The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses

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widijanto judono e-Library collection - widijanto.wordpress.com Interdisciplinary agendas 27 Figure 2.2 A strip for Plate 91: Exhumation II from Bateson and Mead’s Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942: 236–7). © 1942, New York Academy of the Sciences.
widijanto judono e-Library collection - widijanto.wordpress.com 28 Engaging the visual Balinese Character depicting ‘ritual self-wounding … the disinterring of corpses for ceremonial purposes … and a dog consuming the faeces emerging from a crawling infant’. They suggest such uses of photography are a strategy of giving readers ‘a feel for the kind of society they are dealing with’ in a context of a colonial discourse that allowed anthropologists to represent their objects with little fear of censure from those depicted. Moreover, ‘[d]istance in terms of geography, culture and race allowed the ethnographic photograph to be positioned as a neutral and scientific document rather than as pornographic or voyeuristic, exploitative or potentially corrupting’. In particular they note close-up pictures of naked Nuer women and men that reveal their genitalia in Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) work (Emmison and Smith 2000: 15). Emmison and Smith’s critique is not totally misguided, but neither is it completely new. In fact more sophisticated critiques of the visual discourses of colonial photography (that they do not cite) had already been developed within visual anthropology (for example Edwards 1992, 1997). In his (1990) discussion of Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer photographs, Hutnyk also noted how one image shows two full-frontal nude males, to suggest that ‘These anonymously foregrounded natives are species “Nuer” undifferentiated, ready for comparison’ (1990: 90). Hutnyk demonstrates how this use of photographs sets up a set of general types of Nuer – man, boy, youth, and so on (1990: 90–1) – thus photographically creating ‘a simple model of a complex entity’ which can easily be used for comparison, and using captions that employ ‘the symbols of colonial and anthropological lumpen categorization’ with labels such as ‘boy’ and the ‘contextual racism’ that the term carries (1990: 95). The critiques on which Emmison and Smith base their rejection of visual anthropology have already been made. Moreover, as Loizos has already demonstrated in his response to Nichols’ (1991) comparison of pornography and ethnography, the analogy just does not work (Loizos 1993: 206–7). However, as developed from within anthropology, the existing critiques have, unlike Emmison and Smith’s commentary, not stopped at criticism, but have been incorporated as a point of departure and basis for exploring how appropriate photographic representations of other cultures should be produced, both by anthropologists and in collaborative projects with local people and by indigenous photographers. A good example of collaboration between anthropologists and photographers that has developed critical responses to these approaches using visual media is the Visible Evidence (1995) project developed by the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Photographers’ Gallery. Ignoring the many recent developments of this kind, Emmison and Smith disregard any work that has been done after 1942 and fail to situate the work of Bateson and Mead and Evans-Pritchard either historically or theoretically. Effectively they write off anthropology’s claim to be a reflexive ethical visual discipline without engaging with the last 60 years of its development and self-critique, or with the fact that much anthropology is now done either ‘at home’ and/or by anthropologists who are themselves not from modern western cultures (see Moore 1999a). One of the key problems with the critiques of anthropology directed through discussions of Flaherty, Bateson and Mead and Evans-Pritchard is their failure to
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The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses

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