Visual Anthrop~logy - Essential Method and Theory - Instructure

Visual Anthrop~logy

Essential Method and Theory

Fadwa El Guindi

c~~) ;ALTM'\IRA

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El Guindi, Fadwa. Visual anthropology : essential method and theory I Fadwa El Guindi.

p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7591-0394-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)- ISBN 0-7591-0395-X

(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Visual anthropology-Philosophy. 2. Visual anthropology-Methodology.

I. Title.

G 347.£5 2004 301-dc22

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2004008217

§TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This work is dedicated to ANTHROPOLOGY­the four-field science of humankind.

In homage to Jean Rouch (1918-2004) and his passion for ethnographic ft.lm

CONTENTS

Preface ................................ . .... . ............ ix Introduction . . ................... . ...... . ..... . ........ . .. .

PART ONE ISSUES, ANCESTRY, AND GENEALOGY

CHAPTER ONE History, Euro-Americanization, and New l!>irections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

CHAPTER TWO For God's Sake, Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

PART TWO ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM

CHAPTER THREE Filming Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

CHAPTER FOUR Filming Selves .............. ~ . . . . . . . . . . . 121

PART THREE RESEARCH FILM

CHAPTER FIVE Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

CONTENTS

Preface .................................................. ix Introduction ..................... . .... ... ............... . . .

PART ONE ISSUES, ANCESTRY, AND GENEALOGY

CHAPTER ONE History, Euro-Americanization, and New Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

\ CHAPTER TWO For God's Sake, Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

PART TWO ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM

CHAPTER THREE Filming Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

CHAPTER FOUR Filming Selves .. , ........... ~ . . . . . . . . . . • 121

PART THREE RESEARCH FILM

CHAPTER FIVE Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

vii

CONTENTS

PART FOUR VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY

CHAPTER SIX From Doing Cinema to Doing Anthropology . . 185

CHAPTER SEVEN Parameters for Visual Ethnography . . . . . . . . 217

Conclusion .............................................. 247

Appendix: Bibliography of Films on Primates,

compiled by Julia Cody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Index .................................................. 287

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

Vlll

PREFACE

Our Human Past

I t is quite common in visual anthropology to trace the use of visual tools to the advent of modern photographic technology of still and movie cameras and sound equipment. But I find it more true to the

anthropological approach and to the history of human achievements to begin from the beginning. There are two beginnings. First, since about 30,000 years ago, humans pictorialized, and we have evidence of cave "art." In Paleollthic cave and rock art, humans used rudimentary tools to pro­duce a vast pictorial record of life and ideas. It is assumed that pictorializ­ing never ceased throughout human existence, paralleling the beginnings of culture itself

Primatological research and experimental observations also point to the role primates play in pictorializing. According to Zeller (1997), "cave painting by apes may rival cave paintings by our ancestors in their poten­tial to provide information about the act and product, shape and meaning, nature and mental foundations for nonlinguistic expression of nontangi­ble ideas" (21). In Figure 1, Ann Zeller, in her capacity as visual primatol­ogist, is trying to take a photo of an orangutan.1

Figure 2 is a collage showing a chimpanzee, Colleen, working on a wa­tercolor. Zeller has been for some time now observing Colleen (now about four years old and owned by Monkey Jungle). The watercolor shown in the collage is by Colleen at one and a half years old. She has done a number of paintings that are now included in the database of primate paintings

ix

PREFACE

Figure I. Visual anthropologist Anne Zeller trying to toke a picture o(Tut, adult female orangutan, who in turn is trying to take the anthropologist's camera while holding her two infants, Tom and Nancy. Pic­ture taken at Camp Leakey Orangutan Research and Rehabilitation Centre, Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan, Borneo, in 1988 by Diana Schiffer. By permission from Anne Zeller.

\

currently being set up by Zeller. According to Zeller (personal communi­cation), the orangutans and gorillas at Monkey Jungle all paint and have contributed to the database in progress. I include a select bibliography of films on primates as the Appendix at the end of this book. 2

More primate studies can perhaps refine conclusions on the qualita­tive difference in pictorially recorded activities between primates and hu­mans, but we know that both pictorialized. As humankind pictorialized its universe, it memorialized itself and made its ideas part of the visible ma­terial world to be learned, decoded, and studied. We do know that many ~illennia ago, humans have been pictorially keeping record and commu­nicating their way of life and achievements on walls and literally etched in stone (for example, the first record of written laws in the Hammurabi tablets ofMesopotarnia). That happened about 5,000 years ago, when pic­torializing took a turn to a more systemic approach. The progressive de­velopment of pictorialized expression led to the invention of the earliest

X

PREFACE

system~ of representational symbols: the alphabet and systems of writing as seen in Sumerian cuneiform3 and Egyptian hieroglyphics.4 By systemic, I mean that humans began to organize pictorial representations in ways by which meaning is rendered from the relationship of pictures as elements in a system rather than as independent elements. This enabled them to communicate messages via what is known as an alphabet,5 which led to forms of writing decipherable across "borders" that marked, along with a cluster of other developments, the developmental stage known as civiliza­tion. At this civilizational stage, humans relied on sophisticated visually based recording systems. Tools were harnessed to keep record of their ac­complishments, to organize public labor and economic life, to express ab­stract ideas, and to communicate messages internally and externally. For example, ancient Egyptian rulers would send written messages in hiero­glyphics to rulers of Mesopotamia who would decipher them into cuneiform and respond in cuneiform to Egypt wherein the message is in turn deciphered into hieroglyphics. Pictorial-based global communication

PREFACE

started long before the advent of faxes, the Internet, and satellite commu­nication. Taking this broader, longer look, back millennia ago, to the be­ginning of human development reveals how pictorializing is as old as human culture itself, possibly older. This is one beginning.

Theory ofVision and Technology

Second, there is the theory of vision, itself pertinent to our contemporary understanding of visual theory and the notion of visible and invisible worlds, and at the same time there is experimentation with technical tools for research dynamics of the visual that revealed insights leading to the vi­sual theory. Arabs of the eleventh century invented the tools and the the­ory that paved the way for the development of modern visual technology. Both beginnings-the invention of the alphabet and writing and the eleventh-century formulation of a theory of vision-point to the Arab East. It is there that our journey, like civilization itself, begins.

The theory of vision and visual perception that is being referred to is one formulated by Ibn ;u-Haytham (965-1041).6 His full name is Abu Ali al-Hasan (stress on the first syllable) Ibn al-Haytham. The Latin translit­eration is Alhacen, presumably based on the mistaken assumption that the stress in t~ word al-Hasan is on the second syllable. Smith (2001 [1028]) notes that a variant of the name, A/hazen, was used in a sixteenth -century manuscript found in Paris. The correct Arabic last name is al-Haytham (stress on the first syllable).

