Visual Anthropology ─ Essential Method and Theory

El Guindi (anthropology, U. of Southern California) explores the premises, principles, methods and history of the use of the visual--particularly film recording--within field anthropology. She begins by describing how film came to be a part of fieldwork, and how the camera, a Euro-American technology, affected those on both sides of the lens. She examines the roots of the visual within anthropology, its early uses, and even includes a discussion of photography in that era by none less than Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. El Guindi describes ethnographic and research films, not as a series of cautionary tales, but as a means of discerning and recording. She examines the transitions and tensions inherent in filming the "other," whether as a means of preparing a film or as a means of doing anthropology. She closes with her list of parameters for visual ethnography, and includes a bibliography of films on primates in her resources. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Fadwa El Guindi teaches in the Visual Anthropology Program at the University of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin, and her field research includes work with Arab, Nubian, and Zapotec cultures, and Arab-Americans. She is past president of the Society for Visual Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, and author of The Myth of Ritual: A Native's Ethnography of Life-Crisis Rituals (University of Arizona Press, 1986). Her visual ethnographies include El Sebou': Egyptian Birth Ritual, El Moulid: Egyptian Religious Festival, and Ghurbal. Her most recent book, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, is a visual, cultural, and textual analysis of the phenomenon of veiling in the Arab East.