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David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab eds., "Understanding Social Images: Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Visual Anthropology" (Berghahn, 2025)
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Gene George Earl
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gene George Earl, and today we're discussing Understanding Social Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Anthropology, a posthumous collection of writings by the late anthropologist Marcus Banks, edited by my guests today, David Zeitland and and Shahab al Khashab. Banks was a major figure in visual anthropology, and this volume gathers essays that show the breadth of his thinking on film, photography, archives, photo elicitation, visual methods, and teaching. But the book and its chapters are not only about the images as illustrations or documentary evidence per se, nor is it a simple handbook on doing visual anthropology, but rather a series of reflections and interventions on these very subjects about the power of images and what they can and sometimes can't do or reveal when employed methodologically, and about bringing awareness to their social life, how they circulate, how they gather meaning over time, how they mediate relationships between anthropologists and interlocutors or collaborators and how they can help us think through things like memory, ethics, absence and representation. So the volume is also part of a broader effort to preserve Banks intellectual legacy. And. And so today's conversation is both, in a way, an introduction to his work, if you're new to it, and in some ways a tribute to him. So that just leaves me to say welcome to the show, David and Shahab.
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David Zeitland
Hi, nice to see you.
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Shahab al Khashab
Hi.
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Gene George Earl
Great. So I want to jump right in, just, I guess, before we get into some of the details of the book, for listeners who may not know Marcus Banks and may be encountering him for maybe the first time. Who was he in anthropology? What were some of his main areas of inquiry? And what kind of legacy has he left, particularly in visual anthropology and visual methods that we'll be discussing today? The introduction, I think, that you guys wrote together, it sort of asks, in effect, why read Marcus Banks today? To which you point to him as someone who has almost a forerunner for some of the visual methods and thinking about the visuals that have become more commonplace today. So perhaps we can maybe begin there. Since this is also, in some ways a memorial volume. How would you maybe describe Marcus as a colleague, friend or intellectual presence? You can feel free to speak to that.
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David Zeitland
Yeah, I think I'll start. Thanks, Gene, for inviting us to talk about Markus. I think if I wanted to start on a personal level, Markus was my PhD supervisor and we had a lot of common interests around the anthropology of film, which is now the thing I teach in Oxford, basically in the same job that he used to have. So if I had to describe him personally, he was someone who was very instrumental in shaping my intellectual path, my interests in film, but also someone who exuded a sort of soft warmth, which I think is maybe the theme of a lot of how I feel about his legacy and his books and his film, which we might talk about later. But beyond the personal thing, I think, objectively speaking, Marcus Banks was a very important figure in the intellectual and institutional development of visual anthropology in Britain. Intellectually, I suppose, as you mentioned, as this book shows, and the wider set of posthumous volumes that we're working on show he had a kind of quite broad range of interests and areas of inquiry. He started off his career thinking very carefully about a sort of religious tradition of India called Jainism. And one of the kind of posthumous volumes we've been working on is about his earlier ethnographic work on the Jains, and specifically lay Jains, because a lot of the ethnographic work historically has been on sort of aesthetics. He was really interested in kind of the everyday life of kind of non hyper religious Jains and their visual culture as well. And from there started an interest in sort of visually documenting the life of the Jains through photography. And then eventually he made a film and from there he started having these wider reflections on like how do you use film and photography as visual methods? And he was starting to do all of this in the late 80s at a time where, especially in Britain, anthropology departments weren't particularly visual and the intersections of film and anthropology were more happening outside of the university. And I think intellectually what Marcus did was bring an interest in these visual methods within the university, but then also a kind of a sort of critical thinking about how to use those methods and what it means for what he called at the time visual systems more generally. So as his career progressed, progressed, he became more and more interested in just how does an anthropologist analyze images in general? And he mainly talked about ethnographic film in that respect, which is another one of the posthumous volumes we're working on. But he was really interested in a broad range of images. And if I could just speak to the institutional point I suppose as well, is that as his career progressed and he had all these different intellectual interests developed, he also was very much anchored in Oxford since the late 1980s and built up all of these pedagogical vehicles basically to communicate visual anthropology in a university setting at a time especially in the late 80s where this wasn't really the case. So now we're sitting in 2026, there is a kind of very well established degree in visual material museum anthropology where I teach on. There's a bunch of people teach on it. It's a kind of well known area of research and teaching in our university and in Britain more generally that didn't really exist at all in the late 80s when he started up. And think that change, if you want to think about it, over the last 35 odd years or so, 40 years maybe, is in large part attributable to a figure like Marcus Banks. In many ways for people in this university in Oxford and in Britain more generally, is synonymous with the institutional development of visual anthropology.
