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An Excess
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005. 34:159-79 The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at anthro.annualreviews.org doi: 10.1146/ annurev.anthro. 3 3.070203.144034 2005 by Copyright Annual Reviews. All rights reserved 0084-6570/05/1021 0159$20.00
Key Words
photography, visual anthropology, temporality, archive,
ethnography Abstract
This essay provides an overview of recent anthropological work on
the relationship between racial thought and the visual technologies of photography and film. I argue that anthropologists have moved
away from a concern with representation per se in favor of the more
affective register of suspicion that has surrounded both visual meth ods and the idea of race in anthropology. Whereas this suspicion
has led some to dismiss visual technologies as inherently racializ
ing or objectifying,
as a productive site
uncertainty, and contingency that characterize both ethnographic and visual accounts of the world. I begin by discussing recent work on the photographic archive, early fieldwork photography, and the subsequent move in the 1960s and 1970s from still photography to film and video within the emergent subfield of visual anthropology. Finally, I consider how more recent work on the problem of race in
favor of descriptive accounts of mediascapes.
159
posed
of
skin
colors
or ritual as
behaviors
was within
Contents INTRODUCTION. THE ARCHIVE. EXCESS AND CONTEXT. 164 Contingency. IN THE FIELD. PHOTOGRAPHY
Culture at a Distance.
presumed
if concealed order
task
constituted
NOTICING
DIFFERENCE.
171
ethnographic is distressing
Al subject. thinking at were leveled easily endeavors of the past, at least is that, some by of the
about critique,
post-Orientalist
confin
INTRODUCTION
Anthropological proliferated work on race and vision in recent has years in conversation
the directional di
they other, left alter about vision,
metaphysics,
scenarios
technology,
with
a yet broader visual turn in the fields of critical theory and philosophy (Brennan & Jay 1996; Crary 1990;Debord 1987; Foucault 1980, 1986; 1973, 1977; Jay 1994; Mitchell
1979). Theories representation disciplines traditional culture of language, in discourse, these to sis ques and ter tion developed led many
and difference might be differently related (Benjamin 1999; Buck-Morss 1989; Connolly 2002; Deleuze 1985, 1994; Jay 1988; Levin 1999).
This review for takes this dilemma recent on the as a start as well relation and I ask affec anthro ing point as some not ship revisiting so recent race, In idea of of some work
Rorty
scholars
between
between
vision,
social dif
shaped which
essentialized (e.g.,
with to greet
boundaries
Michaels 1995; Said 1978, 1993). Yet others from within the discipline itself leveled the
more herent inclusive to charge that modes the visualism of description racialization, whom in ethnographic led to the reification, distancing of
technologies.
photography, By focus
temporal
the people
anthropologists study (Clifford & Marcus Fabian 1983). This charge was fueled 1986,
by the parallel histories, between as well as the and grounded pre an sumed homology, as interpretive thropology racialism projects
in have, technologies notion of race. Although turn, shaped the recent prolifer and important, interesting on ation of anthropological writing questions and film of race, representation, photography, that these are, by now, familiar argu suggests visual the very As such, of the ostensibly anthropology run its course critical account
in Enlightenment
discovery. about ing face was worlds behaviors served Thus, finding underneath of the world, about
ideals of description
it was reasoned, order the if race
and
is
and mean visible ethnography and moral of embodied the ob com sur
similarly of cultural
would provide in that they du or norma the same sort of descriptive plicate to tive force we have so convincingly assigned as a that is produc technology photography studies to have
the discovery
cases, whether
the world
16o
Poole
than visual
dwelling
on
the
ordering
ef in this
Although was
early
work con vi an
possibilities
reclaiming that
characterize This
indigenous
subject, media
the world.
indigenous
cisely because of the ambiguous role played by visual images in the disciplinary struggle first to identify, and then later to avoid, the
idea of race scribed. work suality as that which no been attempt done on can be seen and de all the I make that has in recent to review either race
race with
formation. tions
race
encounter,
difference
or vi not
ethnography.
years.
