Marcus Banks - Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology

Made to Be Seen

Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology

EDITED BY MARCUS BANKS AND JAY RUBY

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

MARCUS BANKS is professor of visual anthropology at the University of Oxford and the author, most recently, of Using Visual Data in Qualitative Research. JAY RUBY is professor emeritus of anthropology at Temple University and the author or editor of numerous books, including Picturing Culture: Essays on Film and Anthropology, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2011 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2011

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03661-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03662-5 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-03661-8 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-03662-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03663-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Made to be seen : perspectives on the history of visual anthropology / edited by Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03661-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-03661-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03662-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-03662-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Visual anthropology. I. Banks, Marcus. II. Ruby, Jay.

GN347.M33 2011

301dc22 2010048748

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences

Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents

MARCUS BANKS AND JAY RUBY

CRISTINA GRASSENI

SANDRA DUDLEY

ROXANA WATERSON

ARND SCHNEIDER

BRENDA FARNELL

ELIZABETH EDWARDS

MATTHEW DURINGTON AND JAY RUBY

SARAH PINK

FAYE GINSBURG

KATHRYN RAMEY

STEPHEN PUTNAM HUGHES

MICHAEL HERZFELD

I NTRODUCTION

Made to Be Seen: Historical Perspectives on Visual Anthropology

MARCUS BANKS AND JAY RUBY

History, Anthropology, and the History of Visual Anthropology

In Britain, the United States, and elsewhere in the Euro-American world the discipline of anthropologyin its broadest senseis at least a century and half old. How much more or less is a matter of debate that need not concern us here, though we draw the line at claiming that Herodotus was an anthropologist or that Edward Curtis or the Lumire brothers were anthropological image creators. For the purposes of this volume we limit ourselves to the anthropological endeavors of those who recognized the contemporary anthropological project and the image-making activities of those who understood that project or were in other ways engaged with it. Even with this limitation (indeed, because of it), there remains the question of whether there is in fact a distinct history of visual anthropology that can be untwined from the history of the discipline as a whole. Below we demonstrate that such a history is not only possible but a worthwhile venture, but at the same time we acknowledge that those traces that historians of the subdiscipline have previously seized uponthe Balinese films and photographs of Mead and Bateson, the West African films of Jean Rouchexist only because those individuals were already conducting field research relevant to the production of the images or were engaged in anthropological analyses for which image analysis was a part, but only a part. While there is, in that sense, a visual strand, or strands, to be teased out, we and our contributors never lose sight of the fact that all anthropologists work on a variety of fronts and that anthropology is distinctive as a discipline precisely because of its ambition to produce holistic accounts, albeit with primary and secondary foci. A linguistic anthropologist, a political anthropologist, an anthropologist of globalization canand doincorporate visual data and visual methods into their studies while contributing to their respective subfields. Authors in this volume note, for example, that the production and consumption of images plays only a part in the history of anthropological approaches to dress and textiles (Dudley) and to the built environment (Waterson). Even with regard to the anthropological uses of photography, Edwards notes that in many ways work on photography is becoming more diffuse and dispersed across the anthropological field, no longer confined within visual anthropology. Our joint aim in this volume is therefore to give an account of the visual as it passes in and out of the discipline of anthropology.

As editors, we encouraged our contributors to reflect on the role of the visual within distinct fields of anthropological inquiry. Some of these fields are constitutive of what is generally thought to be the particular subject matter of visual anthropology (film, photography), while others (materiality, embodiment, the use of technology) make such use of the visual, or share common methodologies and approaches to such an extent, that they are often considered within the same ambit or that it would be intellectually hobbling to exclude them. This history is not a narrative of great men and their movies or photographs. It is rather a history of ideas and interests within the discipline that at some times have cried out for visual exploration (whether that call was heeded or not) and at others have apparently spurned the visual in favor of the written word as a mode of representation and language as an access route to the mind.

Perhaps the most closely examined period in this volume is those few decades before long-term field research became common, a time when the study of art and material culture was thought to yield evidence of cultural evolution (e.g., Haddon 1895). At this time, roughly between the 1880s and the 1920s, photography was vital as a form of evidence that could be circulated among ethnologists anxious to receive as much information about as many primitive groups as possiblefar more than they could ever hope to gather firsthand (Edwards 2001, chap. 2). The development of long-term fieldwork, with its Malinowskian emphasis on the imponderabilia of everyday life, and the subsequent rise of interest in the comparative study of abstract institutions such as kinship, the economy, and so forth led to a setting aside of material culture studies for many decades. This, together with the costs and difficulties of publishing photographs in books and journals, contributed to a decline in the perceived value of the photomechanical image.

There have been several previous attempts to write a history of visual anthropology, some condensed (e.g., Banks and Morphy 1997, 413), others more elaborate (e.g., de France 1975; Pink 2006, 515). Many have focused largely or exclusively on the history of ethnographic film (several are discussed here by Durington and Ruby) or on a particular period, particularly the foundational period (Edwards 2001; Griffiths 2002). If we follow Rubys strict definition of ethnographic film (2000, 239), as that produced by anthropologists for anthropological purposes, then the history of ethnographic film essentially begins after World War II, as there are very few such films from before that conflict and little in the way of institutional support. While the same is not true for still photography, which was put to explicitly anthropological uses starting in the late nineteenth century, some contributors to this volume share this view of visual anthropology as an essentially postwar development when it comes to invoking the visual (through production or analysis) in other fields. While an interest in clothing and the built environment formed part of the Victorian and Edwardian anthropological project, the interest was largely technological, concerned with the relation between practical knowledge or skill and the level of a culture. As Dudley points out there was also an interest in dress as a marker of ethnicity, and photography was used to document this. While this could be taken as evidence of an early interest in the capacity of clothing to communicate visually, there is little to suggest that preWorld War II anthropologists were more than superficially interested in such visual communication between peoples, as opposed to their own scientific task of reading meaning from the surface of the photograph. Indeed, it was not until the 1970s that an anthropological model of visual communication was explicitly formulated (Worth 1981). Waterson finds even less historical evidence of attention to visual aspects of the built environment, situating the anthropological study of vernacular architecture firmly in the postwar period. When it comes to anthropological studies of the body and embodiment, Farnell states in her chapter that visual representations of the body can be said to have permeated anthropology since its inception (for example, in drawings and photographs of tattoos; see Gell 1993), yet the body was not problematized as such; nor, we might add, were its representations. So while anthropological interest in the body, its movement, its clothing, and its built environment would all seem fruitful ground for visual exploration and visual analysis, it seems this was not conducted in any systematic way until recently.