He wants to explore his own involvement, as an anthropologist, in this entire industry that describes and explains Calcutta as if it existed for the benefit of the west. His book is about the voyeurism of poverty and the poverty of voyeurism. Hutnyk gets beyond what Edward Said called 'Orientalism', or the argument that western ways of seeing the east are culture-bound. But the problem is not just the ethnic origin of the hand and eye behind the camera or word processor. The tools we use to perceive things are not just a means to an end.
Tools frame particular types of ends.
We see things framed by the methods used to make perceptions. His sources are the writings of Georg Lukacs and Martin Heidegger, who were concerned with the effects of commerce and contraptions on our ways of seeing and thinking. What Hutnyk takes from them is a thorough kind of materialism. Every perception that we have is the product of an act of labour, an effort shaped by particular tools. If this is so, then we have a problem.