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Shahab al Khashab
Okay, I will add one thing to that, which is that another sort of reason for why read Marcus today, is that all researchers now, like it or not all, sorry, all anthropologists now really are visual anthropologists because they got a phone in their pocket, they are taking photographs, they are taking film, making little films. And there's a question then, what on earth do you do with all this stuff. And what Marcus work provides is an analytical framework for dealing with this in a critical fashion and then perhaps also thinking about it in the long term. What are people going to think about your material in 100 years time when it ends up in some sort of archive? And there are people saying, well, I'm in charge here. I mean, for an awful lot of people that won't happen, but for a few it might. And the archival reflections in this book actually help focus the mind on these long term consequences. And that's, I think, a very useful, helpful provocation to us all to
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Gene George Earl
think
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Shahab al Khashab
about how we process our own material now to help ourselves, to help our successes. And the only thing I'll add on a more personal level is. Well, I knew Marcus was finishing his PhD when I was starting mine, and he was a very dear friend for a long time. And we used to regularly have lunch together and talk through stuff that was happening in the department, stuff we'd been reading. And so it's the kind of intellectual conversations that may happen in the pub after a seminar or over dinner that kind of merge in the best possible way friendship and intellectual development. Which is why. Why I miss him.
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Gene George Earl
Yeah, no, those are the best sort of great colleagues to have like that, where you can, you know, it's not just in the classroom or, you know, within the faculty or something. It's someone you can, you can hang out with afterwards over a beer or something and discuss some of these, some of these things.
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Shahab al Khashab
Well, great.
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Gene George Earl
I think, David, you've sort of set us up a little bit there for just moving on to some of the kind of themes of the book. And the book is sort of structured along different sort of themes of different kind of essays that Marcus writes. And he opens up for the ones that you've put together and the sort of opening chapters. One of the themes that runs through the book is that the images are not just these kind of pure, unmediated representations, but they are also objects in themselves, like you've mentioned there. And so that they circulate, they get archived, they're kind of gifted, damaged, reinterpreted or reactivated at later moments, and this kind of thing. So to this end, following the kind of first essay that Marcus opens up with, could you speak a little bit about Marcus's interest in the materiality of the visual and what he means by this? What does it mean to kind of treat photographs, films of visual archives, not simply as kind of images of social lives, but as things that have kind of social lives of Their own.
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Shahab al Khashab
So Marcus was writing many of these essays, was teaching here in Oxford in the late 80s. So there's this wonderful coincidence that while he was teaching in the Institute of Social Cultural Anthropology, at that time in the Pitt Rivers Museum, was Elizabeth Edwards working on their photographic archives. And both they were working in parallel, they were collaborating in the teaching. And you've also got. Oh, I'm now blanking his name. The Social Biography, Social Life of Things, edited by Art P Durai, Kopitov's essay about the biography of things and all these. There's a wonderful coincidence here, so. And again, I'm going to talk about modern contemporary versions of these arguments. So Elizabeth Edwards stressed photographs as objects. She wrote an article about just looking at the backs of things, as well as doing a close reading of the image. You can learn all sorts of things from the annotations on the back. There's stuff you can learn about the actual photographic paper when you were talking about prints and photographs move between people. And you can follow the trajectory in which photographs move and thereby trace the biography of that individual print and bring in the humans who are involved in that film. When I say film, I mean film. Also very material. And if we're talking about early film, incredibly fragile, incredibly dangerous film shot before, I can't remember the dates, certainly before the Second World War, has a tendency to explode and so has to be kept refrigerated. So looking at it now is very, very difficult. It has to be very gently warmed up, then screened. And I mean, these days what you do is you warm it up and digitize and then put it back in the freezer. But there are versions of these sorts of concerns. For digital images because we think of them as living in the cloud, whatever that is, somewh off your computer. But as there are now really well documented examples where cloud services just get switched off. So the life of our images is dependent on servers somewhere else in the world. In some cases, they haven't been uploaded. So they are dependent on the physical object, the computer, the phone in which they sit. Phones get stolen, phones get wiped by accident. So the images you take have a fragility which can be captured perhaps by thinking of them and. Their physical holders. And of course, photographs. Digital photographs do move very easily between people. So if you can track them, you can learn through the biography of an image, you can learn stuff about the people through whom it has passed. So again, you can see parallels between digital images and the physical images, which Marcus mainly discusses.
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Gene George Earl
Great. So a central part of the Volume two Is this writing that Marcus does about older kind of film, I guess when he made his own one. And it was this film called Raju and his Friends. So the film that he made in, I hope I'm going to say it right, Jamnagar, Yamnagar in 1987. So it's quite a while ago. And that was, you know, he talks in the book a little bit about kind of how kind of cumbersome it was carrying some of the film equipment and having to be very kind of selective about what you're filming because of the, you know, how much footage you have and this kind of thing very expensive at that time. So. But this film seems to have been very foundational for him. And even though, as you guys note in the introduction, he never actually made another film afterwards, but nevertheless, this film ended up spawning a great deal of reflection and writing for him, which is also included in some of the other chapters or some of the other papers. So could you maybe just briefly talk a little bit about this film? What was Raju and His Friends, you know, what is, what's, what's in it and what does it kind of contain? I know that's a difficult question about representation, but why was it so important for Marcus's later thinking? And what did making that film kind of teach him about things like, you know, in some of the other chapters he talks about second field work, collaboration, friendship and the kind of practical difficulties of representing another person's life.
