Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists have often affixed an art-cover to their ethnographic books associated with the life of their subjects or an abstract symbolic image related to the main issue under observation. Does that outer message represent the text or the author's response to personal experiences?

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have often affixed an art-cover to their ethnographic books associated with the life of their subjects, an abstract symbolic image related to the main issue under observation, or another reflection. Our query: Does that outer message represent the text or the author's response to personal existential experiences?

Most remembered are the book jackets exhibiting photos presenting Malinowski in the company of his Trobriands informants or in view of his camp's landscape. However, the art-cover of my recent ethnography "Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing and Private Lives" represents a somewhat unusual choice: a 17th Century Italian church picture by Bernardo Strozzi "The Sermon of St. John the Baptist" retouched with New York's skyline as a transformed background. Apparently paradoxical if not controversial; what a venerated Catholic saint is doing in the company of gay people? The paper relates the story of discovering the painting, revealing the hidden connection between the text's contents with the drawing's design and the painter's biography. And last, the ethnographer's attraction to the characters staged in a scene so remote in time yet so engaging a contemporary accidental viewer.