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Emilie Le Febvre
Anthropologist of History and Photography
I am an anthropologist of photography, history, and digital practices. I received my DPhil in Anthropology in 2016 and MSc in Visual Anthropology in 2010 from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford.
My research examines how people construct their social worlds, represent their experiences, and explain their pasts with photographs, digital media, and archives. I am interested in the relationship between conflict and history, and see my work as complicating the study of representations and knowledge in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Initially trained as an archaeologist, my research is committed to community engagement and prioritizes ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Keywords: Anthropology of photography and history; Bedouin societies; visual/digital/material practices; local knowledge production; multimodal storytelling; archival activism; representional politics; visual theory.
Awards
British Society of Middle Eastern Studies
First Place Winner (joint) Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the Best PhD Dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic
The Royal Anthropology Institute and the British Museum
Selected Paper - Anthropology and Photography - No. 2 "A Shaykh's Portrait: Images and Tribal History amongst Bedouin in the Negev"
Wenner-Gren Foundation
Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
Palestinian American Research Center
Doctoral Fellowship
New Book
Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013: An Anthropological Approach
Introducing a novel anthropological study of photography in the Middle East, this book takes us to the Naqab Desert where Bedouin use photographs to make, and respond to, their own histories. I argue Bedouin presentations of the past are selective but increasingly reliant on archival documents such as photographs which spokespersons treat as evidence of their local histories amid escalating tensions in Israel. These practices shape Bedouin visual historicity, that is the diverse ways people produce their pasts in the present with images. This book charts these processes through the afterlives of six photographs (c. 1906–2013) as they circulate between the Naqab’s entangled visual economies – a transregional landscape organised by cultural ideals of proximity and assemblages of Bedouin iconography. I illustrate how representational contentions associated with tribal, civic, and Palestinian-Israeli politics influence how images do history work in this society. I conclude Bedouin visual historicity is defined by acts of persuasion during which photographs authenticate alternating history projects. Here, Bedouin value photographs not because they evidence singular narratives of the past. Rather, the knowledges inscribed by photography are multifarious as they support diverse constructions of history and society with which members mediate a wide range of relationships in southern Israel. This book bridges studies of anthropology, photography, Palestinian-Israeli politics, and Bedouin Middle East history.