I have that
considered visual of
their
images content
THE ARCHIVE
Much sors, like their nineteenth-century anthropologists who have predeces returned to
types, ticular of
or
interest
suspicion
the photographic
concerned der, mous counter. or and with logic, richly the
within diverse
collections such
engagement
with
Institutional
collections
ethnographic method and description. I first consider how anthropologists who both collected and made photographs in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rec
held by the Smithsonian (Scherer 1973), Institute (Pinney the Royal Anthropological The American Mu 1992, Poignant 1992), seum of Natural History (Jacknis 1992), or Harvard's Peabody Museum
1986) have been examined
(Banta& Hinsley
in an attempt to
experi
uncover
terests them. for of
the theoretical
the
(and political)
in
is particularly en al idea
Other
who collected anthropologists much less studied collections the George or Eastman House in
example,
phy the
deception
photogra thus ran by anthropologists an concern with empiricist a concern for the accuracy
together less
academically and on
coherent budgets
personnel much
with which photographs represented a "racial fact") to worries about the inability of pho tography to capture the intangibles of culture
and social organization. I then explore work
the margins
that falls self-consciously within the subfield of visual anthropology that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in reaction to this concern with the distinctive dangers and promises
cal academy. Although less revealing of the specific ways in which early anthropologists looked at photography, these collections offer insight into the importance of photography
and other visual that technologies took place in between governmental, the con versations pological, anthro and
administrative,
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess ofDescription
161
"popular"
ideas
of
race
(e.g.,
Alvarado
et al.
Edwards'
archive than sire" tions as the (2001,
2002, Graham-Brown
A focus on the collecting from the displaces search for
1988).
archive and the analytics of practices of race away
as a series
and the anal "meanings" in favor of a focus content, of images through differ sites. An
concerning
the politics
In my
of colonialism in the study of racial photogra question for phy. An initial andmotivating much of this photographic history concerned the political involvements of anthropologists
in the colonial gies of project and Not the racial surprising, technolo in these colonialism.
dean photography (Poole 1997), for example, I looked at the circulation of anthropologi cal photographs as part of a broader visual economy inwhich images of Andean peoples were produced and circulated internationally. By broadening the social fields through which
photographs circulate and accrue "meaning"
ing photographs from India and other British colonies (Gordon 1997, Pinney 1992); French
ethnologists accumulated images of Algeri
or value,
understandings
ans (Prochaska 1990); andU.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 spondence becomes between clear the is that this corre found subject matter
in the anthropological
the anthropological
argues down" ferentiated that the a focus archive and
complex
acts of anthropolog
gies of anthropological research as it did to the overtly colonialist sympathies of these early practitioners of anthropology. With few
exceptions, gists practiced not nineteenth-century an "epistolary anthropolo ethnography"
led to a "privileg
in the production of race. As
interpretations comparative
methodologies
acquire
knowl
pologists,
the space
photographic
between the
technology
site of
"closed
observation
frame ogy
in which
graphic flection,
on the colonial periphery and the site of metropolitan interpretation" (Edwards 2001, pp. 31-32). At the same time, asEdwards (2001, pp. 38, 133), Poignant
and not others naively point
(1992), Pinney
out, of
(1992, 1997),
were
anthropologists
accepting
the much-lauded
I 2
Poole
"transparency"
or
"objectivity"
of
pho
power of the photographic image as "facts in themselves" (Poignant 1992, p. 44). The RAI
archive was founded on the basis of collec RAI:
all, comparison,
could be made
statistical of regular evolu
to
tions from the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Societies (Pinney 1992, Poignant 1992). Photographs collected for these early
societies conventions often relied on such common vignette, artistic through as the portrait
Royal
Anthropological Institute
predictions
tionary, ticular
importance
which
to look,
"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, as time, context, or individual hu
needy.
thropologists
the RAI's new
sense of
increasingly
to discipline the sorts of poses, and settings inwhich subjects were framings, photographed. During the 1880s, the even concerned
more rigorous standardization demanded by
tographs (Poole 1997, pp. 132-40; Sekula 1989). By specifying uniform focal lengths,
poses, to text, edit and backdrops, sought anthropologists out the distracting "noise" of con countenance and the human culture,
behaviors
appearances, to constitute
themselves
(Edward
1992, thropologists
2001, Macintyre
1992). worked
& MacKenzie
an the
of anthropology 1992).
