The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses

by David MacDougall

In this book, David MacDougall, one of the leading ethnographic filmmakers and film scholars of his generation, builds upon the ideas from his widely praised Transcultural Cinema and argues for a new conception of how visual images create human knowledge in a world in which the value of seeing has often been eclipsed by words.

In ten chapters, MacDougall explores the relations between photographic images and the human body-the body of the viewer and the body behind the camera as well as the body as seen in ethnography, cinema, and photography. In a landmark piece, he discusses the need for a new field of social aesthetics, further elaborated in his reflections on filming at an elite boys' school in northern India. The theme of the school is taken up as well in his discussion of fiction and nonfiction films of childhood. The book's final section presents a radical view of the history of visual anthropology as a maverick anthropological practice that was always at odds with the anthropology of words. In place of the conventional wisdom, he proposes a new set of principles for visual anthropology.

These are essays in the classical sense--speculative, judicious, lucidly written, and mercifully jargon-free. The Corporeal Image presents the latest ideas from one of our foremost thinkers on the role of vision and visual representation in contemporary social thought.

Genres: Anthropology, Film

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays is too fragmented, it is hard for me to navigate what is corporeal image is actually meant. The writings about reinvention of visual anthropology, ethnography cinema, and photography seen from an anthropological perspective are really fascinating. However, that doesn't make the analysis of David's own work at the Doon school interesting to follow.

[Hannah Spadafora · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars-excellent.

[Dragoș · Rating 3 out of 5]

MacDougall's Corporeal image is a fascinating if uneven look at the use of cinema and photography in anthropology and the social sciences in general. Constructed as a series of essays the book ranges from esoteric if not downright arcane philosophical interpretations of visuality to historical summations of visual anthropology to MacDougall's own famous work, like the Doon school series to discussions of photography in anthropology and the use of photography in colonial portrayals and finally down to a brief manifesto for the future of visual anthropology. Overall well documented and scholarly satisfying the book does suffer from a terrible case of unevenness due to its cobbled up nature. It starts with head splitting philosophical discussions, continues with narratives of the author's own work and ends with more anthro-philosophy and a manifesto. Nonetheless it is a valuable book, particularly as a slightly difficult primer to visual anthropology.