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David Zeitland
Yeah, I think Raju and his Friends basically was never really meant to be made. I think that's the first thing to be said is that Marcus in 86, 87, had this fellowship that was kind of co run by the Royal Anthropological Institute and the National Film and Television School, which is where he learned some kind of basic film techniques. And part of the conditions of this fellowship was to make a feature length film. And the initial idea that Markus had for the feature length film was something that he called renouncing the world, which was meant to be about a particular kind of Jain initiation ritual back home. Well, in Jamdagar, the trouble was that a combination of a difficulty of getting visas in India, as well as moving all that equipment through customs, so the equipment was held in customs for a while, as well as the timing of the ritual, which didn't really quite work with all of these bureaucratic and logistical difficulties, made him switch his idea from a film that would have been probably a quite kind of classically ethnographic, observational, sort of here's a ritual type of film to a much more intimate Much more personal in many ways. Film about Raju and his friends. Raju was one of Marcus's kind of. I mean, the old days, you would have called him a key informant. Maybe he was an interlocutor, a friend, you know, whatever you want to call it. And basically, Raju was unusual in the community of Jains and Jamba Negar in the sense that he had friendships that crossed a lot of kind of ethnic, religious boundaries. And the crux of the film is, of course, this sort of unnamable, maybe love, friendship, relationships that he had with a Muslim woman that remains unnamed throughout the film. And Marcus, very gently so, again, going back to the theme of soft warmth, I think, that Marcus had as a person. But also the film kind of exudes that very gentle sort of probing of, you know, how do you, as Raju, navigate this sort of kind of inter ethnic, inter religious tension in a city where, I mean. And in the end, Raju decides not to pursue this relationship formally, as it were, but in a city where, you know, a lot of the way of talking about these sorts of tensions would have been very structural in the old days, right? It would have been like, well, you know, a Jain man can never marry a Muslim woman or whatever, or like, the Muslim woman would never. Her community would never accept that, whatever. But I think one of the reasons why Roger and his friends is quite important for Markus personally, but also for sort of his thinking about film more generally, is that it allowed him to think through some of these issues that he had been trained to think about in this kind of very structural, very kind of bird's eye view through the dilemmas that a very ordinary person faces. Raju is basically reasoning, as you go along the film with him, through some of these tensions, some of these dilemmas. And in many ways, I think beyond that sort of counterpoint to sort of structural understanding of society and religion in particular, the film also gives you a sense of what it feels like to be in jamnagar in the 80s, kind of. And I think that this, for Marcus, was yet another big reason why he thought film was really important in anthropology is because of this, you know, if you want to be fancy, call it like a phenomenological aspect of film, right? Like the way that film makes you feel a certain way about a certain place, right, and makes you feel as if you were emplaced in that area. And I think a lot of his later reflections on visual methods and what film affords especially had to do with that quality of thereness and of specificity of film, right? That, like, you know, the film is not just about a random Jain person and a random Muslim person. It's about Raju and his particular, you know, friend or lover or et cetera. And I think that kind of immediate specificity of film is something that he was really intrigued by and interested in. And I think that's why Raju mattered to him. Not just because of the kind of personal aspect of it, but also because the personal aspect of it made him rethink quite a few of the things that he'd been trained to think about. You know, religion, India and even, you know, what film is for. Because in the end, a lot of what I'm communicating now about what Raju is about is not really in the representation itself. Right. It's more about how the film is put together and how it makes you feel a certain way about certain people. So, yeah, I think that's maybe some of the reasons why Raju mattered to him later on. And in the book we included even a short blog reflection he made on Raju and his friends like 30 years or so after he'd first made it. And I think maybe he himself would have not necessarily seen as much in it as I've just seen in it talking about it now. But I think he definitely remained fond of that film because of all that. It allowed him to think over those really important decades in which he was sort of developing visual methods and sort of theoretical reflections in visual anthropology.
