Edward Lane’s canonical ethnography of Egypt began as a camera-lucida drawing project

Evidence

Like the photographer, the writer wanted to reproduce a picture of things ‘exactly as they are’, of ‘the East itself in its vital actual reality’. Flaubert and Nerval were preceded in Egypt by Edward Lane, whose famous Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was published in 1835. The book’s ‘singular power of description and minute accuracy’ made it, in the words of his nephew, the Orientalist Stanley Poole, ‘the most perfect picture of a people’s life that has ever been written’. … Lane, in fact, did not begin as a writer but as a professional artist and engraver, and had first travelled to Egypt in 1825 with a new apparatus called the camera lucida, a drawing device with a prism that projected an exact image of the object on to paper. He had planned to publish the drawings he made with this device and the accompanying descriptions in an eight-volume work entitled ‘An Exhaustive Description of Egypt’, but had been unable to find a publisher whose printing techniques could reproduce the minute and mechanical accuracy of the drawings. Subsequently, he published the part dealing with contemporary Egypt, rewritten as the ethnographic description of the modern Egyptians. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 107

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of ethnographic method — the most famous early ethnography of Egypt was literally an outgrowth of a mechanical-drawing project, foreshadowing how observation instruments shaped the discipline.
• SEED: Angles: ‘The camera lucida as the unnoticed ancestor of ethnography’ — how a drawing device nobody remembers set the template for anthropological description.