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Updated: Jun 26, 2025

A Methodology for Capturing Joint Visual Attention Using Mobile Eye-Trackers
Published on: January 18, 2020
What Matters to Others: A High-Threshold Account of Joint Attention
1Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Haines Hall; 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA.
Abstract:
If only implicitly, social anthropology has long incorporated joint attention as a research technique employed in what anthropologists call "the field". This paper outlines the crucial role joint attention plays in anthropolgical fieldwork-specifically in Participant Observation-and advances the position that joint attention is a goal rather than a starting point of fieldwork practice. Exploring how anthropologists tentatively use attention as a methodological tool to understand other people's lifeworlds, this paper draws parallels between Participant Observation and ordinary everyday interactions, thus teasing out a view of joint attention as a goal to be reached only by means of knowing what matters to others in the context of the lifeworld they inhabit.
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