The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology

Grimshaw sets a new agenda for visual anthropology, attempting to transcend the old division between image and text-based ethnography. She argues for the use of vision as a critical tool with which anthropologists can address issues of knowledge and technique. The first part of the book critically examines anthropology’s history, focusing on the work of key individuals–Rivers, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown–in the context of early modern art and cinema. In the book’s second part, Grimshaw considers the anthropological films of Jean Rouch, David and Judith MacDougall and Melissa Llewelyn-Davies.