An Excess oJ Bescviplion ElInogvapI, Bace, and VisuaI TecInoIogies

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Souvce AnnuaI Beviev oJ AnlIvopoIog, VoI. 34 |2005), pp. 159-179
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An Excess of
Description:
Ethnography,
Race,
and
Visual
Technologies
Deborah Poole
Department
of
Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
21218;
email:
dpoole@jhu.edu
Annu. Rev.
Anthropol.
2005. 34:159-79
The Annual Review
of
Anthropology
is online at
anthro.annualreviews.org
doi: 10.1146/
annurev.anthro. 3 3.070203.144034
Copyright
2005
by
Annual Reviews. All
rights
reserved
0084-6570/05/1021
0159$20.00
Key
Words
photography,
visual
anthropology, temporality,
archive,
ethnography
Abstract
This
essay provides
an overview of recent
anthropological
work on
the
relationship
between racial
thought
and the visual
technologies
of
photography
and film. I
argue
that
anthropologists
have moved
away
from a concern with
representation per
se in favor of the more
complex
discursive and
political landscapes opened up by
the con
cepts
of media and the archive.
My
review of this work focuses on the
affective
register
of
suspicion
that has surrounded both visual meth
ods and the idea of race in
anthropology.
Whereas this
suspicion
has led some to dismiss visual
technologies
as
inherently
racializ
ing
or
objectifying,
I
argue
that it is
possible
to reclaim
suspicion
as a
productive
site for
rethinking
the
particular
forms of
presence,
uncertainty,
and
contingency
that characterize both
ethnographic
and visual accounts of the world. I
begin by discussing
recent work
on the
photographic
archive, early
fieldwork
photography,
and the
subsequent
move in the 1960s and 1970s from still
photography
to
film and video within the
emergent
subfield of visual
anthropology.
Finally,
I consider how more recent work on the
problem
of race in
favor of
descriptive
accounts of
mediascapes.
159
Contents
INTRODUCTION. 160
THE ARCHIVE. 161
EXCESS AND CONTEXT. 163
Contingency.
164
PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD. 165
Culture at a Distance. 168
NOTICING DIFFERENCE. 171
INTRODUCTION
Anthropological
work on race and vision has
proliferated
in conversation in recent
years
with a
yet
broader visual turn in the fields
of critical
theory
and
philosophy
(Brennan
&
Jay
1996;
Crary
1990;
Debord
1987;
Foucault
1973, 1977;
Jay
1994;
Mitchell
1980, 1986;
Rorty 1979).
Theories of
language,
discourse,
and
representation developed
in these sis
ter
disciplines
led
many
scholars to
ques
tion traditional
anthropological
distinctions
between culture and race insofar as both
of these
languages
for
theorizing
social dif
ference have led to talk about essentialized
or
biologized
identities and boundaries
(e.g.,
Michaels
1995;
Said
1978, 1993).
Yet others
from within the
discipline
itself leveled the
more inclusive
charge
that the visualism in
herent to
ethnographic
modes of
description
and
writing
led to the
reification, racialization,
and
temporal distancing
of the
people
whom
anthropologists study (Clifford
& Marcus
1986,
Fabian
1983).
This
charge
was fueled
by
the
parallel
histories,
as well as the
pre
sumed
homology,
between racialism and an
thropology
as
interpretive projects grounded
in
Enlightenment
ideals of
description
and
discovery.
Thus,
it was
reasoned,
if race is
about
finding classificatory
order and mean
ing
underneath
(or within)
the visible sur
face of the
world,
then
similarly ethnography
was about the
discovery
of cultural and moral
worlds
through
the observation of embodied
behaviors and beliefs. In both
cases,
the ob
served surface of the world whether com
posed
of skin colors or ritual behaviors was
presumed
to
contain,
as if concealed within
it, another,
more abstract order of
meaning,
which was the
ethnographer's
task to reveal.
The native was thus constituted as
object
through
a
perceptual
act that both emanated
from
and,
in so
doing,
constituted the ethno
grapher
as a
reasoned,
thinking subject.
Al
though
these claims were
easily
leveled at
many ethnographic
endeavors of the
past,
what is
distressing
about at least some of the
post-Orientalist critique,
is
that,
by
confin
ing visuality
itself within the directional di
alectic of a Cartesian
metaphysics, they
left
little room for
thinking
about
other,
alter
native scenarios in which
vision,
technology,
and difference
might
be
differently
related
(Benjamin
1999;
Buck-Morss
1989;
Connolly
2002;
Deleuze
1985, 1994;
Jay
1988;
Levin
1999).
This review takes this dilemma as a start
ing point
for
revisiting
some recent as well
as some not so recent work on the relation
ship
between
race, vision,
photography,
and
ethnography.
In
exploring
this
literature,
I ask
how the idea of race has
shaped
the affec
tive
register
of
suspicion
with which anthro
pologists
have tended to
greet photography,
film,
and other visual
technologies. By
focus
ing
on
suspicion,
I
hope
to shift the burden
of criticism
away
from the usual conclusions
about how race has
shaped
the
way
we see the
world,
and how visual
technologies
have,
in
turn,
shaped
the
very
notion of race.
Although
interesting
and
important,
the recent
prolifer
ation of
anthropological writing
on
questions
of
race,
representation, photography,
and film
suggests
that these
are,
by
now,
familiar
argu
ments. As
such,
the
ostensibly
critical account
these studies of
anthropology provide
would
seem to have run its course in that
they
du
plicate
the same sort of
descriptive
or norma
tive force we have so
convincingly assigned
to
photography
as a
technology
that is
produc
tive of racial ideas and orders. This
descriptive
plentitude
comes at the
expense
of
silencing
the
capacity
of both
ethnography
and
photog
raphy
to unsettle our accounts of the world.
16o Poole
Rather than
dwelling
on the
ordering
ef
fects of visual
representations, then,
in this
review I look more
closely
at the
productive
possibilities
that visual
technologies
offer for
reclaiming
the
uncertainty
and
contingency
that characterize
anthropological
accounts of
the world. This
potential
is unleashed
pre
cisely
because of the
ambiguous
role
played
by
visual
images
in the
disciplinary struggle
first to
identify,
and then later to
avoid,
the
idea of race as that which can be seen and de
scribed. I make no
attempt
to review all the
work that has been done on either race or vi
suality
in recent
years.
In
particular,
I have not
considered the numerous studies that address
visual
images
of "others"
exclusively
in terms
of their content as
representations,
stereo
types,
or
misrepresentations. Rather, my par
ticular interest is to understand how the forms
of
suspicion
that surround visual
representa
tions and race have
shaped anthropological
understandings
of
evidence, experience,
the
limits of
ethnographic inquiry,
and,
as a con
sequence,
our own
ongoing engagement
with
ethnographic
method and
description.
I first consider how
anthropologists
who
both collected and made
photographs
in the
nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries rec
onciled
disciplinary
norms of evidence and
evolutionary
models of race with the
peculiar
temporality
of the
photograph.
