“Trust your appetite”. Notes on ethnographic accuracy and the use of drawing in a context of mistrust toward photographs.
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Keywords

Drawing
Multispecies
Multimodality
Visual anthropology
Ecology

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“Trust your appetite”. Notes on ethnographic accuracy and the use of drawing in a context of mistrust toward photographs. (2025). Universitas Humanística, 94. https://doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.uh94.caae
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Abstract

The following article asks what role drawing plays in a context where the indexicality of images is politically charged, and where doubt is not only an ethnographic tool but also the object of ethnographic research. The article presents how in the mountainous district of the High Pyrenees and Aran (Alt Pirineu i Aran) in Spain, where I conducted research between 2016 and 2018, attacks by wildlife have drawn attention to the veracity of highly disputed visual evidence. Amid contradictory statemets from farmers and officials from the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, and Fisheries (DARP), the images fail to reflect epistemological certainty and instead foster a climate of mistrust. This article proposes that ethnographic drawing has the capacity to reveal the nuances of the complicated relationship that interlocutors have with images.

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