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Gene George Earl
Yeah, I mean, that actually kind of maybe links nicely or bridges to some of the other essays that come up sort of shortly after that. I think one was called Reclaiming a Soul Stolen by the Camera and Revisiting Raju. So these are the ones where Marcus kind of comes back to this question of what it means to be seen, filmed and edited and then also being shown back to oneself and one's community. So, you know, these kind of essays trace a little bit the kind of afterlife almost of these films and then bringing them back and showing them to the people there and reflecting, reflecting again on its kind of construction or sort of the process of filming it and some of the kind of decisions that he made. You know, I guess this particular scene that you've discussed is the one that's on the rooftop, right, where Raju sort of talks about this or reflects about this particular lady friend of his. So there is, there's this kind of extraordinary story that I really loved in it where Roger himself is trying to kind of gift wrapped the kind of VHS tape version of the film and presented to the mayor at one point almost as a way of kind of containing or reclaiming this kind of film. And that's, that's one of the sort of crucial reflections that he also thinks about, you know, sort of how people then kind of reinterpret or try and reassimulate a particular representation of themselves that have been on screen and this kind of power dynamic almost. So I wonder if you can maybe just speak a little bit to that. So what do you think? Kind of Marcus learned from these later episodes and the afterlife of Raj and his friends. So, yeah, maybe just talk a little bit about some of the afterlife of this film. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan. $15 a month, even unlimited.
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Shahab al Khashab
There is a crucial difference to how Raju was made from how it would be made today. Because, and this is where the materiality of film comes in. Because it was shot on film, they the filmmakers had no access to what had been recorded until after they got back from India. And the film was developed. So Raju never saw it until quite late in the day. Whereas of course today, well, as soon as video came in, you could start seeing what you had recorded more or less instantly and discussing the results with the people in shot. So the story of the VHS cassette, as Markus has it, it was sort of Raju trying to take control, take agency ownership of the film. This is my film because it's about me and I want it to be recognized by the city. So we will have a meeting and it will be officially presented to. Of the mayor. And there's then a long. This made Marcus feel very uncomfortable about what his role in all this was. And in the end, I never quite understood quite why the meeting didn't happen, but it didn't. And so there is this very weird account of the VHS cassette having been wrapped, being unwrapped to save the wrapping paper for another occasion, which is poignant. So a. It would now be made very differently. And I think Marcus was quite conscious of that. And some of those later reflections are basically explore how technological changes and conceptual changes have occurred sort of separately, but they all add up together to make representation a far more collaborative process than it once was. So, yeah, as Shia said earlier, it's not, you know, the anthropologist is not not giving an external view. This is how these strange people look. It's far more an exploration of how people want to be seen. Yeah, I'll stop there.
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David Zeitland
Yeah. And I think the afterlife of Raju is also another great example of how Marcus always thought of film as both representation and a thing, Right. In the sense that because, I mean, partly because he made it, but also because he was very highly reflexive about each and every single aspect of the making of it, as it were. He was highly aware of all the moments where different decisions could have been made, different technology could have been used. Once video came in. Different sorts of narratives could have been crafted out of the material that he had. Different kinds of material were available to the people back in Jamnagar. In the essays on Raju, he explains that actually he'd shown two different cuts to people in Jamnagar once. He had them much later than instantly, as it were. One of them much longer and more boring in his own account, but that they preferred because it showed many more people of their families and they treated it functionally along the lines of what a wedding video would have been like or something. And then the second version, which is the one that we now see, still see and is distributed and it's sort of officially, you know, the Raju and his friends, whatever, which they didn't much like because he had to cut out all these people that weren't really fitting into the narrative and the story. And I think that sort of discrepancy between what he himself felt was like a good film, quote unquote, and what, you know, the people back in Jamnagar felt was, quote unquote, a good film, very instructive to him, not only sociologically, as it were like to tell you, differences in how people perceive film in different places, but also Materially speaking, like that, you know, effectively. I personally have never seen that very long VHS version he showed in Jamnagar, because that VHS version is probably now lost somewhere in the weeds. And the material, Rajwan to his friends that we still have now as a sort of digitized version of the 40 minute film now available online is because of its particular material conditions of production. The thing that we think of as like Roger and his friends and I think that this. He was also keenly aware of that kind of, you know, sort of slight facticity, if you want to call it that, or like fakeness of like the film as its own bounded entity. I think that helped him a lot thinking about film in general, right. As like, where do you trace the end of a film and the beginning of a film as it were? Like, if you're thinking of it in that level of granular material details. And I think, because that's partly his experience of Raju as well.
