Visual Anthropology: Essential
Method and Theory
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By Fadwa El Guindi, (University of Southern
California) |
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AltaMira Press |
El Guindi provides a comprehensive guide to the methods of
visual anthropology and the use of film in research and ethnography. She shows
how visual media-photographic, filmic, interactive-is now an accepted part of
the anthropological process, a vital tool that reflects and produces knowledge
about the range of cultures and about culture itself. It preserves the
integrity of people, objects, and events in their cultural context, and expands
our horizons beyond the reach of memory culture. El Guindi places visual
anthropology within an empirically based, analytic framework, built on
systematic observation, following a research cycle that begins with data
gathering and leads to visual ethnographic construction that is anthropological
in method, process, and product. She explains how indigenous, professional, and
amateur forms of pictorial/auditory materials are grounded in personal, social,
cultural, and ideological contexts, and describes the non-Western critique of
the Western traditions of visual anthropology. This will be an excellent guide
to the methods and goals of visual anthropology, valuable in ethnographic
courses as well as film and other media instruction concerned with
cross-cultural representation.
About The Author
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.