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An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies Author(s): Deborah Poole Reviewed work(s): Source: Annual Review

of Anthropology, Vol. 34 (2005), pp. 159-179 Published by: Annual Reviews Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064881 . Accessed: 09/03/2012 12:29
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of Description: Race, and Ethnography, Visual Technologies


Deborah Poole
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218; Department of Anthropology, email: dpoole@jhu.edu

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

complex discursive and political landscapes opened up by the con


cepts of media and the archive. My review of this work focuses on the

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

I argue that it is possible to reclaim suspicion


for rethinking the particular forms of presence,

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

to contain, more the was

if concealed order

160 161 163 165


168

it, another, which The was native a

abstract ethnographer's thus

task

of meaning, to reveal. as object

constituted act that both

through from grapher though many what

perceptual and, in so doing, as a reasoned, these claims

emanated the ethno

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

ing visuality itself within


alectic little native of room a Cartesian for thinking in which

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

anthropological race and

distinctions insofar as both

between

vision,

photography, this literature, the

ethnography. how tive the register

of these languages for theorizing


ference or have led to talk about and biologized identities

social dif

exploring race has

shaped which

essentialized (e.g.,

suspicion tended visual

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

have pologists and other film,

technologies.

photography, By focus

ing on suspicion, I hope to shift the burden


of criticism how and away from the usual the way conclusions we see the about world, race has how shaped

and writing and

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

ments. these seem

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

classificatory (or within) then

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

tive of racial ideas and orders. This descriptive


plentitude comes at the expense of silencing

through and surface

the observation beliefs. of In both

cases, whether

the capacity of both ethnography and photog


raphy to unsettle our accounts of the world.

the world

16o

Poole

Rather fects review of

than visual

dwelling

on

the

ordering

ef in this

of visual in visual cerned

technologies. anthropology about countering

then, representations, at the I look more productive closely

Although was

early

work con vi an

explicitly the notion that constituted

possibilities
reclaiming that

that visual technologies offer for


the uncertainty contingency accounts of anthropological is unleashed pre potential and

sual representations exploitative of on the and/or

necessarily racializing more displaces

characterize This

indigenous

subject, media

expropriation recent work discussion of

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

theories of ethnicity and identity


I close recent can with some reflec of visual for rethink in histories offer and

Finally, on what these and

technologies ing visuality,

race

encounter,

difference

or vi not

ethnography.

years.

In particular, studies exclusively

I have that

considered visual of

the numerous of "others" as

address in terms stereo my par

their

images content

THE ARCHIVE
Much sors, like their nineteenth-century anthropologists who have predeces returned to

representations, Rather, how visual

types, ticular of

or

interest

misrepresentations. is to understand that surround

the forms representa

suspicion

the photographic
concerned der, mous counter. or and with logic, richly the

archive have been largely


finding some the sort of or sometimes enor en they as those

tions and race have shaped anthropological


understandings limits of evidence, inquiry, ongoing of ethnographic our own sequence, experience, and, as a con

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

onciled disciplinary norms of evidence and


evolutionary ence models of race with the peculiar

(Banta& Hinsley
in an attempt to

temporality of the photograph. The


of these anthropologists

experi

uncover
terests them. for of

the theoretical
the

(and political)

in

is particularly en al idea

revealing in that it coincides with a period


in which thusiastic most anthropology of pursuit fervent suspicion moved racial rejection with from order to the an

Other

who collected anthropologists much less studied collections the George or Eastman House in

example,

Rochester, New York, the Royal Geographic


Society ings in London, at France's over the magnificent Library periods of were time, hold put with National longer

equally of race. The was gamut

of the very which

phy the

greeted from (i.e.,

deception

photogra thus ran by anthropologists an concern with empiricist a concern for the accuracy

together less

academically and on

coherent budgets

personnel much

and with agendas, often that were very of the anthropologi

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,

approach to the photographic


of "microintentions" rather de ques reflection p. of a "universalizing 7) also raises important where we locate

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

of image ysis on the movement ent institutional, own work

and the anal "meanings" in favor of a focus content, of images through differ sites. An

concerning

the politics

In my

and cultural regional, on nineteenth-century

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"

studies we find thatVictorian anthropologists


tended to concentrate their efforts on collect

ing photographs from India and other British colonies (Gordon 1997, Pinney 1992); French
ethnologists accumulated images of Algeri

I argued for the privileged role played by photography in the crafting of a


racial cian ular" common sense which, of the as in the Grams term, unites of "pop em understanding and "scientific"

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

bodied difference (Poole 1997, 2004).


