an excess of description ethnography rac

8/16/2019 An Excess of Description Ethnography Rac

1/26


2/26

Contents

INTRODUCTION.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

THE ARCHIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161EXCESS AND CONTEXT . . . . . . . . 163

Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD. 165

Culture at a Distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168NOTICING DIFFERENCE . . . . . . . 171

INTRODUCTION

Anthropological work on race and vision has

proliferated in conversation in recent years with a yet broader visual turn in the fields

of critical theory and philosophy (Brennan &

Jay 1996; Crary 1990; Debord 1987; Foucault 1973, 1977; Jay 1994; Mitchell 1980, 1986;Rorty 1979). Theories of language, discourse,

and representation developed in these sis-

ter disciplines led many scholars to ques-tion traditional anthropological distinctions

between culture and race insofar as bothof these languages for theorizing social dif-

ference have led to talk about essentializedor biologized identities and boundaries (e.g.,

Michaels 1995; Said 1978, 1993). Yet others

from within the discipline itself leveled themore inclusive charge that the visualism in-

herent to ethnographic modes of descriptionand writing led to the reification, racialization,

and temporal distancing of the people whomanthropologists study (Clifford & Marcus

1986, Fabian 1983). This charge was fueled

by the parallel histories, as well as the pre-sumed homology, between racialism and an-

thropology as interpretive projects groundedin Enlightenment ideals of description and

discovery. Thus, it was reasoned, if race isabout finding classificatory order and mean-ing underneath (or within) the visible sur-

face of the world, then similarly ethnography was about the discovery of cultural and moral

worlds through the observation of embodiedbehaviors and beliefs. In both cases, the ob-

served surface of the world—whether com-

posed of skin colors or ritual behaviors—waspresumed to contain, as if concealed within

it, another, more abstract order of meaning,

which was the ethnographer’s task to reveal. The native was thus constituted as object

through a perceptual act that both emanatedfrom and, in so doing, constituted the ethno-

grapher as a reasoned, thinking subject. Al-though these claims were easily leveled at

many ethnographic endeavors of the past,

what is distressing about at least some of thepost-Orientalist critique, is that, by confin-

ing visuality itself within the directional di-alectic of a Cartesian metaphysics, they left

little room for thinking about other, alter-native scenarios in which vision, technology,

and difference might be differently related

(Benjamin 1999; Buck-Morss 1989; Connolly

2002; Deleuze 1985, 1994; Jay 1988; Levin1999).

This review takes this dilemma as a start-

ing point for revisiting some recent—as wellas some not so recent—work on the relation-

ship between race, vision, photography, and

ethnography. In exploring this literature, I ask how the idea of race has shaped the affec-

tive register of suspicion with which anthro-pologists have tended to greet photography,

film, and other visual technologies. By focus-

ing on suspicion, I hope to shift the burdenof criticism away from the usual conclusions

about how race has shaped the way we see the world, and how visual technologies have, in

turn, shaped the very notion of race. Althoughinteresting and important, the recent prolifer-

ation of anthropological writing on questions

of race, representation, photography, and filmsuggests that these are, by now, familiar argu-

ments. As such, the ostensibly critical account these studies of anthropology provide would

seem to have run its course in that they du-plicate the same sort of descriptive or norma-

tive force we have so convincingly assigned to

photography as a technology that is produc-tive of racial ideas andorders. This descriptive

plentitude comes at the expense of silencingthe capacity of both ethnography and photog-

raphy to unsettle our accounts of the world.

160 Poo le


3/26

Rather than dwelling on the ordering ef-

fects of visual representations, then, in thisreview I look more closely at the productive

possibilities that visual technologies offer forreclaiming the uncertainty and contingency

that characterize anthropological accounts of the world. This potential is unleashed pre-

cisely because of the ambiguous role playedby visual images in the disciplinary strugglefirst to identify, and then later to avoid, the

idea of race as that which can be seen and de-scribed. I make no attempt to review all the

work that has been done on either race or vi-suality in recent years. In particular, I have not

considered the numerous studies that address

visual images of “others” exclusively in termsof their content as representations, stereo-

types, or misrepresentations. Rather, my par-

ticular interest is to understand how the formsof suspicion that surround visual representa-tions and race have shaped anthropological

understandings of evidence, experience, the

limits of ethnographic inquiry, and, as a con-sequence, our own ongoing engagement with

ethnographic method and description.I first consider how anthropologists who

both collected and made photographs in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries rec-

onciled disciplinary norms of evidence and

evolutionary models of race with the peculiartemporality of the photograph. The experi-

ence of these anthropologists is particularly revealing in that it coincides with a period

in which anthropology moved from the en-thusiastic pursuit of racial order to an al-

most equally fervent rejection of the very idea

of race. The suspicion with which photogra-phy was greeted by anthropologists thus ran

the gamut from an empiricist concern withdeception (i.e., a concern for the accuracy

with which photographs represented a “racialfact”) to worries about the inability of pho-

tography to capture the intangibles of culture

and social organization. I then explore work that falls self-consciously within the subfield

of visual anthropology that emerged in the1960s and 1970s in reaction to this concern

with the distinctive dangers—and promises—

of visual technologies. Although early work in visual anthropology was explicitly con-

cerned about countering the notion that vi-

sualrepresentations necessarily constituted anexploitative and/or racializing expropriation

of the indigenous subject, more recent work on indigenous media displaces discussion of

race with theories of ethnicity and identity formation. Finally, I close with some reflec-

tions on what these recent histories of visual

technologies and race can offer for rethink-ing visuality, encounter, and difference in

ethnography.

THE ARCHIVE

Much like their nineteenth-century predeces-

sors, anthropologists who have returned tothe photographic archive have been largely concerned with finding some sort of or-

der, or logic, within the sometimes enor-

mous and richly diverse collections they en-counter. Institutional collections such as those

held by the Smithsonian (Scherer 1973),the Royal Anthropological Institute (Pinney

1992, Poignant 1992), The American Mu-seum of Natural History (Jacknis 1992), or

Harvard’s Peabody Museum (Banta & Hinsley

1986) have been examined in an attempt touncover the theoretical (and political) in-

terests of the anthropologists who collectedthem. Other much less studied collections—

for example, the George Eastman House in

Rochester, New York, the Royal GeographicSociety in London, or the magnificent hold-

ings at France’s National Library—were put together over longer periods of time, with

less academically coherent agendas, and withpersonnel and budgets that were often very

much on the margins of the anthropologi-cal academy. Although less revealing of thespecific ways in which early anthropologists

looked at photography, these collections offerinsight into the importance of photography

and other visual technologies in the con- versations that took place between anthro-

pological, administrative, governmental, and

www.annualreviews.org • An Excess of Description 161


4/26

“popular” ideas of race (e.g., Alvarado et al.

2002, Graham-Brown 1988). A focus on the archive and practices of

collecting displaces the analytics of race away from the search for “meanings” and the anal-

ysis of image content, in favor of a focuson the movement of images through differ-

ent institutional, regional, and cultural sites.In my own work on nineteenth-century An-dean photography (Poole 1997), for example,

I looked at the circulation of anthropologi-cal photographs as part of a broader visual

economy in which images of Andean peoples were produced and circulated internationally.

By broadening the social fields through which

photographs circulate and accrue “meaning”or value, I argued for the privileged role

played by photography in the crafting of a

racial common sense which, as in the Grams-cian understanding of the term, unites “pop-ular” and “scientific” understandings of em-

bodied difference (Poole 1997, 2004).

Whereas my more Foucauldian approachused circulation to argue for an expansion of

the anthropological archive, Edwards (2001)argues that a focus on movement “breaks

down” the archive “into smaller, more dif-ferentiated and complex acts of anthropolog-

ical intention” (2001, p. 29). She concludes

that the informal networks and “collectingclubs” through which British anthropologists

suchas Tylor, Haddon, andBalfour exchangedand shared photographs led to a “privileg-

ing of content over form” in the productionof anthropological interpretations of race. As

a product of the comparative methodologies

and exchange practices (or “flows”) through which photographs were rendered as “data”

in anthropology, the concept of race emergesas an abstraction produced by the archive as

a technological form. Such a move to re-frame the archive as itself a visual technol-

ogy takes us a long way from early studies

in which the “meaning” of particular photo-graphic images was interpreted as being a re-

flection, or “expression,” of racial and colo-nial ideologies formed elsewhere, outside the

archive.

