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An Excess of Description:Ethnography, Race, andVisual TechnologiesDeborah PooleDepartment of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.2005. 34:159-79The Annual Review ofAnthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.orgdoi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro. 3 3.070203.144034

Copyright 2005 byAnnual Reviews. All rightsreserved0084-6570/05/10210159$20.00

Key Wordsphotography, visual anthropology, temporality, archive,ethnography

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of recent anthropological work onthe relationship between racial thought and the visual technologiesof photography and film. I argue that anthropologists have moved

away from a concern with representation per se in favor of the morecomplex discursive and political landscapes opened up by the concepts of media and the archive. My review of this work focuses on theaffective register of suspicion that has surrounded both visual methods and the idea of race in anthropology. Whereas this suspicionhas led some to dismiss visual technologies as inherently racializing or objectifying, I argue that it is possible to reclaim suspicionas a productive site for rethinking the particular forms of presence,uncertainty, and contingency that characterize both ethnographicand visual accounts of the world. I begin by discussing recent workon the photographic archive, early fieldwork photography, and thesubsequent move in the 1960s and 1970s from still photography tofilm and video within the emergent subfield of visual anthropology.Finally, I consider how more recent work on the problem of race infavor of descriptive accounts of mediascapes.

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ContentsINTRODUCTION. 160

THE ARCHIVE. 161EXCESS AND CONTEXT. 163

Contingency. 164PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD. 165

Culture at a Distance. 168NOTICING DIFFERENCE. 171

INTRODUCTIONAnthropological work on race and vision hasproliferated in conversation in recent yearswith a yet broader visual turn in the fieldsof critical theory and philosophy (Brennan &Jay 1996;Crary 1990;Debord 1987; Foucault1973, 1977; Jay 1994;Mitchell 1980, 1986;

Rorty 1979). Theories of language, discourse,and representation developed in these sister disciplines led many scholars to question traditional anthropological distinctionsbetween culture and race insofar as bothof these languages for theorizing social difference have led to talk about essentializedor biologized identities and boundaries (e.g.,Michaels 1995; Said 1978, 1993). Yet othersfrom within the discipline itself leveled the

more inclusive charge that the visualism inherent to ethnographic modes of descriptionand writing led to the reification, racialization,and temporal distancing of the people whomanthropologists study (Clifford & Marcus1986, Fabian 1983). This charge was fueled

by the parallel histories, as well as the presumed homology, between racialism and anthropology as interpretive projects groundedin Enlightenment ideals of description anddiscovery. Thus, it was reasoned, if race isabout finding classificatory order and meaning underneath (or within) the visible surface of the world, then similarly ethnography

was about the discovery of cultural and moralworlds through the observation of embodiedbehaviors and beliefs. In both cases, the observed surface of the world whether com

posed of skin colors or ritual behaviors waspresumed to contain, as if concealed withinit, another, more abstract order of meaning,

which was the ethnographer's task to reveal.The native was thus constituted as object

through a perceptual act that both emanatedfrom and, in so doing, constituted the ethnographer as a reasoned, thinking subject. Although these claims were easily leveled at

many ethnographic endeavors of the past,what is distressing about at least some of thepost-Orientalist critique, is that, by confining visuality itself within the directional dialectic of a Cartesian metaphysics, they leftlittle room for thinking about other, alter

native scenarios in which vision, technology,and difference might be differently related(Benjamin 1999; Buck-Morss 1989;Connolly2002; Deleuze 1985, 1994; Jay 1988; Levin1999).

This review takes this dilemma as a starting point for revisiting some recent as wellas some not so recent work on the relationship between race, vision, photography, andethnography. In exploring this literature, I askhow the idea of race has shaped the affective register of suspicion with which anthropologists have tended to greet photography,film, and other visual technologies. By focusing on suspicion, I hope to shift the burdenof criticism away from the usual conclusionsabout how race has shaped the way we see the

world, and how visual technologies have, inturn, shaped the very notion of race. Althoughinteresting and important, the recent proliferation of anthropological writing on questionsof race, representation, photography, and filmsuggests that these are, by now, familiar argu

ments. As such, the ostensibly critical accountthese studies of anthropology provide wouldseem to have run its course in that they duplicate the same sort of descriptive or normative force we have so convincingly assigned tophotography as a technology that is productive of racial ideas and orders. This descriptiveplentitude comes at the expense of silencingthe capacity of both ethnography and photography to unsettle our accounts of the world.