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Gene George Earl
Yeah, great. I guess sort of moving that on then, to kind of connecting it with this idea almost of a gap between your own kind of intentions of filming this and then kind of the reception that it would have and this kind of interesting problem of almost a time lag, like you mentioned, David, between when this thing is filmed and when it gets shown. The kind of next part of the collection of essays, while not necessarily just dealing with film, does talk about things like photo elicitation and image analysis, where I think maybe David also comes back to almost this idea, I think, quite interesting way, where he returns sort of intermittently back to his sort of field site and to people that he used to know there. And for Marcus, he writes one of the most kind of interesting methodological moments, I think for me that I sort of got from the book was Marcus goes back and he sort of shows these photographs to people that he took Cook while he was there conducting his fieldwork and things for his doctorate, with this expectation that his own images from the 1980s and 1990s would kind of provoke all these kind of maybe fond memories among people that he had known there for decades. But instead, most of them, from what I understand in the book, he sort of have an iPad or something and they're kind of swiping through at these most sort of end up actually being far more excited and interested in older images of the cities from the 1920s, sort of images of the city, in other words, before they were even born. And this kind of idea that that's the kind of thing a Marcus really couldn't have anticipated almost in what is. And I think anthropologists often find this, you know, the kind of questions that you set out to answer is obviously very often not the interesting ones for the people that you're studying with or among. And it feels like Marcus kind of ran into one of these moments here. So as another kind of seemingly significant kind of turning point in his own thinking, what did Marcus maybe take from this experience? What kind of reflections did he have on why those kind of older, more distant images had this kind effective power more than his own kind of more recent ones?
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Shahab al Khashab
Anthropological research is a humbling experience. Basically, you are not in control of what's going on. It's the people you're talking to, the people you're working with, who have far more control over the sorts of things that happen than you do, perhaps, as you'd like. But this is the very power of anthropology. And the lesson, I think Markus drew from this, from that photo elicitation project, was the importance of being open, that we should be designing research in such ways insofar as we can design it to be open to going in different directions from those we think we are going to end up going down. So he ended up doing a re photography project in Jamnagar on the basis of those early photographs from the 1920s. Given how interested everybody was, he tried to. When he was there having those interviews, he started going to the places where the original photographs were taken and taking new views of them. And in some cases you can see there's extraordinary one where it's right at the edge of what's now around the belt, but there is a little bit of the original balustrade still visible. And yeah, it's just the real moral, I think, is the openness to new directions. And of course, in other bits of photo elicitation, sometimes it's stuff in the background. So if you wanted to be kind of all fancy and theoretical, we could start talking about, but. And the punctum, the thing that, that surprises that pricks our attention. And it's not necessarily the things that are in the center stage.
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Gene George Earl
Yeah, I mean, I guess one of my actual favorite sort of ideas in the book too that Marcus brings out is this sort of phrase or idea about letting images breathe. And so it sort of seems also that, you know, in this photo elicitation, that's something he was kind of thinking about. A lot of these sort of older images have kind of, you know, they've been around for a while and they seem to have accrued almost like a fine wine quality to them. You know, of These images, their analytic value may only be borne out kind of years later as it travels and ages and sort of accrues new meanings and begins to connect with other images and later events. So could you maybe just elaborate on that a little bit too? So especially in relation, I think, to some of his later writing in the essays on archives. So, you know, the kind of latter part of the book starts looking a lot more at sort of archival work that he started doing and reflections on those. What did Marcus mean by this idea of slow research? And how did this kind of thinking relate to his own sort of archival work, where often by the nature kind of, you know, the images that you're dealing with, they have lots of breathing room. They've been around for a very long time. Sometimes people haven't seen him for, you know, forever. They're stuck in an archive somewhere. So, and, you know, how did he kind of think about interacting with these sort of these particular images in institutions or the places and the people that they depict?
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David Zeitland
Yeah, I can answer this. I think here we can come back to the question of materiality a little bit, because I think a lot of that sense of understanding images, as you mentioned, as sort of fine wine, like something that you let rest and gain accrue in meaning and significance over time, came from the materiality of his own collection, as it were. Because if you want to think of Markus's practice as a visual anthropologist, he not only made the film Raju, which we talked about in the 80s, but he also took thousands of photographs in the 80s in different cities in Gujarat, mainly in Jamnagar, where he was doing fieldwork. And if you'd read most of what Marcus wrote in the 80s and 90s, you would barely see anything about his own photography. It was mainly sort of analyses of other people's photography, maybe along the lines of what Elizabeth Edwards would talk about, the materiality of photography in general, like that sort of thing. And it's only really in the 2000s and possibly in the 2010s, that he started looking back at the collection of photography that he had himself made and that David and I basically found after his death that he was mainly using as a sort of teaching collection. But then when you think about, you know, here's this visual anthropologist who has all these photographs, he's made a film, he has all this visual material, but there's been a kind of 30 year lag almost between the time that he had this material and then now thinking of new projects that he was doing in the late 90s, early 2000s, which had to do more with kind of colonial era film in India, which was really the central project he was involved in when he was thinking about archives, because he was going to film archives in India to look