The
experi
ence of these
anthropologists
is
particularly
revealing
in that it coincides with a
period
in which
anthropology
moved from the en
thusiastic
pursuit
of racial order to an al
most
equally
fervent
rejection
of the
very
idea
of race. The
suspicion
with which
photogra
phy
was
greeted by anthropologists
thus ran
the
gamut
from an
empiricist
concern with
deception (i.e.,
a concern for the
accuracy
with which
photographs represented
a "racial
fact")
to worries about the
inability
of
pho
tography
to
capture
the
intangibles
of culture
and social
organization.
I then
explore
work
that falls
self-consciously
within the subfield
of visual
anthropology
that
emerged
in the
1960s and 1970s in reaction to this concern
with the distinctive
dangers
and
promises
of visual
technologies. Although early
work
in visual
anthropology
was
explicitly
con
cerned about
countering
the notion that vi
sual
representations necessarily
constituted an
exploitative
and/or
racializing expropriation
of the
indigenous subject,
more recent work
on
indigenous
media
displaces
discussion of
race with theories of
ethnicity
and
identity
formation.
Finally,
I close with some reflec
tions on what these recent histories of visual
technologies
and race can offer for rethink
ing visuality,
encounter,
and difference in
ethnography.
THE ARCHIVE
Much like their
nineteenth-century predeces
sors,
anthropologists
who have returned to
the
photographic
archive have been
largely
concerned with
finding
some sort of or
der,
or
logic,
within the sometimes enor
mous and
richly
diverse collections
they
en
counter. Institutional collections such as those
held
by
the Smithsonian
(Scherer 1973),
the
Royal Anthropological
Institute
(Pinney
1992,
Poignant
1992),
The American Mu
seum of Natural
History (Jacknis 1992),
or
Harvard's
Peabody
Museum
(Banta
&
Hinsley
1986)
have been examined in an
attempt
to
uncover the theoretical
(and political)
in
terests of the
anthropologists
who collected
them. Other much less studied collections
for
example,
the
George
Eastman House in
Rochester,
New
York,
the
Royal Geographic
Society
in
London,
or the
magnificent
hold
ings
at France's National
Library
were
put
together
over
longer periods
of
time,
with
less
academically
coherent
agendas,
and with
personnel
and
budgets
that were often
very
much on the
margins
of the
anthropologi
cal
academy. Although
less
revealing
of the
specific ways
in which
early anthropologists
looked at
photography,
these collections offer
insight
into the
importance
of
photography
and other visual
technologies
in the con
versations that took
place
between anthro
pological,
administrative,
governmental,
and
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess
of Description
161
"popular"
ideas of race
(e.g.,
Alvarado et al.
2002,
Graham-Brown
1988).
A focus on the archive and
practices
of
collecting displaces
the
analytics
of race
away
from the search for
"meanings"
and the anal
ysis
of
image
content,
in favor of a focus
on the movement of
images through
differ
ent
institutional,
regional,
and cultural sites.
In
my
own work on
nineteenth-century
An
dean
photography (Poole 1997),
for
example,
I looked at the circulation of
anthropologi
cal
photographs
as
part
of a broader visual
economy
in which
images
of Andean
peoples
were
produced
and circulated
internationally.
By broadening
the social fields
through
which
photographs
circulate and accrue
"meaning"
or
value,
I
argued
for the
privileged
role
played by photography
in the
crafting
of a
racial common sense
which,
as in the Grams
cian
understanding
of the
term,
unites
"pop
ular" and "scientific"
understandings
of em
bodied difference
(Poole 1997, 2004).
Whereas
my
more Foucauldian
approach
used circulation to
argue
for an
expansion
of
the
anthropological
archive,
Edwards
(2001)
argues
that a focus on movement "breaks
down" the archive "into
smaller,
more dif
ferentiated and
complex
acts of
anthropolog
ical intention"
(2001, p. 29).
She concludes
that the informal networks and
"collecting
clubs"
through
which British
anthropologists
such as
Tylor,
Haddon,
and Balfour
exchanged
and shared
photographs
led to a
"privileg
ing
of content over form" in the
production
of
anthropological interpretations
of race. As
a
product
of the
comparative methodologies
and
exchange practices (or "flows") through
which
photographs
were rendered as "data"
in
anthropology,
the
concept
of race
emerges
as an abstraction
produced by
the archive as
a
technological
form. Such a move to re
frame the archive as itself a visual technol
ogy
takes us a
long way
from
early
studies
in which the
"meaning"
of
particular photo
graphic images
was
interpreted
as
being
a re
flection,
or
"expression,"
of racial and colo
nial
ideologies
formed
elsewhere,
outside the
archive.
Edwards'
approach
to the
photographic
archive as a series of "microintentions" rather
than as the reflection of a
"universalizing
de
sire"
(2001, p. 7)
also raises
important ques
tions
concerning
where we locate the
politics
of colonialism in the
study
of racial
photogra
phy.
An initial and
motivating question
for
much of this
photographic history
concerned
the
political
involvements of
anthropologists
in the colonial
project
and the racial technolo
gies
of colonialism. Not
surprising,
in these
studies we find that Victorian
anthropologists
tended to concentrate their efforts
on collect
ing photographs
from India and other British
colonies
(Gordon 1997,
Pinney 1992);
French
ethnologists
accumulated
images
of
Algeri
ans
(Prochaska 1990);
and U.S.-based anthro
pologists sought images
that could
complete
their
inventory
of Native American
"types"
(Bernardin
& Graulich
2003,
Blackman
1981,
Bush & Mitchell
1994,
Faris
1996,
Gidley
2003).
What becomes clear is that this corre
spondence
between the
subject
matter found
in the
anthropological
archive and the
impe
rial
politics
of
particular
nation states owed
as much to the
contemporary
methodolo
gies
of
anthropological
research as it did to
the
overtly
colonialist
sympathies
of these
early practitioners
of
anthropology.
With few
exceptions, nineteenth-century anthropolo
gists practiced
an
"epistolary ethnography"
(Stocking
1995, p. 16)
in which data was ob
tained not
through
direct
observation,
but
rather
through correspondence
with the
gov
ernment
officials, missionaries,
and
sundry
agents
of commerce and colonialism who had
had the occasion to
acquire
firsthand knowl
edge (or
at least scattered
observations)
of na
tives in
far-flung places.
For these anthro
pologists, photographic technology
"closed
the
space
between the site of observation
on the colonial
periphery
and the site of
metropolitan interpretation" (Edwards 2001,
pp. 31-32).
At the same
time,
as Edwards
(2 001, pp.
3
8,
133), Poignant (1992), Pinney (1992, 1997),
and others
point
out,
anthropologists
were
not
naively accepting
of the much-lauded
I 2 Poole
"transparency"
or
"objectivity"
of
pho
tographs.
Indeed,
the value
they assigned
to
photographs
as scientific evidence was inti
mately
related to the forms of
exchange,
accu
mulation, and,
above
all,
comparison, through
which mute
photographs
could be made to
produce
the
general
laws,
statistical
regular
ities and the
systemic predictions
of evolu
tionary,
and
ethnological "theory."
