Visuality in question and the right to look.
The concept of visuality is central to visual studies. It shows the constructed, social, nature of vision, and it has come to be productive in order to question the objectivist and positivist tendencies in methodologies and forms of production of knowledge within the field of Anthropology and, more generally, the cultural analysis. However, that concept is in question and recent books show that its genealogy is intertwined with the maintenance of authority, colonialism, totalitarianism and violence. Nicholas Mirzoeff proposes “the right to look” as a starting point for a “counterhistory of visuality”, based on the forms of opposition to that alliance between visuality and power. Against this, the right to look implies a relational, reciprocal and equal look. This does not mean that we should dismiss the concept as a whole, but we have to make the effort to rearticulate it with the critical discourse and practice within an interdisciplinary context.