean. In this way, the author asks to what extent these representations can offer us clues to clarify the processes involved in the fact that the Afro-descendant population, present in Yucatan since colonial times, was excluded from the local (Yucatecan) identity narrative and, in its place, "the black" became entrenched as a foreigner, more specifically Cuban. With this analysis we can confirm, as in the case analyzed by Pezzat, the nodal role that images can play in the hierarchical, exoticized and racialized representations of otherness.

On the other hand, two collaborations explore self-representation in contemporary contexts. In one of them, Nahayeilli Juárez Huet reconstructs a visual ethnography based on the identity narrative of a Yucatecan woman. To do so, she resorts to photo-elicitation with photographic material from her family album and selfies. The notion of self-representation that guides her work links identity to a "self-representational practice" from which new readings of racialized otherness are articulated (Mela, 2021: 65), but also possible counter-narratives on local identity and ideals of beauty; transversal processes with the work of Itza Varela Huerta, who articulates self-representation, art lgbttiq+ and the construction of the "prieto" in Mexico. Her work discusses "counter-miscegenation" and anti-racist struggles, in which diverse forms of domination related to social class, sexual orientation and dissident gender identities converge. From this perspective, the experience of the deviant is irreducible to a biologicist notion of race and stands as a political subjectivation from art; an aesthetic expression that questions hegemonic models of beauty, visual discourses of miscegenation and seeks to dignify the representation of what is considered "deviant".

The experiences of these dissident sex-gender identities, but in other territorial and cultural spaces, are dealt with in the review proposed by Mauricio Sánchez Álvarez on Laerte-se and Palomatwo Brazilian films -one documentary and one fiction-. These productions show the experiences of transgender women in profoundly contrasting territories: the city of São Paulo and the rural Sertão. From their cinematic narratives, the author examines the tensions between trans identities and the hegemonic heteronormative order, by highlighting the ways in which their protagonists construct networks of acceptance and recognition. The analysis allows us to reflect on the limits and possibilities of social and identity recognition of sex-gender diversities in Latin America.

On the other hand, the review written by Ana Isabel León presents Amare (2024), a short film by Afro-Mexican filmmaker Balam Toscano, as a valuable work of "ethnofiction", conceived from and for the communities of the Costa Chica region. Shot in 35 mm format, the film addresses with great sensitivity issues such as migration, education, identity and gender. León emphasizes the anthropological approach of the filmmaker, by making visible real problems that affect the daily life of the communities. He also recognizes his contribution to Afro-Mexican cinema as it is constructed from an internal and committed perspective.

Nostalgia, memory and heritage

In times when the image has become a field of political, affective and epistemic dispute, the audiovisual in anthropology ceases to be a mere illustrative resource to become a sentimentalizing (Walsh, 2005) and transforming language. The proposals of Claudia Lora and Sergio Navarrete dialogue from the territories of Guerrero and Oaxaca through specific languages: dance, music and audiovisual. Both share a methodological core: they explore collaborative ways of constructing ethnographic knowledge, in which the body, the archive and the moving image play a central role in the reconstruction of cultural memories.

Although Navarrete coordinates a large-scale collective project that systematizes musical knowledge with a view to influencing public policies and Lora presents a community accompaniment process around the dance of the Diablos, both works seek to strengthen and revitalize musical and dance repertoires. They also coincide in considering the audiovisual not as a simple support, but as an epistemological tool capable of recording, interpreting and activating artistic heritage and collective memories.

On the other hand, a concept that runs through several of the articles is that of nostalgia, which can be understood as a bittersweet emotion in relation to the past or as "a suffering (souffrance) caused by the awareness of the ineluctable loss of a place and a moment" (Chauliac, 2022: 3), which is not only individual but extends to the memory of a social group, which can help to reconstruct or recover those processes that were thought to be lost. Daniel Murillo affirms that without nostalgia he would not have been able to reconstruct a series of photos of the Rural Communication System of the Mexican Institute of Water Technology (imta) where she worked for several years. Laura Machuca, for example, immerses herself in a Mérida carnival of yesteryear, that of 1913, when the Merida elites showed off their wealth and the carnival was in all its splendor and had not been relegated to the periphery of Mérida; Claudia Lora, for her part, relates her feelings about the death of one of the key characters in the making of her documentary and the way she searches for places and people to find him.

Just as nostalgia was a propellant for the writing of some articles, another very close process was the search for and construction of memories and the role that photographic and audiovisual collections can play in this. Claudia Lora tells us about the process of making her documentary about a dance from the town of El Quizá, in Guerrero, a process that has taken her several years of coexistence with the community. She says that by recreating the dance of the Diablos, what she reactivates is a dance memory, this immaterial capital of the people in which they recreate part of their history, their present and their future. These reflections lead her to analyze the meaning of "ethnographic documentary"; for her what counts is the problematization of the forms of colonial representation, the awareness that the visual work that is done is also a critical and committed practice, which can be a reference of the people filmed and thus contribute to their cultural memory.