Born in Basra, Iraq, and establishing his career in Cairo, Egypt, he be­came internationally renowned as the founder of the branch of physics known as the science of optics. He was extraordinarily prolific, with more than 180 tracts to his name. Smith (2001 [1028]) notes that most works were written in the relatively short interval between 1027 and his death (xvi). The scope of al-Haytham's work is broad, "ranging from pure math­ematics and astronomy to medicine, logic, metaphysics, and even kalam, or speculative theology" (xvi). The primary focus of his research was on scien­tific and mathematical rather than philosophical matters, with nineteen tracts relating one way or another to optics (for detail on al-Haytham's ex­perimental science, see Omar 1977). I single out one work considered an original contribution to scientific theory of the visual process for its rele­vance to visual anthropology. It is called Kitab al-Manazir, translated in

X1l

PREFACE

English as Book of Optics (Ibn al-Haytham 1983 [1027]). A better transla­tion emerges if we break the word "manathir' (transliterated as th, not z with a dot below, for simplification) down to its triliteral root n-th-r and examine the range of derivative Arabic words such as nathara (verb, stress on the first syllable, meaning to look), nathar (noun, stress on the first syl­lable, meaning sight and vision), minthar (noun, stress on the second sylla­ble, meaning telescope or similar instrument), naththara (noun, stress on the second syllable, meaning glasses), and so on. Doing so unravels some interesting dimensions of the word used in the tide, manathir. Its etymol­ogy combines "seeing" and "seen" and "visible" and "vision." In other words, embedded in this one term is both vision and object of vision, seeing and object of sight.

His scientific research covered a range of concerns from vision to ap­pearance to sight, all of which bear direct relevance to the field of visual anthropology. Other than producing the first experimental theory of vi­sion and visual perception, al-Haytham's experimental research on light rays-their reflection in mirrors and refraction through lenses-worked out their properties and led to the development of modern technology of visual instruments. He himself constructed "parabolic mirrors," an inven­tion used today in telescopes.

These experimentations and insights about human visual perception are related to the development of modern visual instruments used today in field research. In the industrial West shordy before the turn of the twenti­eth century, modern still photography, followed by motion film technology, was developed. Perhaps there is some truth to the exaggeration by Mac­Dougall (1995) that cinema was invented in response, in part, to the desire to observe the physical behavior of men and animals (115-32). Nonethe­less, it is argued here that one can mark the beginnings of visual anthro­pology not by the development of modern technology but rather by the developmental progress in human (and prehuman) pictorializing and the development of instruments and experimental theories of vision that ulti­mately led to modern visual technology. Many claims are definitively made about by whom and when cinema was invented, but, as Cohen (2001, cit­ing Williams 1983) writes, this is contested terrain since "there is the pos­sibility of all sorts of arguments about who invented the cinema" (4).

This prelude has taken us back on a journey to the earliest roots of hu­man visualization, with a possible base in earlier capacities in prehuman

PREFACE

primates, and has traced a science of visualizing to the earliest experimen­tal theory of optics and visual perception by an Iraqi Arab scientist of the eleventh century. This set the foundation for the modern visual premises, theories, and technologies.

The book is, however, about the modern field of visual anthropology­its premises, principles, methods, and developmental history set within the parameters of the discipline of anthropology, which has recognizable meth­ods, research strategies, and debates.

Notes

1. The Monkey Jungle is an amusement park/primatological research site, founded in 1933 when Joseph DuMond released six monkeys into a South Florida hammock. By releasing these monkeys into the wild, they were able to be­have naturally and go back to food foraging without human assistance. This cre­ated a natural setting more suitable for study. The Monkey Jungle is located in South Dade, Florida, off U.S. Highway 1. It houses various primates, such as Java monkeys, gibbons, guenons, spider monkeys, colobus, golden lion tamarins, lemurs, gorillas, and orangutans. The website is at www.monkeyjungle.com.

2. The bibliography in the Appendix was compiled by Julia Cody, a student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is my resea'rch assistant. The selection is from the larger bibliography at the Wis­consin Regional Primate Research Center. It consists of films by anthropologists.

3. Cuneiform (from Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge") refers to the mode of writing utilizing wedge-shaped strokes, inscribed mainly on clay (but also on stone, metals, wax, and other materials), that originated in southern Mesopotamia. The earliest texts in cuneiform script (about 5,000 years old and almost 1,500 years before the development of alphabets) were composed of pic­tographs. Consequently, a stylus was invented to make tapered impressions, gradually altering the outlines of the pictographs into patterns composed of wedge-shaped lines.

4. Hieroglyphs, a Greek term meaning "sacred carving," refers to the script in which the ancient Egyptian language was written and is comprised of ideograms (to signify object) or phonograms (to signey sound). Abstract meaning is repre­sented by a papyrus scroll. The script was time consuming to write, so eventually two cursive scripts developed: hieratic for specialized religious texts and demotic for common usage.

5. Alphabet is a word consisting of two parts. The first part is from the first let­ter of the alphabet in Arabic and Greek: alif and alpha, respectively. The second

PREFACE

part is from the second letter of alphabet in Arabic and Greek: ba', or beh, and beta, respectively. It is a set of written symbols, each representing a given sound or sounds, that can be variously combined to form all the words of a language. Early systems of writing were of the pictographic-ideographic variety as, for ex­ample, the cuneiform of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Egyptian hiero­glyphs, written symbols, and Mayan picture writing. Such a system can be converted into an alphabet through the use of a pictography or an ideograph to represent a sound rather than an object or an idea. The sound is usually the ini­tial sound of the spoken word denoted by the original pictograph. In early Se­mitic, a pictograph representing a house would correspond to a spoken word bayt, the contemporary Arabic word for "house," the root of what ultimately became the sound beh in Arabic and b in English.

The ancient Sumerians are generally credited with the developments. of the first ~ystem of writing, in cuneiform, about 3200 B.C. Scientists have recendy con­cluded that writing in hieroglyphics may have begun independendy in Egypt about the same time. Both systems are called pictographic because they began with litde pictures representing the objects or ideas being written about.

The alphabetic writing system, in contrast with the pictographic, is called aero­phonic. The symbols are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs but are shortened and streamlined. It was generally supposed that the first known alphabet devel­oped along the eastern Mediterranean between 1700 and 1500 B.C. The earliest examples were found in Bilad al-Sham, which included Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine~ whose inhabitants were Semitic-speaking people. Researchers had be­lieved that alphabetic writing began there.

Those previous discoveries dated from about 1500 B.C. This alphabet became classified as North Semitic. It is characterized as having evolved from a combi­nation of cuneiform and hieroglyphic symbols, with some symbols possibly bor­rowed froni other related systems, such as Hittite. Recendy, however, Egyptologist John Coleman Darnell ofYale University made_ a discovery of new inscriptions in Egypt in the summer of 1998. The inscriptions were scrawled on a cliff wall in Wadi El Hol (a place-name that in English might translate into "valley of terror"), situated in the southern Egyptian desert. Researchers at the University of Southern California photographed what is being proposed as the earliest known characters of the alphabet.