Whereas used my more Foucauldian for an approach expansion of circulation to argue

in the anthropological

archive and the impe


states methodolo owed

the anthropological
argues down" ferentiated that the a focus archive and

archive, Edwards (2001)


on "into movement smaller, "breaks more dif

of particular rial politics nation as much to the contemporary

complex

acts of anthropolog

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


that the informal networks and "collecting

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"

clubs" through which British anthropologists


such as Tylor, content Haddon, and Balfour exchanged

(Stocking 1995, p. 16) in which data was ob


tained rather ernment agents had through direct observation, with and but the gov sundry who had through officials, of commerce the occasion to correspondence missionaries, and colonialism firsthand

and shared photographs


ing of over form" of anthropological a of the product

led to a "privileg
in the production of race. As

interpretations comparative

methodologies

and exchange practices (or "flows") through


which photographs were rendered of race by the a move a visual from early as "data" emerges archive to technol studies as re in anthropology, as an abstraction a technological the takes archive us a long the concept produced form. as Such itself way

acquire

knowl

edge (or at least scattered observations) of na


tives in far-flung places. For these anthro

pologists,
the space

photographic
between the

technology
site of

"closed

observation

frame ogy

in which
graphic flection,

the "meaning" of particular photo


as was interpreted images being or of racial and "expression," a re colo

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

nial ideologies formed elsewhere, outside the


archive.

anthropologists

accepting

the much-lauded

I 2

Poole

"transparency"

or

"objectivity"

of

pho

tographs. Indeed, the value they assigned to


photographs mately mulation, related and, as scientific evidence was inti accu through to the forms above of exchange,

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,

which mute photographs


produce ities and the the and general systemic ethnological here laws,

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

Of par "theory." was the genre of the

which
to look,

the "native" subject could be made


as During it were, the more 1880s, human however, and more the an

"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

charged with making


endeavor became

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

man being portrayed in each photograph, but


rather self-contained exemplars of ideal

Adolphe Bertillon's and Arthur Chervin's an


thropom tion between trie methods "racial" cemented and the distinc pho "ethnological"

ized racial categories with no single referent in


the world. not read In other by words, anthropologists photographs as evidence were of

facts that could be independently observed.


Rather, awareness man as of if in response to infinite an increasing of hu the almost and came variety

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

photographs the facts

themselves

(Edward
1992, thropologists

2001, Macintyre
1992). worked

& MacKenzie
an the

of anthropology 1992).

(Edwards 2001, Poignant

Spencer

In yet other cases, on the surface of

EXCESS AND CONTEXT


As almost everyone who has studied the

photographic print to inscribe interior frames thatwould isolate bits of ethnological or racial
data (for example, tattoos) from the rest of

the individual's body (Wright 2003).Whereas


such gestures betray a felt "need for some

history of anthropological
been century quick to point out, anthropological

photography has
with pho

the mid-nineteenth romance

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

tography was fueled in important ways by a


desire tion. from for It was the coherence, also, accuracy, however, by and comple almost plagued a certain nervous

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

nude in the act

anthropom stances where "intersubjective

trie poses,

(Edwards 2001, Griffiths 1992, Pinney 1992).

2002, Poignant

were photographs constituted space

the

of photographing"
the images in the Such and

(p. 145) left its mark on


form of content

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

and its political ef


temporal

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

duced awhole other layer of distracting detail


into the anthropological science of race. Con

photographs
races. From revealing den its or

of buildings
beginnings, making the visible

than of people or
race was about lay hid details cul

vinced of both the inevitability and desire


ability of evolutionary progress, nineteenth what surface

century anthropologists
twentieth-century

(like many of their


were con

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

they imagined to be the last vestiges of ev


idence life. For camera graph at least some hands, a latent of those however, threat for who held the photo the available earlier forms of human

from

culture, expression, so of natives portraits of cranial readily structure revealed

