Visual Anthropology 1

AESTHETICS VERSUS KNOWLEDGE: AN AMBIGUOUSMIXTURE OF GENRES IN VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Lorenzo Brutti

Feld, Steven, ed. Cine-Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 2003. viiiþ 401 pp.

MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and theSenses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xviþ 312 pp.

Marano, Francesco. Anni Cinquanta e Coccinelle che volano: Video ePoetiche della Memoria Etnografica. Nardo: Besa Editrice, 2005. 172 pp.

Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright, eds. Contemporary Art andAnthropology. Oxford: Berg, 2006. xviþ 223 pp.

Visual anthropology is both a descriptive and an aesthetic endeavor.Filmed ethnography, for example, is a powerful scientific tool fordocumenting reality, but it is also often used to express anthropologist-filmmakers’ personal artistic visions. This mixture of science andaesthetics has indirectly but deeply influenced anthropological theory,and has also contributed to visual anthropology’s unclear definition inacademia since it constitutes a terra nullius between science and art.This mixture of aesthetics and knowledge has practical consequences inthe anthropology of art.

LORENZO BRUTTI is an anthropologist and researcher (chercheur) at the

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Recherche et

Documentation sur l’Oceanie. A Melanesianist, his interests include cultural

change, mining impacts, mass industry and autochthonous identities, multi-

media anthropology, trans-cultural communication, and cross-cultural

psychology. He is author of Les Papous: Une diversite singuliere (2007) and

co-editor with Anna Paini of La terra dei miei sogni: Esperienze di ricerca

in Oceania (2002).

Address correspondence to Lorenzo Brutti, CNRS-CREDO UMR 6574, Maison Asie

Pacifique, Universite de Provence, 3, place Victor Hugo, 13003 Marseille, France. E-mail:

[email protected]

Reviews in Anthropology, 37: 279–301, 2008

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online

DOI: 10.1080/00938150802398644

Keywords: Aesthetics, contemporary art, documentary, ethnographic film,visual anthropology

The French visual anthropologist Pierre Jordan used to start hisseminars addressing the audience with the following sentence: ‘‘Everyanthropology is visual since it proceeds from a sight and it is built onthe base of observation.’’ The rest is just a matter of technical tools,one would add. Technical tools to record and diffuse by audiovisualmeans have developed so incredibly in the last two decades that todayis almost impossible to be an anthropologist without being a visualanthropologist, too. However, when a scientifically based disciplinelike anthropology meets aesthetically based disciplines like art andcinema, the consequent exogamic union begets prolific ambiguousoffspring. The products of this union sometimes abandon scientificpaths to seek adventure in more subjective dimensions, which arenevertheless additional ways of doing anthropology.

Since its origins, cinema has been intended for the visual doc-umentation of the other. The first moving images were of ethno-graphic interest since they could achieve a descriptive goal ofillustrating faraway realities. In 1894 Thomas A. Edison shot NativeAmericans with his kinetoscope, and in 1897 Auguste and LouisLumiere filmed Ashanti people using their first movie camera.Though a stage was often built for such occasions, as for the BuffaloBill Wild West Show or for the ethnographic reconstitution of anAshanti village in Lyon, France (Jordan 1992), the pioneers of visualdocumentation had an amateur ethnographic aim and a clear interestin exotic people. An ethnographic aim was more properly achievedfew years later by several pioneering researchers. Filming with theexplicit goal of enriching ethnography was used, for example, byAlfred Cort Haddon during the Cambridge University Expedition tothe Torres Straits in 1898, by Walter Baldwin Spencer in CentralAustralia in 1901, by Rudolph Poch in New Guinea in 1904, and byHeinrich Tischner in the Caroline and Solomon Islands and in NewGuinea between 1908 and 1910 (Jordan 1992). These are just few ofthe most famous scientists who traveled, in the early years of eth-nology, into the field to film native peoples in authentic landscapes.

Filming fictional or authentic frames, recreating situations in astudio or pursuing observations in the field, the methods of the firstfilmmakers focused mainly on passive observation of a scene, mini-mizing their interventions as cinematic directors. Although at the endof the 19th century cinematographic technical tools where limited,that constraint did not constitute a definite edge to the creativity ofthe filmmakers.

280 L. Brutti

Indeed, the French filmmaker Georges Melies produced wonderfulinventions in his films: shot just few years after the birth of cinema inhis studios of Montreuil, near Paris. Some of his cinematographicfindings remain in use today. By contrast, Auguste Lumiere was asort of scientist, a neutral observer inspired by his elder brother whowas a famous doctor and administrator in their father’s photographicbusiness. Cameramen working for Lumiere’s company were sent allover the world to capture real shots of foreign peoples in exoticsituations. Their observations were a sort of visual anthropology antelitteram and Lumiere’s approach is indeed quite ethnographic—tending to document—though its purpose was amusing payingaudiences in movie theaters. In the same years and in the samecontext, Melies acted as a creative artist, exploiting all the possibi-lities of the new tool. He was a genial ‘‘trickster’’ inventing cinema-tographic tricks to persuade the audience that what they saw on thescreen was real. In other words, Melies showed the reality of illusionwhile the Lumiere brothers showed the illusion of reality.

On these historical bases, it seems already that from its verybeginning and at least in the French tradition, film must deal with anomnipresent dichotomy of aesthetics versus science, creation versusreproduction, invention versus discovery. In looking at the ‘‘ethno-graphic’’ film production of the early years, which was essentially adocumentary one, from the Lumiere brothers’ and Edison’s materialuntil the more proper visual ethnography collected by the first pro-fessional visual anthropologists, the spectator may realize that aes-thetic features did not particularly characterize the camera works ofthat period. Even when it was recreated for the purpose of beingrecorded, an event was filmed in the most simple way, without artisticpurpose. That was probably due to the fact that the newborn scienceof anthropology had the sincere though often illusory goal of simplyrecording observed reality.