Of
par
ticular
importance
here was the
genre
of the
"type" photograph
studied
by
Edwards
(1990,
2001), Pinney (1992, 1997), Poignant (1992),
Poole
(1997),
and others. The
classificatory
conceit of
type
allowed
images
of individ
ual bodies to be read not in reference to
the
place,
time, context,
or individual hu
man
being portrayed
in each
photograph,
but
rather as self-contained
exemplars
of ideal
ized racial
categories
with no
single
referent in
the world. In other
words,
photographs
were
not read
by anthropologists
as evidence of
facts that could be
independently
observed.
Rather,
as if in
response
to an
increasing
awareness of the almost infinite
variety
of hu
man behaviors and
appearances, photographs
themselves came to constitute the facts
of
anthropology (Edwards 2001,
Poignant
1992).
EXCESS AND CONTEXT
As almost
everyone
who has studied the
history
of
anthropological photography
has
been
quick
to
point
out,
the mid-nineteenth
century anthropological
romance with
pho
tography
was fueled in
important ways by
a
desire for
coherence, accuracy,
and
comple
tion. It was
also, however,
plagued
almost
from the
beginning by
a certain nervous
ness about both the excessive detail and the
temporal contingencies
of the
photographic
prints
that
began
to
pile up
around the anthro
pologist's
once
comfortably
distant armchair.
In her
study
of the
photographic
archives
at the
Royal Anthropological
Institute
(RAI),
Poignant
charts the subtle faultlines
through
which British
anthropologists
came to tem
per
their initial fascination with the evidential
power
of the
photographic image
as "facts in
themselves"
(Poignant
1992, p. 44).
The RAI
archive was founded on the basis of collec
tions from the
Anti-Slavery
and
Aborigines'
Protection Societies
(Pinney
1992,
Poignant
1992). Photographs
collected for these
early
societies often relied on such common artistic
conventions as the
portrait vignette, through
which the "native"
subject
could be made
to
look,
as it
were,
more human and more
needy. During
the
1880s, however,
the an
thropologists charged
with
making
sense of
the RAI's new endeavor became
increasingly
concerned to
discipline
the sorts of
poses,
framings,
and
settings
in which
subjects
were
photographed. During
the
1880s,
the even
more
rigorous
standardization demanded
by
Adolphe
Bertillon's and Arthur Chervin's an
thropom
trie methods cemented the distinc
tion between "racial" and
"ethnological" pho
tographs
(Poole 1997, pp. 132-40;
Sekula
1989). By specifying
uniform focal
lengths,
poses,
and
backdrops, anthropologists sought
to edit out the
distracting
"noise" of con
text, culture,
and the human countenance
(Edward 2001,
Macintyre
& MacKenzie
1992, Spencer 1992).
In
yet
other
cases,
an
thropologists
worked on the surface of the
photographic print
to inscribe interior frames
that would isolate bits of
ethnological
or racial
data
(for example, tattoos)
from the rest of
the individual's
body (Wright 2003).
Whereas
such
gestures betray
a felt "need for some
kind of intervention to make
things [like
race and
culture] fully
visible"
(Wright
2003,
p. 149), they
also
betray
an
underlying suspi
cion about "the
frustratingly
... m
tonymie
nature of the
photograph" (Poignant
1992,
p. 42).
Edwards'
(2001, pp. 131-55)
study
of the
Darwinian
biologist,
Thomas
Huxley's
"well
considered
plan"
to
produce
a
photographic
inventory
of the races of the British
Empire,
provides
one
example
of how "the intrusion
of
humanizing,
cultural detail"
(2001, p. 144)
disrupted
the scientific ambitions of anthro
pology.
Not
only
were colonial officials reluc
tant to
jeopardize
relations with the natives
RAI:
Royal
Anthropological
Institute
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess
of Description i6$
by imposing
the absurd strictures of nude
anthropom
trie
poses,
but even in those in
stances where
photographs
were
taken,
the
"intersubjective space
constituted
by
the act
of
photographing" (p. 145)
left its mark on
the
images
in the form of
expression, gaze,
and
beauty.
Such content was read
by
Hux
ley
and his fellow
systematizers
as an "excess"
of visual detail. Yet their
attempts
to
purge
it
ultimately
led to failure in that the tech
nology
of
photography
was,
in the final anal
ysis,
not
capable
of
matching
the
totalizing
ambitions of the
project.
As a
result,
Edwards
wryly
comments,
the colonial office's archive
of this
project
about race contains
many
more
photographs
of
buildings
than of
people
or
races.
From its
beginnings,
race was about
revealing
or
making
visible what
lay
hid
den underneath the
untidy
surface details
the
messy
visual excess of the
human,
cul
tural
body (Spencer
1992,
Wallis
2003).
Well
before the invention of
photography,
Cuvier,
for
example,
had instructed the artists who
accompanied expeditions
to eliminate both
ersome details of
gesture, expression, culture,
or context from their
portraits
of natives so
that the
underlying
details of cranial structure
and "race"
might
be more
readily
revealed
(Herv 1910).
Whereas
photography
held out
the
promise
of
facilitating
this
anthropologi
cal
quest
for order
through
the elimination of
detail or
"noise,"
the same machine that had
made it
possible
to
imagine
a
utopia
of com
plete transparency
also introduced the twin
menace of
intimacy
and
contingency
and
with
them,
the
possibility (however remote)
of
acknowledging
the coevalness
and, thus,
the
humanity
of their racial
subjects.
It is
per
haps
for this reason that
anthropologists
be
gan by
1874
(with
the
publication
o Notes and
Queries)
to
express
an interest in
regulating
the
types
and amount of visual information
they
would receive
through photographs. By
the
1890s,
although photography
continued to
be used in
anthropometry,
there was a
gen
eral decline in interest in the collection and
use of
photographs
as
ethnological
evidence
(Edwards 2001,
Griffiths
2002,
Poignant
1992,
Pinney 1992).
Contingency
An
arguably
even more
important slippage
between the
classificatory
or
stabilizing
am
bitions of
photography
and its
political
ef
fects can be located in the
unique temporal
ity
of the
photograph.
Both the
evidentiary
power
and the allure of the
photograph
are
due to our
knowledge
that it
captures (or
freezes)
a
particular
moment in time. This
temporal
dimension of the
photograph
intro
duced a whole other
layer
of
distracting
detail
into the
anthropological
science of race. Con
vinced of both the
inevitability
and desire
ability
of
evolutionary progress,
nineteenth
century anthropologists (like many
of their
twentieth-century descendants)
were con
vinced that the
primitives they
studied were
on the
verge
of
disappearing. Ethnological
encounters
acquired
a
corresponding urgency
as
anthropologists
scrambled to collect what
they imagined
to be the last
vestiges
of ev
idence available on earlier forms of human
life.
For at least some of those who held the
camera in their
hands, however,
the
photo
graph
carried a latent threat for
anthropol
ogy.
The Dutch
ethnologist
Im
Thurm,
for
example, famously
cautioned
anthropologists
against
the
dangers
of
erasing
the
human,
aes
thetic,
and
individualizing
excess of
photo
graphic portraiture
in favor of a too
rigorous
preference
for
"types" (Thurm 1893,
Tayler
1992). Anthropometry,
he
added,
was
proba
bly
better
practiced
on dead bodies than on
the human
beings
he
sought
to
capture
in his
portrait photography
from
Guyana.
