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Questions of vision and knowledge are central to debates about the world in which we live. Developing new analytical approaches toward ways of seeing is a key challenge facing those working across a wide range of disciplines. How can visuality be understood on its own terms rather than by means of established textual frameworks? Visualizing Anthropology takes up this challenge. Bringing together a range of perspectives anchored in practice, the book maps experiments in the forms and techniques of visual enquiry. The origins of this collection lie in visual anthropology. Although the field has greatly expanded and diversified, many of the key debates continue to be focused around the textual concerns of the mainstream discipline. In seeking to establish a more genuinely visual anthropology, the editors have sought to forge links with other kinds of image-based projects. Ethnography is the shared space of practice. Understood not as a specialized method but as cultural critique, the book explores new collaborative possibilities linked to image-based work

Drawing has emerged as a recent focus of anthropological attention. Writers such as Ingold and Taussig have argued for its significance as a special kind of knowledge practice, linking it to a broader re‐imagining of the anthropological project itself. Underpinning their approach is an opposition between the pencil and the camera, between 'making' and 'taking', between restrictive and generative modes of inquiry. This essay challenges this assumption, arguing that these elements in drawing and filmmaking exist in a dialectical rather than a polarized relationship. It highlights particular insights that follow from a dialogue between written and film‐based anthropologies and links them to broader debates within the discipline – for example, debates about ways of knowing, skilled practice, improvisation and the imagination, and anthropology as a form of image‐making practice.

'Observational cinema' has long been central to debates in visual anthropology. Although initially hailed as a radical breakthrough in ethnographic filmmaking, the genre was subsequently criticized as naïvely empiricist and lacking in reflexive sophistication. In this article, we make a new case for observational cinema. It grows out of a renewed attention to practice. We argue that observational work be understood not as preliminary to anthropological proper but as a distinctive form of anthropology in its own right.RésuméLe « cinéma d'observation » est depuis longtemps un sujet de controverse dans l'anthropologie visuelle. Saluéà ses débuts comme une révolution dans l'acquisition d'images ethnographiques, le genre a été critiqué par la suite comme entaché d'un empirisme naïf et dépourvu d'élaboration réflexive. Les auteures plaident ici pour le cinéma d'observation, à partir d'une attention renouvelée pour cette pratique. Elles demandent que le travail d'observation soit considéré non pas comme un préliminaire au travail anthropologique proprement dit, mais comme une forme distincte d'anthropologie à part entière.