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.

Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION: Meaning and Being 1 PART I: MATTER AND IMAGE 11 CHAPTER 1: The Body in Cinema 13 CHAPTER 2: Voice and Vision 32 PART II:IMAGES OF CHILDHOOD 65 CHAPTER 3: Films of Childhood 67 CHAPTER 4: Social Aesthetics and the Doon School 94 CHAPTER 5: Doon School Reconsidered 120 PART III:THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION 145 CHAPTER 6: Photo Hierarchicus: Signs and Mirrors in Indian Photography 147 CHAPTER 7: Staging the Body: The Photography of Jean Audema 176 PART IV:THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION 211 CHAPTER 8: The Visual in Anthropology 213 CHAPTER 9: Anthropology 's Lost Vision 227 CHAPTER 10: New Principles of Visual Anthropology 264 Filmography 275 Bibliography 283 Index 299