Lesley McFadyen - Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive

Samuel Derbyshire

This chapter considers the potential value that historic ethnographic photographic collections might bring to archaeological engagements with the recent past. It does so via a discussion of recent research conducted in the Turkana region of northern Kenya between 2014 and 2015. Much of this fieldwork took place around a rich photographic collection, comprising images taken by numerous individuals who journeyed to Turkana at different times over the last century. I first encountered this collection in 2013 at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and brought it to Turkana a year later having supplemented it with my own photographs of the Turkana-related ethnographic object collections both at the Pitt Rivers Museum and at a range of other institutions. As I outline below, my use of these photographs was deeply informed not only by recent developments in visual anthropology and photo elicitation, but also by approaches to the recent past that have emerged from the worlds of postcolonial African archaeology and indigenous archaeology. During discussion sessions and interviews, the collection I brought to Turkana served to evoke a series of historical narratives that contrast with and disrupt still-prevalent notions of the regions contemporary population as socially static and passive in the face of broad economic, political and environmental change. Before exploring the fieldwork in more detail, I want to first consider its theoretical foothold in the interplay between several distinct bodies of literature and outline some of the ways in which both archaeology and photography have been actively implicated in the production of such prevalent visions over the last century, and the ways in which these visions are politically consequential.

The last few decades have seen a monumental shift in the ways in which museums containing historical ethnographic collections are envisioned, engaged with and utilized in the contemporary world. Laura Peers and Alison Brown have described this development as one of the most important in the history of museums (Peers and Brown 2003: 1). Often uncomfortable bodies of everyday objects, photographs, films and other materials have ascended to an unlikely position at the vanguard of much anthropological research. This has taken place not in denial but rather direct confrontation of anthropological museums earlier entanglements with the colonial project, their complicity in the production and representation to Western audiences of visions of primitiveness and otherness and their accompanying roles, in conjunction with early ethnographer partners and contributors, in disseminating and incubating literary and theoretical savages (MacDougal 1997: 279) in popular culture.

This troubled heritage and its enduring legacies in more recent displays, representations and outreach/partnership policies was the subject of much critique in the 1990s (Clifford 1991, 1999; Coombes 1994; Harlan 1995; Barringer and Flyn 1998). From these debates, James Cliffords conceptualization of museums as contact zones spaces where different cultures, worldviews, interests and stakeholders encounter each other and contest the past in an ongoing historical, political, [and] moral relationship, has perhaps been the most influential (Clifford 1999: 1923). The point that these meetings and conversations are ongoing, unfinished and open to the incorporation of heterogeneous pasts and multi-vocal accounts has become critical in numerous research and outreach projects that have taken part in transforming the one-way relationship that had previously existed between museums and their source communities (Peers and Brown 2003; Marstine 2006; Crooke 2008). Museum collections are no longer seen as dead places, lifeless vestiges of colonialism and imperialism, but rather opportunities to open up new ways of thinking and talking about both past and present tools that might help to subvert the colonial gaze (and its legacies) and find new values, histories and meanings in its remains.

In no other museum-based medium is this open-endedness and lack of fixity more profound and valuable than in historical ethnographic photographs; they are, as Elizabeth Edwards has written, the most potent of museum objects (2003: 83). Their simultaneous qualities of stillness and restless mutability, the traits that often made them such persuasive indicators of the timelessness and pristineness of societies living at the margins of empire, also imbue them with the powerful potential to express counter narratives that work against the gaze of the camera lens, and to articulate a diversity of new versions of the times, histories and transformations that they depict (Poignant 1994; Edwards 2001, 2003). The place of photographs in anthropological museum collections has, in many cases, been unveiled as inconclusive and temporary, a singular stage in a still-unfolding biography (Bell 2003). Visual repatriation, and the often-accompanying field method of photo elicitation (Collier and Collier 1986), have seen these objects take part in, and become tools that are used to tell, neglected and supressed histories in the locales that they pertain to rather than simply remaining as enclosed visions of the past that are read in silence and obscurity.

Whilst the development of the practice in anthropology of returning such photographs to source communities and using them to seek to create new knowledge is not without ethical implications (Niessen 1991; Thomas 1997), it has nevertheless provided many museums with a much-required means of building relationships with source communities. In the process, many communities across the globe have reintegrated collections of historical photographs into local knowledge systems, inscribing personal experiences of past places, people, events and objects on to them and using them to address ongoing social, economic and political issues (Binney and Chaplin 2003; Bell 2003, 2008, 2010; Carrier and Quaintance 2012).

Archaeology, meanwhile, has been undergoing a parallel and similar transformation. In moving away from previous implicit correlations between history and European encounter or occupation (and thus textual records), postcolonial historical archaeologies have sought to envision history instead as a kind of community memory transmitted across generations in numerous conscious and unconscious ways (cf. Lane 2004; Pikirayi 2004; Schmidt and Walz 2007; Davies and Moore 2016; Straight et al. 2016). As part of this shift, archaeological research undertaken in postcolonial contexts has become less about merely collecting evidence of the past for interpretation and presentation elsewhere, and more about new forms of collaboration with communities (Greer et al. 2002; Harrison and Williamson 2004; Schmidt 2010, 2014; Davies et al. 2014; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016) with the aim of co-creating new indigenous historical narratives that are valuable or useable in the contemporary world and connected local and global political issues (Lane 2011). In Africa, recent years have thus seen archaeology used as a means of engaging with post-genocide development in Rwanda (Giblin 2010, 2012, 2014), supermodernity, conflict and destruction in Ethiopia (Gonzles-Ruibal 2006, 2008) and failed development interventions in Kenya (Davies and Moore 2016; Derbyshire 2018; Derbyshire and Lowasa forthcoming). In such contexts, it is archaeologys predilection for quotidian artefacts the materialities of everyday life (Schmidt and Walz 2007: 142) and the small things forgotten (Deetz 1977) that renders it uniquely capable of seeking out and documenting the voices of the subaltern, the Other, those who have no voice in official records (Gonzles-Ruibal 2008: 248; but see Spivak 1988).

This divergence and yet mutual significance of postcolonial historical archaeologies and recent developments in visual and museum anthropology struck me when I was surveying the extensive ethnographic objects and photographs from Turkana in the archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2013. Both enterprises seemed to me to be grappling with the same objectives, confronting similar troubled disciplinary pasts and finding new ways of inserting themselves into non-Western epistemologies and narratives that the broader disciplines of archaeology and anthropology could, in turn, be influenced by and perhaps even re-imagined through. In doing so, however, they were forging new methodological paths that drew close but did not fully converge.