for colonial era film. And what does it mean really for a film to be Indian before 1947 and so on. But as aside from these sorts of substantive issues, methodologically, it was basically he had all this stuff that he had accumulated over the years, like these photographs, the film, et cetera. He had all this stuff he was encountering in archives and then he had this reflection around how is it that the stuff that I've accumulated in the 80s now is so much more meaningful because it was accumulated that long ago. It would be very different if he had gone, let's say, in the 2010s and done a sort of photography project about contemporary Jamnagar or something. A lot of the power of the photography that he had was because they were of a particular moment in a particular time. And the realization of that lag, that distance between what he had done in the 80s and how differently significant it was in the 2010s is I think, really what allowed him to develop this idea of slow research and images breathing and so on. And I just wanted to point out that at the back of that kind of understanding of images breathing is not just this sort of reflection on time passing and how images hold different sorts of values or, or prick one's interest differently over time. When you look at them over and over again over a long period of time. There's also a sort of implicit kind of political point made there. And it's clear in his article on slow research, in particular about the structure of funding in UK higher education, which also Markus has had an experience of over the course of the 80s and 90s into the 2000s, where increasingly funding gets more scarce, you have to apply for more and more amounts of money for less and less chance of getting it, and so on, on. And a lot of the structure of the funding is premised on a kind of project by project basis that like you're going to, you know, I'm proposing this project where from 2005 to 2010, I'm going to take a bunch of photographs in Jamnagar or whatever, and then from 2010 to 2015 I'm going to move to this other project that it's a bit, you know, it becomes a sort of research project management, as it were. But part of his point is that a lot of the insights that you get from a project where you revisit, you know, photography you've done in the 80s, for example, or you try and kind of of string together a sense of how a research trajectory can evolve over the span of a career of 20 years, 30 years, et cetera. A lot of these things get lost in the kind of project by project model in the uk. And I think that's partly why he went for that idea of slow research as well, is that in a sense, even though I don't think that was really his intention in the 80s to do slow research, he was very much doing fast research in the 80s, I think, think. But over time and with that accumulation you can have a sense of insight and kind of depth of reflection because of that temporal lag that isn't allowed by the funding model. And so he was proposing that we should maybe permit researchers to be able to do this form of slow research, you know, from the get go and not necessarily expect them to have this series of smaller kind of research bits because in particular when it comes to the use of visual methods and images and so on, a lot of the value of these things are, as David was saying earlier, sort of in their proto archival ness, kind of, you know, they're, you know, almost an archive at the moment at which they're being taken. And I think that it takes time for that potential to manifest.
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- [44:35]
Shahab al Khashab
and I would just add two kind of contemporary versions of this. One is to point out that as he gives credit, the idea of slow research comes from Sarah Ping from doing work on Slow Cities, which of course is a thing. And it's quite interesting actually given what Shia was just saying, thinking about Sarah's trajectory, which has been very project based, but what she is doing now is sort of reflecting over that trajectory and so she is exemplifying a different version of what Marcus is talking about. But the other person I wanted to name check is Tina Campt who has been working on photoarchives and she talks about listening to the hum of archives. And I think there's a lovely parallel between Marcus's idea of archives breathing and the and camps hum. And of course the sound of breathing is extremely evocative. So yeah, I'll just leave that as kind of two contemporary resonances between Marcus's work and what people are thinking about now.
- [46:14]
Gene George Earl
Yeah, fantastic. I think that's a great point at the end there too about someone who's knee deep and trying to write proposals at the moment to try to your money. I can really sympathize. I would love some slower research for things to slow down. So great. Maybe just moving on then to sort of start drawing a bit to a close. We'll quickly just talk about some of the sort of final chapter or actually the final chapter which is quite striking I think as Markus begins to not only ask kind of what visual methods or a particular film can actually teach us, but he also seems kind of especially interested in how visual methods help us approach what cannot actually be seen directly. So I, I thought this was a really interesting and quite compelling kind of theme. And he brings up particular examples, but sort of spirits, myths, power, memory, diseases. And so he draws an example such as Haddon's. I'm not sure I'm going to say this right, the QAM image of a reenactment of a particular kind of myth which had already kind of sort of disappeared, but it's also something which no one had sort of seen, in a sense, but it's kind of reenacted for a particular photo or Snow's original mapping of the cholera outbreak in 1954, with lots of dots clustering around a particular kind of map to sort of show the outbreak and to this film Kusum, where, as Marcus points out, they're kind of really skillful and quite deliberate editing because, you know, he's moving from this idea from anthropology in the early stages, just sort of being seen as a thing which just documents. Whereas these kind of films like Kusum was very much, you know, it wasn't just taking a long shot and recording events, but sort of very kind of close up, kind of deliberate filming and through deliberate quiet editing techniques, trying to evoke this sort of sense, as Marcus points out, of kind of spirit possession and healing and to sort of. You get this distinct sense that there are things which is just beyond the frame or that you can't quite see and sort of to give you that kind of experience or sense of something which is. Which is, you know, absent, essentially. So can you maybe just speak a little bit to some of that, too? What was the role or importance of absence to Marcus in thinking through the visual? And would it be fair to say that for Marcus, in part, but the strength of visual methods, I think, as he sort of sums up, maybe it's not only that they show things, but they also point to things which still remain outside of the frame. The sort of negative space tells you as much about the image as what's in it.
