Marcus John Banks (4 July 1960 – 23 October 2020 was an English visual anthropologist, who did fieldwork among the Jains in Leicester, England and Jamnagar, Gujarat, India.

[1] Born in Liverpool, he attended New Heys Comprehensive School, from where he went to Christ's College, University of Cambridge, in 1978, to study social anthropology.

He decided to stay in Cambridge to pursue a doctorate that was supervised by Deborah Swallow, which was awarded in 1985.

Banks had a one-year Royal Anthropological Institute fellowship at the National Film and Television School (in 1986–1987).

Instances of his work being discussed by prominent scholars include for visual anthropology, Paul Hockings[6] and Sarah Pink[7] as well as the 2020 volume 'The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video' edited by Phillip Vannini[8] and several mentions in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (2020)[9] In 1997, his work was discussed in a review article by John E. Cort in Religious Studies Review.