Edwards’ approach to the photographicarchive as a series of “microintentions” rather

than as the reflection of a “universalizing de-

sire” (2001, p. 7) also raises important ques-tions concerning where we locate the politics

of colonialism in the study of racial photogra-phy. An initial—andmotivating—question for

much of this photographic history concernedthe political involvements of anthropologists

in the colonial project andthe racial technolo-

gies of colonialism. Not surprising, in thesestudies we find that Victorian anthropologists

tended to concentrate their efforts on collect-ing photographs from India and other British

colonies (Gordon 1997, Pinney 1992); Frenchethnologists accumulated images of Algeri-

ans (Prochaska 1990); and U.S.-based anthro-

pologists sought images that could complete

their inventory of Native American “types”(Bernardin & Graulich 2003, Blackman 1981,Bush & Mitchell 1994, Faris 1996, Gidley

2003). What becomes clear is that this corre-spondence between the subject matter found

in the anthropological archive and the impe-

rial politics of particular nation states owedas much to the contemporary methodolo-

gies of anthropological research as it did tothe overtly colonialist sympathies of these

early practitioners of anthropology. With few

exceptions, nineteenth-century anthropolo-gists practiced an “epistolary ethnography”

(Stocking 1995, p. 16) in which data was ob-tained not through direct observation, but

rather through correspondence with the gov-ernment officials, missionaries, and sundry

agents of commerce and colonialism who hadhad the occasion to acquire firsthand knowl-

edge (or at least scattered observations) of na-

tives in far-flung places. For these anthro-pologists, photographic technology “closed

the space between the site of observationon the colonial periphery and the site of

metropolitan interpretation” (Edwards 2001,

pp. 31–32). At the same time, as Edwards (2001, pp. 38,

133), Poignant (1992), Pinney (1992, 1997),and others point out, anthropologists were

not naively accepting of the much-lauded

162 Poo le


5/26

“transparency” or “objectivity” of pho-

tographs. Indeed, the value they assigned tophotographs as scientific evidence was inti-

mately related to the forms of exchange, accu-mulation, and,aboveall, comparison, through

which mute photographs could be made toproduce the general laws, statistical regular-

ities and the systemic predictions of evolu-tionary, and ethnological “theory.” Of par-ticular importance here was the genre of the

“type” photograph studied by Edwards (1990,2001), Pinney (1992, 1997), Poignant (1992),

Poole (1997), and others. The classificatory conceit of type allowed images of individ-

ual bodies to be read not in reference to

the place, time, context, or individual hu-man being portrayed in each photograph, but

rather as self-contained exemplars of ideal-

ized racialcategories with no singlereferent inthe world. In other words, photographs werenot read by anthropologists as evidence of

facts that could be independently observed.

Rather, as if in response to an increasingawareness of the almost infinite variety of hu-

man behaviors and appearances, photographsthemselves came to constitute the facts

of anthropology (Edwards 2001, Poignant 1992).

EXCESS AND CONTEXT

As almost everyone who has studied thehistory of anthropological photography has

been quick to point out, the mid-nineteenth-

century anthropological romance with pho-tography was fueled in important ways by a

desire for coherence, accuracy, and comple-tion. It was also, however, plagued almost

from the beginning by a certain nervous-ness about both the excessive detail and the

temporal contingencies of the photographicprintsthat began to pile up aroundthe anthro-pologist’s once comfortably distant armchair.

In her study of the photographic archivesat the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI),

Poignant charts the subtle faultlines through which British anthropologists came to tem-

per their initial fascination with the evidential

RAI: Royal AnthropologicalInstitute

power of the photographic image as “facts in

themselves” (Poignant 1992, p. 44). The RAIarchive was founded on the basis of collec-

tions from the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’Protection Societies (Pinney 1992, Poignant

1992). Photographs collected for these early societies often relied on such common artistic

conventions as the portrait vignette, through which the “native” subject could be madeto look, as it were, more human and more

needy. During the 1880s, however, the an-thropologists charged with making sense of

the RAI’s new endeavor became increasingly concerned to discipline the sorts of poses,

framings, and settings in which subjects were

photographed. During the 1880s, the evenmore rigorous standardization demanded by

Adolphe Bertillon’s and Arthur Chervin’s an-

thropometric methods cemented the distinc-tion between “racial” and “ethnological” pho-tographs (Poole 1997, pp. 132–40; Sekula

1989). By specifying uniform focal lengths,

poses, and backdrops, anthropologists sought to edit out the distracting “noise” of con-

text, culture, and the human countenance(Edward 2001, Macintyre & MacKenzie

1992, Spencer 1992). In yet other cases, an-thropologists worked on the surface of the

photographic print to inscribe interior frames

that would isolate bits of ethnological or racialdata (for example, tattoos) from the rest of

the individual’s body (Wright 2003). Whereassuch gestures betray a felt “need for some

kind of intervention to make things [likerace and culture] fully visible” (Wright 2003,

p. 149), they also betray an underlying suspi-

cion about “the frustratingly . . . metonymicnature of the photograph” (Poignant 1992,

p. 42).Edwards’ (2001, pp. 131–55) study of the

Darwinian biologist, Thomas Huxley’s “wellconsidered plan” to produce a photographic

inventory of the races of the British Empire,

provides one example of how “the intrusionof humanizing, cultural detail” (2001, p. 144)

disrupted the scientific ambitions of anthro-pology. Not only were colonial officials reluc-

tant to jeopardize relations with the natives



6/26

by imposing the absurd strictures of nude

anthropometric poses, but even in those in-stances where photographs were taken, the

“intersubjective space constituted by the act of photographing” (p. 145) left its mark on

the images in the form of expression, gaze,and beauty. Such content was read by Hux-

ley and his fellow systematizers as an “excess”of visual detail. Yet their attempts to purgeit ultimately led to failure in that the tech-

nology of photography was, in the final analysis, not capable of matching the totalizing

ambitions of the project. As a result, Edwards wryly comments, the colonial office’s archive

of this project about race contains many more

photographs of buildings than of people or“races.”

From its beginnings, race was about

revealing—or making visible—what lay hid-den underneath the untidy surface details—the messy visual excess—of the human, cul-

tural body (Spencer 1992, Wallis 2003). Well

before the invention of photography, Cuvier,for example, had instructed the artists who

accompanied expeditions to eliminate both-ersome details of gesture, expression, culture,

or context from their portraits of natives sothat the underlying details of cranial structure

and “race” might be more readily revealed

(Herv ́ e 1910). Whereas photography held out the promise of facilitating this anthropologi-

cal quest for order through the elimination of detail or “noise,” the same machine that had

made it possible to imagine a utopia of com-plete transparency also introduced the twin

menace of intimacy and contingency—and

with them, the possibility (however remote)of acknowledging the coevalness and, thus,

the humanity of their racial subjects. It is per-haps for this reason that anthropologists be-

gan by 1874 (with the publication of Notes and Queries ) to express an interest in regulating the

types and amount of visual information they

would receive through photographs. By the1890s, although photography continued to

be used in anthropometry, there was a gen-eral decline in interest in the collection and

use of photographs as ethnological evidence

(Edwards 2001, Griffiths 2002, Poignant 1992, Pinney 1992).

Contingency

An arguably even more important slippagebetween the classificatory or stabilizing am-

bitions of photography and its political ef-fects can be located in the unique temporal-ity of the photograph. Both the evidentiary

power and the allure of the photograph aredue to our knowledge that it captures (or

freezes) a particular moment in time. Thistemporal dimension of the photograph intro-

duced a whole other layer of distracting detail

into the anthropological science of race. Con- vinced of both the inevitability and desire-

ability of evolutionary progress, nineteenth-

century anthropologists (like many of theirtwentieth-century descendants) were con-

vinced that the primitives they studied were

on the verge of disappearing. Ethnological

encounters acquired a corresponding urgency as anthropologists scrambled to collect what

they imagined to be the last vestiges of ev-idence available on earlier forms of human

life.For at least some of those who held the

camera in their hands, however, the photo-

graph carried a latent threat for anthropol-ogy. The Dutch ethnologist Im Thurm, for

example, famously cautioned anthropologistsagainst the dangers of erasing the human, aes-

thetic, and individualizing excess of photo-graphic portraiture in favor of a too rigorous

preference for “types” (Thurm 1893, Tayler

1992). Anthropometry, he added, was proba-bly better practiced on dead bodies than on

the human beings he sought to capture in hisportrait photography from Guyana. At the

same time, however, Thurm (1893) himself often blocked out the distracting backgrounds

and contexts surrounding his photographic

subjects. His focus was on the “human,” but his anthropological perception of photogra-

phy excluded, as did the racial photography he opposed, the “visual excess” of context and

the “off -frame.”Thurm’s cautious embrace of

164 Poo le


7/26

photography speaks clearly to its suspect sta-

tus at a time when all fieldwork was if not di-rectly animated by a concern for finding racial

types, then at the very least carried out underthe shadow of the idea of race.

