The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology

by Anna Grimshaw

• ISBN13: 9780521774758
• ISBN10: 0521774756
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Grimshaw’s exploration of the role of vision within modern anthropology engages with current debates about ocularcentism, investigating the relationship between vision and knowledge in ethnographic enquiry. Using John Berger’s notion of 'ways of seeing’, the author argues that vision operates differently as a technique and theory of knowledge within the discipline. In the first part of the book she examines contrasting visions at work in the so-called classical British school, reassessing the legacy of Rivers, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown through the lens of early modern art and cinema. In the second part of the book, the changing relationship between vision and knowledge is explored through the anthropology of Jean Rouch, David and Judith MacDougall, and Melissa Llewelyn-Davies. Vision is foregrounded in the work of these contemporary ethnographers, focusing more general questions about technique and epistemology whether image-based media are used or not in ethnographic enquiry.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xii
Introduction	1	(14)
Part I Visualizing anthropology
The modernist moment and after, 1895-1945	15	(17)
Anxious visions: Rivers, Cubism and anthropological modernism	32	(12)
The innocent eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the romantic quest	44	(13)
The light of reason: John Grierson, Radcliffe-Brown and the enlightenment project	57	(14)
Part II Anthropological visions
Cinema and anthropology in the postwar world	71	(19)
The anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch	90	(31)
The anthropological cinema of David and Judith MacDougall	121	(28)
The anthropological television of Melissa Llewelyn-Davies	149	(23)
Epilogue	172	(2)
Notes	174	(39)
Index	213