Spencer
photographic print to inscribe interior frames thatwould isolate bits of ethnological or racial
data (for example, tattoos) from the rest of
history of anthropological
been century quick to point out, anthropological
photography has
with pho
kind of intervention to make things [like race and culture] fully visible" (Wright 2003,
p. cion 149), they also betray an about "the frustratingly underlying ... m suspi tonymie
beginning
ness about both the excessive detail and the temporal contingencies of the photographic
prints pologist's that began once to pile up around distant the anthro armchair. comfortably
nature of the photograph" (Poignant 1992, p. 42). Edwards' (2001, pp. 131-55) study of the Darwinian biologist, Thomas Huxley's "well considered plan" to produce a photographic inventory of the races of the British Empire,
provides one example of how "the intrusion
In her study of the photographic archives at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), Poignant charts the subtle faultlines through which British anthropologists came to tem per their initial fascination with the evidential
of 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
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess ofDescription
i6$
by
imposing
the
absurd but
strictures even
of in those taken, by
trie poses,
2002, Poignant
the
of photographing"
the images in the Such and
Contingency
An arguably the even more between important slippage or am stabilizing
gaze, expression, was read by Hux beauty. as an "excess" ley and his fellow systematizers to purge of visual their detail. Yet attempts
classificatory
bitions of photography
fects can be located
in the unique
it ultimately led to failure in that the tech nology of photography was, in the final anal ysis, not capable of matching the totalizing
ambitions of the project. the As a result, office's many Edwards archive more comments, wryly of this project about colonial race
ity of the photograph. Both the evidentiary power and the allure of the photograph are due to our knowledge that it captures (or
freezes) temporal a particular moment in time. This intro dimension of the photograph
contains
photographs
races. From revealing den its or
of buildings
beginnings, making the visible
than of people or
race was about lay hid details cul
century anthropologists
twentieth-century
underneath visual
the messy
untidy excess of
descendants)
the human,
Wallis 2003).Well tural body (Spencer 1992, before the invention of photography, Cuvier,
for example, had instructed the artists who both accompanied ersome details or that and context expeditions of gesture, their to eliminate
vinced that the primitives they studied were on the verge of disappearing. Ethnological
encounters as acquired a anthropologists on scrambled urgency corresponding to collect what
from
details be more
in their carried
(Herv
Whereas 1910).
of facilitating
anthropol
the promise
ethnologist
cautioned of erasing
Im Thurm,
anthropologists the human,
for
aes
excess of photo
of a too rigorous
introduced contingency
(however remote)
and, thus,
coevalness
gan by 1874 (with the publication o Notes and Queries) to express an interest in regulating the types and amount of visual information they would receive through photographs. By the 1890s, although photography continued to
be used in anthropometry, there was a gen
bly better practiced on dead bodies than on the human beings he sought to capture in his portrait 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 "off-frame." the "visual Thurm's excess" of context embrace and of cautious
eral decline in interest in the collection and use of photographs as ethnological evidence
164 Poole
photography
speaks
clearly
to its suspect
sta
to "what
was
perceived whereas
to be the
frag
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 under
community,"
"detective
paradigm," premised on a faith in the eviden tiary status of the photographic document,
with manifested when faced commonly as vital caste society." He further a curato sociates the detective with paradigm rial imperative of inventory and preservation, amore "was more
and the salvage paradigm with a language of urgency and "capture" (Pinney 1997, p. 45). Although the particular mapping of the two
ways, tribal and caste society to India and peculiar Pinney so far as to that uncertainty suggest idioms sual evidence is somehow in India peculiar, on is, in many even about goes vi
be said to have harnessed the aesthetic of por trait photography as part of a broader, political framing of Native Americans as the sad, in evitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely
manifest Curtis's what destiny. photographs they reveal On another are about also the level, of however, interest for tem
or at least ten
peculiarly
marked,
the general
sion between
the
distinctive
porality of the "racializing gaze." Although Curtis's photographs have been criticized as
inauthentic for their use of costume and tribal
of photography, and anx temporal actuality and truthfulness about the nature of the iety was in other world present perceptual clearly colonial and postcolonial settings. in this way, When viewed the understand race ing of that emerges from a history of an
to do with theways inwhich he was able to dis till contemporary fascination for a technology
that allows to one to gaze forever on that which is about Within disappear. anthropology, however, this "tem
thropological photography is clearly asmuch about the instability of the photograph as eth
nological cion evidence and things the unshakeable are not what suspi they ap that perhaps
served only to in
of the pho of scientific number to the of an
thropologist
primitive
is usually asked about stability and fixing and instead ask how it is that photography simul
taneously of "race" somewhat sediments as a visual differently, and fractures and conceptual can we how the solidity fact. Put
people
recapture
just such a dilemma that anthropologists at the RAI came to favor studio portraits over photographs taken in the field because the clear visual displacement found in the studio portrait between the primitive subject and the world allowed the anthropologist "to impose
order on people too numerous to disappear"
the productive forms of suspicion with which early anthropologists greeted photography's unique capacity to reveal the particularities of
moments, encounters, and individuals?
