Photography and Anthropology

176 Pages·2011·0.76 MB·English

by  Christopher Pinney

Photography and Anthropology
Christopher Pinney
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Photography and
Anthropology
EXPOSURESis a series of books on photography designed to explore the
rich history of the medium from thematic perspectives. Each title
presents a striking collection of images and an engaging, accessible
text that offers intriguing insights into a specific theme or subject.
Series editors: Mark Haworth-Booth and Peter Hamilton
Also published
Photography and Spirit John Harvey
Photography and Australia Helen Ennis
Photography and Cinema David Campany
Photography and Science Kelley Wilder
Photography and Flight Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox
Photography and Literature François Brunet
Photography and Egypt Maria Golia
Photography and Italy Maria Antonella Pelizzari
Photography and the USA Mick Gidley
Photography and Death Audrey Linkman
Photography and Japan Karen M. Fraser
Photography and
Anthropology
Christopher Pinney
reaktion books
For Roslyn Poignant –with belated thanks
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2011
Copyright © Christopher Pinney2011
Some illustrations were supplied with the support of the following institutions:
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China by Eurasia
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Pinney, Christopher.
Photography and anthropology. –(Exposures)
1. Photography in anthropology.
2. Photography in anthropology –History.
I. Title
II. Series
301-dc22
isbn978 1 86189 804 3
Contents
Prologue: Images of a Counterscience 7
one The Doubled History of Photography
and Anthropology 17
two The Trouble with Photography 63
three The Problem with Anthropology 106
Epilogue: The Holograph 147
References 155
Select Bibliography 163
Acknowledgements 167
Photo Acknowledgements 168
Index 169
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Prologue: Images of a
Counterscience
Consider four moments, and four images, that catapult us along a trajec-
tory of transformation into the history of anthropology’s relationship
with photography. The first of these images (illus. 1) is a line drawing of
an anthropologist at work in the mid-1880s.1Drawn by a Nicobarese
artist whose name is unknown to us, it shows a police orderly and a
servant who holds an umbrella, assisting Edward Horace Man in his
photographic endeavours. Man’s face is hidden in the cloak of his
camera, which points at three children posed at the base of a tree.
All this occurs in the top of three horizontal registers. In the middle
register, and subsequently numbered by Man, is a range of Nicobarese
sea life including a dugong, crocodile, turtle and ray. In the lower register
is the steamer Nancowrywith a Malacca village, Spiteful Bay and Leda
Point visible in the background.
This drawing, pasted in at the beginning of one ofE. H. Man’s
remarkable photographic albums of late nineteenth-century life in
the Nicobar Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, mixes several genres. Most
obviously it is a drawing that engages photography. Less obviously it
juxtaposes the ‘screen’ imposed by the camera with the rigid frames of an
enduring Nicobarese representational tradition, the henta-koi. The three
frames transfer onto paper the horizontal frames that characterize the
wooden shields installed by shamans in Nicobarese homes afflicted
with sickness and designed to ward off evil spirits. Henta-koiusually
incorporated depictions of aquatic life-forms (crabs, male mermaids,
squid) and symptoms of the Nicobar Islands’ long history of cultural
1 Unknown Nicobarese artist, drawing of
contact with Burmese, Malay and Ceylonese traders, Jesuit missionaries
E. H. Man at work, c. 1880s. 7
and the detritus of sundry shipwrecks. These include
sailing ships, ship’s compasses, pocket-watches,
telescopes, envelopes and mirrors whose very exotic
hybridity seemed to be a source of strength to preserve
the Nicobarese.2
The protective potential of photography, its
apotropaic qualities that enabled it to ward off evil,
lies at the heart of Queensland aboriginal people’s
engagement with it in the early part of the twentieth
century. Aborigines who commissioned bourgeois
portraits of themselves and their families, the
Aboriginal curator Michael Aird notes, ‘felt a very
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real need to state their successes in the European
community to ensure protection from oppressive
“protection” policies’.3The Aboriginals Protection
and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897was
one element of a colonial legal apparatus that endured
through to the 1960s and which made it possible for
Aboriginal children deemed ‘neglected’ to be forcibly
removed from their parents and their communities.
Adults who requested assistance from the state could
be forcibly relocated to Aboriginal stations.4
Photographs, Aird notes, indexed success according
to European norms, and staged displays of middle-class white
2 Peter Hyllested, Emily and William
respectability were used to distance the Aboriginal subjects from the Williams photographed at Beaudesert,
c. 1910, hand-coloured photograph.
possibility of punitive state action. William Williams’s family, from the
Upper Logan River, for instance, ‘lived and worked on their own land’
and Aird’s suggestion is that they managed to continue to do this is in
part because they were able to mobilize photography in their defence.
Their children were stockmen, drovers, axmen and housekeepers.
Their descendants continue to live in Queensland and ‘proudly identify
themselves as Munanjahli’.5In a hand-coloured photograph dating
from about 1910William Williams stands next to his seated wife,
Emily Jackey: he faces the world, staring down its threat, Emily regarding
him anxiously.
8