At the
same
time, however,
Thurm
(1893)
himself
often blocked out the
distracting backgrounds
and contexts
surrounding
his
photographic
subjects.
His focus was on the
"human,"
but
his
anthropological perception
of
photogra
phy
excluded,
as did the racial
photography
he
opposed,
the "visual excess" of context and
the "off-frame." Thurm's cautious embrace of
164
Poole
photography speaks clearly
to its
suspect
sta
tus at a time when all fieldwork was if not di
rectly
animated
by
a concern for
finding
racial
types,
then at the
very
least carried out under
the shadow of the idea of race.
In other
cases,
photographers
most fa
mously,
Edward Curtis made skillful use of
aesthetic conventions such as soft focus and
vignette
to transform the
inevitability
of ex
tinction into the
tragic
romance of nostal
gia.
On one
level,
Curtis's
photographs
can
be said to have harnessed the aesthetic of
por
trait
photography
as
part
of a
broader,
political
framing
of Native Americans as the
sad,
in
evitable,
and
unresisting
victims of a
divinely
manifest
destiny.
On another
level, however,
Curtis's
photographs
are also of interest for
what
they
reveal about the distinctive tem
porality
of the
"racializing gaze." Although
Curtis's
photographs
have been criticized as
inauthentic for their use of costume and tribal
attribution
(Gidley
2003, Lyman 1982),
their
power
and massive
popular appeal
had much
to do with the
ways
in which he was able to dis
till
contemporary
fascination for a
technology
that allows one to
gaze
forever on that which
is about to
disappear.
Within
anthropology,
however,
this "tem
porality
of the moment" served
only
to in
crease anxieties about the
utility
of the
pho
tographic image
as an instrument of scientific
research. For one
thing,
the sheer number of
photographs
that became available to the an
thropologist
seemed to belie the notion that
primitive people
were somehow
disappearing,
as
evolutionary theory
had led them to believe.
Poignant suggests
that it was in
response
to
just
such a dilemma that
anthropologists
at
the RAI came
to favor studio
portraits
over
photographs
taken in the field because the
clear visual
displacement
found in the studio
portrait
between the
primitive subject
and the
world allowed the
anthropologist
"to
impose
order on
people
too numerous to
disappear"
(1992, p. 54). Pinney suggests
that this tension
between
actuality
and
disappearance played
out in the case of India
through
two
photo
graphic
idioms. The
"salvage paradigm"
was
applied
to "what was
perceived
to be a
frag
ile tribal
community,"
whereas the "detective
paradigm," premised
on a faith in the eviden
tiary
status of the
photographic
document,
"was more
commonly
manifested when faced
with a more vital caste
society."
He further
as
sociates the detective
paradigm
with a curato
rial
imperative
of
inventory
and
preservation,
and the
salvage paradigm
with a
language
of
urgency
and
"capture" (Pinney
1997, p. 45).
Although
the
particular mapping
of the two
idioms on tribal and caste
society
is,
in
many
ways, peculiar
to India and
Pinney
even
goes
so far as to
suggest
that
uncertainty
about vi
sual evidence is somehow
peculiar,
or at least
peculiarly
marked,
in India the
general
ten
sion between ideas of racial
extinction,
the
temporal actuality
of
photography,
and anx
iety
about the nature and truthfulness of the
perceptual
world was
clearly present
in other
colonial and
postcolonial settings.
When viewed in this
way,
the understand
ing
of race that
emerges
from a
history
of an
thropological photography
is
clearly
as much
about the
instability
of the
photograph
as eth
nological
evidence and the unshakeable
suspi
cion that
perhaps things
are not what
they ap
pear
to be as it is about
fixing
the native
subject
as a
particular
racial
type. Yet,
recent critical
interventions have
paid
far
greater
attention
to the
fixing.
What would have to be
done,
then,
if we were to invert the
question
that
is
usually
asked about
stability
and
fixing
and
instead ask how it is that
photography
simul
taneously
sediments and fractures the
solidity
of "race" as a visual and
conceptual
fact. Put
somewhat
differently,
how can we
recapture
the
productive
forms of
suspicion
with which
early anthropologists greeted photography's
unique capacity
to reveal the
particularities
of
moments, encounters,
and individuals?
PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD
For an answer to this
question,
we
might
want
to
begin by looking
at some
early attempts
to
integrate photography
into the
ethnographic
toolkit. Recent studies of
early
fieldwork
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess
of Description 165
photography
stress the extent to which
pho
tography
offered
anthropologists
a
guilty
pleasure.
On the one hand and to an even
greater
extent than with the archival collec
tions
just
discussed
anthropologists wishing
to use
photography
in the field were faced
with the
problem
of
weeding
out the extra
neous contexts and
contingent
details
cap
tured
by
the camera. This
problem
was at once
technical an artifact of the
unforgiving
"re
alism" of the
photographic image
and con
ceptual,
in that the
subjects
of
anthropology
(first
race,
then culture and social
organiza
tion)
were themselves statistical or
interpre
tive abstractions. As
such,
their
perception
and documentation
required
a
temporality
that was
quite
different from that of
pho
tographs,
whose content
spoke only
of the
mute and
singular
existence of
particular
ob
jects, bodies,
and events.
Indeed,
earliest uses
of
photography
in fieldwork made
every
effort
to erase the
contingent
moment of the
pho
tographic
act. In his Torres Straits
fieldwork,
Haddon,
for
example,
made wide use of reen
actment and
restaging
as a means to document
rituals and
myths (Edwards
2
001, pp.
15
7-80).
Hockings
also
suggests
that W.H.R. Rivers
used
mythical allegories
drawn from Frazer's
The Golden
Bough
in his curious
photographs
of Todas
(Hockings 1992).
Whereas Rivers
sought
to
place
natives in a
mythical past,
Haddon
sought
to use
photography
to
portray
what the natives "saw" when
they
talked of
mythology.
Both
produced photographs
that
were concerned to erase evidence of the mo
ment at which the
image
was taken.
On the other
hand,
along
with contin
gency, photography
also
brought
the trou
bling specter
of
intimacy.
Thus,
although
vi
sual
description
was
recognized
as
important
for the scientific
project
of data collection and
interpretation, photographs
could also be read
as documents of
encounter,
and
encounter,
in
turn,
contained within it the
specter
of com
munication,
exchange,
and
presence
all fac
tors that
challenged
the
ethnographer's
claims
to
objectivity.
The tension between these two
aspects
of
ethnographic practice
is
perhaps
best
captured
in Malinowski's now famous
term
"participant
observation." Whereas ob
servation
appeals
to the ideal of the
distanced,
objective
onlooker,
participation clearly
in
vokes the notion of
presence and,
with
it,
a
certain
openness
to the
humanity
of the
(still
racialized)
other.
In his own fieldwork
photography,
Mali
nowski seems to
signal
an awareness of the
problematic
status of
photography
in the ne
gotiation
of this
contradictory charge
of be
ing simultaneously
distant and close
(Wright
1991, 1994;
Young 1999). Among
his British
contemporaries,
Malinowski made the most
extensive use of
photographs
in his
published
work, averaging
one
photo
for
every
seven
pages
in his
published ethnographies (Samain
1995).