PHOTOGRAPHY
For to an answer begin by
IN THE FIELD
integrate photography into the ethnographic toolkit. Recent studies of early fieldwork
www.annualreviews.org An Excess ofDescription 165
photography
stress
the
extent
to which
pho
best term
captured "participant
in Malinowski's observation."
now Whereas
famous ob
tography offered
pleasure. greater On extent the
anthropologists
one hand the and archival
a guilty
to an even collec
than with
out the extra of weeding problem contexts and contingent details cap was at once tured by the camera. This problem an artifact technical of the unforgiving "re alism" of the and con image photographic
gotiation of this contradictory charge of be ing simultaneously distant and close (Wright 1991, 1994; Young 1999). Among his British
contemporaries, Malinowski made the most
abstractions. documentation
required
perception a temporality
in his published
for every seven
that of pho
only of the ob uses
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 1967). graphies (Clifford 1988, Malinowski
For example, despite having taken numer
ous, elaborately posed photographs of him self and other colonial officials, he seems to have carefully edited out the presence of all
such nonindigenous elements when illustrat
dis
The Golden Bough in his curious photographs of Todas (Hockings 1992). Whereas Rivers
sought Haddon what the to place natives to use sought natives past, mythical to portray photography "saw" when of they talked in a
photography
Evans-Pritchards' similar and
mythology.
were ment at which
that
concerned
the mo
of eye
contact
Wolbert
ethnographer
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
On
shot,
how con to in
specter
munication,
"strong
to objectivity. The
aspects of
ethnographic
Argonauts,
(1922,
166
Poole
pp.
52-53)
comments
on
the
"great
variety
in
logical writes,
facts" that
(1961, there
"One
he
of the Trobrianders. the physical appearance" are men and women of tall stature, "There fine open bearing and and intelligent delicate features ... ... with an
hidden
expression
[and] oth
foreheads,
expressed byMalinowski and others (Jacknis 1984,1992; Wright 2004; Young 2001) about the use of photography in fieldwork speak to the unsuitability of a visual medium that is
about surface, contingency, and the moment
for a discipline whose interpretive task was to describe the hidden regularities, systemic
workings, stituted 2001). On and structural and "society" the other regularities "culture" however, that con (Grimshaw as a re
(1922, p. 53), he again relies not on language but on two photographs: One (taken by his friend Hancock) he captions "a coarse but fine looking unmarried woman" (plate XI in Malinowski 1922), and the other (his own) is
a medium-long shot of a group of Boyowan
hand,
alist mode
of documentation,
the photograph
also contained within it the possibility of au thenticating the presence that constituted the
basis The of the ethnographer's visual scientific technologies method. such as other
girls (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" towhich Malinowski gestures in his text, in fact, very few ofMalinowski's photographs
conform to the standard racial photograph
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
century even sorts anthropologists fewer of visual opportunities excess and detail the distance One experimented to control that offered for the
required
he first he met.