6. The dates given here are probably approximate. The original Arabic text of Ibn al-Hytham's Optics (Kitab ai-Manathir) survives in five copies, only one of which is complete. As to the fust three books, the text is extant in three copies, all preserved in libraries in Istanbul. The oldest and best copy consists of three volumes (part of a set), purportedly transcribed by a relative oflbn al-Haytham's at Basra in 1083-1084, about forty-four years after the author died. For a reliable

XV

PREFACE

source, edited with an introduction, Arabic-Latin glossaries, and concordance ta­bles, see Ibn al-Haytharn (1983 [1027]). It is the first of four volumes that con­tain the Arabic text and an English translation of the al-Haytham's Optics, which consists of seven maqalas, or books, divided into two main parts. One consists of three books on a theory of direct radiation and direct vision, and the second con­sists of the last four books, which deal with optical reflection and refraction.

XVI

INTRODUCTION

Filming in Fieldwork

Mter modern photographic technologies were invented (still photography in 1845 and cinematography approximately four decades later), they were eventually adopted by archeologists, primatologists, and ethnologists for regular data gathering, elicitation of data using special techniques, cross­checking offacts, and building a record (de Brigard 1995; Hockings 1995; Michaelis 1955). In fact, Cohen (2001) points out that"[u]sing fum in the service of science ... precedes early cinema ... and with specific ethno­graphic intent in the work of Baldwin Spencer" (5).

Filming activity began long before synchronized sound technology. We know that by today's standards, fliming technology in the 1800s and early 1900s was difficult to use and manipulate in anthropological field situations. Filming equipment was crude, bulky, and awkward to handle. Cameras were fixed on tripods, and fUm was oflow exposure suitable only for shooting in broad daylight or with use of artificial light. It was cum­bersome to transport such equipment on field trips for use in research, and there was danger in working with the highly inflammable nitrate fUm. Yet like their pioneer ancestors who pictorialized incessantly despite the crudeness of their tool technology and awkwardness in conditions of work, some anthropologists immediately saw the innovative potential of motion picture technology. And despite crudeness of equipment, the first fliming in the field took place in 1898 during a British ethnographic ex­pedition to the Torres Straits. It was Alfred Cort Haddon who took this

1

INTRODUCTION

initiative for the purpose of gathering information on the local population in a systematic way. We know about Felix-Louis Regnault, who used a form of serialized photography predating actual cinematographic technol­ogy, and Baldwin Spencer, who ventured with visual tools as part of his re­search expedition. These are among the early serious research efforts that took visual technology and went beyond its popular commercial begin­nings by the Lumiere brothers (Lumiere 1895 [fllm]). What escaped damage and loss is still an ethnographically valuable record of pho­tochronological innovations by Regnault on craft making and some fllm footage by Spencer on ritual.

In his classic article "The Camera and Man," Jean Rouch put it this way: "One almost needed to be crazy to try using (as did some ethnogra­phers) a tool as forbidding as the camera. When we see today the first clumsy attempts to use it correctly in Marcel Griaule's Au pays des Dogons (In the land of the Dogon) (Griaule 1935[135]) and Sous le masque nair (Beneath the black mask) (Griaule 1938 [fllm]), we can understand their discouragement with the results of their efforts. Their admirable docu­mentation was put through the ftlmmaking machine. There was wild, in­sensitive editing, oriental music, commentary in the style of a sportscast . . . . It is this sort of travesty that Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were able to avoid when they produced their series Character Formation in Different Cultures at about the same time (1936-1938).1 [The fllms in the series] were successful because they had the financial aid of American uni­versities which understood before others did that it is absurd to try to mix research and business" (Rouch 1995a:84).

Rouch is right to criticize mixing research and business, although this idealism of the 1970s has given way today to the mixing not only of re­search and business in the United States but of both to religion and poli­tics as well-a trend that bodes badly for "free" anthropological research, including the visual component. Very little funding exists today for an­thropological fUming, pressuring some, who do not wish to, to subordi­nate their ethnographies to television standards. The overall climate induced by instituting "homeland security" measures inside America makes it highly unlikely for scholars of visual ethnography to enjoy sup­port. We need to counter such loss of freedoms as we continue to counter colonialist and racist attitudes that might even become more serious in the current sociopolitical climate.

INTRODUCTION

The absence of synch-sound technology before the 1960s did pose a challenge for anthropological field research and recording. Staring in 1894, Franz Boas spent over forty years studying the Kwakiud of the Northwest Coast. He used still photography in the field. But in 1930, at the age of sev­enty, he went on what was his last field trip to the Kwakiud accompanied by Russian anthropologist Yulia Averkieva. He took along a motion picture camera and wax cylinder sound-recording machine. During that last field trip and for the first time in his field research career Boas shot 16-mm ftlm of dances, games, manufacturing, songs, music, and other aspects of life. This footage was meant to be for research and archiving.

Ruby (1983:27, 29) sheds light on Boas's reason for using fllm. He sees a connection between his interest in dance and his overall research in­terest. According to Ruby, Boas's interest in body movements and dance brought together several lifelong themes in his work-the relationship be­tween race and culture to behavior and the study of expressive and aes­thetic forms of culture. He espoused a theory of rhythm that encompassed dance, music, song, and many other aspects of culture. The idea that Boas may have made the ftlm and sound recordings to study rhythm finds sup­port in a letter from Benedict to Mead (Mead 1959:495-96; see also Mead 1977). Ruby goes on to say that Boas may have assumed that he could synchronously record sound and image even though it was impossi­ble in the 1930s. Boas would not have had sufficient technical knowledge to realize this. While evidendy it was not Boas's intent to turn the footage into a film, his footage was edited after his death, more than forty years after it was fUmed. Bill Holm edited it with the assistance of several Kwakiud informants into thematic segments in the form of a two-reel production completed in 1973 (Boas 1973 [film]).

