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More than a year aft er the Brussels district Molenbeek came to international attention as “ISIS’s European capital,” an unplanned encounter during a visit at my former field site leads to a conversation about the struggles and concerns that people are facing in this much-talked-about place. The discussion on a small restaurant terrace wanders off into disappointments and adjustments during research and life and is marked by a shared feeling of uncertainty that mirrors the atmosphere of a city that has seldom been portrayed beyond ephemeral media descriptions.

This article traces the life and work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre (1888-1971), a Belgian explorer and ethnographer. While fragments of his oeuvre are familiar to scholars of South America, he is almost completely unknown in historical studies, and largely forgotten within anthropology too. Here we will explore his filmic work as well as its contribution to the history of visual anthropology. While de Wavrin's work cannot be divorced from the discipline's colonial and Eurocentric heritage, we show that his visual record provides notable historic insights and merits further scholarly attention. DE WAVRIN'S EARLY LIFE Born in 1888 into a noble family, the Marquis Robert de Wavrin spent his childhood in Ronsele, a village in Flanders. Following home-schooling and secondary school in Namur, he studied natural science for two years at Ghent University. Little else is known about his early life, and he appears in official documents for the first time only in 1913. The young de Wavrin, then 25 years old, had shot a pellet gun at two children attempting to steal hazelnuts in the orchard on his family's estate. The prosecutor argued that the nobility's CHRISTINE MODERBACHER is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker (MA in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester).