For Grimsahw, various “ways of seeing” have structured anthropological thought and practice. She argues that vision operates differently in anthropology depending on conversations of technique or knowledge production. Ultimately, Grimsahw asks what’s the relationship of vision to ethnographic methods/techniques and epistemological inquires?
In the early European projects of ethnography, seeing was the central mode of the practice. Grimshaw states there was an ocularcentric bias. Ethnographers were encouraged to go “see” for themselves (7). Grimshaw wishes to show how the ethnographer’s eye is always “partial” (8). In this book, we’re encouraged to “see anthropology as a project of visualization rather than read it as a particular kind of literature” (9).
Throughout the book, Grimshaw traces the rise and fall of various moments in the visualization of anthropology moving from British to where visual anthropology really developed in American Anthropology, especially with the work and photography of Margaret Mead.
Visualization in anthropology, our seeing, is much like the lens of a camera, we must zoom in and out-- “the movement of ethnographer's eye, always tracking between panorama and close-up in much the same way as the camera itself” (12).