WHEN AESTHETICS AND ETHNOGRAPHY MIX

Though some of the earliest filmmakers had ‘‘ethnographic’’ inter-ests, in France more than half a century separated the invention ofcinema from the birth of true ethnographic film. Jean Rouch (1917–2004) is commonly considered the founder of French ethnographicfilm, and it is to Rouch that Steven Feld’s edited book Cine-ethnography (2003) is dedicated. Feld’s volume is certainly the mostcomplete book in English about the work of this paramountcharacter of visual anthropology. It is probably due to the combi-nation of the anthropological (Feld 1982), audiovisual (Feld 2001)

Aesthetics Versus Knowledge in Visual Anthropology 281

and aesthetic (Feld and Basso 1996) sensibility of the editor that sucha comprehensive and rich account of a lifework has been con-centrated into a single book. The book starts with English transla-tions of four essays in visual anthropology that Rouch wrote between1960s and 1970s. In ‘‘The Camera and Man’’ Rouch (2003a) writesabout ethnographic cinema’s approach to history, methods, pro-spects, and problems. ‘‘The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinemain Africa’’ (Rouch 2003b) is an historically valuable piece on thefilmic representation of Africa and Africans, the colonial gaze, andrepresentation. The other two essays are specifically ethnographicconcerning the Songhay (Rouch 2003c) and the Dogon (Rouch2003d).

Four conversations and interviews complete the book. One, withLucien Taylor (2003), covers his personal background in which helocates himself not only as an anthropologist and filmmaker but alsoas an artist and intellectual in the broadest historical sense. EnricoFulchignoni (2003) pushes Rouch to rethink his career locating theexperience and the experiments of each film within larger narrativesof Rouch’s poetics and politics. John Marshall and John W. Adams(2003) discuss certain of Rouch’s films. Cineaste magazine critics DanGeorgakas, Udayan Gupta, and Judy Ganda (2003) consider thepolitics of cinema and ethnography.

After the writing by Rouch and about Rouch, Feld’s book pre-sents the English translation of the 1962 Edgar Morin essay,‘‘Chronicle of a Film’’ (Morin 2003) documenting one of Rouch’sbest known films, Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin 1961).Rouch’s (2003e) essay ‘‘The Cinema of the Future’’ on the birth ofcinema direction follows. Then there is a complete transcript of thefilm Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin 2003a). FinallyRouch and Morin present their post film interviews with the prin-cipal participants in ‘‘The Point of View of the ‘Characters’’’(Rouch and Morin 2003b). An annotated filmography (Feld2003:345–384) and a bibliography (Feld 2003:385–389) close thecollection of Rouch’s documents.

In Rouch’s films the neutral description typical of scientificobservation is often replaced by a more engaged, personal approach.In Les maıtres fous (1955) Rouch mixes the participant-observationof his film camera with the interpretation of the anthropologist givenas comments in voice over. The result is the documentation of a spiritpossession ritual that tends to direct the sight and the attention of theviewer. In Les maıtres fous the analysis of the ethnologist shifts oftento the aesthetic rendering of a filmic poetics, defending the Africanpeople against the power of white colonialism.

282 L. Brutti

The past two generations of ethnographic filmmakers in France—and probably all over the world of documentary film in anthro-pology—have been deeply influenced by Rouch’s style of filmingethnographic data and treating ethnological discourse. Nevertheless,rarely was Rouch’s approach merely descriptive and analytical in thestrict sense of the anthropological discipline. In his films Rouch wasmore influenced by his empathetic and aesthetic perceptions of hisAfrican ‘‘actors’’ and by his political engagement and social com-mitment in their defense against colonialism.

A similar approach was employed during the same period by thethen rising star of French anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss. HisTristes Tropiques (1955) is a literary piece where ethnographicdescription moves forward to encounter ethnological poetics. Theresult is often a nostalgic enchantment that evokes a vanishing‘‘wildness’’ in the best legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philo-sophical writings (e.g., 1755) accompanied by a revulsion for theconsequences of the impact of mass industry like rubber productionon Brazil’s autochthonous societies. Although Levi-Strauss provideda lot of ethnographic data in that book, his main emphasis was on hissubjective and emotional vision. As the son of a painter, Levi-Strausswas probably more sensible to what he perceived as the artisticexpression of Amazonian societies. Tristes Tropiques is rich in theauthor’s drawings of Amazonian art motifs he observed on bodiesand material objects. In his passion for drawing while collectingethnographic data, Levi-Strauss launched among scholars a trendoften followed in subsequent decades. For example, in the Frenchedition of Philippe Descola’s (1994) monograph In the Society ofNature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia, each chapter opens with adrawing by the anthropologist. If drawings were necessary to enrichethnographic description before the era of photography, whycontinue to use these pictorial, aesthetic descriptions if not to addan artistic dimension to the work of the ethnographer?

Today, more than half a century after the first edition of TristesTropiques and the first screening of Les maıtres fous it seemsappropriate to wonder about the emotional and subjective dimensionpervading written as well as audiovisual anthropology in France andstill influencing generations of anthropologist in their writings aswell as in their films. Insofar as ethnographic anthropology hashad difficulty, at least in France, demonstrating its epistemologicalrigor compared to other sciences, this is partially due to its often-prominent ‘‘artistic’’ approach, which introduces a subjectivedimension to scientific discourse. Some critics may argue that ‘‘hard’’sciences’ accounts do not need aesthetics, they simply work since the


results of their findings may be repeated. So-called ‘‘soft’’ sciences,such as anthropology, including its visual dimension, may need toseduce readers with their aesthetic form since the facts they presentare not always sufficient to convince readers of anthropologists’arguments. That may be one of the paramount taboos in the socialsciences and in visual anthropology as well: form supplies content,while aesthetics provides meaning in the absence of sense. This is truefor both written and visual anthropology.

In respecting history, one must distinguish between the lifework ofJean Rouch and the man himself. What Feld’s book does notdescribe is the situation seen from inside France. In order to providea balanced historical frame for Jean Rouch’s controversial role inthe history of French ethnographic film, one must note that hispersonality was, like virtually all prominent academics, quite com-plex. An engineer by training, Rouch attained academic fame as anoutsider, building a creative and subjective approach to ethnographicfilm that opposed more traditionally academic and cumulativeapproaches, like that of Margaret Mead for instance, which weredominant at the time.