Yet his careful selection of
photographs
seems to
replicate
the strict division of la
bor
by
which he
separated
affective and sci
entific
description
in his diaries and ethno
graphies (Clifford 1988,
Malinowski
1967).
For
example, despite having
taken numer
ous,
elaborately posed photographs
of him
self and other colonial
officials,
he seems to
have
carefully
edited out the
presence
of all
such
nonindigenous
elements when illustrat
ing
his books
(Spyer
2001, p. 190).
The dis
tancing
effect created
by
such careful
editing
was further reinforced
by
Malinowski's
pref
erence for the middle to
long
shot in his own
photography (Young
2001, p. 18).
Studies of
Evans-Pritchards' field
photography
reveal a
similar
preference
for
long
shots,
aerial
shots,
and a careful avoidance of
eye
contact in what
Wolbert
(2001) interprets
as an effort
by
the
ethnographer
to erase his own
presence
in
the
field,
thereby establishing
the
physical
or
"ecological
distance"
required
to sustain his
own
authority
as
ethnographer.
No matter how distant the
shot,
how
ever,
the
very
medium of
photography
con
tained within it an
uncanny ability
to in
dex the
presence
of the
photographer.
The
"strong language"
of race
helped ethnog
raphers
to silence this
technological regis
ter of
encounter,
often with
great
effect. In
Argonauts,
for
example,
Malinowski
(1922,
166 Poole
pp. 52-53)
comments on the
"great variety
in
the
physical appearance"
of the Trobrianders.
"There are men and women of tall
stature,
fine
bearing
and delicate features
...
with an
open
and
intelligent expression
...
[and]
oth
ers with
prognatic, Negroid
faces, broad,
thick
lipped
mouths,
narrow
foreheads,
and a coarse
expression." Through
such
language,
it
might
be
argued,
Malinowski avoided
physical
de
scription
of individuals
something
that re
mains rare in
ethnographic writing
in favor
of the
distancing language
of race.
Similarly,
to
support
the more
personal
observation that
the women "have a
genial, pleasant approach"
(1922, p. 53),
he
again
relies not on
language
but on two
photographs:
One
(taken by
his
friend
Hancock)
he
captions
"a coarse but
fine
looking
unmarried woman"
(plate
XI in
Malinowski
1922),
and the other
(his own)
is
a
medium-long
shot of a
group
of
Boyowan
girls (plate XII).
Although
such a division of labor between
text and
photo may
well
speak
to the
affinity
of
photography
for the sorts of racial
"typ
ing"
to which Malinowski
gestures
in his
text,
in
fact, very
few of Malinowski's
photographs
conform to the standard racial
photograph
(Young
2001, pp. 101-2).
Instead what seems
to be at stake in Malinowski's use of
photogra
phy
is his
inability
to
engage
or make sense
of that moment in which he first
perceived
some
aspect
of the
people
he met.
Repeat
edly
in his
opening descriptions
of both na
tives and
landscapes,
Malinowski
speaks
of the
insights
that seem to evade him in the form
of
fleeting impressions
or
glimpses.
Hori
zons are "scanned for
glimpses
of natives"
(1961, p. 33);
natives are "scanned for the
general impression" they
create
(1961, p. 52);
and the entire Southern Massim is
experi
enced "as if the visions of a
primeval, happy,
savage
life were
suddenly
realized,
even if
only
in a
fleeting impression" (1961, p. 35).
Malinowski is
intrigued by
such
impressions,
however,
not for what
they
tell of the moment
in which
they
occur,
but rather because
they
hold the
promise
that
they may someday
be
come
legible
as
"symptoms
of
deeper,
socio
logical
facts"
(1961, p. 51).
"One
suspects,"
he
writes,
that there are
"many
hidden and
mys
terious
ethnographic phenomena
behind the
commonplace aspect
of
things" (p. 51).
On the one
hand, then,
the reservations
expressed by
Malinowski and others
(Jacknis
1984,1992;
Wright
2004;
Young
2001)
about
the use of
photography
in fieldwork
speak
to
the
unsuitability
of a visual medium that is
about
surface,
contingency,
and the moment
for a
discipline
whose
interpretive
task was
to describe the hidden
regularities, systemic
workings,
and structural
regularities
that con
stituted
"society"
and "culture"
(Grimshaw
2001).
On the other
hand, however,
as a re
alist mode of
documentation,
the
photograph
also contained within it the
possibility
of au
thenticating
the
presence
that constituted the
basis of the
ethnographer's
scientific method.
The other visual
technologies
such as
museum
displays (Edwards 2001,
Haraway
1989,
Karp
& Levine
1990,
Stocking 1985),
live exhibitions
(Corbey
1993;
Griffiths
2002,
pp. 46-84;
Poignant
2003,
Reed
2000,
Ry
dell
1984),
and film
(Grimshaw 2001,
Oksiloff
2001,
Rony 1996)
with which turn-of-the
century anthropologists experimented
offered
even fewer
opportunities
to control for the
sorts of visual excess and detail that threatened
to undermine the distance
required
for scien
tific observation. One
particularly
instructive
set of debates discussed
by
Griffiths
(2002,
pp.
3
45)
concerned the visual and even
moral effects of
overly
realistic habitat and
life
groups
at the American Museum of Nat
ural
History. Although
some curators
sought
to attract museum
goers through
the
hyperre
alism of wax life
group displays
that "blended
the
uncanny presence
of the human double
with the
authority
of the scientific artifact"
(Griffiths 2002, p. 20),
others
including
Franz Boas
(Jacknis 1985)- expressed
con
cern that these
hyperrealist technologies
would distract the
gaze
of museum
goers.
As a
remedy,
Boas
sought
to create exhibits whose
human
figures
were
intentionally
antirealist,
and to which the
spectator's gaze
would first
be drawn
by
a central focal artifact and then
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess
of Description 167
carefully guided through
a series of related
items and
display
cases. Griffiths uncovers
similar worries about the more obvious
per
ils that the
Midway
sideshows
presented
to the
scientific claims of
ethnology.
Whereas others
have
pointed
toward world's fairs as sites for
the
propagation
of
nineteenth-century
racial
ist
anthropology (Greenhalgh
1988,
Maxwell
1999,
Reed
2000,
Rydell 1984),
Griffiths'
(2002) emphasis
on the
professional suspicion
surrounding
such
displays
reveals the extent
to
which,
for
contemporary anthropologists,
the concern was with the
disruptive potential
of distraction
(Benjamin
1968,
Simmel
1971,
Crary 1999)
as a form of affect that worked
against
the focused visualism
required
for the
education of the museum
goer.
Such worries
speak clearly
to the
general
nervousness sur
rounding
the visual
technologies
of
photogra
phy
and film within
anthropology and,
along
with
it,
the
persistent
and
perhaps Utopian
belief that the aesthetic and affective
appeal
of the visual could be somehow
brought
in
line with
contemporary
scientific ideals of
objective
"observation."
Culture at a Distance
The subfield of visual
anthropology emerged
in the mid-1960s in
response
to this concern
about the
viability
of visual
technologies
for
ethnographic
work.
Ethnography,
of
course,
deploys
a
language
of
witnessing
and visual
observation as a means to defend its account
of the world.
