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

427 Pages·2011·4.52 MB·English

by  Marcus Banks

Made to Be Seen

Made to Be Seen
Perspectives on the History
of Visual Anthropology
EditEd by Marcus banks
and Jay ruby
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
marcus banks is professor of visual anthropology at the Univer­
sity of Oxford and the author, most recently, of Using Visual Data in
Qualitative Research. jay ruby is professor emeritus of anthropology
at Temple University and the author or editor of numerous books, in­
cluding Picturing Culture: Essays on Film and Anthropology, also published
by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN­13: 978­0­226­03661­8 (cloth)
ISBN­13: 978­0­226­03662­5 (paper)
ISBN­10: 0­226­03661­8 (cloth)
ISBN­10: 0­226­03662­6 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging­in­Publication Data
Made to be seen : perspectives on the history of visual
anthropology / edited by Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN­13: 978­0­226­03661­8 (alk. paper)
ISBN­10: 0­226­03661­8 (alk. paper)
ISBN­13: 978­0­226­03662­5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN­10: 0­226­03662­6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Visual anthropology. I. Banks, Marcus. II. Ruby, Jay.
GN347.M33 2011
301—dc22 2010048748
a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48­1992.
Contents
Introduction: Made to Be Seen
Historical Perspectives on Visual Anthropology 1
Marcus banks and Jay ruby
1 Skilled Visions
Toward an Ecology of Visual Inscriptions 19
cristina grassEni
2 Material Visions
Dress and Textiles 45
sandra dudlEy
3 Visual Anthropology and the Built Environment
Interpenetrations of the Visible and the Invisible 74
roxana watErson
4 Unfinished Dialogues
Notes toward an Alternative History of Art and
Anthropology 108
arnd schnEidEr
5 Theorizing “the Body” in Visual Culture 136
brEnda farnEll
6 Tracing Photography 159
ElizabEth Edwards
7 Ethnographic Film 190
MatthEw durington and Jay ruby
8 Digital Visual Anthropology
Potentials and Challenges 209
sarah pink
9 Native Intelligence
A Short History of Debates on Indigenous Media and Ethnographic Film 234
fayE ginsburg
10 Productive Dissonance and Sensuous Image­Making
Visual Anthropology and Experimental Film 256
kathryn raMEy
11 Anthropology and the Problem of Audience Reception 288
stEphEn putnaM hughEs
Hindsight/Postscript: Ethical and Epistemic Reflections on/of
Anthropological Vision 313
MichaEl hErzfEld
Bibliography 335 Filmography 401 Contributors 405 Index 409
Additional illustrations are posted at
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/banks.
INTRODUCTION
Made to Be Seen:
Historical Perspectives on
Visual Anthropology
MaRCUs BaNks aND Jay RUBy
History, Anthropology, and the History of Visual
Anthropology
In Britain, the United States, and elsewhere in the Euro-
American world the discipline of anthropology—in its
broadest sense—is at least a century and half old. How much
more or less is a matter of debate that need not concern us
here, though we draw the line at claiming that Herodotus
was an anthropologist or that Edward Curtis or the Lumière
brothers were anthropological image creators. For the pur-
poses of this volume we limit ourselves to the anthropologi-
cal endeavors of those who recognized the contemporary
anthropological project and the image-making activities of
those who understood that project or were in other ways
engaged with it. Even with this limitation (indeed, because
of it), there remains the question of whether there is in fact
a distinct history of visual anthropology that can be un-
twined from the history of the discipline as a whole. Below
we demonstrate that such a history is not only possible but
a worthwhile venture, but at the same time we acknowl-
edge that those traces that historians of the subdiscipline
have previously seized upon—the Balinese films and pho-
tographs of Mead and Bateson, the West African films of