Rouch personified a mixture of adventurer and rebel in Frenchpopular culture. He became a culture hero inside the new discipline ofCinema d’observation as Leroi-Gourhan defined ethnographic film in1948 (MacDougall 2006:228). French culture needed a dominantcharacter to embody a discipline in a sort of national metonymy:in the frame of human and social sciences Jean Martin Charcot(1825–1893) had filled the bill for neurology, as had Emile Durkheim(1858–1917) for sociology. Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–present) andJacques Lacan (1901–1981) were just building their reputations inanthropology and psychoanalysis. In the same years, the 1950s and1960s, Rouch was going to be the right character to fill the emptycase of ethnographic film. He acquired such a strong aura, at leastinside France, that he was able to climb all the steps of an insti-tutional career and beyond, until being promoted to president of theCinematheque francaise which is more an artistic institution than ascientific one. Claude Levi-Strauss has likewise collected a plethora ofscientific and artistic acknowledgements, first of all his admission atthe Academie francaise, a special honor reserved for exquisite novelwriters and definitely rare for a scientist. This is a further point ofcommunion between art and science, which has characterized Frenchanthropology and ethnographic since the golden years.

Rouch acted like a chief, a paramount chief. He had a decisiveinfluence on the destination of institutional budgets concerningethnographic film projects. From the early 1960s to the late 1990s the

284 L. Brutti

majority of human resource and budget decisions concerninganthropological film in France had to pass through Jean Rouch’slens. He supported the careers of some of his pupils and criticizedgreat ethnographic filmmakers who were not following the Rouchway, but were trying to be more ethnographic, insisting on shootingdocumentary films without a subjective interaction with the people tosafeguard the objective distance of ethnographer (Jean-DominiqueLajoux, personal communication, November 2001). Rouch madealmost all of his own films with close collaborators and, with fewexceptions such as the French ethnologist Germaine Dieterlen, avoi-ded working with other anthropologists in the field. Probably becauseof the African orientation of ethnographic film between the 1960s andthe 1980s, it was awfully hard for French anthropologists doingfieldwork on other continents to find national funding in their owncountry (Maurice Godelier, personal communication, April 2000).

As strange as it may seem for so talented a character, Rouch wasextremely resistant to technical innovation. He was a strong enemy ofvideo. Because of his hatred of ‘‘this new technology producing aframe the size of a stamp,’’ as he used to repeat, he make it com-pulsory for filmmakers screening their work at the Parisian festival,Bilan du film ethnographique, to convert their video into film until theearly 1990s. This caused the first generation of anthropologists usingvideo—because it was cheaper than film—to be excluded for yearsfrom the Bilan. Only in the last decade have organizers of the Bilansuccumbed to evidence of the video revolution and started to includevideo works. And the Bilan itself was a typical ritual enacted fordecades by the same characters with Rouch directing the action,recounting the same anecdotes of his youth to each edition of thefestival, with people laughing at the same jokes, always held in theframe of the historic screening theater at the Musee de l’Homme.Especially during the last years, the ritual became a psychodramawith Rouch shouting against the forthcoming transfer of the Museede l’Homme’s collections to the new Musee du Quai Branly. A risingparamount institutional power was going to engulf a vanishing one,but they were so similar to each other, being both the expression ofscience soiled by politics. One shudders to think what Rouch wouldhave said if he would have known that just one year after his deaththe new organizers of the Bilan du Film Ethnographique decidedcharge entry fees for tickets, while he as a left-wing activist hadmaintained for decades the gratuity of the screenings. What would hehave said had he known that just two years after his death, Bilanorganizers decided to move to the opposite bank of the Seine River,to the brand new movie theater inside the Musee du Quai Branly, his


rightwing paramount enemy, against whom Rouch have fought foryears?

Nevertheless, nothing has still sensibly changed in the culturallandscape of French ethnographic film since it is no exaggeration tosay that Rouch and his very close circle succeeded in banning theexpression of new talent and freezing the burgeoning of new ideas inFrench ethnographic film for decades, from the 1960s to the present.With his departure from the stage, an era is waning even if these hardtimes have not yet vanished because Rouch placed disciples in stra-tegic posts, inhibiting, at least in the Parisian frame, new voices fromrising up from the crowd. Le roi est mort. Vive le roi! [The king isdead. Long live the king!]

WHERE AESTHETICS MEET ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

Compared to Jean Rouch’s oeuvre, David MacDougall producesdeeper and more balanced ethnography and makes fewer concessionsto art while being—paradoxically—even more aesthetically rich. Inthe introduction of his The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography andthe Senses (MacDougall 2006), he states that one of the functions ofart as well as science is to help us understand the being of others inthe world.

‘‘Images reflect thought, and they may lead thought, but they aremuch more than thought. . . . When we look at things, our perceptionis guided by cultural and personal interests . . . and, moreover, acomplex construction such as a film or photograph has an animalorigin. Corporeal images are not just the images of other bodies; theyare also images of the body behind the camera and its relations withthe world.’’ (MacDougall 2006:1–3).

MacDougall lists a series of three different modes of looking with acamera in documentary film: responsive camera, by which the film-maker reacts to the action; interactive camera, in which the action isinfluenced by the filmmaker’s responses to the changing action; andconstructive camera, in which the filmmaker is proactive and directsthe scene.

More precise than Rouch about the role of images, MacDougall(2006:5) is frank when he states that for the humanities and socialsciences, images are a form of observational data. In this sense,according to MacDougall, filming is a form of looking, and unlikewriting, in many respects it precedes thinking. He illustrates this withthe example of novice videographers’ tendency to move the cameraabout in a constant and dissatisfied search, as though its wanderinggaze would reveal something hidden (MacDougall 2006:7).

286 L. Brutti

In his chapter ‘‘The Body in Cinema,’’ there is parallel betweenMacDougall’s distinction between life and art on the one hand, andcorporeal versus incorporeal on the other. This dichotomy is remi-niscent of the bipolarity between art and science, aestheticsand knowledge, subjective and objective. Concerning cinema,MacDougall (2006:24) writes that the cinema ‘‘affects the spectatorcorporeally through its construction of imaginary spaces and itsevocation of real ones.’’ MacDougall (2006:28) argues that ‘‘thebodies of the subject, the filmmaker, and the viewer become inter-connected and in some ways undifferentiated.’’ MacDougall quotesAlfred Gell (1992, 1998), insisting that art be seen as more a matter ofagency and power than of aesthetics and meaning, operating in a fieldof desire and conventions, as a technology of influence andenchantment. MacDougall has found here an elegant and appropri-ate way to resolve the contrast between art and science by integratingthe two approaches in a whole model in which the physical dimensionis diluted in the unphysical one and concur by achieving a productperceptible by the eyes in concert with the mind in terms of objectiveknowledge, which is the aim of science.

