Wolfson College Record 2021

A year’s training at the National Film and TV School in 1986–87 – as part of
a special scheme set up by the Royal Anthropological Institute, designed to
deepen ties between the discipline and the media industry – turned out to be
transformative. From the time he arrived at Oxford, Marcus focused his energies
upon the then nascent sub-discipline of Visual Anthropology. Over the following
three decades he went on to establish himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent
scholars in that field, which he re-defined in a long series of publications including
the collections Rethinking Visual Anthropology (co-edited with Howard Morphy,
1997) and Made to be Seen (co-edited with Jay Ruby, 2011), and the book Visual
Methods in Social Research (2001).
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Beginning with studies of Indian iconography, but moving on to a range of other
examples as well, Marcus’ contribution was to show how visual production should
never be analysed as a ‘peripheral’ activity, the domain of a specialised group of
individuals (‘artists’). Rather, the making of visual artefacts (of all kinds) should be
thought of as a central – perhaps the central – means through which all people,
everywhere, forge their identities, and order and transform the social and political
worlds around them. In short, his interest was in the possibilities of image-making
as a mode of cultural expression. Writing largely in an era before Facebook,
Instagram, and other kinds of social media had become commonplace, his ideas
were well ahead of their time, and in many ways anticipated the effects of the
visually and media-saturated worlds in which we all now live.
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It was not only Marcus’ research that was ahead of its time. So too was his
teaching. At a time when Oxford’s anthropology syllabuses were still marked by
the legacy of structuralist theories – with their emphasis upon such concepts as
rules, roles, offices, and obligations – from early on Marcus’s teaching centred
around refreshing new ideas of post-colonial theory, of de-construction, of
the ‘new’ gender and queer theories. His textbook Ethnicity: Anthropological
Constructions (1996) was equally forward-looking. It remains in common use for
university courses on that subject, even today.
All of this innovation, combined with Marcus’ personal charisma and generosity,
endeared him to successive generations of students who went through ISCA’s taught
Master’s programmes. He also built up strong loyalties amongst many generations of
the Institute’s growing numbers of doctoral students (of whom I was one).
Marcus was as supportive and committed a member of his college as he was to
the other communities to which he belonged. He quickly became a stalwart of
the Wolfson College community. Scrupulously calm, balanced and erudite in his
advice and judgement on all matters, Marcus quickly gained the trust of the wider
college record 2021