Sound and Picture

In the 1960s, synchronous sound technology gave the moving picture simultaneous, natural sound. This was a turning point for anthropologists with interest in ethnographic filin. Changes in camera and sound-recorder technology from 1960 on enabled simultaneous recording of image and speech. In addition, 16-mm color fllm became accessible, and faster ftlm enabled fUming in poor light, thus making it possible for anthropologists to ftlm inside houses and huts and other dark conditions, no longer con­fined to outdoor daylight filming. Managing scenes, such as asking people

INTRODUCTION

to perform or to go outdoors to do what they would normally do indoors, even for reasons of technical limitations, is controversial in anthropological filming. The advances in technology, such as fast ftlm and lighter equip­ment, made it possible to ftlm indoors and to shoot rituals and events tak­ing place in the evening or at night. In general, these improvements allowed more intimacy, more flexibility, and more spontaneity, leading to more innovations in shooting style. Rouch in particular captured every op­portunity to harness technology in order to shoot innovatively. He intro­duced participatory camera, eventually becoming his signature style, leading to a catalytic subjective, even somewhat provocative engagement with the fUmed subjects (see Rouch 1957 [ftlm]; Rouch and Morin 1961 [film]). This sometimes leads to an impression that Rouch is the one to have discovered the use of the handheld camera. This is not the case. Loizos (1993) reminds us that combat cameramen had been hand-holding their 16-mm cameras back in World War II (65). Actually, Jean Rouch himself wrote about this in his classic "The Camera and Man" (1995a): "Most of the war reporting done on 16-mm fllm ... had been done with hand-held cameras" (88). Rouch quickly enlisted technological advances to innovate in cinema technique and in expanding exploration in the human condition. Capturing the real world in both picture and synch sound made other inhovations possible.

Somewhat overenthusiastically, MacDougall (1995) wrote that "the notion of the synchronous-sound in ethnographic fllm was born at the moment Baldwin Spencer decided to take both an Edison cylinder recorder and a Warwick camera to Central Australia in 1901" (117). This is an interesting metaphor. It would be more valid to suggest that techno­logical limits never stopped anthropologists from exploring new ways and going beyond the limits. Colette Piault (1994) vividly describes the expe­rience when first encountering the effect of synch sound in a ftlm: "[I]n 1972, we saw at a festival in Venice ... To Live with Herds (1971 [film]) shot by David and Judith MacDougall of the Jie in East Mrica. For me, and probably for many other ftlm-makers, it was a shock and a revelation: the sync sound had appeared, and for the first time the dialogues had been recorded and translated ... we discovered ... what people ... were talk­ing about. It was one of the first ftlms-as far as I know, the first one shown in Europe-to use subtides (in this case, English) to render in­digenous speech .... This ftlm marked an important step and influenced

I TRODUCTIO

many film-makers. Sync sound brought the possibility of listening to the voice of the other direcdy ... gave the feeling of closeness and intimacy which was so missing in the preceding films" (5-6).

In the Netherlands, filming before World War II was incorporated as part of expeditions to the colonies and was sponsored by the Colonial In­stitute at Amsterdam. J. C. Lamster was the first to use film in the field of Dutch anthropology. In 1912, he produced fifty-five films on the colonies dealing with subjects on Java or Bali, agricultural plantations, and various traditions and customs. This, according to Nijland (citing van Duuren 1990), was for the purpose of educating the Dutch population about the colonies. The Colonial Institute's fum collection was finally housed in the Nederlands Filmmuseum {see Kester and Schmele 1989) and served as a basis for other works (for more details, see Nijland 2002). .

On the other hand, Loizos (1993) expressed bewilderment at what he considered a slow response by ethnographic filmmakers to the new tech­nology. He noted that when highly portable synch-sound cameras were fi­nally developed around 1960, few ethnographic filmmakers jumped to use them, with the exceptions ofJean Rouch in France and John Marshall in the United States. In contrast, many anthropologists adopted rapidly and more readily still cameras and tape recorders. Loizos finds that the still camera and the tape recorder were granted rapid and virtually unquestioned accep­tance by most anthropologists for their basic "recording" capacities.

Cinematic experiments in ethnology remained isolated and frag­mented. Anthropologists remained conservative about the use of visual equipment in their research. It is somewhat remarkable that the holistic science of humankind, which has innovated culture and picture, was ex­ceedingly slow in accepting visualization as a research tool and admitting the pictorial medium as scientific evidence. Toward the end of his life, Felix-Louis Regnault seemed to have felt that his urgings for use of film for ethnography had not been effective (de Brigard 1995:16).

Words and Pictures Regnault, Haddon, Collier, and Margaret Mead called for using visual

tools in research, a usefulness they themselves demonstrated in projects of record and discovery of knowledge. They demonstrated the importance of the visual as both a datum and a tool in the wider holistic discipline of an­thropology. In what is now a classic article by Margaret Mead (1995), she

5

INTRODUCTION

admonished anthropologists for their passivity and resistance to using pic­tures in field research. She criticized ethnographic inquiry that came to "depend on words, and words and words," anthropology for "becoming a science of words," and anthropologists who relied on words and "have been very unwilling to let their pupils use the new tools" (5). Collier (1988:74; see also Collier 1967), too, recognized that photography's po­tential contribution to anthropology had not been exploited. He found it ironic that anthropologists doubted the photographic fact (for its scientific value), whereas photography had already been widely used in the hard sci­ences (where data control is more of an issue). In the 1970s, Paul Hock­ings called for integrating the visual medium more fully in anthropology. "It is not sufficient," he wrote, "to give lectures at the universities and use films to illustrate those lectures. We have much to teach mankind about itself; let us do so through all the visual media available to us" (Hockings 1975:480).

Forums and Meetings

The most visible forum for visual anthropology focused on ethnographic film in international venues of film festivals/ conferences. Among the most prominent are the Bilan du film Ethnographique held annually in Paris in the spring. The twenty-second Bilan was held on March 17-23,2003, and it included a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Ethno­graphic Film Committee.2 The twenty-second Bilan opened in the midst of the Anglo-U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as people around the world protested and demonstrated against it. Christopher W. Thompson, chairman of the Comite du Film Ethnographique, wrote in the program brochure Uncertain Times,

In today's worsening climate between people and cultures, many anthro­pologists are asking themselves if they are doing enough to make their knowledge known to a wider public. For 50 years now the filin makers of the Comite du Film Ethnographique have shown what cinema can do in this respect and Bilan du Film Ethnographique has continued this work for 22 years by introducing each year a large and very varied audience to other cultures with meticulous care and enthusiasm. This work reflects the ideals of the Musee de l'Homme, an institution which this year has

INTRODUCTION

reached a crucial turning point in its life. In many ways this transition is worrying, but the Comite has the ftrm intention of continuing its tradi­tional work and seizing the opportunities which may also occur to de­velop, enrich, and make more widely known its activities (2003).