In ‘‘Voice and Vision,’’ MacDougall deals with the cumulativeapproach in filming, providing a comprehensive and compositeaccount of an event by recording only a single perspective at a time:‘‘as in writing, the filmmaker must therefore proceed analytically,constructing a new reality out of fragments, seeing it as much with themind as with the eye’’ (MacDougall 2006:34). MacDougall suggeststhat what is cumulative in writing becomes, in the cinema, composite.The composite vision of photographs and films offers a way ofexploring connections in the social world often lost in writing, muchas writing offers a way of recording conclusions about societyunavailable to film (MacDougall 2006:38).

Comparing written and filmic discourse, MacDougall says thatwhen writing, as he selects one or another world, he thinks about howit fits or fails to fit the half-articulated sense he has in mind; when, incontrast, he is making a film, he is ‘‘constantly confronted by shotsthat are filled with both relevant and extraneous matter at everylevel.’’ Ethnographic writing is therefore ‘‘not simply cultural trans-lation, as it is often described, but a completely new object, an object(on a page) of an entirely different order from its object of study’’(MacDougall 2006:41). In semiotic terms, a translation from writingto filming in visual anthropology is not automatic but encounters allthe problems of what Umberto Eco (2007:10) has called ‘‘inter-semiotic translation,’’ decoding sense from one medium to create thesame sense by the tools and mode of expression of a different


medium. Just to remain in the frame of Eco’s literary production, hisnovel Il nome della Rosa (1980) was translated into a movie by Frenchfilmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud as The Name of the Rose (1986).Examples of novels translated into movies are of course countless. Bythe same logic it would be appropriate for ethnographers to letprofessional filmmakers turn their ethnographic productions intoimages. This has actually been tried quite often by filmmakers col-laborating with anthropologists to make their own films on the eth-nological topic studied by the researcher. Though filmic renderings ofethnological research have not often been presented as ‘‘intersemiotictranslations,’’ the results have often been interesting and constitutepedagogical material used in anthropology courses (see for example,concerning New Guinea, Balmes 1999, 2000; Dunlop 1972; Gardner1964; Jablonko 1982; Kildea 1976; Nairn 1974). These documentaryfilms are indeed very good from an ethnological point of view.Though the documentary filmmakers often did not have scientifictraining, their goal was to shoot films as scientifically as possiblebecause they were collaborating with an anthropologist. Shot byprofessionals, these movies are also excellent as films. Such colla-borations help ensure that aesthetic and scientific aspects are wellbalanced and integrated.

Ironically, when anthropologists become filmmakers—often toproduce images for their own ethnography—they can seem moreconcerned with the aesthetic dimension of their film than with itsscientific contents. In such cases, the movie often turns out to be alyric reflection on the anthropologist himself or herself (e.g., Breton2001, 2003), a description of the anthropologist’s relationship withthe informants (e.g., Iteanu and Kapon 2001). Such trends werecertainly inspired by Rouch’s legacy of filmic narration. Amazingly,when anthropologists become filmmakers, they seem to often loseinterest in providing an objective, intersemiotic translation, that is, atranslation of research findings from written form into images.Rather, they often concentrate their efforts on producing more sub-jective narration and place greater emphasis on the aesthetic than onthe scientific dimensions, depicting more empathetic participationthan disinterested observation. Perhaps the solution for achieving awell balanced and—as long as postmodernists would agree withthis—a more neutral visual anthropology, is to share the job throughcollaborations between anthropologists and filmmakers. That, ofcourse, does not mean that anthropologist must refrain from filming.It is best for anthropologists to strive to be as neutral as possible inmaking pictures, remembering that they are in principle scientists andnot artists, whose mandate and duty is to produce knowledge before

288 L. Brutti

beauty. Of course, if the scientific content of a film is served up in anaesthetically pleasing package, it may help anthropological dis-coveries to be assimilated more quickly and with greater pleasure by alarger audience. But such an approach to anthropological filmmakingshould not be compulsory.

WHEN INFORMANTS GET IN THE FRAME

Since visual anthropologists are currently discovering new topics—either in established visual cultural forms or in evolving uses of visualmedia—they may well redefine the terrain of anthropology. Onerecent phenomenon in visual anthropological research is the study ofpeople’s visual representations of themselves or, as FrancescoMarano (2005) calls it in his book Anni Cinquanta e Coccinelle cheVolano: Video e poetiche della memoria ethnografica [Nineteen-Fiftyand Flying Beetles: Videos and Poetics of Ethnographic Memory], theirauto-ethnography.

Marano writes about people’s use of video as a tool to describetheir own local traditions. This will likely be a permanent theme invisual anthropology, comprising not only the use of audiovisualdevices to produce ethnography, but also a research perspectiveconcerning how such productions communicate and disseminatepictures as cultural products. The evolution and spread of light videorecording equipment in recent decades has enabled an increase ofcinematic recording, not just by professional ethnographers but byeveryone else, as in the case of Basilicata, the region in Southern Italydescribed by the Marano. The inhabitants of that Italian region havebegun filming their own traditions to constitute, together with theirpublications, photographs and exhibitions, several forms of auto-ethnography whose aim is to communicate aspects of the traditionalculture of the video-makers themselves. These documents are remi-niscent of the ‘‘indigenous videos’’ or ‘‘ethnographic videos’’ studiedby Faye Ginzburg (1991). However, the Italian vernacular auto-ethnographies do not identify traits of ethnicity or manifest anta-gonism toward the dominant culture, elements that characterize filmsmade by natives of indigenous nations in Brazil, Australia, Canada,or the United States.