Thus,
although
voice and lan
guage
are crucial to
ethnography,
both the
descriptive
task and the
authorizing
method
of
ethnography
continue to
rely
in
important
ways
on the
ethnographer's physical presence
in a
particular
site and her
(normatively)
visual
observations and
descriptive
accounts of the
people,
events,
and
practices
she encounters
there. At the same
time,
and as recent work
on
anthropological photography
and film has
made
clear,
visual documentation is
generally
not considered to be a sufficient source of ev
idence unless it is
accompanied by
the con
textualizing
and/or
interpretive testimony
of
the
ethnographer (AAA 2002). Thus,
as much
as
photographs
entered as
juridical
evidence
require
a human voice to authenticate their
evidentiary
status in court
(Derrida 2002),
the
"hard" visual evidence of
ethnographic pho
tography
or film is
intimately,
even inextri
cably,
bound
up
with the "soft" testimonial
voice
(or
"subjectivity")
of the
ethnographer
(Heider 1976,
Hockings
1985,
Loizos
1993,
MacDougall
1997,
Stoller
1992).
Like
judi
ciary photographs
as
well,
the dilemma in
ethnographic photography
is in
large part
a
temporal
one. The
ethnographer (like
the
ju
dicial
witness)
must
speak
for the
photograph
as someone who was in the
place
shown in
the
photograph
at the time when the
photo
graph
was taken and this
privileged
author
ity
of the
ethnographic
witness seems to hold
true no matter what the role
assigned
to his
"native"
subjects (Crawford
& Turton
1992,
Hockings
& Omori
1988,
Worth & Adair
1997).
It is this move that affords decisive sta
tus to the
photographic image
as
testimony
to
an event in a
nonrepeatable
time.
However,
it
is the
photograph
not the
photographer
that allows for the
peculiar
conflation of
past
and
present
that renders the
photograph
a
form of material evidence.
In
ethnography,
however,
as we have
seen,
the
photograph's
evocation of an off-frame
context and a
particular, passing,
moment has
most often been seen to
pose
a
debilitating
limit to the task of
ethnographic interpreta
tion. Rather than
thinking
about how voice
and
image
work
together
to create the evi
dentiary
aura and distinctive
temporality
of
the
photograph, ethnographers,
as we have
seen,
have instead looked to
photography
as a
means to
discipline
the visual
process
of obser
vation.
Occupying
an
uneasy place
at the ori
gins
of the visual
anthropology
canon,
the 759
photographs published
in Bateson & Mead's
Balinese Character
(1942) represent
one ex
treme solution to
taming
visual evidence for
ethnographic
ends. Bateson and Mead ini
tially began using photographs
to
supplement
their
notetaking
and observations and to rec
oncile their
disparate writing styles (Jacknis
i68 Poole
1988,
Sullivan
1999).
As work
progressed
on
the
photographie
index that was to
comple
ment their written
fieldnotes, however,
they
quickly
came to see
photographs,
first,
as an
independent
control on the
potential
biases
of visual observation
(Sullivan 1999, p. 16)
and
then,
somewhat
later,
as a form of doc
umentation
through
which to
capture
"those
aspects
of the culture which are least amenable
to verbal treatment and which can
only
be
properly
documented
by photographic
meth
ods"
(Bateson
& Mead
1942, p. 122).
In her
later work on
child-rearing practices,
Mead
extended this
understanding
of the
supple
mental character of
photography
in an at
tempt
to
replicate precise temporal sequences
of
practices (Mead
&
MacGregor 1951).
Wliat is
perhaps
most
intriguing
about
Mead's Balinese work is the
lengths
to which
she
goes
to transform
photographs
into
words. As
"objective"
traces of the
temporal
sequences
of
gestures, poses, expressions,
and
embraces that
together
add
up
to
something
like "character" or
"child-rearing,"
the
pho
tographs
construct their
meaning
as a narra
tive.
Photographs
thus remain as "raw mate
rial" or "facts" whose
"meaning"
lies not in the
detail
they
reveal of
particular
encounters,
but
rather in the narrative
message they convey
about the
sequence (and presumed outcome)
of
many
different events and encounters.
That the ideas of narrative and information
lay
at the heart of
early
visions of visual an
thropology
is
suggested by
the fact that the
subfield's first
professional organization
was
the
Society
for the
Anthropology
of Visual
Communication,
founded in 1972. As con
tainers of information indexed
through
lan
guage, photographs
were meant to commu
nicate the broader
message lurking
behind
the surface
rendering
of the
event,
person,
or
practice they portrayed.
In Mead & Metraux's
(1953) textbook,
The
Study of
Culture at a
Distance,
photography,
film,
and
imagery
were held
up
as
privileged
sites for
communicating
a
feeling
of cultural
immersion,
a sort of substitute for the
per
sonal
experience
of fieldwork. "The
study
of
imagery,"
Metraux
writes,
"is an
intensely per
sonal and
yet
a
rigorously
formal
approach
to
a culture."
Although "every
cultural
analysis
is to a
greater
or lesser extent built
upon
work
with
imagery,"
in the
study
of culture from
a
distance,
imagery
comes to constitute "our
most immediate
experience
of the culture"
(Metraux 1953, p. 343;
Mead
1956).
The im
age,
in this
early approach
to visual
anthropol
ogy,
was
imagined
as both an
expression
of the
perceptual system
shared
by
the members of
a
society
and as a
surrogate
for the
experience
that would allow one to
access,
and
describe,
that
perceptual system
or "culture." As var
ious authors have
subsequently argued (e.g.,
Banks &
Morphy
1997,
Edwards
1992,
Taylor
1994),
this
approach
to the visual is "racial
ized" both in the sense of a
subject/object
divide and in the idea that there is an in
ner
"meaning"
hidden beneath the surface of
both culture and the
image.
What is lost in
such an
approach
is the
immediacy
of
sight
as a
sensory experience
that could
speak
to
the
ethnographic intangibles
of
presence
and
newness
(Edwards 1997). Instead,
images
photographs, gestures,
films are scrutinized
for clues to the cultural
configuration they
ex
press.
Given what Mead's own Balinese work
had done to divorce still
photography
from
both affect and the
spontaneity
of the mo
ment,
it is
perhaps,
then,
no
surprise
that the
field of visual
anthropology
had,
by
the late
1970s,
come to be dominated
by
the
study
and
production
of
ethnographic film,
whereas
still
photographs
had more or less
disap
peared
from "serious"
ethnographic
texts
(de
Heusch
1962).
In
explicit
contrast to
photog
raphy (MacDougall
1998, pp. 64,68),
film was
seen as a visual
technology
that could
go
be
yond
"observation" to include
explicit,
reflex
ive references to the sorts of intimate rela
tionships
and
exchanges
that bound the film
maker to his
"subjects" (MacDougall
1985,
Rouch
2003).
The affective
power
of
film,
MacDougall
notes,
is due to both its imme
diacy
and its nonverbal character in that
(for
MacDougall)
film unlike
photography
and
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess
of Description 169
the forms of "visual communication"
put
for
ward
by
Mead is not mediated
by analysis
or
writing (MacDougall
1985, pp. 61-62). Film,
in other
words,
was considered to bear within
it an affective
transparency
that was denied
to
photography
as a "frozen" and hence dis
tanced
image.