the underlying "race" might

details be more

in their carried

(Herv

Whereas 1910).
of facilitating

photography held out


this anthropologi

anthropol

the promise

ogy. The Dutch


example, against famously the dangers

ethnologist
cautioned of erasing

Im Thurm,
anthropologists the human,

for
aes

cal quest for order through the elimination of


detail made plete menace or "noise," the to same machine a utopia that had of com the twin and it possible transparency of intimacy imagine also and

thetic, and individualizing


graphic portraiture in favor

excess of photo
of a too rigorous

introduced contingency

preference for "types" (Thurm 1893, Tayler


1992). Anthropometry, he added, was proba

with them, the possibility


of acknowledging the

(however remote)
and, thus,

coevalness

the humanity of their racial subjects. It is per


haps for this reason that anthropologists be

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

applied ile tribal

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

the shadow of the idea of race.


In other cases, photographers as soft most fa

mously, Edward Curtis


aesthetic vignette tinction gia. On conventions to transform into one the

made skillful use of


such the focus of nostal can and ex

tragic level, Curtis's

inevitability romance of photographs

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

ideas of racial extinction,

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

attribution (Gidley 2003, Lyman 1982), their


power and massive popular appeal had much

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

pear to be as it is about fixing the native subject


as a particular racial have type. Yet, paid to recent critical attention interventions far greater

porality of the moment"


crease tographic research. photographs anxieties image For one about

served only to in
of the pho of scientific number to the of an

the utility as an instrument the sheer available

to the fixing. What


then, if we were

would have to be done,


invert the question that

thing, that became

thropologist
primitive

seemed to belie the notion that


were somehow disappearing, to

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

as evolutionary theory had led them to believe.


Poignant suggests that it was in response

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

(1992, p. 54). Pinney suggests that this tension


between out in the actuality case of and India disappearance through two played photo

to this we want question, might at some to looking early attempts

graphic idioms. The

"salvage paradigm" was

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

servation appeals to the ideal of the distanced,


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

than with

tions just discussed to use photography


with the neous

anthropologists wishing in the field were faced

certain openness to the humanity of the (still


racialized) other.

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

In his own fieldwork photography, Mali


nowski problematic seems to status signal an awareness of the of photography in the ne

ceptual, in that the subjects of anthropology


(first tion) tive and race, were then culture and social or organiza interpre themselves As statistical such, their

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

extensive use of photographs


work, averaging one photo

in his published
for every seven

that was quite different from


whose tographs, mute and singular jects, bodies, and content existence events. spoke

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

of particular Indeed, earliest

of photography in fieldwork made every effort


to erase the contingent moment of the pho

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

tographic act. In his Torres Straits fieldwork,


Haddon, actment for example, and restaging made wide use of reen as ameans to document

rituals andmyths (Edwards 2001, pp. 157-80).


also suggests Hockings used mythical allegories that W.H.R. drawn from Rivers Frazer's

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

ing his books (Spyer 2001, p. 190). The


tancing was further erence for effect created reinforced the middle by such careful

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

editing by Malinowski's pref to in his own long shot a

photography
Evans-Pritchards' similar and

(Young 2001, p. 18). Studies of


field for photography long shots, aerial reveal shots, in what

mythology.
were ment at which

Both produced photographs


to erase the image evidence was taken. of

that

concerned

the mo

preference a careful avoidance

of eye

contact

Wolbert
ethnographer

(2001) interprets as an effort by the


to erase his own presence in

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

the field, thereby establishing the physical or


distance" required "ecological own as authority ethnographer. matter No how distant the ever, tained dex the the very within presence language" to silence medium it an of of this often to sustain his

for the scientific project of data collection and


interpretation, as documents turn, contained photographs of encounter, within exchange, the it the could and also be read encounter, of com all fac claims in

shot,

how con to in

of photography uncanny the ability

specter

munication,

and presence ethnographer's

"strong

photographer. race helped technological with great

The ethnog regis effect. In

tors that challenged

to objectivity. The
aspects of

tension between these two


practice is perhaps

raphers ter of encounter,

ethnographic

Argonauts,

for example, Malinowski

(1922,

166

Poole

pp.

