The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology

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.

• Articulates a critical intellectual agenda for a new visual anthropology which transcends the old division between words and images • Offers an original perspective on anthropology’s intellectual history • Develops a critical anthropological perspective toward documentary cinema and television

Part I. Visualizing Anthropology: The Modernist Moment and After, 1895–1945: 1. Anxious visions: rivers, cubism and anthropological modernism; 2. The innocent eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the romantic quest; 3. The light of reason: Grierson, Radcliffe-Brown and the Enlightenment project; Part II. Anthropological Visions: Cinema and Anthropology in the Postwar World: 4. The anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch; 5. The anthropological cinema of David and Judith MacDougall; 6. The anthropological television of Melissa Llewelyn-Davies.

‘The Ethnographer\'s Eye is an excellent contribution to mainstream and visual anthropology.’ Ethnos