MaRCUs BaNks aND Jay RUBy
Jean Rouch—exist only because those individuals were already conduct-
ing field research relevant to the production of the images or were en-
gaged in anthropological analyses for which image analysis was a part,
but only a part.1 While there is, in that sense, a visual strand, or strands,
to be teased out, we and our contributors never lose sight of the fact that
all anthropologists work on a variety of fronts and that anthropology is
distinctive as a discipline precisely because of its ambition to produce
holistic accounts, albeit with primary and secondary foci. A linguistic
anthropologist, a political anthropologist, an anthropologist of global-
ization can—and do—incorporate visual data and visual methods into
their studies while contributing to their respective subfields. Authors in
this volume note, for example, that the production and consumption
of images plays only a part in the history of anthropological approaches
to dress and textiles (Dudley) and to the built environment (Waterson).
Even with regard to the anthropological uses of photography, Edwards
notes that “in many ways work on photography is becoming more dif-
fuse and dispersed across the anthropological field, no longer confined
within visual anthropology.” Our joint aim in this volume is therefore
to give an account of the visual as it passes in and out of the discipline
of anthropology.
As editors, we encouraged our contributors to reflect on the role of the
visual within distinct fields of anthropological inquiry. Some of these
fields are constitutive of what is generally thought to be the particular
subject matter of visual anthropology (film, photography), while oth-
ers (materiality, embodiment, the use of technology) make such use of
the visual, or share common methodologies and approaches to such an
extent, that they are often considered within the same ambit or that it
would be intellectually hobbling to exclude them. This history is not a
narrative of great men and their movies or photographs.2 It is rather a his-
tory of ideas and interests within the discipline that at some times have
cried out for visual exploration (whether that call was heeded or not)
and at others have apparently spurned the visual in favor of the written
word as a mode of representation and language as an access route to the
mind.
Perhaps the most closely examined period in this volume is those few
decades before long-term field research became common, a time when
the study of art and material culture was thought to yield evidence of
cultural evolution (e.g., Haddon 1895). At this time, roughly between the
1880s and the 1920s, photography was vital as a form of evidence that
could be circulated among ethnologists anxious to receive as much in-
formation about as many “primitive” groups as possible—far more than

INTRODUCTION
they could ever hope to gather firsthand (Edwards 2001, chap. 2). The
development of long-term fieldwork, with its Malinowskian emphasis on
“the imponderabilia of everyday life,” and the subsequent rise of interest
in the comparative study of abstract institutions such as “kinship,” “the
economy,” and so forth led to a setting aside of material culture studies
for many decades. This, together with the costs and difficulties of pub-
lishing photographs in books and journals, contributed to a decline in
the perceived value of the photomechanical image.
There have been several previous attempts to write a history of visual
anthropology, some condensed (e.g., Banks and Morphy 1997, 4–13),
others more elaborate (e.g., de France 1975; Pink 2006, 5–15). Many have
focused largely or exclusively on the history of ethnographic film (several
are discussed here by Durington and Ruby) or on a particular period,
particularly the foundational period (Edwards 2001; Griffiths 2002). If
we follow Ruby’s strict definition of ethnographic film (2000, 239), as
that produced by anthropologists for anthropological purposes, then the
history of ethnographic film essentially begins after World War II, as
there are very few such films from before that conflict and little in the
way of institutional support. While the same is not true for still photogra-
phy, which was put to explicitly anthropological uses starting in the late
nineteenth century,3 some contributors to this volume share this view
of visual anthropology as an essentially postwar development when it
comes to invoking the visual (through production or analysis) in other
fields. While an interest in clothing and the built environment formed
part of the Victorian and Edwardian anthropological project, the interest
was largely technological, concerned with the relation between practical
knowledge or skill and the “level” of a culture. As Dudley points out there
was also an interest in dress as a marker of ethnicity, and photography
was used to document this. While this could be taken as evidence of an
early interest in the capacity of clothing to communicate visually, there is
little to suggest that pre–World War II anthropologists were more than
superficially interested in such visual communication between peoples,
as opposed to their own scientific task of reading meaning from the sur-
face of the photograph. Indeed, it was not until the 1970s that an an-
thropological model of visual communication was explicitly formulated
(Worth 1981). Waterson finds even less historical evidence of attention
to visual aspects of the built environment, situating the anthropologi-
cal study of vernacular architecture firmly in the postwar period. When
it comes to anthropological studies of the body and embodiment, Far-
nell states in her chapter that “visual representations of the body can be
said to have permeated anthropology since its inception” (for example,