This work examines the reasons why anthropologists have not used the camera as a research instrument or film as a means of communicating ethnographic knowledge. It suggests that images and words in this discipline operate on different logical levels; that they are hierarchically related; that whereas writings may encompass the images produced by film, the inverse of this cannot be true. The author argues for this position further by suggesting that the visual is to the written mode as "thin description" (giving a record of the form of behaviour) is to "thick description" (giving an account of meaning). -- .

A valuable collection of articles, which should be widely read. DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE Studies on war and violence in Bosnia, Somalia and other regions, their effect on ethnic minorities, and the intervention of political and other agencies. The great majority of today's wars take place within rather than between states and are often explained and justified by participants as the result of deep and ineradicable differences between "them" and "us". The contributors tothis book, whose disciplinary backgrounds include history, political science, international relations and anthropology, explore the growing importance of such 'ethnic' differences in a world that is also becoming more unified, politically, economically and culturally. They discuss the causes of internal war, the techniques used by nationalist politicians and intellectuals to turn ethnicity into a powerful political resource, the response of the UN and of non-governmental agencies to such "complex" political emergencies as those in former Yugoslavia and Somalia and the constitutional strategies that can be used to acknowledge and accommodate ethnic diversity. Taken together, the papers demonstrate that the relationship between ethnicity and war is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Ethnic differences are not given in nature, ethnicity does not arise suddenly andspontaneously but only in specific historical circumstances and it is unlikely to become a lethal force in human affairs except through the deliberate calculation of political elites. DAVID TURTON is Director of the Refugee Studies Programme, University of Oxford. CONTRIBUTORS: TOM GALLAGHER, STEFAN TROEBST, THOMAS ZITELMANN, KLAUS JUERGEN GANTZEL, JAKOB ROESEL, HARRY GOULBOURNE, IOAN LEWIS, MARK DUFFIELD.