particularly
instructive
(2002,
even
edly in his opening descriptions of both na tives and landscapes,Malinowski speaks of the
to evade him in the form that seem insights or Hori of fleeting impressions glimpses. zons are "scanned for glimpses of natives"
moral
life groups
through
the hyperre
(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, in which not they for what occur, they but tell of the moment rather because they
with
the authority of the scientific artifact" (Griffiths 2002, p. 20), others including Franz Boas (Jacknis 1985)- expressed con cern that these hyperrealist technologies
distract Boas figures the gaze sought were of museum to create intentionally goers. As a remedy, human exhibits whose
would
antirealist,
the spectator's gaze would first be drawn by a central focal artifact and then
www.annualreviews.org An Excess ofDescription 167
and to which
carefully guided
items similar and display worries
the ethnographer (AAA 2002). Thus, asmuch as photographs entered as juridical evidence
require a human voice to authenticate their
ils that the Midway sideshows presented to the scientific claims of ethnology. Whereas others
have pointed toward world's fairs as sites for the propagation of nineteenth-century racial
(Greenhalgh 1988,Maxwell 1999, Reed 2000, Rydell 1984), Griffiths' (2002) emphasis on the professional suspicion
surrounding to which, the concern such for displays reveals the extent contemporary was with the anthropologists, disruptive potential
ist anthropology
tography or film is intimately, even inextri cably, bound up with the "soft" testimonial voice (or "subjectivity") of the ethnographer 1985, Loizos 1993, (Heider 1976, Hockings 1997, Stoller 1992). Like judi MacDougall ciary photographs as well, the dilemma in ethnographic 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 in
of distraction (Benjamin 1968, Simmel 1971, Crary 1999) as a form of affect that worked against the focused visualism required for the
education speak of the museum to the general goer. Such worries sur clearly nervousness
the 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
rounding the visual technologies of photogra phy and film within anthropology and, along
with it, the persistent and perhaps Utopian
belief that the aesthetic and affective appeal of the visual could be somehow brought in line with contemporary scientific ideals of
objective "observation."
"native" subjects (Crawford & Turton 1992, Hockings & Omori 1988, Worth & Adair 1997). It is thismove that affords decisive sta
an event as tus to the image testimony photographic in a time. However, nonrepeatable not is the photograph the photographer to it
Culture The
at a Distance
present of material
that
the
photograph as we
form In the
ethnography,
have
seen,
in the mid-1960s
for
photograph's context and a most limit tion. and often to the Rather image
of
an off-frame moment a debilitating interpreta how the voice evi of have has
course, visual
passing, to pose
work aura
guage
ethnography,
dentiary the
descriptive task and the authorizing method of ethnography continue to rely in important
ways on the ethnographer's physical presence
photograph,
ethnographers,
temporality as we
gins of the visual anthropology canon, the 759 photographs published in Bateson & Mead's
Balinese treme Character solution to ends. (1942) taming Bateson represent visual one ex for ini evidence
as recent
ethnographic
and Mead
idence
textualizing
testimony
styles (Jacknis
i68
Poole
imagery," a culture."
Metraux
writes,
"is an intensely
per
quickly
to see
independent control on the potential biases of visual observation (Sullivan 1999, p. 16)
and then, somewhat through later, which which as a form of doc umentation aspects to capture "those are least amenable
with
most
a distance,
1956). The
anthropol
im
of the culture
to visual
to 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, Mead extended this understanding
mental tempt to character replicate of precise
ogy, was imagined as both an expression of the perceptual system shared by the members of
a society and as a surrogate allow one system have for the experience and describe, As var (e.g., that would that ious to access, or
of the supple
in an at sequences
perceptual authors
"culture."
photography temporal
subsequently
argued
Banks &Morphy
1994), this
1951).
