This dissertation investigates the twentieth century American and British preoccupation with ethnographic looking by reading comparatively across literary travelogues, documentary films, and anthropological ethnography. I argue that twentieth-century texts about seeing “real natives” are not merely similar thematically and ideologically, but are linked through a shared set of formal operations. By applying methods of film analysis to written texts and methods of literary analysis to film texts, I illustrate the convergence of ethnographic texts around the point of view of the participant-observer. Instead of considering participant-observation as a methodology reserved solely for anthropologists, I suggest that the participant-observer is a point of view central to cinematic spectatorship as well as twentieth-century ethnographic literary travel writing. I trace the emergence of ethnographic visuality in the 1920’s through its divergence into codified, disciplinary ways of seeing in the 1950’s. Finally, I argue that the turn toward privileging the authenticity of “native voices” in the 1980’s across literature, film, and anthropology should be considered a direct response to the ideological problems of the ethnographic gaze.
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