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Rather than dwelling on the ordering effects of visual representations, then, in thisreview I look more closely at the productivepossibilities that visual technologies offer forreclaiming the uncertainty and contingencythat characterize anthropological accounts ofthe world. This potential is unleashed precisely because of the ambiguous role playedby visual images in the disciplinary strugglefirst to identify, and then later to avoid, theidea of race as that which can be seen and described. I make no attempt to review all the

work that has been done on either race or visuality in recent years. In particular, I have notconsidered the numerous studies that addressvisual images of "others" exclusively in termsof their content as representations, stereotypes, or misrepresentations. Rather, my particular interest is to understand how the formsof suspicion that surround visual representations and race have shaped anthropologicalunderstandings of evidence, experience, thelimits of ethnographic inquiry, and, as a consequence, our own ongoing engagement withethnographic method and description.I first consider how anthropologists whoboth collected andmade photographs in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries reconciled disciplinary norms of evidence andevolutionary models of race with the peculiartemporality of the photograph. The experience of these anthropologists is particularlyrevealing in that it coincides with a periodin which anthropology moved from the enthusiastic pursuit of racial order to an al

most equally fervent rejection of the very ideaof race. The suspicion with which photography was greeted by anthropologists thus ranthe gamut from an empiricist concern withdeception (i.e., a concern for the accuracywith which photographs represented a "racialfact") to worries about the inability of photography to capture the intangibles of cultureand social organization. I then explore workthat falls self-consciously within the subfieldof visual anthropology that emerged in the1960s and 1970s in reaction to this concern

with the distinctive dangers and promises

of visual technologies. Although early workin visual anthropology was explicitly concerned about countering the notion that visual representations necessarily constituted anexploitative and/or racializing expropriationof the indigenous subject, more recent workon indigenous media displaces discussion ofrace with theories of ethnicity and identityformation. Finally, I close with some reflections on what these recent histories of visualtechnologies and race can offer for rethinking visuality, encounter, and difference inethnography.

THE ARCHIVEMuch like their nineteenth-century predeces

sors, anthropologists who have returned tothe photographic archive have been largelyconcerned with finding some sort of order, or logic, within the sometimes enor

mous and richly diverse collections they encounter. Institutional collections such as thoseheld by the Smithsonian (Scherer 1973),the Royal Anthropological Institute (Pinney1992, Poignant 1992), The American Museum of Natural History (Jacknis 1992), orHarvard's Peabody Museum (Banta& Hinsley1986) have been examined in an attempt touncover the theoretical (and political) interests of the anthropologists who collectedthem. Other much less studied collectionsfor example, the George Eastman House inRochester, New York, the Royal GeographicSociety in London, or the magnificent holdings at France's National Library were puttogether over longer periods of time, withless academically coherent agendas, and with

personnel and budgets that were often verymuch on the margins of the anthropological academy. Although less revealing of thespecific ways inwhich early anthropologistslooked at photography, these collections offerinsight into the importance of photographyand other visual technologies in the conversations that took place between anthropological, administrative, governmental, and

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"popular" ideas of race (e.g., Alvarado et al.2002, Graham-Brown 1988).

A focus on the archive and practices ofcollecting displaces the analytics of race away

from the search for "meanings" and the analysis of image content, in favor of a focuson the movement of images through different institutional, regional, and cultural sites.In my own work on nineteenth-century Andean photography (Poole 1997), for example,I looked at the circulation of anthropological photographs as part of a broader visualeconomy inwhich images of Andean peopleswere produced and circulated internationally.By broadening the social fields through whichphotographs circulate and accrue "meaning"or value, I argued for the privileged roleplayed by photography in the crafting of aracial common sense which, as in the Gramscian understanding of the term, unites "popular" and "scientific" understandings of embodied difference (Poole 1997, 2004).

Whereas my more Foucauldian approachused circulation to argue for an expansion ofthe anthropological archive, Edwards (2001)argues that a focus on movement "breaksdown" the archive "into smaller, more differentiated and complex acts of anthropological intention" (2001, p. 29). She concludesthat the informal networks and "collectingclubs" through which British anthropologistssuch as Tylor, Haddon, and Balfour exchangedand shared photographs led to a "privileging of content over form" in the productionof anthropological interpretations of race. Asa product of the comparative methodologiesand exchange practices (or "flows") through

which photographs were rendered as "data"in anthropology, the concept of race emergesas an abstraction produced by the archive asa technological form. Such a move to re

frame the archive as itself a visual technology takes us a long way from early studiesinwhich the "meaning" of particular photographic images was interpreted as being a reflection, or "expression," of racial and colonial ideologies formed elsewhere, outside thearchive.

Edwards' approach to the photographicarchive as a series of "microintentions" ratherthan as the reflection of a "universalizing desire" (2001, p. 7) also raises important ques

tions concerning where we locate the politicsof colonialism in the study of racial photography.