In other cases, photographers—most fa-mously, Edward Curtis—made skillful use of

aesthetic conventions such as soft focus and vignette to transform the inevitability of ex-tinction into the tragic romance of nostal-

gia. On one level, Curtis’s photographs canbe said to have harnessed the aesthetic of por-

trait photographyas part of a broader, politicalframing of Native Americans as the sad, in-

evitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely

manifest destiny. On another level, however,Curtis’s photographs are also of interest for

what they reveal about the distinctive tem-

porality of the “racializing gaze.” AlthoughCurtis’s photographs have been criticized asinauthentic for their use of costume and tribal

attribution (Gidley 2003, Lyman 1982), their

power and massive popular appeal had muchtodowiththewaysinwhichhewasabletodis-

till contemporary fascination for a technology that allows one to gaze forever on that which

is about to disappear. Within anthropology, however, this “tem-

porality of the moment” served only to in-

crease anxieties about the utility of the pho-tographic image as an instrument of scientific

research. For one thing, the sheer number of photographs that became available to the an-

thropologist seemed to belie the notion that primitive people were somehow disappearing,

asevolutionarytheoryhadledthemtobelieve.

Poignant suggests that it was in response to just such a dilemma that anthropologists at

the RAI came to favor studio portraits overphotographs taken in the field because the

clear visual displacement found in the studioportrait between the primitive subject and the

world allowed the anthropologist “to impose

order on people too numerous to disappear”(1992,p. 54). Pinneysuggests that this tension

between actuality and disappearance playedout in the case of India through two photo-

graphic idioms. The “salvage paradigm” was

applied to “what was perceived to be a frag-ile tribal community,” whereas the “detective

paradigm,” premised on a faith in the eviden-

tiary status of the photographic document,“was more commonly manifested when faced

with a more vital caste society.” He further as-sociates the detective paradigm with a curato-

rial imperative of inventory and preservation,and the salvage paradigm with a language of

urgency and “capture” (Pinney 1997, p. 45).

Although the particular mapping of the twoidioms on tribal and caste society is, in many

ways, peculiar to India—andPinney even goesso far as to suggest that uncertainty about vi-

sual evidence is somehow peculiar, or at least peculiarly marked, in India—the general ten-

sion between ideas of racial extinction, the

temporal actuality of photography, and anx-

iety about the nature and truthfulness of theperceptual world was clearly present in othercolonial and postcolonial settings.

When viewed in this way, the understand-ing of race that emerges from a history of an-

thropological photography is clearly as much

about the instability of the photograph as eth-nological evidence and the unshakeable suspi-

cion that perhaps things are not what they ap-peartobeasitisaboutfixingthenativesubject

as a particular racial type. Yet, recent critical

interventions have paid far greater attentionto the fixing. What would have to be done,

then, if we were to invert the question that is usually asked about stability and fixing and

instead ask how it is that photography simul-taneously sediments and fractures the solidity

of “race” as a visual and conceptual fact. Put somewhat differently, how can we recapture

the productive forms of suspicion with which

early anthropologists greeted photography’sunique capacity to reveal the particularities of

moments, encounters, and individuals?

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD

For an answer to this question, we might want

to begin by looking at some early attempts tointegrate photography into the ethnographic

toolkit. Recent studies of early fieldwork



8/26

photography stress the extent to which pho-

tography offered anthropologists a guilty pleasure. On the one hand—and to an even

greater extent than with the archival collec-tions just discussed—anthropologists wishing

to use photography in the field were faced with the problem of weeding out the extra-

neous contexts and contingent details cap-turedbythecamera.Thisproblemwasatoncetechnical—an artifact of the unforgiving “re-

alism” of the photographic image—and con-ceptual, in that the subjects of anthropology

(first race, then culture and social organiza-tion) were themselves statistical or interpre-

tive abstractions. As such, their perception—

and documentation—required a temporality that was quite different from that of pho-

tographs, whose content spoke only of the

mute and singular existence of particular objects, bodies, and events. Indeed, earliest usesof photography in fieldwork made every effort

to erase the contingent moment of the pho-

tographic act. In his Torres Straits fieldwork,Haddon, for example, made wide use of reen-

actment and restaging as a means to document rituals andmyths(Edwards2001, pp. 157–80).

Hockings also suggests that W.H.R. Riversused mythical allegories drawn from Frazer’sThe Golden Bough in his curious photographs

of Todas (Hockings 1992). Whereas Riverssought to place natives in a mythical past,

Haddon soughtto usephotographyto portray what the natives “saw” when they talked of

mythology. Both produced photographs that were concerned to erase evidence of the mo-

ment at which the image was taken.

On the other hand, along with contin-gency, photography also brought the trou-

bling specter of intimacy. Thus, although vi-sual description was recognized as important

for the scientific project of data collection andinterpretation,photographscould alsobe read

as documents of encounter, and encounter, in

turn, contained within it the specter of com-munication, exchange, and presence—all fac-

tors that challenged the ethnographer’s claimsto objectivity. The tension between these two

aspects of ethnographic practice is perhaps

best captured in Malinowski’s now famousterm “participant observation.” Whereas ob-

servation appeals to the ideal of the distanced,

objective onlooker, participation clearly invokes the notion of presence and, with it, a

certain openness to the humanity of the (stillracialized) other.

In his own fieldwork photography, Mali-nowski seems to signal an awareness of the

problematic status of photography in the ne-

gotiation of this contradictory charge of be-ing simultaneously distant and close (Wright

1991, 1994; Young 1999). Among his Britishcontemporaries, Malinowski made the most

extensive use of photographs in his published work, averaging one photo for every seven

pages in his published ethnographies (Samain

1995). Yet his careful selection of photographs

seems to replicate the strict division of la-bor by which he separated affective and sci-entific description in his diaries and ethno-

graphies (Clifford 1988, Malinowski 1967).For example, despite having taken numer-

ous, elaborately posed photographs of him-

self and other colonial officials, he seems tohave carefully edited out the presence of all

such nonindigenous elements when illustrat-ing his books (Spyer 2001, p. 190). The dis-

tancing effect created by such careful editing

was further reinforced by Malinowski’s pref-erence for the middle to long shot in his own

photography (Young 2001, p. 18). Studies of Evans-Pritchards’ field photography reveal a

similar preference for long shots, aerial shots,and a careful avoidance of eye contact in what

Wolbert (2001) interprets as an effort by theethnographer to erase his own presence in

the field, thereby establishing the physical or

“ecological distance” required to sustain hisown authority as ethnographer.

No matter how distant the shot, how-ever, the very medium of photography con-

tained within it an uncanny ability to in-

dex the presence of the photographer. The“strong language” of race helped ethnog-

raphers to silence this technological regis-ter of encounter, often with great effect. In

Argonauts , for example, Malinowski (1922,

166 Poo le


9/26

pp. 52–53) comments on the “great variety in

the physical appearance” of the Trobrianders.“There are men and women of tall stature,

fine bearing and delicate features . . . with anopen and intelligent expression . . . [and] oth-

ers withprognatic, Negroid faces, broad, thick lippedmouths, narrowforeheads, anda coarse

expression.” Through such language, it might be argued, Malinowski avoided physical de-scription of individuals—something that re-

mains rare in ethnographic writing—in favorof the distancing language of race. Similarly,

to support the more personal observation that the women “have a genial, pleasant approach”

(1922, p. 53), he again relies not on language

but on two photographs: One (taken by hisfriend Hancock) he captions “a coarse but

fine looking unmarried woman” (plate XI in

Malinowski 1922), and the other (his own) isa medium-long shot of a group of Boyowangirls (plate XII).

