Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Visualizing anthropology
- 1 The modernist moment and after, 1895–1945
- 2 Anxious visions: Rivers, Cubism and anthropological modernism
- 3 The innocent eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the romantic quest
- 4 The light of reason: John Grierson, Radcliffe-Brown and the enlightenment project
- Part II Anthropological visions
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
3 - The innocent eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the romantic quest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Visualizing anthropology
- 1 The modernist moment and after, 1895–1945
- 2 Anxious visions: Rivers, Cubism and anthropological modernism
- 3 The innocent eye: Flaherty, Malinowski and the romantic quest
- 4 The light of reason: John Grierson, Radcliffe-Brown and the enlightenment project
- Part II Anthropological visions
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.
John Berger, Ways of SeeingThe First World War brought to an end the period of remarkable creativity in modern painting, particularly in Cubism. The ghastly horror of trench warfare and the sheer scale of human destruction shattered for ever Europe's optimism and belief in inexorable progress. Rivers, as a doctor responsible for treating severely traumatised soldiers sent home from the battlefield, found himself at the very centre of the crisis precipitated by the war. This experience is widely acknowledged to have brought about a transformation in his own personality. Malinowski, however, was marooned on a Pacific island for many of the war years. He was engaged in the fieldwork which formed the basis for the principles of scientific ethnography he subsequently laid out in his ‘Introduction’ to Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). The sharply contrasting relationship of Rivers and Malinowski to the Great War is important in understanding the different ways of seeing which characterise their anthropological projects.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Ethnographer's EyeWays of Seeing in Anthropology, pp. 44 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001