Review of book - Picturing culture: Explorations of film & anthropology by Jay Ruby

Abstract

To limit visual anthropology to a select audience (comprised primarily of academics, or of anthropologists, as Ruby is proposing), would be to deny the potential of such films to play the important role of generating public debate. Those films that are broadcast to a mass audience are capable of being used and re-used, not only within the realms of academia, but by those very people whose culture has been the subject (and often object) of ethnographic fieldwork. Ruby’s argument seems fraught with pessimism, as he does not allow for the possibility that everyday people, in a variety of social, cultural and economic contexts, may be active participants, not only in the process of studying culture, but in the process of culture building.