In addition to the regularly selected filins for the festival, many filins by French pioneers in ethnographic filin were shown and discussed in a special Roundtable: The Pioneers3 (see Rouch 1995b:8Q-86).Jean Rouch was well represented as the introduction to the occasion by showing his Circoncision (Mali 1949 [filin]) and some other of his known fllms. Dur­ing the Roundtable, filins by Claude Meillassoux (Mali 1963 [filin]; 1964 [fll.m]), Marc-Henri Piault (Niger 1967 [filin]), Claudine de France (France 1969 [filin]), and Olivier de Sardan (Niger 1972 [film]) were shown and discussed. The Bilan is always held at the filin auditorium of the Musee de l'Homme in Trocadero, Paris. One amazing phenomenon about the Bilan is its popularity among scholars, fll.mmakers, and the pub­lic. It is free, and people of all strata walk in, view filins, and passionately engage in discussion on representation, sexism, racism, and so on. Other festivals/conferences are the biennial Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in England. There is also the festival that began in the 1980s in Sardinia sponsored by the Instituto Regionale Etnograflco of Nuoro. This biennial Ethnographic Film Festival is organized thematically. There are also the annual Gottingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, the annual Society for Visual Anthropology Festival held during the an­nual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, fUm and panel sessions organized by the Commission on Visual Anthropology and presented as part of the International Union of Anthropological and Eth­nological Sciences (IUAES) held every five years in different world cities, and IUAES Intercongresses in between (for more on ethnographic film festivals around Europe, see C. Piault 2001).

Is There Ethnography in Ethnographic Film?

It is interesting that ethnographic filin is the focus of so much attention and also the subject of much controversy. Anthropologists have raised two serious questions regarding fUm and photography. One line of inquiry and critique has to do with the quality of ethnographicness of the visual

7

INTRODUCTION

medium, and the other raises an issue pertaining to the colonial legacy and racist postures associated with the anthropological project since its incep­tion, now reemerging regarding ethnographic film.

Regarding the first concern, ethnographicness, a number of visual an­thropologists attempted to define what it meant and how to measure it. Sol Worth (1969) referred to ethnographic ft.lm as a set of signs to study the behavior of a people, used either as a recording of data about culture or as data of culture. Jay Ruby (1975) proposed four criteria for ethno­graphic ft.lms. They should 1) be films about whole cultures, or definable portions of cultures; 2) be informed by explicit or implicit theories of cul­ture; 3) be explicit about the research and ft.lming methods they employed; and 4) use a distinctively anthropological lexicon.

In a full-length monograph, now a classic, Karl Heider (1976) stated clearly that satisfactory ethnographic fllms are those revealing "whole bodies, and whole people, in whole acts" (75). He formulated a framework for discussing different attributes that contribute to the ethnographicness of a film. Balikci discussed degrees of ethnographicness on the basis of six premises used "to define what is ethnographic in a ft.lm" (Balikci 1988:33-34). Rollwagen (1988a, b) stressed the disciplinary framework within which ethnographic film is situated, ethnography being a scientific descriptio~ conducted within a theoretical framework. Dirk Nijland (2002) defines ethnographic ft.lm as "a lucid, descriptive ft.lm in which the recording and the editing are methodologically inspired by means of a specific analysis in time and space of the activities to be ft.lmed, including ... their meaning" (894).

These definitions put fum/photography within anthropology, not cin­ema, and entails the premise that the visual medium is integral to research or, in the case of ethnographic fum, is based on a significant amount of re­search prior to filming. Clearly, ethnographic film is not merely an in­volvement in other cultures. Hockings (1995:508) specifies a distinctive role for ethnographic ft.lming in 1) undergraduate teaching, 2) archiving cultural material, 3) designing and presenting research projects, 4) con­ducting exploratory fieldwork, and 5) bringing anthropology more to the attention of the public.

MacDougall, a practitioner of ethnographic fllm, does not see it as constituting a genre, "nor is ethnographic ft.lm-making a discipline with unified origins and an established methodology" (1978:405). To Mac-

INTRODUCTION

Dougall the filinmaker, the task is determined from film to filin and moves from culture to culture. Is the "film-to-film" or "culture-to-culture" ap­proach truly in correspondence with the anthropological project, or is it film as pure art? Jay Ruby (2000) sees it di.fferendy. He considers the claim to ethnographicness in ethnographic filin by filinmakers questionable. To him there is misuse of the notion of "ethnographic" and that the term "ethnographic filmmaker" should be confined to qualified ethnographers or academic anthropologists "who have received formal graduate training, usually concluding in a Ph.D. [whose work is subject to] critical reception and validation . . . within the field of anthropology, not within the film world" (281 n.1). The issues raised here should not be dismissed or trivial­ized, nor should they be reduced to a technicality about having or not hav­ing a Ph.D. There is a real concern that should engage all anthropology.

Qyestions that seem to concern visual anthropologists about ethno­graphic film include, Who is doing the fUming? Is he or she an anthro­pologist or a filin practitioner? If the film is made by a nonethnographer, then the question becomes, Was an anthropologist involved at all in the project, and if so, in what capacity? Ruby is specific. For the filin to be considered "ethnographic," the filmmaker must have the "intent to pro­duce an ethnography," must "use ethnographic field methods," and must seek "validation among those competent to judge work as an ethnography" (2000:4, 6). This set of standards should also be extended to jury judgment of fllms for award consideration. Along the same thinking, Heider ( 1983) insists that "ethnographic filins must themselves be ethnographically ac­countable" and that "the better the ethnographicness, the better the cin­ema" (5). It is ultimately the ethnography that matters and how the ethnographic material is constructed in filin form.

Accordingly, many visual anthropologists, such as Ruby, Heider, and others, characterize existing "ethnographic filins" as filins about culture or documentary films about the cultures of exotic people marginal to both an­thropology and documentary film. For the term "ethnographic" to retain its meaning, it should be applied "only to those films produced by ethnogra­phers and explicidy designed to be ethnographies [as process and product of investigation]. Standards of evaluation derived from anthropology should be applied" (Ruby 2000:28). Yet, as Marc Piault (2001) wrote, the

r "ethnographic film-maker is still distinguished from that of anthropologist ~ or even ethnographer, as if these latter dignities would be fully granted to

l 9

INTRODUCTION

the mere makers of images, whose one use is that they provide data and il­lustrations to the 'true' specialists in a domain legitimated by writing alone" (3; see also M. Piault 2000). Piault takes us back to Mead's vocal critique about anthropology being a discipline of words (Mead 1995). This is a dilemma since visual anthropologists are critical of the quality of ftlms made by nonanthropologists yet find themselves ghettoized from main­stream anthropology when they make their own ftlms that are ethno­graphically sound. In this book, I am proposing a new integrative approach in conceptualizing the paths taken in visual anthropology-one beyond polarities of art versus science, cinema versus visual anthropology. It is an approach that recognizes the difference in paths but does not condemn any of them (see chapter 2).