Although such a division of labor between

text and photo may well speak to the affinity of photography for the sorts of racial “typ-

ing” to which Malinowski gestures in his text,in fact, very few of Malinowski’s photographs

conform to the standard racial photograph(Young 2001, pp. 101–2). Instead what seems

to be at stake in Malinowski’s use of photogra-

phy is his inability to engage—or make senseof—that moment in which he first perceived

some aspect of the people he met. Repeat-edly in his opening descriptions of both na-

tives andlandscapes, Malinowski speaks of theinsights that seem to evade him in the form

of fleeting impressions or glimpses. Hori-

zons are “scanned for glimpses of natives”(1961, p. 33); natives are “scanned for the

general impression” they create (1961, p. 52);and the entire Southern Massim is experi-

enced “as if the visions of a primeval, happy,savage life were suddenly realized, even if

only in a fleeting impression” (1961, p. 35).

Malinowski is intrigued by such impressions,however, not for what they tell of the moment

in which they occur, but rather because they hold the promise that they may someday be-

come legible as “symptoms of deeper, socio-

logical facts” (1961, p. 51). “One suspects,” he writes, that there are “many hidden and mys-

terious ethnographic phenomena behind the

commonplace aspect of things” (p. 51).On the one hand, then, the reservations

expressed by Malinowski and others (Jacknis1984, 1992; Wright 2004; Young 2001) about

the use of photography in fieldwork speak tothe unsuitability of a visual medium that is

about surface, contingency, and the moment

for a discipline whose interpretive task wasto describe the hidden regularities, systemic

workings, and structural regularities that con-stituted “society” and “culture” (Grimshaw

2001). On the other hand, however, as a re-alist mode of documentation, the photograph

also contained within it the possibility of au-

thenticating the presence that constituted the

basis of the ethnographer’s scientific method. The other visual technologies—such as

museum displays (Edwards 2001, Haraway

1989, Karp & Levine 1990, Stocking 1985),live exhibitions (Corbey 1993; Griffiths 2002,

pp. 46–84; Poignant 2003, Reed 2000, Ry-

dell 1984), and film (Grimshaw 2001, Oksiloff 2001, Rony 1996)—with which turn-of-the-

centuryanthropologists experimentedofferedeven fewer opportunities to control for the

sorts of visualexcess and detail that threatened

to undermine the distance required for scien-tific observation. One particularly instructive

set of debates discussed by Griffiths (2002,pp. 3–45) concerned the visual and even

moral effects of overly realistic habitat andlife groups at the American Museum of Nat-

ural History. Although some curators sought to attract museum goers through the hyperre-

alism of wax life group displays that “blended

the uncanny presence of the human double with the authority of the scientific artifact”

(Griffiths 2002, p. 20), others—includingFranz Boas (Jacknis 1985)—expressed con-

cern that these hyperrealist technologies

would distract the gaze of museum goers. As aremedy, Boas sought to create exhibits whose

human figures were intentionally antirealist,and to which the spectator’s gaze would first

be drawn by a central focal artifact and then



10/26

carefully guided through a series of related

items and display cases. Griffiths uncoverssimilar worries about the more obvious per-

ils that theMidway sideshowspresentedto thescientific claims of ethnology. Whereas others

have pointed toward world’s fairs as sites forthe propagation of nineteenth-century racial-

ist anthropology (Greenhalgh 1988, Maxwell1999, Reed 2000, Rydell 1984), Griffiths’(2002) emphasis on the professional suspicion

surrounding such displays reveals the extent to which, for contemporary anthropologists,

the concern was with the disruptive potentialof distraction (Benjamin 1968, Simmel 1971,

Crary 1999) as a form of affect that worked

against the focused visualism required for theeducation of the museum goer. Such worries

speak clearly to the general nervousness sur-

rounding the visual technologies of photogra-phy and film within anthropology and, along

with it, the persistent—and perhapsutopian—

belief that the aesthetic and affective appeal

of the visual could be somehow brought inline with contemporary scientific ideals of

objective “observation.”

Culture at a Distance

The subfield of visual anthropology emerged

in the mid-1960s in response to this concernabout the viability of visual technologies for

ethnographic work. Ethnography, of course,deploys a language of witnessing and visual

observation as a means to defend its account

of the world. Thus, although voice and lan-guage are crucial to ethnography, both the

descriptive task and the authorizing methodof ethnography continue to rely in important

ways on the ethnographer’s physical presencein a particular site and her (normatively) visual

observations and descriptive accounts of thepeople, events, and practices she encountersthere. At the same time, and as recent work

on anthropological photography and film hasmade clear, visual documentation is generally

not considered to be a sufficient source of ev-idence unless it is accompanied by the con-

textualizing and/or interpretive testimony of

the ethnographer (AAA 2002). Thus, as muchas photographs entered as juridical evidence

require a human voice to authenticate their

evidentiary status in court (Derrida 2002), the“hard” visual evidence of ethnographic pho-

tography or film is intimately, even inextri-cably, bound up with the “soft” testimonial

voice (or “subjectivity”) of the ethnographer(Heider 1976, Hockings 1985, Loizos 1993,

MacDougall 1997, Stoller 1992). Like judi-

ciary photographs as well, the dilemma inethnographic photography is in large part a

temporal one. The ethnographer (like the ju-dicial witness) must speak for the photograph

as someone who was in the place shown inthe photograph at the time when the photo-

graph was taken—and this privileged author-

ity of the ethnographic witness seems to hold

true no matter what the role assigned to his“native” subjects (Crawford & Turton 1992,Hockings & Omori 1988, Worth & Adair

1997). It is this move that affords decisive sta-

tus to the photographic image as testimony toan event in a nonrepeatable time. However, it

is the photograph— not the photographer—that allows for the peculiar conflation of past

and present that renders the photograph aform of material evidence.

In ethnography, however, as we have seen,

the photograph’s evocation of an off-framecontext and a particular, passing, moment has

most often been seen to pose a debilitatinglimit to the task of ethnographic interpreta-

tion. Rather than thinking about how voiceand image work together to create the evi-

dentiary aura and distinctive temporality of

the photograph, ethnographers, as we haveseen, have instead looked to photography as a

means to discipline thevisual process of observation. Occupying an uneasy place at the ori-

gins of the visual anthropology canon, the 759photographs published in Bateson & Mead’sBalinese Character (1942) represent one ex-

treme solution to taming visual evidence forethnographic ends. Bateson and Mead ini-

tially began using photographs to supplement their notetaking and observations and to rec-

oncile their disparate writing styles (Jacknis

168 Poo le


11/26

1988, Sullivan 1999). As work progressed on

the photographic index that was to comple-ment their written fieldnotes, however, they

quickly came to see photographs, first, as anindependent control on the potential biases

of visual observation (Sullivan 1999, p. 16)and then, somewhat later, as a form of doc-

umentation through which to capture “thoseaspects of theculture which are least amenableto verbal treatment and which can only be

properly documented by photographic meth-ods” (Bateson & Mead 1942, p. 122). In her

later work on child-rearing practices, Meadextended this understanding of the supple-

mental character of photography in an at-

tempt to replicate precise temporal sequencesof practices (Mead & MacGregor 1951).

What is perhaps most intriguing about

Mead’s Balinese work is the lengths to whichshe goes to transform photographs into

words. As “objective” traces of the temporal

sequences of gestures, poses, expressions, and

embraces that together add up to somethinglike “character” or “child-rearing,” the pho-

tographs construct their meaning as a narra-tive. Photographs thus remain as “raw mate-

rial” or “facts” whose “meaning” lies not in thedetail they reveal of particular encounters, but

rather in the narrative message they convey

about the sequence (and presumed outcome)of many different events and encounters.

That the ideas of narrative and informationlay at the heart of early visions of visual an-

thropology is suggested by the fact that thesubfield’s first professional organization was

the Society for the Anthropology of Visual

Communication, founded in 1972. As con-tainers of information indexed through lan-

guage, photographs were meant to commu-nicate the broader message lurking behind

the surface rendering of the event, person, orpractice they portrayed.

In Mead & Metraux’s (1953) textbook, The

Study of Culture at a Distance, photography,film, and imagery were held up as privileged

sites for communicating a feeling of culturalimmersion, a sort of substitute for the per-

sonal experience of fieldwork. “The study of

imagery,” Metraux writes, “is an intenselyper-sonal and yet a rigorously formal approach to

a culture.” Although “every cultural analysis

is to a greater or lesser extent built upon work with imagery,” in the study of culture from

a distance, imagery comes to constitute “ourmost immediate experience of the culture”

(Metraux 1953, p. 343; Mead 1956). The im-age, in this early approach to visual anthropol-

ogy, was imagined as both an expression of the

perceptual system shared by the members of a society and as a surrogate for the experience

that would allow one to access, and describe,that perceptual system or “culture.” As var-

ious authors have subsequently argued (e.g.,Banks & Morphy 1997, Edwards 1992, Taylor

1994), this approach to the visual is “racial-

ized” both in the sense of a subject/object

divide and in the idea that there is an in-ner “meaning” hidden beneath the surface of both culture and the image. What is lost in

such an approach is the immediacy of sight as a sensory experience that could speak to

the ethnographic intangibles of presence and

newness (Edwards 1997). Instead, images—photographs, gestures, films—are scrutinized

for clues to the cultural configuration they ex-press.

