Outline of a Theory of Anthropology of Images

投稿日: 2012/04/21 12:17:32

Keywords: image, ethnographic visual media, shot, cine-trance, the whole

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1. This essay proposes to rethink anthropological practice as a discipline of images (and not only of words), and to reconsider the role of ethnographic visual media in that science/art of the "anthropology of images." Here, following K. Iwaki, I take "image" to be all that appears to our consciousness (sometimes taking form, while at other times formless). From that point of view, the experiences in the anthropological field constitute a set of "images," part of which the anthropologist fixes by means of ethnographic visual media (above all through photography). Once returned from the field, the anthropologist works on his or her data with those "images" in mind. In that process of anthropological creation, ethnographic visual media plays, in general, a more important part than one might think.

2. To see that, we have only to examine the ethnographic photography of three anthropologists of the classical era: Malinowski, Bateson and Lévi-Strauss. Photography had a vital importance for Malinowski. Not only did he express himself by means of photography (in his main books he combined his texts with numerous photos in quite an original way), but we can also assume that his photography constituted important material for his anthropological thinking, since his photos, mostly extreme long shots, were ideal for functionalist analysis. Ethnographic visual media was also very important for Bateson: we may say that the expressive and analytical possibilities of the media that he explored (montage, sequence-shot or sequential photography, materiality, etc.) were exactly what his theoretical thinking needed. If some of his photos in Balinese Character are so penetrating, it is because his shots, fluctuating between medium and long shots, reflect his almost impossible need to capture, at once, the materiality, the action and the context of the event. Meanwhile, Lévi-Strauss's photography is quite different from Malinowski's and Bateson's anthropological photography, in that he takes close-ups and candids with total freedom, with an artist's spirit. Nevertheless, his photography and his structuralist theory do have something in common: the invariable attention to "the sensible" no less than to the "intelligible."

3. In any case, it is also undeniable that for these anthropologists, the discipline of images is subordinate to the discipline of words. And my contention is that this is not the only way -nor, perhaps, the most fruitful after all. But first we have to look more closely at what photography is (including films and videos). On the one hand, the photographic act is, in a word, "overdetermined" by the photographer and the photographed, both in the selection of the topic and in the selection of the variables (framing, focus, camera movement, etc.), so that the resulting image has always an "intention" much broader than that of the photographer. On the other hand, the photographic act is never a neutral event: the eternity, although hypothetical, of the preserved image always ensures that the photographed person finds himself or herself, consciously and unconsciously, in another reality. Surely, photography is not a copy of the existing reality: it is a record of the reality created in front of the camera.

4. Those issues have been admirably approached and deepened by some of the most important "ethnographic" filmmakers, such as Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner, filmmakers who are rather marginal in visual anthropology (obviously Rouch himself was not marginal in the least, but his whole career overrides - significantly - the field of visual anthropology). Probably, the very fact that their films continue to be marginal, both in visual anthropology and in anthropology tout court, testifies to the still preserved freshness of their experiments. It is just so with Flaherty's shooting method (a long period of preparation living with the people to film, and the projection of rush films in front of them) and the characteristic of his images that refers somehow, in the words of Frances H. Flaherty, to "the time beyond the time" and that go "into that clear, calm, whole world." Rouch's creative ideas of "cine-trance" and "cine-anthropology" - according to which the filmmaker becomes "possessed" by the filmed people (or reality) and, thus, becomes free of the external categories introduced by anthropologists (us/them, tradition/modernity, etc.) - still await a more thorough understanding. That may be even truer for Gardner's films: his sensitive way of showing the materiality of the human body and human world - materiality that is, after all, both our starting point and end - seems to suggest the possibility of a new kind of anthropological approach, namely, that is of great necessity in the current hypercodified world where, precisely, that fundamental materiality tends to be forgotten. And, as we see it at the end of the section, those topics, although not yet fully treated in anthropology itself, are taken further by the contemporary movements such as the ''video in the Villages" project in Brazil, and lived by its participants as vital issues.

5. To conclude, it is worth remarking that the "non-neutral" character of the photographic act is in fact shared by anthropological fieldwork outside the camera, since writing is another way of eternizing things. Now, what seems to have been suggested, both by the ethnographic filmmakers discussed above and by the indigenous filmmakers of Brazil, is that such a character is not necessarily something to be eliminated or overcome. Probably, what is important is not the seemingly objective (and static) sociocultural reality, but the profound truth glimpsed in the "motion" between existing reality and the reality created by the research (the truth of that "whole world" mentioned by Frances H. Flaherty), because in fact we are "in motion" in our most decisive moments just as in the moment of the photographic or research act. If it is really so, the "anthropology of images" will certainly have an important role to play in the anthropology of the future.