New Terrain: No Visual, No Ethnography

Increasingly, there are visual studies that focus on popular media, home photography, postcards, and public culture (Albers and James 1983, 1984a, b, 1985, 1990; Chalfen 1975, 1987, 1992; El Guindi 1996b; Gins­burg 1993, 1995; Ruby 1981). There is nothing new about studying pub­lic media. Edmund Carpenter is a striking example of one who used the best of apthropology to study the effect of public media (see Prins and Bishop 2001-2002). But there is new interest in television content re­ferred to as "field" or "new terrain." As in any claim to doing ethnography or using ethnographic analysis, anthropologists using the visual medium or studying public media should still be doing anthropology. The critique and scrutiny to be applied to fllms claiming to be ethnographic would be extended to the emerging writing on public media as well. When some write that anthropologists are no longer the "primary interlocutors or ad­vocates ... [but rather] ... it is CNN, Hollywood, MTV, and other global media that now present and represent cultures to the majority of our world" (Askew and Wilk 2002:1), they assume that the goal of anthro­pology is to "represent" other peoples and cultures, wrongly, I might add, an idea perhaps in large part influenced by the eloquent scholarship cri­tiquing orientalism (see Said 1978).

True, anthropologists do undertake projects of advocacy and anthro­pologists do engage in activist projects to protect the rights and interests of groups they associate with, but where has it ever been stated that the

INTRODUCTION

goal of the scientific discipline of anthropology is to simply "speak for" other peoples? That is usually the task oflawyers, not anthropologists. The claim about the failure of anthropology to monopolize the representation of cultures and people because public media displaced it in reaching the world reflects at best a superficial understanding of both culture and an­thropology. Such a leap in thinking is as absurd as stating that the public's reading of their horoscopes reflects a failure in the field of physics.

There are some real interesting developments in the area of media. Prins and Bishop (2001-2002) write that McLuhan, who was almost for­gotten in the 1980s and 1990s, is now becoming fashionable again. "The first to predict the end of the book, his once-strange ideas about electronic media now seem perfectly obvious in light of the Internet. Posthumously tied to the digital technologies of the post-industrial cyberscape, his com­munications theories are compatible with the ... 'global village' that owes its name to him" (136; see also McLuhan and Carpenter 1957).

Hockings (1995:514) considers film to be a good way to record and preserve observations of events. He describes some areas in which filming can make contributions to anthropological theory. They are to do ex­ploratory fieldwork; to improve the quality and quantity of ethnographic observations; to provide comparative, cross-cultural data; to provide a rel­atively objective view of a culture; and to document culture change by jux­taposing segments of footage taken at different points (he gives as an example N'ai, The Story of a !Kung Woman).

In a critical analysis of flims by an anthropologist, we may find some real good insights, among the best to date. Howard Morphy (2001) made a presentation at the Origins Conference in Gottingen and in a system­atic and thoughtful critique discussed in detail the flims by Ian Dunlop on aboriginal Australia. He focuses on the aesthetics of his flims contrasting the series on the people of the Western Desert with those of the Yirrkala project-which spans a period of change in the history and technology of ethnographic flimmaking. Morphy (2001) uses a sophisticated notion of aesthetics that, as a concept, he finds applicable at "many different levels: from the visual properties of a particular art work to the affective sensual experience of being in the world" (93). So Morphy first distinguishes be­tween the aesthetics of the subject flimed (the cultural) and the aesthetics of the flim itself and then proceeds to systematically follow Dunlop's flim career integrating these two kinds of aesthetics in his observations. This

11

INTRODUCTION

kind of critique is a model for anthropologists ethnographically specializ­ing in the cultural areas covered in ethnographic ftlm by filmmakers-to critique them seriously and share their critique with general anthropology rather than dismiss them altogether or accept them uncritically (see also Moore 1995). This expert knowledge must be included via anthropolo­gists on all jurying committees of ethnographic film festivals. To integrate and mainstream, visual anthropology has to produce observations that contribute to the discovery and advancement of knowledge about hu­mankind. Importantly, it is the task of visual anthropologists to identify such observations to anthropology.

New Visions

Video technology made fUming easy and accessible, leading to further in­novations in the recording of culture, particularly in terms of data gather­ing and for anthropological efforts toward self-representation both as data and, by exploited populations, for self-determination. With the advent of predigital video, reactions by visual anthropologists were swift and strong. Video was rejected as an alternative to 16-mm ftlm. Prestigious ethno­graphic film festivals, specifically the Bilan du Film Ethnographique, re­jected suqmissions fUmed in video format. Eventually, after many years, it succumbed under pressure from filmmakers who appreciated the new medium for its accessibility and low cost. The earliest established visual anthropologist to enthusiastically make extensive use of video for anthro­pological observation is Barrie Machin. He argued for the value of video in observing complex events and considered the new video technology to be revolutionary for anthropology (see Machin 1988). Today, multimedia technology simultaneously and interactively combines various media and formats, thus allowing for maximum flexibility in application and for methodological and analytic rigor. This promises to become an invaluable tool for teaching and research. 4

The activity preoccupying most of the globe today is war by dominant states and resistance by people and groups seeking to prevent or stop war or end occupation of their land, to regain sovereignty, and to resist the ho­mogenizing influences of coercive globalization. Anthropology has much to say about the study of war and violence and should have something to say about the contemporary forms of conflict and violent confrontation,

12

INTRODUCTION

their roots in our past, and their root causes in our present. Visual anthro­pology, in particular, can play a pivotal role in increasing understanding if some emphasis is given to public media, less to television soaps, and more to the comparative analysis of news styles and war coverage. If not, then this important area will be relegated to journalism, media studies, and communication. Visual anthropology would become marginal to the ef­fort of shedding light on phenomena and events preoccupying the whole world today.

I was thrust into the challenge of dealing with current events by virtue of being both a visual anthropologist and an ethnographer with expertise in the Islamic East. In response to urgent current global events since the attacks of 9/11 on the United States, followed by the U.S. wars on Mghanistan and Iraq, I have been receiving nationwide invitations by ac­ademic groups and institutions to talk on current global conflicts and on the Middle East and Islam. There have also been requests for running workshops on Arab and Muslim Americans, now a subject of more cu­riosity and interest in educational forums and institutions. The audiences coming to these presentation forums are public academics, many of whom seem to be open to hearing a different angle from that presented in the United States by its public and commercial media and in news programs. They seek an expert voice to provide background and analysis of news they are receiving. In other words, the goal of my presentation becomes to educate, to illuminate, to provide background, and to familiarize as I pro­vide a new perspective and new ideas.

