In this episode I discuss the book Understanding Social Images: Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Anthropology (Berghahn, 2025) with co-editors David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab, a posthumous collection of writings by the late anthropologist Marcus Banks. Banks was a key the figures in development of visual anthropology, but his work remains of continuing relevance. This volume brings together several of his essays on film, photography, archive work, as well as reflections of visual methods such as photo-elicitation and ways of teaching visual anthroplogy.
The conversation begins with Marcus Banks himself, his place within anthropology, his influence on visual anthropology, and the broader effort to preserve and extend his work through a set of posthumous collections. From there, the discussion turns to one of the central themes that emerge from across several essays, namely, that images are not simply illustrations or transparent representations, but socially and temporally situated objects with disctinct social lives. From there, we discuss Banks’s interest in the materiality of the visual and how the circulation and afterlives of images gather new meaning over time.
A substantial part of the interview focuses on Banks’s film Raju and His Friends (1988), which proved foundational to his later reflections on ethnographic filmmaking, and especially on the ethics and politics of representation. As well as providing an introduction to Marcus Banks’s work and serving as a tribute to a scholar whose influence continues to shape the field, many of the topics covered in the interview touches on many broader questions in anthropology itself, and as such will be of interest not only to students of visual anthropology, but to anthropology students and anthropologists more generally.
David Zeitlyn is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. His work spans visual anthropology, photography and archives, religion and divination, and long-term fieldwork in Cameroon. He also collaborated with Marcus Banks on the second edition of Visual Methods in Social Research.
Chihab El Khachab is Associate Professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He is a social anthropologist specializing in visual and media anthropology, especially Egyptian media production, and is the author of Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry.
Further reading and resources mentioned in the recording
Jainism as Social and Visual Practice: Anthropological PerspectivesMarcus Banks. Edited by John E. Cort, David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2026. This posthumous volume gathers Banks’s writings on Jain social organization and visual representation.
The revived HADDON catalogue of ethnographic filmsOriginally created by Marcus Banks in the 1990s, HADDON is an online catalogue of archival ethnographic film. The revived site presents a restored version of the database, now hosted through Paul Henley’s Silent Time Machine project.
Raju and His Friends (1988)The film discussed at length in this episode, and a key reference point for Banks’s later reflections on visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking.
Marcus Banks was Professor of Visual Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford until he passed away in 2020. He was a pioneer in integrating visual approaches into the mainstream of social and cultural anthropology. With Howard Morphy, he edited the influential volume Rethinking Visual Anthropology (Yale University Press, 1999).
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