Understanding Social Images: Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Visual Anthropology

Marcus Banks was one of the scholars who changed the way visual anthropology and visual methods were regarded in social and cultural anthropology. This collection of Banks’ essays considers the role of collaboration in the making of ethnographic films and makes the case for slow research. It discusses the meaning of anthropological research in film archives and illustrates how to analyse a wide range of visual material like maps, diagrams and enigmatic photographs. Howard Morphy’s afterword is written in response to the essays in the book and as a part of an interrupted dialogue with Marcus. It focuses on how visual anthropology’s distinctive methodology engages with the central theoretical issues of contemporary anthropology.

Marcus Banks was Professor of Visual Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford until he passed away in 2020. He was a pioneer in integrating visual approaches into the mainstream of social and cultural anthropology. With Howard Morphy, he edited the influential volume Rethinking Visual Anthropology (Yale University Press, 1999).

David Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford. He collaborated with Marcus Banks on the 2nd edition of Visual Methods in Social Research (SAGE, 2015). He won the 2023 Curl Essay Prize awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Chihab El Khachab is Associate Professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. His most recent publication is Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry (Cairo Press, 2021).