Moreover, contrary to the kind of reflexive filmed ethnographyrealized by Sol Worth and John Adair (1972), who gave Navajos thetraining and tools to film themselves, Marano insists that Basilicataauto-ethnographies are a completely independent initiative of localpeople. The anthropologist did not interfered with the making ofthese videos; he simply analyzed them once they were finished


(Marano 2005:9–10). Marano studied these video works as‘‘discourses,’’ comparing them with oral field data from the sameinformants. The resulting analysis is not merely the result of reflec-tion on video, but rather an attempt to describe the intertextualweave produced by these discourses in moving from one ‘‘text’’ toanother, partially produced by his presence in the field as a researcher(Marano 2005:12). Vernacular auto-ethnography raises the questionsof who should hold the authority to decide what ethnography shouldbe and on what basis. These cinematic auto-ethnographies constitutean unconscious tendency to re-materialize culture, which was reducedto ‘‘networks of meanings’’ by postmodernist anthropologists(Marano 2005:16). The dichotomy of art as creation versus science asdocumentation saturates Marano’s questions, including: What doesthe relationship between reconstructing experience and fiction mean?How should we interpret the relationship between a desire to returnto an abandoned way of life and the re-enactment necessary toshoot a true image of that way of life? Producing vernacular auto-ethnographies provides an opportunity to update relationshipnetworks, moves emphasis from social to affective engagement, andprovide lived experience with traditions (Marano 2005:35). The film’sauthenticity does not derive from the presence of a visual anthro-pologist; rather he or she shares common aims with the filmedsubjects (Marano 2005:42). But what are these aims, and what do the‘‘actors’’ playing for these video auto-ethnographies intend totransmit? An ‘‘aesthetic community,’’ Marano answers, a conceptnear to that of ‘‘social aesthetics’’ developed by David MacDougall(2006:94): a collective narration in which they inscribe their auto-biographical accounts, their life histories and their own selves(Marano 2005:45).

Marano has found a third way between art and science since heimplicitly tries to reconcile in a new frame the two different ways ofdoing visual anthropology: the classic way, embodied by MargaretMead, looking at the camera as a documentation tool, and the mostcreative and subjective way professed by filmmakers like DavidMacDougall or Jean Rouch. These two ways of doing visualanthropology are now re-appropriated by native auto-ethnographerswho put them together in very ‘‘creative’’ but not less ‘‘ethnographic’’terms, in their video works. The spontaneous question is, if autoch-thonous filmmakers are legitimated in re-creating a traditional frameto record it visually, should not also anthropologists who use thistechnique? The same reconstruction takes place in experimentalarchaeology, when researchers reconstruct forgotten techniquesby combining trial and error informed by archaeological and

290 L. Brutti

ethnographic data (see, e.g., Petrequin and Petrequin 2006). Visuallyrecreating ethnographic situations to better analyze and understandthem can be of similar value. Techniques of visual reconstruction arecommonly used by medical doctors, criminologists, and insurancecompanies.

As psychologists of the Gestalttheorie understood in the earlydecades of 19th century, to look straight at a scene and so perceive itas a whole, allows the viewer insight and helps understanding. Indocumentary films shot with the scientific advice of historians,reconstructions of battles and other historical events are frequent.When they are well done, according to the historical sources andrespecting scrupulously the context, they may sensibly help theaudience to understand and, in this sense, they are even more‘‘scientific’’ that writings, which can only solicit the reader’simagination verbally. Indeed, if reading a written account leaves roomto the subjective imagination, to witness an action—spontaneousor reconstructed—leaves much less liberty to the wandering of theaudience’s minds. An audiovisual description, if reliable to theethnographic sources, may be considered even more objective than awritten ethnography, and this especially for material culture, themain focus of Marano’s informants. In this sense, aesthetics may helpscience in furnishing a more truthful description of an ethnographiccontext. Art can help anthropology to be more sensitive.

AESTHETICS WORKING WITH SCIENCE: CONTEMPORARYART AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Anthropology, with its principle of cultural relativism, can also helpartistic interpretation through awareness of the perils of ethnocen-trism. Anthropologists can promote this by practicing a sort of‘‘auto-ethnography’’ by approaching contemporary, globalized art asa part of their common background. Anthropologists can also col-laborate with artists to achieve a common goal. The anthropology ofart has often dealt with ‘‘classic’’ periods of autochthonous art or, inother cases, with diachronical perspectives on style transformations.Rare are the attempts of anthropology and contemporary art to worktogether. Arnd Schneider and Cristopher Wright’s edited bookContemporary Art and Anthropology (2006b) begins to fill this lacuna.The essays in this book try to stimulate new dialogues between thedomains of contemporary anthropology and art and to discernendeavors that encompass both disciplines. They intend to encourageborder crossings. The aim of the editors was not ‘‘to establishcontemporary art as an object of anthropological research but to


encourage fertile collaborations and the development of alternativeshared strategies or practice on both sides of the border’’ (Schniderand Wright 2006a:1). Many of the categories involved are unstableand the editors intended to question some of the ‘‘common-sense’’assumptions about these two fields:

. . . art and anthropology are both made up of a range of diverse

practices that operate within the context of an equally complex range

of expectations and constraints. Ideas and practices of training are

one key area of differentiation between the two fields and need to becreatively refigured. . . . Even though anthropology, from the per-

spective of art, is often perceived negatively as a science, both are

disciplines in the sense of having canons and practices (however

loosely defined), accepted histories (although these are frequently

disputed and rewritten), and their own academies and institutions. Art

and anthropology have both been active in criticizing and existing at

their own boundaries, but they still involve broadly defined ways of

working, regular spaces of exhibition, and sets of expectations.[Schneider and Wright 2006a:2]

Both disciplines share specific questions, areas of investigationand, increasingly, methodologies, and there is growing recognitionand acceptance of these areas of overlap.

[C]onnections between the two disciplines have become relevant andproblematic, with the so called ‘ethnographic turn’ of contemporary

art. This has involved, amongst other things, the adoption of a broad

definition of ethnography, and the production of an increasing num-

ber of works that directly take some of the concerns in anthropology.

From the perspective of contemporary anthropology, the development

of DVD and other audiovisual digital technologies has raised the

possibilities of an enhanced audiovisual practice in anthropology.

