“Is watching the feast making the feast? Visual language and practice in an ethnography”

Drawing on research carried out between 2006 and 2011, this article argues for the centrality of the ethnographic work in the investigation of the most innovative field for contemporary anthropology: visual culture. The original characteristics of the Gigli., a one hundred year-old feast encourages the author to think in visual anthropological terms, and to propose an hypothesis about the potential of the visual as a methodology and metaphor of anthropology. Based on concrete ethnographic examples, the article presents communal ritual practice through three visual dimensions: as a methodological and knowledge-producing practice of investigation, as the object and source of the research itself and, lastly, the visual document as a potential product of ethnography alongside the written text. Therefore this article will try to answer some questions in anthropological literature about visual apprenticeship and the methodological role of the participant observation.