about
approach
intriguing
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
add up
"child-rearing," construct their meaning tographs as "raw mate tive. thus remain Photographs rial" or "facts" whose lies not in the "meaning" detail but reveal of particular encounters, they rather about in the narrative the sequence different ideas message (and presumed events and and they convey
"character"
the ethnographic intangibles of presence and newness (Edwards 1997). Instead, images
gestures, photographs, for clues to the cultural press. Given what Mead's own Balinese work films are scrutinized they ex configuration
of narrative of early
at the heart
visions
thropology is suggested by the fact that the subfield's first professional organization was the Society for the Anthropology of Visual
Communication, founded in 1972. As con
field 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 (MacDougall 1998, pp. 64,68), film was
seen yond ive as a visual "observation" references technology to include the sorts that could go be explicit, of intimate reflex rela
nicate
the
lurking behind
person, or
surface
of the event,
practice
to
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 cultural
immersion, a sort of substitute for the per
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 film unlike photography and MacDougall)
www.annualreviews.org An Excess ofDescription 169
of "visual
communication"
put by analysis
for or
unites work on
is the of concept a particu the no claim, for
by Mead
is not mediated
writing
in other it an to
(MacDougall
words, was
considered
identity
affective
transparency as a "frozen"
photography
hence
by a profound hu
as universal or "tran
tion of the indigenous invokes ideals of local ity, cultural specificity, and authenticity. For some it has functioned as an effective form for critically rethinking (Ginsberg 1992) or even rejecting (Faris 2003) the possibilities of recuperating photography and film within respect to the specific anthropology. With
problem of race, however, the notion of the in
scultural" (MacDougall 1998) seemed likely to transcend the forms of racial objectification and the objectifying "conventions of scientific
reason" that many considered inherent to the
To
counter the anticolonial critique of the 1980s. the surprise (and, perhaps, dismay) of
anthropology has emerged largely un
perspective
represented"
(Alexander
many,
scathed from the charges of objectification, racialism, and colonialism levied against it in the 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
national, and as
or thus they
tializing dichotomies that characterized New World slave societies and European colonial
rule. In many cases, the resulting disciplinary
sensitivity
also
to both history
an activist to establish helped agenda to be seen in which has come ethnography as and critical, collaborative, simultaneously interventionist. More specifically, within the
media" is said to "obliterate identity" while the more portable forms of handheld "video
tends to rediscover identity and consolidate
it" (Dowmunt
Such claims the premium
1993, p. 11;Ginsburg
all the more on peculiar and authenticity
2002).
given local
subfield 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
seem placed
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
ism within neoliberal multicultural discourse (Hale 2002, Povinelli 2002, Rose 1999). By ignoring the broader political and discursive
landscape indigenous" the literature within which emerge on such as "the categories of and take hold, much media ends up
indigenous
media and the archive (Ginsburg et al. 2002). As the new disciplinary paradigm for vi
sual dia tions anthropology, has of tended image to work focus on on indigenous the and social me rela
defending an essentialist or primordial notion of identity that comes perilously close to older
ideas of racial essences.
production
consumption
(Ginsburg 1992, Himpele 1996) and the cul tural idioms through which indigenous pro ducers and artists appropriate filmic mediums
i jo Poole
and film have effectively (and, I think, in advertently) destabilized earlier assumptions and hence about the necessarily objectifying
racializing technologies. or
character Thus,
of recent
still
tions, the
financial burden of
flows, evidence
and
discursive collecting
regimes, in ethno
the "slippery"
racial referent
(Firstenberg 2003, Fusco 2003, Poole 1997), the highly mobile meanings attached to pho
tographs as they circulate through different
of description.
the handover
(Howell
of gazes
1998,
as a po
tentially destabilizing site of encounter within the photographic frame (Lutz & Collins
1993), tographic or the creative surface reworkings in postcolonial of the pho pho portrait
of (racial) essentialization and (visualist) dis tancing leveled against anthropology by the Orientalist critique.What has been sacrificed
in this move forms of is an attention and intimacy to the unsettling that con contingency
tography (Behrend 2003, Buckley 1999, Jhala 1993, Mirzoeff 2003, Pinney 1997, Sprague 1978). Although emphases in these works differ and I cannot do justice to them all
here the general trend (with some excep
stitute the subversive hallmarks (and hence potential strengths, aswell as liabilities) of the
ethnographic encounter.
