Visual culture in Mauritania; an ethnographic study

"Visual Culture in Mauritania; An Ethnographic Study" is an interdisciplinary study that examines questions of Vision and Visuality in Mauritanian Bidan society in particular. Vision and Visuality here are defined in simple terms as the way Bidan culture uses in conscious and unconscious ways their eyes for variety of practical, symbolic and aesthetic ways. In this term, the study examines different problematic related to particular ways Bidan use their eyes; 1. the use of the eye in comparison to the use of other sensory organs, the mouth and the ear as the speaking and listening organs. 2. The centrality or marginality of orality / aurality and visuality. 3. The mythical beliefs related to the visible / invisible worlds. 4. The dichotomy of hiding from and displaying for the eye in particular social and historical contexts. 5. The problematisation of iconic and pictorial representation and the way this prohibition is dealt with in Bidan nomads cultural context. 6. The question of aesthetics and aesthetic values. Methodologically, the study is informed by multiple disciplinary branches. The study takes its subject and theoretical tools from Culture and Visual Studies in its focus on the dynamics of human cultural activities. The interdisciplinary nature of the study opens the door to other disciplinary tools to examine the problematic raised in the study to be properly analysed in proper historical, social and anthropological contexts. In this way, the study uses anthropology, social theory, oral tradition, ethnography, literary theory, linguistics analysis, archaeology and art history as complementary analytical tools used in dynamic way to properly analyse every problematic in the best theoretical tool that fits methodological framework used in this study.