- [48:35]
Shahab al Khashab
Absolutely. And that's a really nice summary and the evocation of a negative image. So one of the things about the Haddon film is that it was filmed right at the start of field anthropology, 1890s. And it's this tiny, what, something like 15 seconds that has survived, but as Marcus explores it, was that even then it was a reenactment. So he had collaborated with people in the Trovian Islands, so between Papua New guinea and Australia, for them to show him, to show the camera rituals, which they. They no longer did even then in the 1890s. And the dance showed spirit well, does a dance show a spirit? I don't know. I mean, there's a whole literature about masquerading and. And possession and the relationship of what you can see to a numinous other world. Which connects very nicely with the film Kusum, because Kusum, the girl at the center of that film herself becomes possessed by a spirit. And there's no suggestion in that that she is acting. But from the point of view of the audience, there is a question, does it matter? And it gets really interestingly complicated and difficult at this point, which is where us as anthropologists should get interested. Then Marcus moves beyond film to thinking about other forms of visual representation. And I think he was quite influenced by Edward Tufte's book on diagrams. And that led him to the way that in. Oh, what do I want to say in medical epidemiology, the case of John Snow's work mapping cholera deaths in London is hugely, hugely celebrated. That just by putting the dots on a map you can identify the one pump which was infected and that provided hard evidence for cholera being a waterborne disease, which then was not clear. But other geographers have looked at the data and re represented it drawing maps in different ways. And depending on how you choose to draw the map, the Broad street pump may or may not jump out as being central. So. So what seems at first to be unambiguously compelling suddenly becomes less compelling. And that's interesting in a different way. It's almost like in arguments about statistics, there's a whole thing about running lots and lots of statistical tests and you only publish the ones which have significance. And in a weird way, the case of the Broad Street Pump is a visual version of that same thing.
- [53:01]
David Zeitland
Can I say also on sort of how visual methods can allow you to think about the invisible or either what's not within the frame in a co extensive world or beyond the world itself. I think that's one of the lessons I took from Markus's teaching in general, actually, that this particular property of images, whether they're photographic or filmic, to be always kind of quite specific but very obviously partial and depending on where you shoot something from and how you position a camera and so on, is a really excellent kind of. Of simile for the process of ethnographic observation. Right. I think there's no ethnographic observation from nowhere. And sometimes, because a lot of our ways of encountering ethnography is through the monograph form or articles, the writing can give you a sense of encompassment that the camera, or whether photographic or filmic never allows you to get because you know that it's a view from somewhere. And I think this is something that I still tell the students in a sense that even if you never pick up a camera in your life, it's still a useful way to think through how observations are always laden by the position of the observer. And in many ways that also makes the point that David was just making about the Broad street pump, which I think is a really neat illustration of how that then translates into analysis. In some ways, the multiplication of viewpoints can kind of complicate the analysis of whatever we have in front of us. And that becomes very evident when you juxtapose multiple kind of visual materials together.
- [54:51]
Gene George Earl
Yeah, great. I mean, maybe just to sort of wrap up then, because we're about at time. You've already kind of talked about this, Shah, but I may be just wondering then, as a sort of a little wrap up, could you perhaps maybe then reflect on some of the kind of markers as a teacher or either his kind of influence on students or wider research projects or your own work. So you've already kind of mentioned what, you know, some of that influence on yourself kind of in your own teaching or in your own work. Have you tried to work through some of these kind of problems or tensions and understanding kind of socially mediated images, maybe just to add something else or sort of. A final question. If you think Marcus was around listening today to this conversation, what do you think he might imagine he might want to correct, qualify or complicate a little bit?
- [55:36]
Shahab al Khashab
Oh, that's a really difficult one. Well, I'd like to hope we have honored his spirit. I mean, one thing that we haven't said. Okay, let me put it so.
- [55:54]
Gene George Earl
Is
- [55:56]
Shahab al Khashab
about our connections with the Internet. So. So Marcus and I were there at the beginning and so some of the stuff that we put into the introduction was some of his early skeptical reflections about the point of multimedia. But one of the projects he did was to construct a database or early ethnographic film. And that was online for many years. And then the server died. The software became redundant. I think it's still around. But anyway, it was inaccessible for quite a long time. And so one of the things I have done after he died was go. I had to pay money to extract. And this isn't. This is an archiving nightmare story. I had to pay money to extract the files from a magneto optical disk, which was a kind of REPL external hard drive, which is now no longer, now not supported. And I had to find a specialist who still had the equipment to extract the data. And so it has now all been converted and it's using a standard form and is accessible again. But it's just a worry. There's a lesson in that about using cutting edge experimental methods, experimental techniques without having an export facility. And of course, yeah, that's the moral that we should all draw from this is use standards. There is a real benefit for using standards because 30 years on there's some hope that you will be able to extract the data. And I'm sure, I think he would be telling us to do that.
