The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology

Abstract

Anna Grimshaw, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, xiii + 222 pages (paper).Reviewer: William RodmanMcMaster UniversityThis is a book as much about ways of knowing as ways of seeing. It is a volume appropriate to the first years of the new millennium, because it carries forward in innovative new directions some of the themes and theoretical advances that emerged during the crisis in representation in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the long wake of Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture, mainstream remains largely a discipline dominated by words. Anna Grimshaw, a leading British visual anthropologist, seeks a shift in focus from emphasis on the construction of the anthropological text, toward perceptions of the ethnographer's eye and a new way of in contemporary anthropology. She seeks to move beyond writing culture, toward culture.The overarching theme of Grimshaw's book is visual techniques and technologies have rendered problematic all aspects of anthropology (p. 89). Her starting point is anthropology's ambivalence concerning vision as a primary source of knowledge. On the one hand, is ocularcentric: it privileges vision as a means of knowing the world. Fieldwork, for example, is premised on the idea of seeing things for ourselves--I-Witnessing, in Geertz's well-known play on words. Yet anthropologists also tend to be iconophobic, distrustful of images, ever-aware of the possibilities that the truth of images may be illusory, or, at best, partial.The author relates the history of visual to broader histories--of cinema, of theory in anthropology. Considering the short length of her book, Grimshaw performs well the difficult task of capturing the grand flow and sweep of during the last century, from romantic and humanist engagement with the world in the first decades of the 20th century, to consolidation and retreat into specialization in the postwar era, to re-engagement with the world in the new age of participatory, collaborative anthropology. She presents visual as an unsettling reminder of some of the most difficult and complex questions that lie at the heart of much current anthropological practice. How does what we see give rise to what we think we know? How do our visions of the world inform our claims to ethnographic authority? What are the limits of truth in still photography and film?Grimshaw has organized her book in an artful way. She conceives of the form of her book as an attempt to strike a balance between two cinematic techniques, and miseen-scene. Montage is a technique based on the idea of radical juxtaposition, a new whole produced from edited fragments. She uses the metaphor of mise-en-scene, or staging, as a scholarly and substantive balance to creative, intuitive, heady montage. Mise-en-scene implies context, composition, situated knowledge, thick description, and totality of design. In the four chapters in part 1 of her book (the montage section), she discusses a film-maker and an anthropologist in the context of each other's work and times: Lumiere and Haddon, Griffith and Rivers, Flaherty and Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Grierson. From these unlikely pairings come some extraordinary insights, such as her provocative but well-argued claim that W.H.R. Rivers' genealogical diagrams owe more to Cubist paintings than to representations of family trees. She also shows how the ideas and techniques of film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumiere influenced the use of film in the first great fieldwork expedition, Haddon's 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits. Then she goes on to make the highly original argument that D.W. Griffith, the innovative director of Birth of a Nation, changed the direction of anthropology, as well as cinema. Griffith shattered the camera's static pose (p. 25), and, by so doing, freed Rivers and, later, Malinowski to create a kind of research in which the vantage point of ethnographer's eye is located at the center of the action, in the complex, ever-changing drama of village life. …