Animated
by
a
profound
hu
manism,
this view of film as universal or "tran
scultural"
(MacDougall 1998)
seemed
likely
to transcend the forms of racial
objectification
and the
objectifying
"conventions of scientific
reason" that
many
considered inherent to the
stillness of
photography.
This view of film
provided
the
grounds
from which visual
anthropologists
set out to
counter the anticolonial
critique
of the 1980s.
To the
surprise (and, perhaps, dismay)
of
many, anthropology
has
emerged largely
un
scathed from the
charges
of
objectification,
racialism,
and colonialism levied
against
it in
the 1980s. Few
anthropologists today
would
be at all
surprised by
the claim that the anthro
pological project
has had a
troubling complic
ity
with the
racializing
discourses and essen
tializing
dichotomies that characterized New
World slave societies and
European
colonial
rule. In
many cases,
the
resulting disciplinary
sensitivity
to both
history
and
politics
has
also
helped
to establish an activist
agenda
in which
ethnography
has come to be seen
as
simultaneously
collaborative, critical,
and
interventionist. More
specifically,
within the
subfield of visual
anthropology,
it led to new
paradigms
of collaborative media
production
(Rouch 2003),
an effective
handing-over
of
the tools of visual documentation to the "na
tive"
subject (Ginsburg
1992,
Turner
1992,
Worth & Adair
1997),
and a shift in anthro
pological
focus from vision itself to the dis
tributive channels and discursive
regimes
of
media and the archive
(Ginsburg
et al.
2002).
As the new
disciplinary paradigm
for vi
sual
anthropology,
work on
indigenous
me
dia has tended to focus on the social rela
tions of
image production
and
consumption
(Ginsburg
1992,
Himpele 1996)
and the cul
tural idioms
through
which
indigenous pro
ducers and artists
appropriate
filmic mediums
(Turner 1992,
2002
a).
What unites work on
indigenous
media, however,
is the
concept
of
the
"indigenous."
As a
gloss
for a
particu
lar form of subaltern
identity
claim,
the no
tion of the
indigenous
invokes ideals of local
ity,
cultural
specificity,
and
authenticity.
For
some it has functioned as an effective form
for
critically rethinking (Ginsberg 1992)
or
even
rejecting (Faris 2003)
the
possibilities
of
recuperating photography
and film within
anthropology.
With
respect
to the
specific
problem
of
race, however,
the notion of the in
digenous
has functioned
primarily
as a frame
for
reinterpreting
video contents for
insight
into how racial
categories
and
representa
tions are
perceived
and countered from the
perspective
of "the
represented" (Alexander
1998;
Ginsburg
1995;
Himpele
1996; Jackson
2004;
Turner
1992, 2002a,b).
In this
work,
video and other visual media
provide
an
outlet for the
communication, defense,
and
strengthening
of
cultural, national,
or eth
nic identities that
preexist,
and thus tran
scend,
the media form
itself,
as
they
are si
multaneously shaped by
it
(Alexander 1998,
Ginsburg
1995,
Himpele 1996). Underlying
much
though
not all of this is a
mapping
of
identity through
scale such that "the mass
media" is said to "obliterate
identity"
while
the more
portable
forms of handheld "video
tends to rediscover
identity
and consolidate
it"
(Dowmunt 1993, p. 11;
Ginsburg 2002).
Such claims seem all the more
peculiar given
the
premium placed
on
authenticity
and local
ism within neoliberal multicultural discourse
(Hale 2002,
Povinelli
2002,
Rose
1999).
By
ignoring
the broader
political
and discursive
landscape
within which
categories
such as "the
indigenous" emerge
and take
hold,
much of
the literature on
indigenous
media ends
up
defending
an essentialist or
primordial
notion
of
identity
that comes
perilously
close to older
ideas of racial essences.
By introducing questions
of voice and
per
spective,
these studies of
indigenous
video
and film have
effectively (and,
I
think,
in
advertently)
destabilized earlier
assumptions
about the
necessarily objectifying
and hence
i
jo
Poole
racializing
character of still
photographic
technologies.
Thus,
recent work on
pho
tography
tends to
emphasize
the
"slippery"
or
unstable
quality
of the racial referent
(Firstenberg
2003,
Fusco
2003,
Poole
1997),
the
highly
mobile
meanings
attached to
pho
tographs
as
they
circulate
through
different
cultural and social contexts
(Howell 1998,
Kravitz
2002),
the
importance
of
gazes
as a
po
tentially destabilizing
site of encounter within
the
photographic
frame
(Lutz
& Collins
1993),
or the creative
reworkings
of the
pho
tographic
surface in
postcolonial portrait pho
tography (Behrend 2003,
Buckley
1999, Jhala
1993,
Mirzoeff
2003,
Pinney
1997,
Sprague
1978). Although emphases
in these works
differ and I cannot do
justice
to them all
here the
general
trend
(with
some
excep
tions; e.g.,
Faris
1992, 2003)
is to reclaim
some sort of
agency
or,
perhaps, autonomy
for the
photograph
in the form of either resis
tance,
mobility,
or the
fluidity
of
photographic
"meaning."
If "race" still haunts the
photo
graph,
it does so in the form of an
increasingly
ghostly presence.
Other
anthropologists
have extended the
paradigm
of
indigenous
media to
explore
how national identities are
shaped by
televi
sion, cinema,
and the internet
(Abu-Lughod
1993,2002;
Mankekar
1999;
Rajagopal 2001).
These works
effectively expand
the scale of
visual
anthropology
from the local to the na
tional or even the transnational as the focus of
analysis
shifts from the
image
itself to encom
pass
the
relationships
that inform and consti
tute the
production
and distribution of com
mercial and televisualist media.
One
troubling
side effect of these devel
opments
within the visual
anthropology
of
both
photography
and film as in the disci
pline
more
generally
has been a move
away
from what we once
thought
of as "the local."
Yet as the terrain of
anthropological inquiry
has
expanded beyond
the traditional
village,
community,
or tribe to embrace the
study
of such
allegedly
"translocal"
(Ferguson
&
Gupta 2002)
sites as the modern
state,
me
dia,
migration, non-governmental organiza
tions,
financial
flows,
and discursive
regimes,
the burden of evidence
collecting
in ethno
graphic
work has shifted
away
from the af
fective or
sensory
domain of encounter and
toward a more removed and
synthetic
mode
of
description.
As
such,
the handover of tech
nologies
and the shift to the translocal do not
so much address as circumvent the
charges
of
(racial)
essentialization and
(visualist)
dis
tancing
leveled
against anthropology by
the
Orientalist
critique.
What has been sacrificed
in this move is an attention to the
unsettling
forms of
intimacy
and
contingency
that con
stitute the subversive hallmarks
(and
hence
potential strengths,
as well as
liabilities)
of the
ethnographic
encounter.
NOTICING DIFFERENCE
In "The Lived
Experience
of the
Black,"
Fanon
(2001) opens by recounting
the ef
fects of an
utterance,
a
labeling
"Look,
a
Negro"
on his
struggle
to inhabit the world.