Given what Mead’s own Balinese work

had done to divorce still photography fromboth affect and the spontaneity of the mo-

ment, it is perhaps, then, no surprise that thefield of visual anthropology had, by the late

1970s, come to be dominated by the study and production of ethnographic film, whereas

still photographs had more or less disap-peared from “serious” ethnographic texts (de

Heusch 1962). In explicit contrast to photog-

raphy(MacDougall1998, pp. 64,68), film wasseen as a visual technology that could go be-

yond “observation” to include explicit, reflex-ive references to the sorts of intimate rela-

tionships and exchanges that bound the film-

maker to his “subjects” (MacDougall 1985,Rouch 2003). The affective power of film,

MacDougall notes, is due to both its imme-diacy and its nonverbal character in that (for

MacDougall) film—unlike photography and



12/26

the forms of “visual communication” put for-

ward by Mead—is not mediated by analysis or writing (MacDougall 1985, pp. 61–62). Film,

in other words, was considered to bear withinit an affective transparency that was denied

to photography as a “frozen” and hence dis-tanced image. Animated by a profound hu-

manism, this view of filmas universal or “tran-scultural” (MacDougall 1998) seemed likely to transcend the forms of racial objectification

and the objectifying “conventions of scientificreason” that many considered inherent to the

stillness of photography. This view of film provided the grounds

from which visual anthropologists set out to

counter the anticolonial critique of the 1980s. To the surprise (and, perhaps, dismay) of

many, anthropology has emerged largely un-

scathed from the charges of objectification,racialism, and colonialism levied against it inthe 1980s. Few anthropologists today would

be at all surprised by the claim that the anthro-

pological project has had a troubling complic-ity with the racializing discourses and essen-

tializing dichotomies that characterized New World slave societies and European colonial

rule. In many cases, the resulting disciplinary sensitivity to both history and politics has

also helped to establish an activist agenda

in which ethnography has come to be seenas simultaneously collaborative, critical, and

interventionist. More specifically, within thesubfield of visual anthropology, it led to new

paradigms of collaborative media production(Rouch 2003), an effective handing-over of

the tools of visual documentation to the “na-

tive” subject (Ginsburg 1992, Turner 1992, Worth & Adair 1997), and a shift in anthro-

pological focus from vision itself to the dis-tributive channels and discursive regimes of

media and the archive (Ginsburg et al. 2002). As the new disciplinary paradigm for vi-

sual anthropology, work on indigenous me-

dia has tended to focus on the social rela-tions of image production and consumption

(Ginsburg 1992, Himpele 1996) and the cul-tural idioms through which indigenous pro-

ducers and artists appropriate filmic mediums

(Turner 1992, 2002a). What unites work onindigenous media, however, is the concept of

the “indigenous.” As a gloss for a particu-

lar form of subaltern identity claim, the no-tion of the indigenous invokes ideals of local-

ity, cultural specificity, and authenticity. Forsome it has functioned as an effective form

for critically rethinking (Ginsberg 1992) oreven rejecting (Faris 2003) the possibilities

of recuperating photography and film within

anthropology. With respect to the specificproblemofrace,however,thenotionofthein-

digenous has functioned primarily as a framefor reinterpreting video contents for insight

into how racial categories and representa-tions are perceived and countered from the

perspective of “the represented” (Alexander

1998; Ginsburg 1995; Himpele 1996; Jackson

2004; Turner 1992, 2002a,b). In this work, video and other visual media provide anoutlet for the communication, defense, and

strengthening of cultural, national, or eth-nic identities that preexist, and thus tran-

scend, the media form itself, as they are si-

multaneously shaped by it (Alexander 1998,Ginsburg 1995, Himpele 1996). Underlying

much—though not all—of this is a mappingof identity through scale such that “the mass

media” is said to “obliterate identity” while

the more portable forms of handheld “videotends to rediscover identity and consolidate

it” (Dowmunt 1993, p. 11; Ginsburg 2002).Such claims seem all the more peculiar given

thepremium placed on authenticityandlocal-ism within neoliberal multicultural discourse

(Hale 2002, Povinelli 2002, Rose 1999). By ignoring the broader political and discursive

landscape within which categories suchas “the

indigenous” emerge and take hold, much of the literature on indigenous media ends up

defending an essentialist or primordial notionof identity that comes perilously close to older

ideas of racial essences.

By introducing questions of voice and per-spective, these studies of indigenous video

and film have effectively (and, I think, in-advertently) destabilized earlier assumptions

aboutthe necessarily objectifying—and hence

170 Poo le


13/26

racializing—character of still photographic

technologies. Thus, recent work on pho-tography tends to emphasize the “slippery”

or unstable quality of the racial referent (Firstenberg 2003, Fusco 2003, Poole 1997),

the highly mobile meanings attached to pho-tographs as they circulate through different

cultural and social contexts (Howell 1998,Kravitz2002),theimportanceofgazesasapo-tentially destabilizing site of encounter within

the photographic frame (Lutz & Collins1993), or the creative reworkings of the pho-

tographic surface in postcolonial portrait pho-tography (Behrend 2003, Buckley 1999, Jhala

1993, Mirzoeff 2003, Pinney 1997, Sprague

1978). Although emphases in these worksdiffer—and I cannot do justice to them all

here—the general trend (with some excep-

tions; e.g., Faris 1992, 2003) is to reclaimsome sort of agency or, perhaps, autonomy for the photograph in the form of either resis-

tance, mobility, or the fluidity of photographic

“meaning.” If “race” still haunts the photo-graph, it does so in the form of an increasingly

ghostly presence.Other anthropologists have extended the

paradigm of indigenous media to explorehow national identities are shaped by televi-

sion, cinema, and the internet (Abu-Lughod

1993, 2002; Mankekar 1999; Rajagopal 2001). These works effectively expand the scale of

visual anthropology from the local to the na-tional or even the transnational as the focus of

analysis shifts from the image itself to encom-pass the relationships that inform and consti-

tute the production and distribution of com-

mercial and televisualist media.One troubling side effect of these devel-

opments within the visual anthropology of both photography and film—as in the disci-

pline more generally—has been a move away from what we once thought of as “the local.”

Yet as the terrain of anthropological inquiry

has expanded beyond the traditional village,community, or tribe to embrace the study

of such allegedly “translocal” (Ferguson &Gupta 2002) sites as the modern state, me-

dia, migration, non-governmental organiza-

tions, financial flows, and discursive regimes,the burden of evidence collecting in ethno-

graphic work has shifted away from the af-

fective or sensory domain of encounter andtoward a more removed and synthetic mode

of description. As such, the handover of tech-nologies and the shift to the translocal do not

so much address as circumvent the chargesof (racial) essentialization and (visualist) dis-

tancing leveled against anthropology by the

Orientalist critique. What has been sacrificedin this move is an attention to the unsettling

forms of intimacy and contingency that con-stitute the subversive hallmarks (and hence

potential strengths, as well as liabilities) of theethnographic encounter.