This would seem to usher in a new period of creative potential forcontemporary anthropology, but, if this is to be a reflexive practice

transcending any art=science dichotomy and involve more than the

production of illustrated multimedia ‘texts’, there needs to be a new

approach to images and creativity in anthropology. [Schneider and

Wright 2006a:3]

However, one would question, to debate with the editors, whythey see the production of a multimedia text as limiting. The great

292 L. Brutti

revolution of digital media enables scientifically oriented anthro-pologists to respond to postmodern critics of ethnographic descrip-tion who make reflexivity the object, rather than a method ofethnography, since today it is easy and cheap for ethnographers touse digital audiovisual devices in the field. Of course, a picture or avideo does not confer universal objective reality to an ethnographicdatum. Nevertheless, it certainly records and communicates certainethnographic facts with greater fidelity than a written text can.However, ‘‘anthropologists frequently find it hard to appreciate theaesthetics and the effects of film in their own right’’ (Schneider andWright 2006a:6) or simply are not concerned with aesthetics, I wouldadd, in the sense of what Alfred Gell (1992) probably meant when hewrote that anthropologists would not succumb to the enchantment ofart (Schneider and Wright 2006a:8). The separation of cinema andanthropology, for example, is the splitting of an exogamic union,begun the early twentieth century but separated into ‘‘scientificethnography’’ based on ‘‘objective observation’’ and ‘‘documentaryfilm’’ based on ‘‘subjective agency’’ by the 1930s. This division was ofdeep consequence for ethnographic fieldwork strategies (Schneiderand Wright 2006:22).

Even though, Schneider and Wright (2006:8) point out, confirmedmasters like David MacDougall develop ‘‘a practice that may need todefine itself not at all in terms of written anthropology but as analternative to it, as a quite different way of knowing relatedphenomena . . . , in fact he describes his own recent work as becomingmore an ‘art practice.’’’ It is still hard to find positions in anthro-pology with a Ph.D. and scientific productions in the form of merepictures and sounds without written texts. Furthermore, ‘‘althoughvisual anthropologists have repeatedly called for the development ofnew forms of practice, there is still reluctance to deal with thoseaspects that have been relegated to the realm of the aesthetic, and aretherefore considered to be the concern of art, art history, or theanthropology of art’’ (Schneider and Wright 2006:9).

One of Schneider and Wright’s main arguments is that anthro-pology’s iconophobia and self-imposed restriction of visualexpression to text based models needs to be overcome by a criticalengagement with a range of material and sensual practices in the artsbecause, they assume, that this kind of work is better able to ‘‘engageus bodily’’ (Schneider and Wright 2006a:5). Schneider and Wright(2006a:12) cite Paul Stoller (1989:xv–xvi) as arguing that

‘‘. . . it is representationally as well as analytically important to con-

sidered how perception in non western societies devolves not simply


from vision . . . but also from smell, touch, taste and hearing so

anthropology must include an active exploration of senses other than

vision, which has been considered the restricted domain of visual

anthropology.’’

The problem with this argument is that we cannot demand theheuristically autochthonous ‘‘political correct’’ while simultaneouslycomplaining about the lack of academic positions in anthropology.Rather, we must admit that since anthropology is a scientific disciplinewith Western origins, it has been applied, developed, and diffused inthe form favored in the Western academic tradition, namely writing.This is the reality, even though privileging the literate may lookethnocentric to some, and the variety of sensual experience involved infieldwork normally disappears from anthropological writing.

A further analogy between the artist and the anthropologist ispresented by J. Kosuth (1993), who envisions the artist as a model ofthe anthropologist engaged. Schneider and Wright (2006a:24) explainthis position as follows.

Artists are ‘engaged’ as opposed to the ‘dis-engagement’ of the

anthropologists who are concerned with maintaining the ‘objective’

distance of scientists. Because the anthropologist is outside of the

culture that he studies, he is not a part of the community. . . . Whereas

the artist, as anthropologist, is operating within the same socio-

cultural context from which he evolved. He is totally immersed and

has a social impact. His activities embody the culture.

However, one would argue, Western artists have never been so faras they are today from their culture or at least from their audiences.Let me choose an example of a classic artist: when Giotto di Bondone(1266=67–1337) painted the ceiling of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua,he was doubly close to his audiences. First, he was close to thesophisticated audience of the elite (often his sponsors as well) whowere able to discern his genius in inventing rules of perspective rules.Second, he was close to his popular audience for whom he wasdepicting a simple version of stories taken from the Bible. By con-trast, works of current artists are often totally incomprehensible totheir large audiences and they are appreciated (and bought) by arestricted audience more on the basis of a fashion phenomenonengendered by oriented art critics than on a sharing of commoncultural representations of world and art.

294 L. Brutti

The works of current artists by Bill Viola (Schneider and Wright2006:16, 17) or Anselm Kiefer (Schneider and Wright 2006:4–6), seemvery far from both audiences and inspired more by the artists’subjective biographies than by their cultural backgrounds. Nor are allanthropologists disengaged. Especially in their native countries, thereare many examples of anthropologists who step outside their aca-demic career paths and take on additional responsibilities defendingthe people they study and others. Nevertheless, I agree withSchneinder and Wright’s (2006a:25) core point that ‘‘the ways inwhich anthropologists and artists work, make and exhibit should beexplored for their productive possibilities in developing new strategiesof representation.’’ The book is indeed dense with rich contributionson the parallelism between contemporary artists and anthropologists.Let us expose some of them.

Arnd Schneider’s chapter focuses on the nature of appropriationas a defining characteristic of the relationship between contempor-ary art and anthropology, and of the ways in which they bothengage with cultural difference (Schneider 2006:29). The authordemonstrates that ‘‘the process of appropriation is fundamental toexchange between cultures and to cultural exchange’’ and this is‘‘because a recognition of otherness lies at the bottom of anyappropriation, anthropological or artistic’’ (Schneider 2006:48).After all, Schneider says, ‘‘others represents themselves towardsus (artists or anthropologists) not just as inanimate objects butas living subjects or communities of subjects who will voice polit-ical, economic, and cultural claims over the symbolical her-itage . . . current discussions about cultural property are a reflectionof these ongoing claims or struggles over representation and power’’since ‘‘the adaptation of anthropological information and practiceof artistic appropriation does not occur in a vacuum but is alwayssituated in an historical context of different economic, social, andcultural power relations’’ (Schneider 2006:49). Schneider reaches hismain relevant point when arguing that ‘‘as there are no ‘originals’ inart, so there are no fixed ethnic, racial, or national categories—butonly different claims to these by groups and individuals. In someinstances ‘roots’ might be constructed quite independently fromgenealogical descent, and be informed instead by an insistence oncultural heritage’’ (Schneider 2006:49).