One main source is news programs. However, in times of crises in which the United States or Israel are party to the crisis, U.S. news tends to present facts in a distorted or incomplete way, and news-related discus­sion on television tends to be ideological rather than analytic. Other sources must also be sought. Cyberspace provides a rich terrain for alter­native perspectives (for anthropological analysis of Internet information, see Jacobson 1999). Another emergent form that has become a clear al­ternative on current events to U.S. commercial and cable coverage is Ara­bic and other international satellite television programs of news and analysis that successfully carved significant alternative media space of free and uncensored news coverage, thus not only bringing balance to U.S. war coverage but also often countering its dominant narrative and often re­placing it. Satellite media is able to escape state and global controls and

13

INTRODUCTION

U.S. pressures for censorship, as in the case of the satellite channel of al­J azeera, which in 2003 received a prestigious award in England for free and objective reporting. This new source is giving the world a new and in­novative constructive space for word and image. Television channels such as al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, and Abu-Dhabi, among others, rapidly main­streamed as a means to give voice to a different perspective.5

To this end, I began constructing a visual form suitable for public presentation that would deconstruct entrenched errors of thinking about Arab and Muslim people and about Islam and Arab culture. I began ex­perimentation with new visual technologies, innovating on the now com­mon PowerPoint presentations to enhance its multimedia capabilities as I seek a suitable mode to capture the different media and particularly cur­rent media coverage and fast-moving current events. Current political events are in a constant state of movement. Such flux cannot be captured by still images or films fixed by past moments.

While this process remains in its experimental stage (because of the rapidity and intensity of global events, there is no time to reflect), I man­aged so far to devise a flexible and dynamic mode, meaning one that uses not only text and image but also stills, cartoons, and moving images and sound, to communicate complexity, using the increasingly more accessible PowerPoi.nt form of presentation. My experimentation with this mode ex­pands the notion of anthropological knowledge beyond traditional under­standing of ethnography (analysis of this method is now in progress). It expands the paradigmatic tools of presentation available to visual anthro­pology and challenges it to reexamine the limits of the notion of anthro­pological knowledge.

Mainstreaming Visual Anthropology

In the 1990s, visual anthropologists began to write about how they yearn for visual anthropology to mainstream. Ruby (2000) wished to see the "study of visual/pictorial phenomena and the production and use of picto­rial statements a part of the mainstream of cultural anthropology" (x). Of course, confining it to cultural anthropology alone diminishes both visual and cultural anthropology. It should be integrated with the whole disci­pline. Some claimed, perhaps zealously, that visual anthropology was al­ready of subdisciplinary status (see Banks and Morphy 1997a, b). The

INTRODUCTION

anthropological profession, however, formally reserves subdisciplinary sta­tus for the traditional four fields: sociocultural studies, biology, archaeol­ogy, linguistics. Visual anthropology should be integrated with all four components of anthropology.

This concern with disciplinary status is different from the calls made most prominently by Margaret Mead, as well as Jean Rouch and Paul Hockings, appealing to anthropologists to "use" visual tools in their re­search and teaching. Mead demonstrated the usefulness of the visual tool for discovery and archiving. Mead's work with Bateson is unsurpassed, if even for only its sheer volume. Taking photographs in the field itself was not a new idea, as Bateson was not the first anthropologist to do so. In the fourth and fifth edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, published originally in 1912 and 1929, respectively, there are discussions about the method of taking photographs in the field and what one needs to know to do it (Aiken et al. 1929:371-81, cited in Sullivan 1999; Friere-Marreco and Myers 1912:267-71).6 The French ethnographer Griaule was among the first to effectively utilize photography and film for research. During the Mission Dakar-Djibouti in 1931-1932, he applied aerial photography not only to analyze the spatial organization of societies but also to use them as a stimulus (what we now call feedback or elicitation) whereby photographs are shown to participants in order to acquire knowledge about their religion. The question becomes, Why has the visual record of Bateson and Mead received so much attention? Roger Sanjek (1990:330) sees the answer lying in the importance of method and analysis. The sheer volume of photos and ftlm and in a sustained body of work is the key to their success. They were not only shooting some photos for illustration but also integrating still and moving photography as research tools in their systematic and comparative research projects. Photos were not only tools for further reanalysis but also the primary data in the research project.

Still, integration of visual tools in the ordinary anthropological proj­ect has not automatically led to the mainstreaming of the field. In the 1980s, a process toward mainstreaming began. As the newly nominated editor in 1990 for the section in the journal American Anthropologist then called "Ethnographic Film" (from 1990 to 1994), I argued for renaming the review section "Visual Anthropology," but this was met with resis­tance by the editorial board. The argument for renaming was made on the basis of a more accurate reflection of the intellectual, theoretical, and

15

INTRODUCTION

methodological broadening of the field that had been taking place. Re­naming of the section was achieved four years later by the next editor of the section, Harald Prins, who succeeded in getting it officially renamed "Visual Anthropology." This was a practical step toward mainstreaming. In general, anthropologists did not take the visual component seriously. When invited to review a film, some semijokingly made light of the task, saying that they promised to do it in the summer as they ate some popcorn. Clearly, much needed to be communicated about the role of the visual tools in anthropology and the responsibility of anthropologists to scrutinize any visual record about culture using the yardstick of an­thropological standards.

Another step in mainstreaming comes from the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA), which in 1984 was formed as a constituent section of the American Anthropological Association (for a brief history preced­ing this phase of development, see chapter 1; see also Ruby 2002). Previ­ously, it had more heavily leaned on ethnographic fUm but was gradually developing a balanced coverage of research areas, including a wide range of interests gradually being subsumed within the field of visual anthropol­ogy. The SVA produced a regular newsletter that has become the Visual

Anthropology Review7 and composed a statement identifYing the SVA's scope ~ follows:

[T]he use of images for the description, analysis, communication and in­terpretation of human (and sometimes nonhuman) behavior-kinesics, proxemics and related forms of body motion communication (e.g., ges­ture, emotion, dance, sign language) as well as visual aspects of culture, including architecture and material artifacts. It also includes the use of image and auditory media, including still photography, filin, video and noncamera generated images, in the recording of ethnographic, archeo­logical and other anthropological genres-how aspects of culture can be pictorially a source of ethnographic data, expanding our horizons be­yond the reach of memory culture. It is the study of how indigenous, professional; and amateur forms of pictoriaVauditory materials are grounded in personal, social, cultural, and ideological contexts.

Clearly, this statement is inclusive of diverse media forms, including pub­lic media and different domains of culture (including material manifesta­tions), and covers multiple approaches. Trends to isolate the study of

INTRODUCTION

public media or exaggerate the visible domain of culture are counterpro­ductive. The latter defines visual anthropology as the anthropology of the visible. Ruby (2000) expounds on what is meant by the visible. He writes that it is "all that humans make for others to see--their facial expressions, costumes, symbolic uses of space, their abodes and the design of their liv­ing spaces, as well as the full range of the pictorial artifacts they produce, from rock engravings to holographs" (ix). This stance was earlier pro­pounded by Banks and Morphy in the introduction to their edited volume Rethinking Visual Anthropology (1997b), in which "visual anthropology ... becomes the anthropology of visual systems or, more broadly, visible ;Plltural forms" (5).