NOTICING DIFFERENCE

In “The Lived Experience of the Black,”Fanon (2001) opens by recounting the ef-

fects of an utterance, a labeling—“Look, a

Negro”—on his struggle to inhabit the world. What is extraordinary about Fanon’s recount-

ing of this very ordinary experience is his em-phasis on that particular, and very brief, mo-

ment when theonlooker’s gaze hasnotyet set-tled on his body. Hope appears to him in that

moment when the “liberating gaze, creeping

over my body . . .

gives me back a lightnessthat I had thought lost and, by removing me

from the world, gives me back to the world.But over there, right when I was reaching the

other side, I stumble, and though his move-

ments, attitudes and gaze, the other fixes me, just like a dye is used to fix a chemical solu-

tion”(Fanon2001,p.184).Thisbriefmoment before “the fragments [of the self ] are put to-

gether by another” constitutes, for Fanon, thesite of betrayal where a chance encounter is so

quickly rendered into the paralyzing fixity—the certain meanings—of race. Various schol-ars have emphasized what this sense of be-

trayal reveals about Fanon’s understanding of theweight of history—and the colonial past in

particular—on the present. In addition to thisgesture toward the past, however, Fanon also

underscores the importance of placing history



14/26

and the past in the service of an “active inflec-

tion of the now” (Bernasconi 2001, p. 178). This is achieved through both “the endless

recreation of himself” and a realization that “the universal is the end of struggle, not that

which precedes it” (p. 179).Fanon’s insistence on the fleeting tempo-

rality of the gaze as a site of ethical possi-bility offers several important leads for how to rethink the place of visual technologies—

and visual perception more generally—in thepractice of ethnography. On the one hand,

Fanon insists (in this and other writings)on the extent to which perceptual and vi-

sual technologies (cinema, in particular) cre-

ate bodily habits of distancing (Alcoff 2001). This emphasis on distance—and on the phys-

ical, chemical qualities through which photo-

graphic technologies, like the racial gaze, “fix”racial subjects in their skins—resonates quiteclearly with the emphasis in so much of visual

anthropology on the classificatory impulses of

racial and anthropological photography. Onthe other hand, however, and along with this

emphasison distance,Fanon also provides im-portant insight into the workings of the gaze.

For Fanon, the gaze is as much about undo-ing the corporeal frame as it is about fixing

(Bernasconi 2001, Weate 2003). As such, his

sense of the gaze is rooted in equal parts intheembodied, sensory, and future-oriented im-

mediacy of encounter and the rapidity with which this opening slips into the exclusion-

ary distancing of which he speaks. When ad-dressed in these terms, Fanon’s insistence on

the visual underpinnings of race offers pro-

ductive grounds for rethinking the temporal-ity of the ethnographic encounter—and the

ways in which photographictechnologies may need to be rethoughtin conversationwith that

particular understanding of encounter. As we have seen for much of the twen-

tieth century, anthropologists have worked

around a dichotomy in which photography—like seeing—was relegated to the domain of

the fleeting and the contingent, whereas inter-pretation (and, with it, description) was con-

strued as a process by which the extraneous

detail or noise of vision was to be disciplinedand rendered intelligible. While an interpre-

tive move must, perhaps, inevitably bring with

it a reduction of noise, what is perhaps lost inthis transition is the immediacy of encounter

as an opening toward both newness and “theother.” The challenge, of course, is to reclaim

this sense of encounter without abandoningthe possibilities for interpretation and expla-

nation.

The relationship of photography to thistask depends on how we think about its pe-

culiar temporality. An anthropology focusedon defining horizontally differentiated forms

of life through the language of “race” (or“culture”) affords conflicting evidential (or

juridical) weight to the different temporali-

ties involved in the fleeting immediacy of the

encounter and the stabilizing permanency of the fact. Ethnographers, as a result, tend toregard the surface appearances of the world—

and the photographic images that recordthem—with a good deal of suspicion pre-

cisely because they are seen as being saturated

with the contingencyof chance encounters. Inthis respect, ethnography’s relationship to the

photographic image continues to be hauntedby the specter of race, in that the photograph

can only really be imagined as a form of evi-

dence in which fixity (in the form of simplic-ity or focus) is favored over excess (in the form

of contingency or confusion) (Edwards 1997). As anthropology turns its attention to forms

of racial and cultural hybridity, one wondershow anthropologists will address this disci-

plinary anxiety about surface appearances andthe visible world, or whether hybridity—like

the native and Indian before it—will come to

be treated as another (racial) “fact” that must be uncovered or revealed, as if lying under-

neaththedeceptivesurfaceofthevisibleworld(Fusco 2003). Perhaps what is needed is a re-

thinking of the notion of difference itself (e.g.,

Deleuze 1994, Connolly 2002), a questioningof its stability as an object of inquiry and a

new way of thinking about the temporality of encounter as it shapes both ethnography and

photography.

172 Poo le


15/26

Fortunately, the move to reclaim both

ethnography and the ethical imperative of de-scription from the Orientalist critique has not

meant a simple return to a “traditional” divi-sion of labor in which ethnography provided

the empirical observations and descriptionsupon which anthropological theory could

draw to uncover the hidden rules, orders, ormeanings of specific cultures and societies.Rather, the theoretical work of ethnography

is now more often assumed to be inseparablefrom the specific forms of encounter, tempo-

rality, uncertainty, and excess that character-ize ethnography as a form of both social in-

quiry and writing (e.g., Biehl 2005, Das 2003,

Ferme 2001, Nelson 1999, Pandolfo 1997, Taussig 1993). At stake here is not so much

a rejection of vision as the basis of knowl-edge as a substantive rethinking of how a

descriptive account that is not grounded in

the idea of interpretation or discovery canspeak to such things as experience, uncer-

tainty, and newness in the cultural worlds westudy as anthropologists. By explicitly ques-

tioning both the empirical language of pos-itivist science—in which physical character-

istics are cited as the visible, and irrefutable,

evidence of racial difference—and the idealist languageof Cartesian metaphysiscs, thismove

makes it possible to rethink the troublesome visuality of “race.” This move also leaves us

open to the sensory and anticipatory aspects

of visual encounter and surprise that animatethe very notion of participant observation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Veena Das, Sameena Mulla, Naveeda Khan, and Gabriela Zamorano for

their comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this article.

LITERATURE CITED

Abu-Lughod L. 1993. Finding a place for Islam: Egyptian television serials and the national

interest. Public Cult. 5(3):493–514 Abu-Lughod L. 2002. Egyptian melodrama. Technology of the modern subject? See Ginsburg

et al. 2002, pp. 115–33 Aird M. 2003. Growing up with Aborigines. See Pinney & Peterson 2003, pp. 23–39 Alcoff LM. 2001. Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment. See Bernasconi 2001,

pp. 267–83 Alexander L. 1998. Palestinians in film: representing and being represented in the cinematic

struggle for national identity. Vis. Anthropol . 10:(2–3):319–33 Alvarado M, B´ aez C, Carre ˜ no G. 2002. Fotograf´ ıa Mapuche: Construcci´ on y montaje de un imagi-

nario. Santiago de Chile: Instituto de Est ́ etica, Pont. Univ. Cat ́ olica de Chile Am. Anthropol. Assoc. (AAA). 2002. AAA statement on ethnographic visual media 2001. Am.

Anthropol . 104(1):305–6Banks M, Morphy H, eds. 1997. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven, CT/London: Yale

Univ. PressBanta M, Hinsley CM. 1986. From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography and the Power of

Imagery. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Mus. PressBarthes R. 1981. Camera Lucida. Transl. R Howard. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux (From

French)Bateson G, Mead M. 1942. Balinese Character . New York: NY Acad. Sci.Behrend H. 2003. Imagined journeys: the Likoni ferry photographers of Mombasa, Kenya.

See Pinney & Peterson 2003, pp. 221–60



16/26

Benjamin W. 1968. On some motifs in Baudelaire. Illuminations . Transl. H Zohn, pp. 155–200.

New York: Schocken (From German)Benjamin W. 1999. The Arcades Project , ed. S Buck-Morss. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Bernardin S, Graulich M, MacFarlane L, Tonkovich N. 2003. Trading Gazes: Euro-

American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880–1940. New Brunswick,

NJ/London: Rutgers Univ. PressBernasconi R, ed. 2001. Race. Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell

Biehl J. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressBlackman MB. 1981. Window on the Past: The Photographic Ethnohistory of the Northern and Kaigani Haida. Ottawa: Natl. Mus. Can.

Brennan T, Jay M. 1996. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight .New York/London: Routledge

Buck-Morss S. 1989. Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Buckley L. 1999. Self and accessory in Gambian studio photography. Vis. Anthropol. Rev.

13(2):63–84Bush A, Mitchell LC. 1994. The Photograph and the American Indian. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Univ. Press

Cavell S. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniv. Press

Clifford J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art .

Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press

CliffordJ, Marcus G, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley:Univ. Calif. Press

Connolly WE. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed . Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. PressCorbey R. 1993. Ethnographic showcases 1870–1930. Cult. Anthropol . 8(3):338–69

Crary J. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Crary J. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA:

MIT PressCrawford PI, Turton D, eds. 1992. Film as Ethnography: Manchester, NY: Manchester Univ.