Suzanne Kuchler (2006) confronts herself with an elegant reflec-tion on art and agency focused on the mathematics and art ofknot-sculpture. Kuchler analyzes the works of American sculptorBrent Collins and European sculptor John Robinson and discussesthe ‘‘potential impact of a particularly prominent example of


contemporary ‘mathematical’ art upon an anthropological approachto artworks’’ (Kuchler 2006:83). Science, she writes,

‘‘backed by computer-generated forms, has merged with art in ways

that are most explicit in these sculptural renderings of knot-spanning

surfaces. Besides the many critical points that might spring to mind,

the merger of the for-centuries distinct realms of science and art might

have an unsuspected positive impact upon anthropology by freeing it

to reconsider figurative geometric and decorative artworks in other

than aesthetic terms.’’ (Kuchler 2006:94)

She concludes by saying that Gell’s (1992) call to tackle the agencyinherent in art has yet to be answered.

In an essay co-written by theatrical artist Fernando Caldazilla andGeorge Marcus, the authors lament that experiments with aestheticissues and textual forms have not become a regular feature of recentanthropological works. In this sense, Caldazilla and Marcus evokethe collaboration between Caldazilla and Abdel Hernandez, aVenezuelan scenographer who became engaged ‘‘with the challengeof producing an ethnographically influenced installation of a mar-ketplace—so diffuse and fluid in the human action it encompasses, socomplexly polyphonous in the voices that define it as a place’’(Caldazilla and Marcus 2006:97). They proposed to present theresults of this workshop in a multimedia course and group of exhi-bitions and performances at the Department of Anthropology at RiceUniversity. The set of public lectures and departmental seminars withAbdel Hern�aandez ‘‘turned out to be a disappointment for theanthropologists, because they had expected them to be more likeperformances (entertainments even) and they felt more didactic andscholastic to them—just more of the same’’ (Caldazilla and Marcus2006:114). Their frank conclusion clearly exemplifies the wholerelationship between anthropologists and contemporary artists whenthey exclaim, ‘‘how mysterious sustained cross-cultural encountersremain, even among people who believe they share an intellectualagenda and a common set of issues’’ (Caldazilla and Marcus2006:114).

Elizabeth Edwards (2006) analyzes the work of Mohini Chandranot simply as ‘‘an idiosyncratic articulation of fragments of methodand concept’’ but as a ‘‘a carefully formulated response andtranslation of field data. It functions like a contemporary ethno-graphic monograph, translating and extrapolating general under-standing from explicit individual observation and experience

296 L. Brutti

through a conscious subject positioning of the author (Edwards2006:156).

Jonathan Friedman’s essay on collection inspired by the work ofartist Carlos Capel�aan is an interesting piece of anthropological cri-tique. The anthropologist, says Friedman (2006:169), ‘‘has and still issomewhat blind to the activity of collection. In fact much recentanthropology has become increasingly ensconced in precisely thegenealogical mode, one that seeks to identify objects by tracing theirorigins.’’ Friedman argues that Capel�aan is doing something special inhis art: ‘‘he is paralleling and parodying the anthropological project,the project of collection of the other: here is his humour but also oneof the powers of this artistic production’’ (Friedman 2006:174).‘‘Capel�aan’s constructions,’’ Friedman (2006:175) says, ‘‘are concretespatial forms within which we move. They are anthropological spacesas well, spaces of the collection of the world, the localization of theglobal.’’ Friedman concludes that

‘‘some anthropologists of a globalizing persuasion might tend today to

deny that there are different experiential worlds but this is not the aim

of Capel�aan. To deny the real differences in experiential worlds is the

ultimate imperialist act, as Sahlins has suggested in another context,

since in the name of globalization it denies to others theirs specificities

even if they do it with Coke. No real artist could ever confuse the issues,

only anthropologists and other academics.’’ (Friedman 2006:176).

The final chapter by Nicholas Thomas (2006) is ‘‘The Case ofTattooing,’’ which draws our attention to a ‘‘familiar theoreticalimpasse and a chronic source of anthropological anxiety’’ inspired byFoster’s (1996) essay ‘‘The Artist as Ethnographer.’’ Foster ‘‘pre-sumes that the discipline is constituted around the object of the other,and that it works on what he calls the horizontal axis, in engagingwith institutions and communities at particular times, rather verti-cally and historically’’ (Thomas 2006:178). However, Thomas argues,‘‘historical anthropology, which has come to be particularly con-cerned with colonialism, and with the shaping of both European andnon-European cultures from the early phases of the colonial age up tothe present, is not a science of the other. It has been consistentlyconcerned with the relations between selves and the others’’ (Thomas2006:178). In the same sense the author asks,

is the representation of tattooed skin inherently pernicious? Are

scholars, artists and photographers . . . refreshing the appetites of a


European audience addicted to dehumanizing, exotic spectacle?

Obviously, those whose body parts are trafficked in, displayed and

reproduced are in no sense authors of their own objectifications. We

must acknowledge, however, that tattooed people who are, so to

speak, caught alive, are more or less willing partners of the sideshow

voyeur, the image maker, or the viewer. What looks like an objectifi-cation may also be an expression of a tattooed person’s agency, if that

person has commissioned a photograph or produced a self-portrait.

[Thomas 2006:180]

Thomas (2006:181) explains that his point is that disembodiment isnot intrinsically a colonialist operation. Tattooing, according toThomas, is

an activity that dealt knowingly with cultural difference; it had long

been modified for application to other Polynesians, and had from an

early stage in colonial history been made available in a kind of sou-

venir form to mariners whose bodies carried emblems of their many

ports and voyages. Neither the ethnographer’s art nor the art’s eth-

nography discover a ‘custom’ that is itself innocent of ethnography;

we find that the tattooist has got there first, if our object is the makingof alterity.’’ [Thomas 2006:189]

CONCLUSION

Behind diatribes on aesthetic versus scientific approaches in anthro-pological filmmaking and writing, it seems that restoring neutralityand strong content may help in rebuilding visual anthropology in thebroader frame of anthropological theory. That will help to inject newstrength in the discipline after almost thirty years of postmodernistweakness. The great force of visual documentation of cultures, asdocumentary film producers well know, is that they get better as theyget older; they increase in value with age, like a good wine. Soperhaps visual anthropologists should rediscover the capacity oftheir cameras to record and fix an historical moment. In this senseaudiovisual documents are as useful, and maybe more so, thanwritten accounts.