52-53)

comments

on

the

"great

variety

in

logical writes,

facts" that

(1961, there

p. 51). are "many

"One

suspects," and mys

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

terious ethnographic phenomena behind the


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

expression

[and] oth

erswith prognatic, Negroid


lipped mouths, narrow

faces, broad, thick


and a coarse

foreheads,

expression." Through such language, it might be argued, Malinowski avoided physical de


scription mains rare of in individuals ethnographic something writing that re in favor

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

of the distancing language of race. Similarly,


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

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

(Young 2001, pp. 101-2). Instead what seems


to be at stake phy of some inMalinowski's to engage in which the people use is his inability that moment aspect of of photogra or make sense perceived Repeat

threatened for scien

to undermine tific observation.

required

he first he met.

particularly

instructive

set of debates discussed by Griffiths


pp. 3 45) concerned the visual and

(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

effects of overly realistic habitat and


at the American Museum curators of Nat sought some

life groups

ural History. Although to attract museum goers

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

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 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,

hold the promise that they may someday be


come legible as "symptoms of deeper, socio

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

through a series of related


cases. Griffiths uncovers obvious per about the more

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

evidentiary status in court (Derrida 2002), the


"hard" visual evidence of ethnographic pho

(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

that allows for the peculiar conflation of past


and

Culture The

at a Distance

present of material

that

renders evidence. however, evocation

the

photograph as we

form In the

subfield of visual anthropology emerged


in response to this concern

ethnography,

have

seen,

in the mid-1960s

about the viability of visual technologies


work. ethnographic Ethnography, a of witnessing deploys language as a means to defend observation of the world. are Thus, crucial to although voice of and

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

particular, seen been task than of

passing, to pose

ethnographic thinking about to create

its account and both lan the

work aura

guage

ethnography,

dentiary the

together and distinctive

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

seen, have instead looked to photography as a


means vation. to discipline the visual an uneasy process place of obser at the ori Occupying

in a particular site and her (normatively) visual


observations people, there. At events, the and descriptive practices time, and accounts she of the and same encounters work

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

on anthropological photography and film has


made not clear, considered unless visual documentation a sufficient to be is generally source of ev by the con of

ethnographic

and Mead

tially began using photographs to supplement


their notetaking and observations and to rec

idence

it is accompanied and/or interpretive

textualizing

testimony

oncile their disparate writing

styles (Jacknis

i68

Poole

1988, Sullivan 1999). As work progressed on


the ment photographie their written came index that was to comple they as an fieldnotes, photographs, however, first,

imagery," a culture."

Metraux

writes,

"is an intensely

per

sonal and yet a rigorously formal approach to


"every Although or lesser extent is to a greater cultural built analysis work upon

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

imagery," in the study of culture from


comes imagery immediate experience to constitute of the "our culture"

a distance,

(Metraux 1953, p. 343;Mead


age, in this early approach

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

1997, Edwards 1992,Taylor


to the visual is "racial

of practices (Mead & MacGregor


Wliat is perhaps most

1951).
about

approach

intriguing

Mead's Balinese work is the lengths to which


she words. sequences embraces like goes As to transform "objective" of gestures, that together or into photographs traces of the temporal poses, and expressions, to something the pho as a narra

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

outcome) encounters. information of visual an

had done to divorce still photography from


both ment, affect and the it is perhaps, then, of spontaneity no surprise the mo that the

of many That lay the

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

tainers of information indexed through lan


guage, photographs were meant to commu

nicate
the

the broader message


rendering portrayed. they

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

sonal experience of fieldwork. "The study of

the forms ward

of "visual

communication"

put by analysis

for or

(Turner 1992, 2002 a).What


indigenous the media, however, a gloss As "indigenous." lar form of subaltern

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

1985, pp. 61-62). Film,


to bear within that was and denied dis

considered

identity

affective

transparency as a "frozen"

photography

hence

tanced image. Animated


manism, this view of film

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

stillness of photography. This view of film provided


from which visual anthropologists

digenous has functioned primarily as a frame the grounds


set out to for into tions reinterpreting how are racial perceived of "the video categories and contents and countered for insight representa from 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

1998;Ginsburg 1995;Himpele 2004; Turner 1992, 2002a,b).


video outlet and for other the visual media communication, of that cultural,

1996; Jackson In this work,


provide defense, an and eth tran are si

strengthening nic scend, identities the media

national, and as

or thus they

preexist, form itself,

tializing dichotomies that characterized New World slave societies and European colonial
rule. In many cases, the resulting disciplinary

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


much of though not all scale of this identity through such is a mapping that "the mass

sensitivity
also

to both history

and politics has

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.

