ABSTRACT
The perception of ethnography as an innovative, albeit potentially problematic, supplement to other research methods,1 has a long history in the discourse of institutionalized art history. This chapter, in continuing the current critique of the transparencies once claimed for visual representations of ethnographic subjects, argues that the history of ethnographic illustration masks a complex rhetorical exchange between word and image that has equally informed the practice of art history as such. In particular, it argues that the persuasive combined power of word and image in framing ethnographic subjects played a key role in art history’s professionalization in the nineteenth century in assigning subordinate positions to non-Western material culture.
