ABSTRACT
The author has been inspired by an article by the art historian Norman Bryson, written to accompany a major exhibition on the theme of drawing. In it, Bryson compares drawing with painting, or more specifically, with the western tradition of oil painting. It is extraordinary that in all the debate about ‘writing culture’, the assumption has always been that the graphic part of ethnography is writing and not drawing. In recent anthropology, however, the potential of drawing to couple observation and description has been largely eclipsed by an overriding dichotomy between the written text and the visual image. A return to drawing is a return to handwriting, replacing the rigid opposition between image and text with a continuum of scribal practices, or processes of line-making, ranging from handwriting through calligraphy to drawing and sketching, with no clear points of demarcation between them.
