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Malinowski Memorial Lecture 2025

When ethnography becomes history

Dr Chihab El Khachab, Associate Professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Thursday, 22 May 2025
6.00pm
Shaw Library, Old Building, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE

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What happens to ethnography over time? Whether understood as a research practice or as a scholarly product, ethnography is always already in the process of becoming historical. It can become, minimally, a document of anthropological knowledge production itself, as studied by historians of anthropology. It can become, more widely, a document of the past ethnographic encounter described in writing or in other ethnographic media. The historical becoming of ethnography, however, is seldom theorised from the perspective of the practicing fieldworker, who must in effect anticipate the (historical) future of their research materials as they are producing them – whether one thinks of field notes, photographs, or videos to be used in monographs or multimodal projects in the short term, or the future of these finished products in the long term. Based on my own practice as an ethnographer over the past decade in Cairo, I want to propose a methodological and epistemological reflection around the endurance of ethnographic materials and their multitemporal affordances.

Chihab El Khachab is Associate Professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College. He is a social anthropologist specializing in visual and media anthropology, with a focus on Egyptian media production and cultural institutions. He has published widely on these themes, including in Visual Anthropology Review, the Arab Studies Journal, the Journal of the African Literature Association, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He is the author of two books: Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology and Mediation Shape the Industry (American University in Cairo Press, 2021) and an Arabic-language introduction to core concepts in social theory, Al-Fahhama (The Explanation Machine, Diwan Publishing, 2022). His forthcoming monograph is a history and ethnography of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, provisionally entitled The Achievement State: Cultural Administration in Postrevolutionary Egypt.

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Judith Scheele’s Malinowski Lecture of 2019 has been published in the JRAI.
https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.13610

Fluctuating formality: anthropology and the structure of difference
Dr Maxim Bolt, 17.05.2018
Maxim Bolt’s Malinowski Lecture of 2018 has been published in the JRAI
https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.13615

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