AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45

An Excess of Description:
Ethnography, Race, and
Visual Technologies
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Deborah Poole
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.

Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218;

email: dpoole@jhu.edu

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. Key Words

2005. 34:159–79
photography, visual anthropology, temporality, archive,
The Annual Review of
Anthropology is online at ethnography
anthro.annualreviews.org
Abstract
doi: 10.1146/
annurev.anthro.33.070203.144034 This essay provides an overview of recent anthropological work on
Copyright

c 2005 by the relationship between racial thought and the visual technologies
Annual Reviews. All rights of photography and film. I argue that anthropologists have moved
reserved away from a concern with representation per se in favor of the more
0084-6570/05/1021- complex discursive and political landscapes opened up by the con-
0159$20.00 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
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Contents
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE ARCHIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
EXCESS AND CONTEXT . . . . . . . .
Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD .
Culture at a Distance . . . . . . . . . . . . .
NOTICING DIFFERENCE . . . . . . .
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-
160 Poole
posed of skin colors or ritual behaviors—was
presumed to contain, as if concealed within
it, another, more abstract order of meaning,
160
which was the ethnographer’s task to reveal.
161
The native was thus constituted as object
163
through a perceptual act that both emanated
164
from and, in so doing, constituted the ethno-
165
grapher as a reasoned, thinking subject. Al-
168
though these claims were easily leveled at
171
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.
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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-
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
suality in recent years. In particular, I have not
considered the numerous studies that address
visual images of “others” exclusively in terms
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.
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
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ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
“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.
162 Poole
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 (2001, pp. 38,
133), Poignant (1992), Pinney (1992, 1997),
and others point out, anthropologists were
not naively accepting of the much-lauded
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
“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
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
conceit of type allowed images of individ-
ual bodies to be read not in reference to
the place, time, context, or individual hu-
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.
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-
RAI: Royal
tions from the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Anthropological
Protection Societies (Pinney 1992, Poignant Institute
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-
thropometric 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 . . . metonymic
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
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by imposing the absurd strictures of nude
anthropometric 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
(Hervé 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 of 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
164 Poole
(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
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
framing of Native Americans as the sad, in-
evitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely
manifest destiny. On another level, however,
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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
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ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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 2001, pp. 157–80).
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
166 Poole
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,
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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
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the women “have a genial, pleasant approach”
(1922, p. 53), he again relies not on language
but on two photographs: One (taken by his
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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
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ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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
168 Poole
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
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
1988, Sullivan 1999). As work progressed on
the photographic 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
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extended this understanding of the supple-
mental character of photography in an at-
tempt to replicate precise temporal sequences
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of practices (Mead & MacGregor 1951).
What 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
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ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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
170 Poole
(Turner 1992, 2002a). 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
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45
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-
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tography (Behrend 2003, Buckley 1999, Jhala
1993, Mirzoeff 2003, Pinney 1997, Sprague
1978). Although emphases in these works
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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
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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
172 Poole
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.
AR254-AN34-10 ARI 25 August 2005 14:45

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-
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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

ize ethnography as a form of both social in- visuality of “race.” This move also leaves us
quiry and writing (e.g., Biehl 2005, Das 2003, open to the sensory and anticipatory aspects
Ferme 2001, Nelson 1999, Pandolfo 1997, of visual encounter and surprise that animate
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.

Taussig 1993). At stake here is not so much 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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 Contents ARI 12 August 2005 20:29

Annual Review of
Anthropology

Volume 34, 2005

Contents

Frontispiece
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Sally Falk Moore p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p xvi

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Prefatory Chapter

Comparisons: Possible and Impossible

Sally Falk Moore p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1

Archaeology

Archaeology, Ecological History, and Conservation

Frances M. Hayashida p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p43
Archaeology of the Body
Rosemary A. Joyce p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 139
Looting and the World’s Archaeological Heritage: The Inadequate
Response
Neil Brodie and Colin Renfrew p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 343
Through Wary Eyes: Indigenous Perspectives on Archaeology
Joe Watkins p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 429
The Archaeology of Black Americans in Recent Times
Mark P. Leone, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, and Jennifer J. Babiarz p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 575

Biological Anthropology

Early Modern Humans

Erik Trinkaus p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 207
Metabolic Adaptation in Indigenous Siberian Populations
William R. Leonard, J. Josh Snodgrass, and Mark V. Sorensen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 451
The Ecologies of Human Immune Function
Thomas W. McDade p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 495

vii
Contents ARI 12 August 2005 20:29

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

New Directions in Pidgin and Creole Studies

Marlyse Baptista p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p33
Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language
William F. Hanks p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p67
Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia
N.J. Enfield p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 181
Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease
Charles L. Briggs p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 269
Will Indigenous Languages Survive?
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Michael Walsh p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 293

Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity
Luisa Maffi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 599
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International Anthropology and Regional Studies

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System

Dipankar Gupta p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 409
Indigenous Movements in Australia
Francesca Merlan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 473
Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992–2004: Controversies,
Ironies, New Directions
Jean E. Jackson and Kay B. Warren p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 549

Sociocultural Anthropology

The Cultural Politics of Body Size

Helen Gremillion p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p13
Too Much for Too Few: Problems of Indigenous Land Rights in Latin
America
Anthony Stocks p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p85
Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements
Dominic Boyer and Claudio Lomnitz p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 105
The Effect of Market Economies on the Well-Being of Indigenous
Peoples and on Their Use of Renewable Natural Resources
Ricardo Godoy, Victoria Reyes-Garcı́a, Elizabeth Byron, William R. Leonard,
and Vincent Vadez p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 121

viii Contents
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An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies

Deborah Poole p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 159
Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Research: Models to Explain
Health Disparities
William W. Dressler, Kathryn S. Oths, and Clarence C. Gravlee p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 231
Recent Ethnographic Research on North American Indigenous
Peoples
Pauline Turner Strong p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 253
The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Ends of Life
Sharon R. Kaufman and Lynn M. Morgan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 317
Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration,
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

and Immigration in the New Europe

Paul A. Silverstein p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 363
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.

Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over

Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe
Bambi Ceuppens and Peter Geschiere p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 385
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System
Dipankar Gupta p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 409
The Evolution of Human Physical Attractiveness
Steven W. Gangestad and Glenn J. Scheyd p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 523
Mapping Indigenous Lands
Mac Chapin, Zachary Lamb, and Bill Threlkeld p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 619
Human Rights, Biomedical Science, and Infectious Diseases Among
South American Indigenous Groups
A. Magdalena Hurtado, Carol A. Lambourne, Paul James, Kim Hill,
Karen Cheman, and Keely Baca p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 639
Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology
Leith Mullings p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 667
Enhancement Technologies and the Body
Linda F. Hogle p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 695
Social and Cultural Policies Toward Indigenous Peoples: Perspectives
from Latin America
Guillermo de la Peña p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 717
Surfacing the Body Interior
Janelle S. Taylor p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 741

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Contents ARI 12 August 2005 20:29

Theme 1: Race and Racism

Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Research: Models to Explain

Health Disparities
William W. Dressler, Kathryn S. Oths, and Clarence C. Gravlee p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 231
Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease
Charles L. Briggs p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 269
Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration,
and Immigration in the New Europe
Paul A. Silverstein p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 363
The Archaeology of Black Americans in Recent Times
Mark P. Leone, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, and Jennifer J. Babiarz p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 575
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology

Leith Mullings p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 667
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.

Theme 2: Indigenous Peoples

The Effect of Market Economies on the Well-Being of Indigenous

Peoples and on Their Use of Renewable Natural Resources
Ricardo Godoy, Victoria Reyes-Garcı́a, Elizabeth Byron, William R. Leonard,
and Vincent Vadez p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 121
Recent Ethnographic Research on North American Indigenous
Peoples
Pauline Turner Strong p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 253
Will Indigenous Languages Survive?
Michael Walsh p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 293
Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over
Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe
Bambi Ceuppens and Peter Geschiere p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 385
Through Wary Eyes: Indigenous Perspectives on Archaeology
Joe Watkins p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 429
Metabolic Adaptation in Indigenous Siberian Populations
William R. Leonard, J. Josh Snodgrass, and Mark V. Sorensen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 451
Indigenous Movements in Australia
Francesca Merlan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 473
Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992–2004: Controversies,
Ironies, New Directions
Jean E. Jackson and Kay B. Warren p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 549

x Contents
 Contents ARI 12 August 2005 20:29

Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity

Luisa Maffi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 599
Human Rights, Biomedical Science, and Infectious Diseases Among
South American Indigenous Groups
A. Magdalena Hurtado, Carol A. Lambourne, Paul James, Kim Hill,
Karen Cheman, and Keely Baca p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 639
Social and Cultural Policies Toward Indigenous Peoples: Perspectives
from Latin America
Guillermo de la Peña p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 717

Indexes
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:159-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Subject Index p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 757

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 26–34 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 771
by Johns Hopkins University on 02/09/14. For personal use only.

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 26–34 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 774

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology chapters

may be found at http://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

Contents xi