Picturing Pity is the first full length monograph on missionary photography. Empirically, it is based on an in-depth analysis of the published photographs taken by Norwegian evangelical missionaries in Northern Cameroon from the early nineteen twenties, at the beginning of their activities in this region, and until today. Being part of a large international movement, Norway sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country in Europe. Marianne Gullestad's main contention is that the need to continuously justify their activities to donors in Europe has led to the creation and maintenance of specific ways of portraying Africans. The missionary visual rhetoric is both based on earlier visualizations and has over time established its own conventions which can now also be traced within secular fields of activity such as international development agencies, foreign policy, human relief organizations and the mass media. Picturing Pity takes part in the present "pictorial turn" in academic teaching and research, constituting visual images as an exciting site of conversation across disciplinary lines.

This collection of essays considers the current significance of kinship in various Western European countries along with manifestations of its cultural diversity. How do nations vary in the value they attribute to the family in this wider sense? How do the different generations communicate with one another? In what ways have questions relating to the legacy of the past and to the role of memory been rehabilitated, in order for the continuity of the family to be assured? This book declines to accept predictions made, on the basis of a common population projection, that European family life will display a common pattern. Further, across a comparison of a number of case studies, it points to a degree of diversity in European family values as revealed when one looks closely at the ways in which these values are transmitted.