Visual Anthropology: Essential Method and Theory

by Fadwa El Guindi

El Guindi provides a comprehensive guide to the methods of visual anthropology and the use of film in cross-cultural 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, identifying the 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. Her book is an excellent guide for ethnographic research, and for film and other media instruction concerned with cross-cultural representation.

312 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2004

About the author

Fadwa El Guindi is an Egyptian-born in 1941 professor of anthropology with a PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin (1972).[1] At present she is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Qatar University in Doha, Qatar, as well as head of the department of social sciences.

El Guindi graduated from the American University in Cairo, with a BA in Political Science. She worked at the Social Research Centre and participated in the first full-scale ethnographic project to study the way of life of the Nubians of Egypt prior to their government-sponsored relocation due to the building of the Aswan Dam.[1]

In 1986, she made the film El Sebou': Egyptian Birth Ritual, which was sponsored by the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution. She also guest-starred as Julian Bashir's mother, Amsha Bashir, in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?", opposite Siddig El Fadil and Brian George.[2]
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