NOTICING
DIFFERENCE
agency
for the photograph in the form of either resis tance, mobility, or the fluidity of photographic
"meaning." If "race" still haunts the photo
In "The Lived Experience of the Black," Fanon (2001) opens by recounting the ef
fects Negro" What of an utterance, on his a the world. struggle recount is extraordinary about Fanon's of this very is his em ing experience ordinary on that and very brief, mo phasis particular, ment when the onlooker's gaze has not yet set labeling to inhabit "Look, a
anthropologists have extended the paradigm of indigenous media to explore how 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
Other
"liberating me gives me
side,
I stumble,
attitudes
and gaze,
televisualist
troubling side effect of these devel opments within the visual anthropology of both photography and film as in the disci
pline from more what generally we once has thought been a move away local." of as "the
One
just like a dye is used to fix a chemical solu tion" (Fanon 2001, p. 184).This brief moment before "the fragments [of the self] are put to
gether by another" where constitutes, a chance for Fanon, encounter the is so site of betrayal
Yet as the terrain of anthropological inquiry has expanded beyond the traditional village,
community, or tribe to embrace the study
reveals
understanding
theweight of history
particular gesture on toward the past,
the present.
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 is the end and of a realization struggle, not that that "the universal
detail or noise of vision was to be disciplined and rendered intelligible. While an interpre
tive move must, it a reduction this as an transition opening The of of noise, bring with inevitably is perhaps what lost in is the immediacy of encounter both newness and "the toward perhaps, of course, without is to reclaim abandoning
other." this
sense
challenge, encounter
bility offers several important leads for how to rethink the place of visual technologies
and visual perception more generally in the
the possibilities
nation.
practice of ethnography. On the one hand, Fanon insists (in this and other writings)
on sual the extent to which (cinema, technologies and vi perceptual cre in particular)
The relationship of photography to this task depends on how we think about its pe culiar temporality. An anthropology focused on 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 the fact. permanency stabilizing as a result, tend Ethnographers, of the world the surface appearances photographic a good they images deal are seen of as that suspicion and the of to
record pre
racial and anthropological photography. On the other hand, however, and along with this
emphasis on distance, Fanon also provides im
with
because
the contingency
ing the corporeal frame as it is about fixing (Bernasconi 2001, Weate 2003). As such, his
sense of the gaze is rooted and in equal parts in the im with embodied, mediacy which of this sensory, encounter opening future-oriented and slips the into rapidity the exclusion
imagined over
ad
on pro
of racial and cultural hybridity, one wonders how anthropologists will address this disci
plinary anxiety about surface appearances and
like the visible world, or whether hybridity the native and Indian before it will come to
be treated as another or (racial) as "fact" if that must under be uncovered
ways inwhich photographic technologies may need to be rethought in conversation with that
particular As we tieth understanding seen for much have anthropologists of encounter. of have the twen
revealed,
lying
century,
around a dichotomy
like seeing was the fleeting pretation strued
inwhich photography
to the domain whereas was of inter con
relegated
thinking of the notion of difference itself (e.g., Deleuze 1994, Connolly 2002), a questioning of its stability as an object of inquiry and a new way of thinking about the temporality of
encounter as it shapes both ethnography and
as a process
extraneous
photography.
172
Poole
to
reclaim
both of de
imperative
as the basis of vision of knowl rejection as a substantive a of how rethinking edge account in that is not grounded descriptive or can the idea of interpretation discovery speak tainty, study to as uncer such experience, things we in the cultural worlds and newness anthropologists. By explicitly ques
upon which
draw meanings to uncover of
anthropological
the hidden specific cultures
theory could
rules, and orders, societies. or
as
as a form
of both
quiry and writing (e.g., Biehl 2005, Das 2003, Ferme 2001, Nelson 1999, Pandolfo 1997, At stake here is not so much Taussig 1993).
of Cartesian this move language metaphysiscs, to rethink it possible makes the troublesome move of "race." This also leaves us visuality to the sensory and anticipatory open aspects encounter of visual and surprise that animate the very notion of participant observation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Iwould
their
like to thankVeena Das, Sameena Mulla, Naveeda Khan, and Gabriela Zamorano
and criticisms on an earlier version of this article.
for
comments
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