Daniel Murillo, on the other hand, worked for many years at the Mexican Institute of Water Technology, with a unit called Sistema de Comunicación Rural (scr), which operated intensively between 1978 and 1996, and whose objective was to try to see how the economic conditions of rural communities in marginalized areas of the Mexican Humid Tropics could be improved. To do so, they first needed to visually document the living conditions of these communities, resorting to strategies that included the use of audiovisual materials, participatory workshops and training and diagnostic methodologies, for which photographers, documentary filmmakers and social communicators were hired to produce an enormous collection of photographs, videos and graphic materials. Several of these evidences were kept for more than thirty years. The photos, found by chance in a shoebox, are the guardians of an entire institutional process that had an impact on distant and remote villages in Mexico. The author describes the procedure he followed to put an order in this archive -whose images correspond to the eighties and nineties-, in which apparently there was no previous order, from which he built a methodology of systematization and classification that allowed him to group the visual material by sequence, places, characters and actions. In this way, he was able to give meaning to his collection, transforming it into a tool for memory, social research and analysis of rural development policies and their forms of visual representation.

Photographs kept in a personal album also trigger remembrance processes, such as the one that refers to the way carnivals were held in Mérida. Laura Machuca analyzes the photographs taken by the German Wilhem Schirp during his visit to Mérida at the beginning of the 20th century. xx -and specifically those of the 1913 carnival, which make up a visual archive. These images allow us to critically review the way in which Yucatecan society was represented during the henequen boom. Beyond the record of a popular festival, the images analyzed by the author show the staging of power and social distinction, where the elite of the peninsula projected its symbolic and aesthetic dominion over the public. Thus, the record becomes a testimony of unequal social structures and symbolic disputes, as well as a tool for reconstructing Yucatecan representation and cultural heritage.

This photographic and audiovisual testimony allows us to rethink carnival, dance and music as places of collective memory. By revisiting the materials from the present, we understand that nostalgia not only acts as a feeling, but also as a way to interrogate the past and its traces in contemporary social life.

Image technologies, filmic records and visual narratives of modernity

At the beginning of the xxIn the last few years, image recording technologies played a crucial role in the transformation of visual culture worldwide, making possible the mass reproduction of images and thus favoring a circulation of unprecedented scope (Poole, 1997). Records became more precise thanks to portable cameras and more sophisticated graphic processes. At the same time, printed media multiplied (newspapers, magazines, books, illustrated press, posters, advertising, postcards, etc.), which allowed a massive circulation of visual representations of the world.

Paulina Pezzat, for example, documents for Guatemala the way in which photoengraving made possible an exponential reproduction of images by incorporating them into the print market and thus reaching a much wider public. Marisol Domínguez, for her part, shows the importance of photography in the universal exhibitions of the 20th century. xixThe Mexican photographic corpus included a corpus of 768 photographs, as was the case of the 1892 Madrid Historic-American Exposition, in which Mexico was represented by a corpus of 768 photographs. Part of these images included portraits and photographs of the diversity of "indigenous" populations. Mexico, unlike Guatemala, did celebrate the indigenous and their monumental archaeological legacy as part of a glorious past, although contemporary indigenous populations remained to be "redeemed" through education and "assimilation". These images entail a visual language traversed by differences of class, "race" and gender, where it is clear how photography was key to the productions and collections of the so-called "racial types", derived from the interest of the nascent anthropology and the consolidation of the racial paradigm in the 20th century. xix. Domínguez shows us how, in the case of Mexico, the catalog derived from the 1892 exhibition will be "recycled" as part of the publications of the anthropology section of the National Museum.

The works of both authors also demonstrate that photoengravings and photographs occupied a central place in a visual discourse of international scope, in tune with the notions of progress and modernity promoted by the Western world. This visual discourse was also appreciated in the field of film. As shown by Gabriela Zamorano, who gives an account of the role played by cinema in this process. In her work, she analyzes the political conditions, technological qualities and material circulation of film and audiovisual records on an iconic symbol: the railroad. In this way, through the case of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Railroad -both from the beginning of the 20th century and from the beginning of the 20th century-, she examines the political conditions, technological qualities and circulation of film and audiovisual materials about an iconic symbol: the railroad. xx as of the century xxi- demonstrates how these materials have served to promote different promises of development, with current political meanings. The author argues that these records function as "aesthetic vehicles" that amplify images of progress, highlight presidential figures and project ideas of modernity, mobility, national belonging and global interconnection.

The papers presented here are, therefore, a small sample of the collaborative work in the ciesas and its Audiovisual Network, in a line of specialization that seeks to continue consolidating. It is clear that in today's world we cannot ignore the multiplication of the social uses of images and audiovisuals, as well as digital technologies. It is our goal to continue integrating these elements in social research and in the collective production of knowledge.

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