PressDas V. 1998. Wittgenstein and anthropology. Annu. Rev. Anthropol . 27:171–95

Das V. 2003. Trauma and testimony: implications for political community. Anthropol. Theory

3(3):293–307

Debord G. 1987. Society of the Spectacle. Exeter: Rebel, Aim

De Heusch. 1962. The Cinema and Social Science: A Survey of Ethnographic and Sociological Films.

Paris: UNESCO

Deleuze G. 1985. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Transl. H Tomlinson, R Galeta, 1989. Minneapo-lis: Univ. Minn. Press (From French)

Deleuze G. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Transl. P Patton, 1968. New York: Columbia Univ.Press (From French)

Derrida J. 2002. The archive market: truth, testimony, evidence. Transl. J Bajorek, 1996, in Echographies of Television, ed. J Derrida, B Steigler, pp. 82–99. Cambridge, UK: Polity (From French)

Dowmunt T. 1993. Channels of Resistance: Global Television and Local Empowerment . London:BFI and Channel Four Television

Edwards E. 1990. Photographic types: in pursuit of method. Visual Anthropol . 4(2–3):235–58

174 Poo le


17/26

Edwards E. 1992. Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press

Edwards E. 1997. Beyond the boundary: a consideration of the expressive in photography andanthropology. See Banks & Morphy 1997, pp. 53–80

Edwards E. 2001. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums . Oxford, NY: BergFabian J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object . New York: Columbia

Univ. PressFanon F. 2001. The lived experience of the black. Transl. V Moulard. See Bernasconi 2001,

pp. 184–201 (From French)Faris J. 1992. Anthropological transparency: film, representation, politics. See Crawford & Turton 1992, pp. 171–82

Faris J. 1996. Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representations of an American

People. Albuquerque: Univ. N.M. Press

Faris J. 2003. Navajo and photography. In Photography’s Other Histories , eds. C Pinney, NPeterson, pp. 85–99. Durham, NC: Duke Univ Press

Ferme M. 2001. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone.

Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressFerguson J, Gupta A. 2002. Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal govern-

mentality. Am. Ethnol. 29(4):981–1002

Firstenberg L. 2003. Autonomy and the archive in America: re-examining the intersection of photography and stereotype. See Fusco & Wallis 2003, pp. 303–34

Foucault M. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception . Transl. AMS

Smith. New York: Vintage (From French)

Foucault M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Transl. A Sheridan. New York: Vintage (From French)

Fusco C. 2003. Racial time, racial marks, racialmetaphors. See Fusco & Wallis 2003, pp. 13–50Fusco C, Wallis B, eds. 2003. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self . New York:

Int. Cent. Photogr., AbramsGidley M. 2003. Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field . Lincoln:

Univ. Nebr. Press

Ginsburg FD. 1992. Indigenous media: Faustian contract or global village?Ginsburg FD. 1995. Mediating culture: indigenous media, ethnographic film and the produc-

tion of identity. In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography,ed. L Devereaux , R Hillman, pp. 256–91. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press

Ginsburg FD. 1996. Institutionalizing the unruly: charting a future for visual anthropology. Ethnos 63(2):173–96

Ginsburg FD, Abu-Lughod L, Larkin B, eds. 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.

Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressGordon RJ. 1997. Picturing Bushman. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press

Graham-Brown S. 1988. Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle

East, 1860–1950. New York: Columbia Univ. Press

Greenhalgh P. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs , 1851–1939. Manchester, NY: Manchester Univ. Press

GriffithsA.2002. WondrousDifference: Cinema, Anthropology , Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture.

New York: Columbia Univ. PressGrimshaw A. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge Univ. PressHale C. 2002. Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights and the politics of

identity in Guatemala. J. Lat. Am. Studies 34(3):485–524



18/26

Haraway D. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New

York: RoutledgeHarvey P. 1996. Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition.

London/New York: RoutledgeHeider K. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: Univ. Tex. Press

Herv ́ e G. 1910. A la recherch ´ e d’un manuscript: les instructions anthropologiques de GeorgesCuvier. Rev. Ecole Anthropol. Paris 10:289–306

Himpele J. 1996. Film distribution as media: mapping difference in the Bolivian cinemascape.Vis. Anthropol. Rev. 12(1):47–66Hockings P, ed. 1985. Principles of Visual Anthropology. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Hockings P. 1992. The yellow bough: Rivers’s use of photograph in The Todas . See Edwards,pp. 179–86

Hockings P, Omori Y, eds. 1988. Cinematographic Theory and New Dimensions in Ethnographic

Film. Osaka: Natl. Mus. Ethnol.

Howell S. 1998. Picturing women, class and community in Arab Detroit: the strange case of

Eva Habib. Vis. Anthropol . 10:209–25 Jacknis I. 1984. Franz Boas and photography. Stud. Vis. Commun. 10(1):2–60

Jacknis I. 1985. Franz Boas and exhibits: on the limitations of the museum method of anthro-

pology. See Stocking, pp. 75–109 Jacknis I. 1988. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: their use of photography and

film. Cult. Anthropol . 3(2):160–77

Jacknis I. 1992. In search of the imagemaker: James Mooney as an ethnograpic photographer.Vis. Anthropol . 3(2):179–212

Jackson JL. 2004. An ethnographic filmflam: giving gifts, doing research and videotaping the

native subject/object. Am. Anthropol . 106(1):32–42 Jay M. 1988. Scopic regimes of modernity. In Force-Fields: Between Intellectual History and

Cultural Critique, pp. 115–33. New York/London: Routledge Jay M. 1994. Downcast Eyes . Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press

Jhala J. 1993. Power and the portrait: the influence of the ruling elite on the visual text in

Western India. Vis. Anthropol . 6:171–98Karp I, Levine SD, eds. 1990. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display .

Washington, DC: Smithson. Inst.Kolko BE, Nakamura L, Rodman GB, eds. 2000. Race in Cyberspace. New York/London: Rout-

ledge. 248 pp.Kravitz C. 2002. The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in

a Photographic Exhibition. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press

Kuehnast K. 1992. Visual imperialism and the export of prejudice: an exploration of ethno-graphic film. See Crawford & Turton 1992, pp. 183–95

Levin DM. 1999. The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment . Berkeley:Univ. Calif. Press

Loizos P. 1993. Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness, 1955–1985 .Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press

Lutz C, Collins J. 1993. Reading National Geographic . Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press

Lyman C. 1982. The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward Curtis . Washington, DC: Smithson. Inst.

MacDougall D. 1985. Beyond observational cinema. See Hockings 1985, pp. 109–24 MacDougall D. 1997. The visual in anthropology. See Banks & Morphy 1997, pp. 256–95

MacDougallD. 1998. Transcultural Cinema, ed. L Taylor.Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press

176 Poo le


19/26

Macintyre M, MacKenzie M. 1992. Focal length as an analogue of cultural distance. See

Edwards 1992, pp. 158–64 Malinowski B. 1961 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific . New York: Dutton Malinowski B. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term . New York/London: Routledge Mankekar P. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood

and Nation. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press Maxwell A. 1999. Colonial Photography and Exhibition: Representations of the ‘Native’ People and

the Making of European Identities . London/New York: Leicester Univ. Press Mead M. 1956. Some uses of still photography in culture and personality studies. In Personal Character and Cultural Milieu, ed. DG Haring, pp. 79–105. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ.

Press Mead M. 1995. Visual anthropology in a discipline of words. See Hockings, pp. 3–10 Mead M, Macgregor FC. 1951. Growth and Culture: A Photographic Study of Balinese Childhood .

New York: Putnam Mead M, M ´ etraux R. 1953. The Study of Culture at a Distance. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press Metraux R. 1953. Resonance in imagery. See Mead & Metraux, pp. 343–64 Metz C. 1985. Photography and fetish. October 34:81–90 Michaels WB. 1995. Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke

Univ. Press Mirzoeff N. 2003. The shadow and the substance: race, photography and the index. See Fusco

& Wallis 2003, pp. 111–26 Mitchell WJT. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: Univ. Chicago PressNelson D. 1999. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Durham, NC:

Duke Univ. PressOksiloff A. 2001. Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography and Early German Cinema.

New York: PalgravePandolfo S. 1997. Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: Univ.

Chicago PressPeterson N. 2003. The changing photographic contract: aborigines and image ethics. See

Pinney & Peterson 2003, pp. 119–44Pinney C. 1992. The parallel histories of anthropology and photography. See Edwards 1992,

pp. 165–73Pinney C. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs . Chicago: Univ. Chicago

PressPinney C, Peterson N, eds. 2003. Photography’s Others Histories . Durham, NC: Duke Univ.