Both orientations-the materialist, which reduces culture to its su­perficial visible manifestations only, and the culturalist, which adopts a cultural studies approach rather than an anthropological one to the study of public media-diminish the notion of culture and its centrality to an­thropology's four-field holism and dilutes the goals of the discipline of an­thropology. Anthropology is the science of uncovering the cognitive structuring process and discovering cross-cultural biological, cultural, and social knowledge about humankind. Anthropological projects are subject to criteria of rigor, consistency, accountability, and transparency, whether the content is material or symbolic and whether the medium of record is visual or print. Visual anthropology is not confined to the visible or the material. Cultural and social relations can be visually manifested, and in­visible domains, including underlying rules and hidden premises, are part of the visual anthropology project.

This book builds and expands on my chapter on visual anthropology (El Guindi 1998:459-511) published in the Handbook of Methods in Cul­tural Anthropology (Bernard 1998). In 1975, a classic collection of articles on visual anthropology (Hockings 1975) appeared, reappearing as a sec­ond edition in 1995 with some changes and revisions. In this collection, Paul Hockings lamented that the various previous anthropology hand­books on research methodology devoted no more than two pages (out of a thousand) to some applications of cinematography in anthropology (Hockings 1975:477). As if in response to Hockings's call, my chapter presented an extended historicaVmethodological overview of visual an­thropology and was published in 1998 in the methodology handbook ed­ited by Russell Bernard, almost thirty years after the previous handbook

17

INTRODUCTION

(see Naroll and Cohen 1973 [ca. 1970]). I consider it a landmark step in mainstreaming visual anthropology. Why? Because the chapter "From Pictorializing to Visual Anthropology" (El Guindi 1998) was published in a handbook on mainstream anthropological methods, not in a specialty journal or in a book focusing on visual anthropology, whose readership is exclusively visual anthropologists and filmmakers. This was a result of the vision of the handbook's editor and national advisory board to include a full-length chapter on visual anthropology. Since its publication, some an­thropologists have been more readily adopting visual anthropology in their teaching of regular methodology and theory classes (Linda Garro, University of California, Los Angeles, personal communication).

Visual Anthropology Is Anthropology

Let me state my position on anthropology. In broad terms, my own re­search has a theoretical-methodological foundation that is based on the centrality of a structuring process and a systematic relationality that shapes cultural systems. I consistently link theory with its database. The paradigm empirically formulated in my analyses of ethnographic data links notions of both society and culture, connecting structure and process with function. This paradigm is grounded in systematic fieldwork-based ethnography. My theoretical position is that anthropology is a science that brings together the human and formal elements of culture and that an­thropological knowledge cumulatively provides improved understanding of culture and the nature of humankind, not because it seeks truth or is based on certainty but through the improvement of paradigmatic and methodological ·tools to further discovery. I argue that certainty is the realm of religion, truth the realm of philosophy, and objectivity the realm of journalism.

The general orientation to visual anthropology in this book is summa­rized in terms of the parameters defining the goals and qualities character­istic of the field. First, it seeks to transmit knowledge about humankind. Second, it serves as a tool for discovery-data gathering, elicitation and re­search experimentation, and cross-cultural comparison. And third, it de­velops visual modes to communicate anthropological analysis of primary cultural, archaeological, and primatological data on human societies and nonhuman primate behavior and of ethnographic insights from other cul-

I TRODUCTIO

tural sources. These parameters situate the field of visual anthropology squarely within the discipline of anthropology. It is not an offshoot of cul­tural anthropology or an offspring of cultural or critical studies (as media ;studies claims to be). Nor is it an extension of cinema-fiction or docu­mentary. It is born out of the premises and tools at the center of the an­thropological project since its very institutionalized beginnings.

This book deals with many of the issues raised in this introduction. It is divided into four parts covering core aspects and developments in visual anthropology. Part 1 covers issues of ancestry and genealogy of origins. Part 2 covers ethnographic filin, which is the most known (and popular) activity and the one most widely used in teaching but also is perhaps the area that produces doubt among general anthropologists about the schol­arliness of the visual field. Experimentation with fllming selves, whether for self-empowerment or for testing hypotheses, is included. Projects for educational purposes that used the method of culture reconstruction are also discussed. Finally, the challenge to ethnography now posed by the new multimedia forms of analysis, technology formats, and forums of presentation are explored. Some of these new forms are website construc­tion, PowerPoint multimedia, CD-ROM, DVD, and so on. Part 3 covers research film, video, and photography (including elicitation, feedback, controlled comparison, and discovery). Part 4 discusses the notion and genre of visual ethnography, discussing specific fllm projects as examples of the kind of research that goes into its process, the inclusion of analysis in the medium itself1 and the process of construction that produces it.

Notes

1. The Character Formation in Different Cultures series (Mead and Bateson 1930s-1950s [filin]) includes Bathing Babies in Three Cultures (Mead and Bate­son 1954 [film]), Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (Mead and Bateson 1952 [film]), and First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby (Mead ca. 1952 [filin]).

2. Comite du Film Ethnographiqe (1955); Comite International du Film Ethnographique et Sociologique (1967).

3. In "Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters," Jean Rouch (1995b) wrote, "I must pay respects to my totemic ancestors, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Marcel Griaule, and also to the pioneers of our discipline who were not re­ally anthropologists yet were the fathers of anthropological fllm.: Robert Flaherty

19

INTRODUCTION

and Dziga Vertov. It is always difficult to speak of another epoch long ago; but if we want to prepare a future we have to refer to the past" (217).

4. We must also caution regarding limitations on digital technology in their present stage. A case in point is the Digital Michelangelo Project, carried out by the Interactive Visualization of the 3D Model of Stanford University, which pro­duced Digital David, of Michelangelo's famous sculpture David (1502-1504). The original sculpture stands today in the Galleria dell' Accademia in Firenze, Italy. Next to it is Digital David in three-dimensional form. The proximity of the two projects allows viewers to see both simultaneously. I am struck by the absence in the digital rendition of the "emotional" content characterizing the original sculpture. The soft look of David's face has become a stern, harsh look in the dig­ital rendition. So while there are valuable advances brought about by digital tech­nology, such as having different views and dimensions of the artwork turning a still sculpture into a dynamic form, the emotional content seen in the original art was sufficiently altered so as to change David's character.

5. Note the number of attempts by the United States to silence these channels by bombing their headquarters in Afghanistan and Iraq, putting pressure on the heads of Gulf countries sponsoring the channels (as in case of ~tar for al­Jazeera), arresting correspondents, and killing an al-Jazeera correspondent in a raid on al-Jazeera's building in Baghdad. An al-Jazeera correspondent was ar­rested in Spain, presumably from U.S. pressure, without evidence-based charges.

6. Sullivan (1999) alerts us that Barbara Friere-Marreco and Barbara Aiken I

are the same person (192 n.6). 7. A select group of articles from the journal were published as a book (see

Taylor 1994).

20