- [58:26]
David Zeitland
Yeah, definitely. I think. I mean, what I remember of Markus as a teacher is that he was. He explained things in this kind of simplified but orderly way. And he had this particular voice and rhythm that I still remember at the back of my mind when I teach, because I don't have the same voice or rhythm at all. But part of what I try and communicate in my own teaching that is sort of inspired by him is the sense of. There's a little bit of a kind of no nonsense attitude about a lot of this stuff that is being said versus sort of practically what actually arises from the use of photography, film, the Internet, et cetera. And really thinking this sort of thinking about materiality is not just for the sake of a philosophical reflection. It's also emerging from very practical, immediate problems. And no problem problem was too small to be discussed, I think, in the classroom, which I think is partly what I got from his way of teaching. But I think one of the things that you said he would correct or complicate or something is probably he would be a bit uneasy about how Marcus centric the book is. In a sense. I think he would be the first person to say, well, actually, it takes a village to make a scholar. He would probably be talking to us much more about Elizabeth Edwards and Howard Morphy, who wrote the Afterword, who was a very close colleague of his, and maybe Jay Ruby, who was another very prominent visual anthropologist with whom he wrote a sort of edited volume that is a history of visual anthropology. And I think partly because of the constraints of the form, as it were, we're publishing a posthumous volume of Marcus's writings. This is kind of the central theme in the book, but I think from his perspective, probably in many ways these would look like outward going trajectories. Right. And that in many ways the areas of the book that we've highlighted in terms of, you know, the making of ethnographic film, photo elicitation, the analysis of images, the analysis of visual Archives would to him seem more like conversations he's been having with various people rather than things that he himself came up with. Even though in some ways, I mean. I mean, partly because of the way that I've personally been taught a lot of these things. I always think of them as being attached to Marcus as a person and as a teacher. In other ways, it's also about just these general issues. And I think he probably would maybe think of himself as more of a catalyst or a conduit for some of these ideas, rather than kind of the main object of attention, which probably will make him uncomfortable, I think.
- [61:15]
Gene George Earl
Well, that's nice. Sort of humbling. Sounds like quite intellectually generous in that sense to sort of shower himself not on the limelight. Well, great. Just the last question then, because you mentioned that these books are. It's part of a trilogy, am I right? So, you know, we might direct people to other ones. Could you maybe just quickly mention what are the other books?
- [61:34]
David Zeitland
Yes. So just very recently, the second of his posthumous volumes was published under the title of Jainism as Social and Visual Practice, Anthropological Perspectives, with a publisher in Delhi called Primus Book Books, which basically gathers a lot of his earlier writings on Jainism and specifically from the perspective of lay Jains. And it's sort of a lot of the kind of posthumous volumes that we have can be read as sort of companion volumes to books that he published in his lifetime. So the Jainism book really goes well with his first monograph based on his doctorate, which is called Organizing Jainism in India and England. And then there's this book which we're discussing today. I'm just Telling Social Images, which kind of accompanies his writings on visual methods more broadly. Quite well. So he has a book called Visual Methods in Social Research, which I still use regularly in my teaching, and I think is a really helpful kind of primer on the use of visual methods in anthropology in general. And David actually co edited the second edition of that book, so you'll find his name there. And then the third volume we're working on right now, actually as we speak, is a volume that will gather his writings on ethnographic film, Film, which I think can be kind of fruitfully read in accompaniment of the book he wrote with J. Ruby called Made To Be Seen, which is about the history of visual anthropology. So he wrote quite a bit about ethnographic film as both a kind of historical form in visual anthropology and as an object of analysis. And we're trying to put together a volume that gathers some of his core writings on, on film and issues to do with a critique of the realism of ethnographic film, a critique of its materiality and of ethnographic film on British television, which was a big deal in the 70s and 80s. In fact, it tends to be forgotten now. So, yeah, these are, in short, the kind of three volumes, two of which are already out. So, yeah, we can put everything on the website and let people know what's
- [63:43]
Shahab al Khashab
on happening and we can come back and talk about the third volume when it comes out. We hope next year at some point.
- [63:51]
Gene George Earl
Yeah, of course, David, you're always welcome. Shoot me a. Shoot me an email whenever. So, yeah, that'd be. That'd be great, actually. Yeah, Great. Well, I will end it there. And I just want to say thanks for joining me today.
- [64:04]
David Zeitland
Thank you so much.
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Gene George Earl
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