PressPoignant R. 1992. Surveying the field of view: the making of the RAI photographic collection.

See Edwards 1992, pp. 42–73Poignant R. 2003. The making of professional ‘savages’: from PT Barnum (1883) to the Sunday

Times . See Pinney & Peterson 2003, pp. 55–84Poole D. 1997. Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World . Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressPoole D. 2004. An Image of ‘our Indian’: type photographs and racial sentiments in Oaxaca,

1920–1940. Hisp. Am. Hist. Rev. 84(1):37–82Povinelli E. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian

Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressProchaska D. 1990. The Archive of l’Algiers imaginaire. Hist. Anthropol . IV:373–420Rajagopal A. 2001. Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian

Public . Cambridge/New York: Cambridge Univ. Press



20/26

Reed CR. 2000. All the World is Here! The Black Presence at the White City. Blooming-

ton/Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. PressRony FT. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke

Univ. PressRorty R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressRose N. 1999. Powers of Freedom Reframing Political Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press

Rouch J. 2003. On the vicissitudes of the self: the possessed dancer, the magician, the sorcerer,the filmmaker, and the ethnographer. Transl. S Feld, in Cin´ e-Ethnography, pp. 87–101.

Minneapolis: Minn. Univ. Press (From French)Rydell RW. 1984. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions ,

1876–1916. Chicago: Univ. Chicago PressSaid EW. 1978. Orientalism. New York: PantheonSaid EW. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. 380 pp.Samain E. 1995. Bronislaw Malinowski et la photographie anthropologique. L’Ethnographie

91(2):107–30Scherer J. 1973. Indians: The Great Photographs that Reveal North American Indian Life, 1847–

1929, from the unique collection of the Smithsonian Institute. New York: Crown Publ.Sekula A. 1989. The body and the archive. In The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histoires of

Photography, ed. R Bolton, pp. 343–89. Cambridge, MA: MIT PressSimmel G. 1971. The metropolis and mental life. In On Individuality and Social Forms , pp.

324–39. Chicago: Univ. Chicago PressSinger A. 1992. Anthropology in broadcasting. See Crawford & Turton 1992, pp. 264–73Spencer F. 1992. Some notes on the attempt to apply photography to anthropometry during

the second half of the nineteenth century. See Edwards 1992, pp. 99–107Sprague S. 1978. Yoruba photography: how the Yoruba see themselves. African Arts 12(1);

reprinted in Pinney & Peterson 2003, pp. 240–60Spyer P. 2001. Photography’s framings and unframings; a review article. Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist .

43:181–92Stocking GW. 1985. Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. Madison: Univ.

Wisc. PressStoller P. 1992. The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago: Univ. Chicago

PressSullivan G. 1999. Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Highland Bali: Fieldwork Photographs of

Bayung Ged´ e, 1936–1939. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press Taussig M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses . New York/London:

Routledge Taylor L. 1994. Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review 1990–1994.

New York/London: Routledge Thurm I. 1893. Anthropological uses of the camera. J. R. Anthropol. Inst . 22:184–203 Turner T. 1991. The social dynamics of video media in an indigenous society: the cultural

meaning and personal politics of video-making in Kayap ´ o communities. Vis. Anthropol. Rev. 7(2):68–72

Turner T. 1992. Defiant images: the Kayap´ o appropriation of video. Anthropol. Today 8(6):5–16 Turner T. 2002a. Representation, politics and cultural imagination in indigenous video. See

Ginsburg et al. 2002, pp. 75–89 Turner T. 2002b. Representation, polyphony and the construction of power in a Kayap´ o video.

In Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America, ed. KB Warren,

JE Jackson, pp. 229–50. Austin: Univ. Tex. Press

178 Poo le


21/26

Tsinhnahjinnie JH. 2003. When is a photograph worth a thousand words? See Pinney &

Peterson, pp. 40–52 Wallis B. 2003. Black bodies, white science: Louis Agassiz’s slave daguerreotypes. See Fusco &

Wallis 2003, pp. 163–82 Weate J. 2003. Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the difference of phenomenology. See Bernasconi

2003, pp. 169–83 Weiner JF. 1997. Televisualist anthropology: representation, aesthetics, politics. Curr. Anthro-

pol . 38(2):197–235 Wolbert B. 2001. The anthropologist as photographer. The visual construction of ethnographicauthority. Vis. Anthropol . 13:321–43

Worth S, Adair J. 1997. Through Navajo Eyes . Albuquerque: Univ. N.M. Press Wright C. 2003. Supple bodies: the Papua New Guinea photographs of Captain Francis R

Barton, 1899–1907. See Pinney & Peterson 2003, pp. 146–69 Wright T. 1991. The fieldwork photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and the beginning of

modern anthropology. J. Anthropol. Soc. Oxf . 22(1):41–58

Wright T. 1994. Anthropologist as artist: Malinowski’s Trobriand photographs, Europeanimagery and colonial history in the Pacific. Nijmegen Stud. Develop. Cult. Change 19:116–

30

Young L. 1996. Fear of the Dark: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema. New York/London:Routledge

Young MW. 1999. Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915–1918. Chicago: Univ.

Chicago Press

Young MW. 2001. An Anthropologist in Papua: The Photography of FE Williams 1922–39. Hon-olulu: Univ. Hawaii Press



22/26

Annual Re

Anthropolo

Volume 34,

Contents

Frontispiece

Sally Falk Moore xvi

Prefatory Chapter

Comparisons: Possible and Impossible

Sally Falk Moore 1

Archaeology

Archaeology, Ecological History, and Conservation

Frances M. Hayashida 43

Archaeology of the Body

Rosemary A. Joyce 139

Looting and the World’s Archaeological Heritage: The InadequateResponse

Neil Brodie and Colin Renfrew 343

Through Wary Eyes: Indigenous Perspectives on Archaeology

Joe Watkins 429

The Archaeology of Black Americans in Recent Times

Mark P. Leone, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, and Jennifer J. Babiarz 575

Biological Anthropology

Early Modern Humans

Erik Trinkaus 207

Metabolic Adaptation in Indigenous Siberian Populations

William R. Leonard, J. Josh Snodgrass, and Mark V. Sorensen 451

The Ecologies of Human Immune Function

Thomas W. McDade 495

vii


23/26

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

New Directions in Pidgin and Creole Studies

Marlyse Baptista 33

Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language

William F. Hanks 67

Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia

N.J. Enfield

181

Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease

Charles L. Briggs 269

Will Indigenous Languages Survive?

Michael Walsh 293

Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity

Luisa Maffi 599

International Anthropology and Regional Studies

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System

Dipankar Gupta 409

Indigenous Movements in Australia

Francesca Merlan 473

Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992–2004: Controversies,

Ironies, New Directions

Jean E. Jackson and Kay B. Warren 549

Sociocultural Anthropology

The Cultural Politics of Body Size

Helen Gremillion 13

Too Much for Too Few: Problems of Indigenous Land Rights in Latin

America

Anthony Stocks 85

Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements

Dominic Boyer and Claudio Lomnitz 105

The Effect of Market Economies on the Well-Being of Indigenous

Peoples and on Their Use of Renewable Natural Resources

Ricardo Godoy, Victoria Reyes-Garc´ ıa, Elizabeth Byron, William R. Leonard,

and Vincent Vadez 121

viii Contents


24/26

An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies

Deborah Poole 159

Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Research: Models to Explain

Health Disparities

William W. Dressler, Kathryn S. Oths, and Clarence C. Gravlee 231

Recent Ethnographic Research on North American Indigenous

Peoples Pauline Turner Strong 253

The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Ends of Life

Sharon R. Kaufman and Lynn M. Morgan 317

Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration,

and Immigration in the New Europe

Paul A. Silverstein 363

Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over

Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe

Bambi Ceuppens and Peter Geschiere

385

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System

Dipankar Gupta 409

The Evolution of Human Physical Attractiveness

Steven W. Gangestad and Glenn J. Scheyd 523

Mapping Indigenous Lands

Mac Chapin, Zachary Lamb, and Bill Threlkeld 619

Human Rights, Biomedical Science, and Infectious Diseases AmongSouth American Indigenous Groups

A. Magdalena Hurtado, Carol A. Lambourne, Paul James, Kim Hill,

Karen Cheman, and Keely Baca 639

Interrogating Racism: Toward

an excess of description ethnography rac

Documents