Finally, we may wonder, is the Manichean way inevitable? Shouldwe necessarily split visual anthropologists’ practice—artistic andapplied—from their use of cameras as research and archival tools?

298 L. Brutti

Can we escape from this conservative versus innovative dichotomyand imagine a multi-sided visual anthropology, acting alternatively inboth ways according to the context, and in so doing mixing aestheticsand sciences so that visual anthropology might take benefit fromboth approaches? That could be a third way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer my sincere thanks to the peer reviewers for their extremelyvaluable remarks. A special acknowledgment to the editor-in-chief,Roger Ivar Lohmann, for his deep competence, his elegant kindness,and his enormous patience.

REFERENCES CITED

Annaud, Jean-Jacques, dir.

1986 The Name of the Rose. 130 minutes. Christalidifilm.

Balmes, Thomas, dir.

1999 L’evangile selon les Papous. Lorenzo Brutti, anthropological advisor.

2000 En attendant Jesus. Lorenzo Brutti, anthropological advisor.

Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds.

1997 Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Breton, Stephane, dir.

2001 Eux et moi.

2003 Le ciel dans un jardin.

Caldazilla, Fernando, and George Marcus

2006 Artists in the Field: Between Art and Anthropology. In Schneider, and

Wright, eds. Pp. 95–115.

Descola, Philippe

1994 In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Dunlop, Ian, dir.

1972 Towards Baruya Manhood. Maurice Godelier, conseiller scientifique.

Eco, Umberto

1980 Il nome della Rosa. Bompiani.

2007[2003] Dire Presque la meme Chose. Experiences de Traduction. Paris:

Grasset.

Edwards, Elizabeth

2006 Travels in a New World: Work around a Diasporic Theme by Mohini

Chandra. In Schneider, and Wright, eds. Pp. 147–156.

Feld, Steven

1982 Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli

Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

2001 Rainforest Soundwalks: Ambiences of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea [audio

compact disc]. Santa Fe: EarthEar.


Feld, Steven, ed.

2003 Cine-Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso, eds.

1996 Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Foster, Hal

1996 The Return of the Real: Critical Models of Art and Theory since 1960.

Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Friedman, Jonathan

2006 Carlos Capelan: Our Modernity, not Theirs. In Schneider, and Wright, eds.

Pp. 169–176.

Fulchignoni, Enrico

2003 Cine-Anthropology. In Feld, ed. Pp. 147–187.

Gardner, Robert, dir.

1964 Dead Birds. Karl Heider, anthropological advisor.

Gell, Alfred

1992 The Enchantment of Technology and the Technology of the Enchantment.

In Anthropology, Arts and Aesthetics. J. Coote, and A. Shelton, eds. Pp. 40–63.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1998 Art Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Georgakas, Dan, Udayan Gupta, and Judy Ganda

2003 The Politics of Visual Anthropology. In Feld, ed. Pp. 210–225.

Ginzburg, Faye

1991 Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village? Cultural

Anthropology 6(1):92–112.

Iteanu, Andre and Eytan Kapon, dirs.

2001 Lettres aux morts.

Jablonko, Allison, and Marek, dirs.

1982 Son nom est venu avec les fleches. Maurice Godelier, anthropological advisor.

Jordan, Pierre

1992 Cinema, Cinema, Kino. Collection Premier Contacts, Premier Regards—

First Contact, First Look—Erster Kontaxt, Erster Blick. Marseille: Musee de

Marseille—Images en manoeuvres editions.

Kildea, Gary, dir.

1976 Trobriand Cricket. Jerry Leach, anthropological advisor.

Kosuth, Joseph

1993 Art after Philosophy and After: Selected Writings. Cambridge, MA:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Kuchler, Suzanne

2006 Reflections on Art and Agency: Knot-Sculpture between Mathmatics and

Art. In Schneider, and Wright, eds. Pp. 85–94.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

1955 Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon.

MacDougall, David

1998 Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2006 The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

300 L. Brutti

Marano, Francesco

2005 Anni Cinquanta e Coccinelle Che Volano: Video e Poetiche della Memoria

Etnografica. Nardo, Italy: Besa Editrice.

Marshall, John, and John W. Adams

2003 Les maıtres fous, The Lion Hunters, and Jaguar. In Feld, ed. Pp. 188–209.

Morin Edgar

2003 Chronicle of a Film. In Feld, ed. Pp. 229–265.

Nairn, Charlie, dir.

1974 Ongka’s Big Moka: The Kawelka of Papua New Guinea. Andrew

Strathern, anthropological advisor.

Petrequin, Pierre, and Anne-Marie

2006 Objets de pouvoir en Nouvelle Guinee. Paris: Reunion des Musees

Nationaux.

Rouch, Jean

2003a The Camera and Man. In Feld, ed. Pp. 29–46.

2003b The Situation and Tendencies of the Cinema in Africa. In Feld, ed.

Pp. 47–86.

2003c On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the

Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer. In Feld, ed. Pp. 87–101.

2003d The Mad Fox and the Pale Master. In Feld, ed. Pp. 102–126.

2003e The Cinema of the Future. In Feld, ed. Pp. 266–273.

Rouch, Jean, dir.

1955 Les maıtres fous. 28 min. Les Films de la Pleiade. Paris.

Rouch, Jean and Edgar Morin, dirs.

1961 Chronique d’un ete. 86 min. Argos Film. Paris.

2003a Chronicle of a Summer [transcript]. In Feld, ed. Pp. 274–329.

2003b The Point of View of ‘‘Characters.’’ In Feld, ed. Pp. 330–342.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

1755 Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements des inegalites Parmi les

Hommes. Amsterdam: M. M. Rey.

Schneider, Arnd

2006 Appropriations. In Schneider, and Wright, eds. Pp. 29–51.

Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright

2006a The Challenge of Practice. In Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright,

eds. Pp. 1–27.

Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds.

2006b Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg.

Stoller, Paul

1989 The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Taylor, Lucien

2003 A Life on the Edge of Film and Anthropology. In Feld, ed. Pp. 129–146.

Thomas, Nicolas

2006 The Case of Tattoing. In Schneider, and Wright, eds. Pp. 177–189.

Worth, Sol, and John Adair, eds.

1972 Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and

Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.


Visual Anthropology 1

Documents

coccinelle

les matres

aesthetics

french ethnographic

princeton

ethnographic

pennsylvania

ethnographic