What is
extraordinary
about Fanon's recount
ing
of this
very ordinary experience
is his em
phasis
on that
particular,
and
very brief,
mo
ment when the onlooker's
gaze
has not
yet
set
tled on his
body. Hope appears
to him in that
moment when the
"liberating gaze, creeping
over
my body
...
gives
me back a
lightness
that I had
thought
lost
and,
by removing
me
from the
world,
gives
me back to the world.
But over
there,
right
when I was
reaching
the
other
side,
I
stumble,
and
though
his move
ments,
attitudes and
gaze,
the other fixes
me,
just
like a
dye
is used to fix a
chemical solu
tion"
(Fanon 2001, p. 184).
This brief moment
before "the
fragments [of
the
self]
are
put
to
gether by
another"
constitutes,
for
Fanon,
the
site of
betrayal
where a chance encounter is so
quickly
rendered into the
paralyzing fixity
the certain
meanings
of race. Various schol
ars have
emphasized
what this sense of be
trayal
reveals about Fanon's
understanding
of
the
weight
of
history
and the colonial
past
in
particular
on the
present.
In addition to this
gesture
toward the
past, however,
Fanon also
underscores the
importance
of
placing history
www.annualreviews.org
An Excess
of Description iji
and the
past
in the service of an "active inflec
tion of the now"
(Bernasconi 2001, p. 178).
This is achieved
through
both "the endless
recreation of himself and a realization that
"the universal is the end of
struggle,
not that
which
precedes
it"
(p. 179).
Fanon's insistence on the
fleeting tempo
rality
of the
gaze
as a site of ethical
possi
bility
offers several
important
leads for how
to rethink the
place
of visual
technologies
and visual
perception
more
generally
in the
practice
of
ethnography.
On the one
hand,
Fanon insists
(in
this and other
writings)
on the extent to which
perceptual
and vi
sual
technologies (cinema,
in
particular)
cre
ate
bodily
habits of
distancing (Alcoff 2001).
This
emphasis
on distance and on the
phys
ical,
chemical
qualities through
which
photo
graphic technologies,
like the racial
gaze,
"fix"
racial
subjects
in their skins resonates
quite
clearly
with the
emphasis
in so much of visual
anthropology
on the
classificatory impulses
of
racial and
anthropological photography.
On
the other
hand, however,
and
along
with this
emphasis
on
distance,
Fanon also
provides
im
portant insight
into the
workings
of the
gaze.
For
Fanon,
the
gaze
is as much about undo
ing
the
corporeal
frame as it is about
fixing
(Bernasconi 2001,
Weate
2003).
As
such,
his
sense of the
gaze
is rooted in
equal parts
in the
embodied, sensory,
and future-oriented im
mediacy
of encounter and the
rapidity
with
which this
opening slips
into the exclusion
ary distancing
of which he
speaks.
When ad
dressed in these
terms,
Fanon's insistence on
the visual
underpinnings
of race offers
pro
ductive
grounds
for
rethinking
the
temporal
ity
of the
ethnographic
encounter and the
ways
in which
photographic technologies may
need to be
rethought
in conversation with that
particular understanding
of encounter.
As we have seen for much of the twen
tieth
century, anthropologists
have worked
around a
dichotomy
in which
photography
like
seeing
was
relegated
to the domain of
the
fleeting
and the
contingent,
whereas inter
pretation (and,
with
it,
description)
was con
strued as a
process by
which the extraneous
detail or noise of vision was to be
disciplined
and rendered
intelligible.
While an
interpre
tive move
must,
perhaps, inevitably bring
with
it a reduction of
noise,
what is
perhaps
lost in
this transition is the
immediacy
of encounter
as an
opening
toward both newness and "the
other." The
challenge,
of
course,
is to reclaim
this sense of encounter without
abandoning
the
possibilities
for
interpretation
and
expla
nation.
The
relationship
of
photography
to this
task
depends
on how we think about its
pe
culiar
temporality.
An
anthropology
focused
on
defining horizontally
differentiated forms
of life
through
the
language
of "race"
(or
"culture")
affords
conflicting
evidential
(or
juridical) weight
to the different
temporali
ties involved in the
fleeting immediacy
of the
encounter and the
stabilizing permanency
of
the fact.
Ethnographers,
as a
result,
tend to
regard
the surface
appearances
of the world
and the
photographic images
that record
them with a
good
deal of
suspicion pre
cisely
because
they
are seen as
being
saturated
with the
contingency
of chance encounters. In
this
respect, ethnography's relationship
to the
photographic image
continues to be haunted
by
the
specter
of
race,
in that the
photograph
can
only really
be
imagined
as a form of evi
dence in which
fixity (in
the form of
simplic
ity
or
focus)
is favored over excess
(in
the form
of
contingency
or
confusion) (Edwards 1997).
As
anthropology
turns its attention to forms
of racial and cultural
hybridity,
one wonders
how
anthropologists
will address this disci
plinary anxiety
about surface
appearances
and
the visible
world,
or whether
hybridity
like
the native and Indian before it will come to
be treated as another
(racial)
"fact" that must
be uncovered or
revealed,
as if
lying
under
neath the
deceptive
surface of the visible world
(Fusco 2003). Perhaps
what is needed is a re
thinking
of the notion of difference itself
(e.g.,
Deleuze
1994,
Connolly
2002),
a
questioning
of its
stability
as an
object
of
inquiry
and a
new
way
of
thinking
about the
temporality
of
encounter as it
shapes
both
ethnography
and
photography.
172
Poole
Fortunately,
the move to reclaim both
ethnography
and the ethical
imperative
of de
scription
from the Orientalist
critique
has not
meant a
simple
return to a "traditional" divi
sion of labor in which
ethnography provided
the
empirical
observations and
descriptions
upon
which
anthropological theory
could
draw to uncover the hidden
rules, orders,
or
meanings
of
specific
cultures and societies.
Rather,
the theoretical work of
ethnography
is now more often assumed to be
inseparable
from the
specific
forms of
encounter,
tempo
rality, uncertainty,
and excess that character
ize
ethnography
as a form of both social in
quiry
and
writing (e.g.,
Biehl
2005,
Das
2003,
Ferme
2001,
Nelson
1999,
Pandolfo
1997,
Taussig 1993).
At stake here is not so much
a
rejection
of vision as the basis of knowl
edge
as a substantive
rethinking
of how a
descriptive
account that is not
grounded
in
the idea of
interpretation
or
discovery
can
speak
to such
things
as
experience,
uncer
tainty,
and newness in the cultural worlds we
study
as
anthropologists. By explicitly ques
tioning
both the
empirical language
of
pos
itivist science in which
physical
character
istics are cited as the
visible,
and
irrefutable,
evidence of racial difference and the idealist
language
of Cartesian
metaphysiscs,
this move
makes it
possible
to rethink the troublesome
visuality
of "race." This move also leaves us
open
to the
sensory
and
anticipatory aspects
of visual encounter and
surprise
that animate
the
very
notion of
participant
observation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Veena
Das,
Sameena
Mulla,
Naveeda
Khan,
and Gabriela Zamorano for
their comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this article.
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