By introducing questions of voice and per


spective, these studies of indigenous video

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

photographic on work pho

tions, the

financial burden of

flows, evidence

and

discursive collecting

regimes, in ethno

tography tends to emphasize


unstable quality of the

the "slippery"
racial referent

graphic work has shifted away from the af


fective toward or sensory domain of and encounter synthetic and mode of tech a more removed As such,

(Firstenberg 2003, Fusco 2003, Poole 1997), the highly mobile meanings attached to pho
tographs as they circulate through different

of description.

the handover

nologies and the shift to the translocal do not


so much address as circumvent the charges

cultural and social contexts


Kravitz 2002), the importance

(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.

tions; e.g., Faris


some sort of

1992, 2003) is to reclaim


or, perhaps, autonomy

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

graph, it does so in the form of an increasingly


ghostly presence.

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

tled on his body. Hope


moment over my when body the ...

appears to him in that


gaze, back a creeping lightness

"liberating me gives me

that I had thought lost and, by removing me


from But other ments, the world, over there, gives back I was to the world. right when and the reaching his move though the other fixes me,

visual anthropology from the local to the na


tional or even the transnational the as the focus of shifts from analysis the relationships pass tute the production mercial and itself to encom image that inform and consti of com

side,

I stumble,

attitudes

and gaze,

and distribution media.

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

quickly rendered into the paralyzing fixity


the certain ars have trayal meanings emphasized about of race. Various what Fanon's this sense schol of be of

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,

and the colonial past in


In addition however, Fanon to this also

of such allegedly "translocal" (Ferguson &


Gupta 2002) sites as the modern state, me dia, migration, non-governmental organiza

the present.

underscores the importance of placing history


www.annualreviews.org An Excess ofDescription iji

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

which precedes it" (p. 179).


Fanon's rality of the insistence gaze the fleeting as a site of ethical on tempo possi

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.

for interpretation and expla

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

ate bodily habits of distancing (Alcoff 2001).


This emphasis on distance and on the phys

ical, chemical qualities through which photo


graphic racial like the racial gaze, "fix" technologies, resonates in their skins quite subjects on

clearly with the emphasis in somuch of visual


anthropology the classificatory impulses of

regard and the them cisely with

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

saturated being encounters. In of chance

portant insight into the workings of the gaze.


For Fanon, the gaze is as much about undo

this respect, ethnography's relationship to the


photographic by the specter can only really image of race, be continues in that to be haunted the photograph as a form of evi

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

dence inwhich fixity (in the form of simplic


ity or focus) is favored excess (in the form

of contingency or confusion) (Edwards 1997).


As anthropology turns its attention to forms

ary distancing of which he speaks.When


dressed the visual in these terms, Fanon's of race insistence offers underpinnings

ad
on pro

of racial and cultural hybridity, one wonders how anthropologists will address this disci
plinary anxiety about surface appearances and

ductive grounds for rethinking the temporal


ity of the ethnographic encounter and the

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

neath the deceptive surface of the visible world


(Fusco 2003). Perhaps what is needed is a re worked

century,

around a dichotomy
like seeing was the fleeting pretation strued

inwhich photography
to the domain whereas was of inter con

relegated

and the contingent, (and, with

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

it, description) by which the

as a process

extraneous

photography.

172

Poole

Fortunately, ethnography meant a and

the move the ethical

to

reclaim

both of de

imperative

scription from the Orientalist critique has not


simple return to a "traditional" divi

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

sion of labor inwhich ethnography provided


the empirical observations and descriptions

upon which
draw meanings to uncover of

anthropological
the hidden specific cultures

theory could
rules, and orders, societies. or

as

tioning both the empirical language of pos


itivist istics science are cited in which physical as the visible, and character irrefutable,

Rather, the theoretical work of ethnography


is now from more the often assumed forms and to be inseparable tempo character social in specific of encounter, excess that

evidence of racial difference

and the idealist

rality, uncertainty, ize ethnography

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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