An initial andmotivating questionfor

much of this photographic history concernedthe political involvements of anthropologistsin the colonial project and the racial technologies of colonialism. Not surprising, in thesestudies we find that Victorian anthropologiststended to concentrate their efforts on collecting photographs from India and other Britishcolonies (Gordon 1997, Pinney 1992);Frenchethnologists accumulated images of Algerians (Prochaska 1990); andU.S.-based anthropologists sought images that could completetheir inventory of Native American "types"(Bernardin & Graulich 2003, Blackman 1981,Bush & Mitchell 1994, Faris 1996, Gidley2003). What becomes clear is that this correspondence between the subject matter foundin the anthropological archive and the imperial politics of particular nation states owedas much to the contemporary methodologies of anthropological research as it did tothe overtly colonialist sympathies of theseearly practitioners of anthropology. With fewexceptions, nineteenth-century anthropologists practiced an "epistolary ethnography"(Stocking 1995, p. 16) inwhich data was obtained not through direct observation, butrather through correspondence with the government officials, missionaries, and sundryagents of commerce and colonialism who hadhad the occasion to acquire firsthand knowledge (or at least scattered observations) of natives in far-flung places. For these anthropologists, photographic technology "closedthe space between the site of observationon the colonial periphery and the site of

metropolitan interpretation" (Edwards 2001,pp. 31-32).At the same time, asEdwards (2001, pp. 38,133), Poignant (1992), Pinney (1992, 1997),

and others point out, anthropologists werenot naively accepting of the much-lauded

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"transparency" or "objectivity" of photographs. Indeed, the value they assigned tophotographs as scientific evidence was inti

mately related to the forms of exchange, accumulation, and, above all, comparison, throughwhich mute photographs could be made toproduce the general laws, statistical regularities and the systemic predictions of evolutionary, and ethnological "theory." Of particular importance here was the genre of the"type" photograph studied by Edwards (1990,2001), Pinney (1992, 1997), Poignant (1992),Poole (1997), and others. The classificatoryconceit of type allowed images of individual bodies to be read not in reference tothe place, time, context, or individual human being portrayed in each photograph, butrather as self-contained exemplars of idealized racial categories with no single referent inthe world. In other words, photographs were

not read by anthropologists as evidence offacts that could be independently observed.Rather, as if in response to an increasingawareness of the almost infinite variety of hu

man behaviors and appearances, photographsthemselves came to constitute the factsof anthropology (Edwards 2001, Poignant1992).

EXCESS AND CONTEXTAs almost everyone who has studied thehistory of anthropological photography hasbeen quick to point out, the mid-nineteenthcentury anthropological romance with photography was fueled in important ways by adesire for coherence, accuracy, and completion. It was also, however, plagued almost

from the beginning by a certain nervousness about both the excessive detail and thetemporal contingencies of the photographic

prints that began to pile up around the anthropologist's once comfortably distant armchair.In her study of the photographic archivesat the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI),Poignant charts the subtle faultlines throughwhich British anthropologists came to temper their initial fascination with the evidential

power of the photographic image as "facts inthemselves" (Poignant 1992, p. 44). The RAIarchive was founded on the basis of collections from the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines'Protection Societies (Pinney 1992, Poignant1992). Photographs collected for these earlysocieties often relied on such common artisticconventions as the portrait vignette, throughwhich the "native" subject could be madeto look, as it were, more human and more

needy. During the 1880s, however, the anthropologists charged with making sense ofthe RAI's new endeavor became increasinglyconcerned to discipline the sorts of poses,framings, and settings inwhich subjects werephotographed. During the 1880s, the even

more rigorous standardization demanded byAdolphe Bertillon's and Arthur Chervin's anthropom trie methods cemented the distinction between "racial" and "ethnological" photographs (Poole 1997, pp. 132-40; Sekula1989). By specifying uniform focal lengths,

poses, and backdrops, anthropologists soughtto edit out the distracting "noise" of context, culture, and the human countenance(Edward 2001, Macintyre & MacKenzie1992, Spencer 1992). In yet other cases, anthropologists worked on the surface of thephotographic print to inscribe interior framesthatwould isolate bits of ethnological or racialdata (for example, tattoos) from the rest ofthe individual's body (Wright 2003).Whereassuch gestures betray a felt "need for somekind of intervention to make things [likerace and culture] fully visible" (Wright 2003,

p. 149), they also betray an underlying suspicion about "the frustratingly ... m tonymienature of the photograph" (Poignant 1992,p. 42).

Edwards' (2001, pp. 131-55) study of theDarwinian biologist, Thomas Huxley's "wellconsidered plan" to produce a photographicinventory of the races of the British Empire,

provides one example of how "the intrusionof humanizing, cultural detail" (2001, p. 144)disrupted the scientific ambitions of anthropology. Not only were colonial officials reluctant to jeopardize relations with the natives

RAI: RoyalAnthropologicalInstitute

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by imposing the absurd strictures of nudeanthropom trie poses, but even in those instances where photographs were taken, the"intersubjective space constituted by the actof photographing" (p. 145) left itsmark onthe images in the form of expression, gaze,and beauty. Such content was read by Huxley and his fellow systematizers as an "excess"

of visual detail. Yet their attempts to purgeit ultimately led to failure in that the technology of photography was, in the final analysis, not capable of matching the totalizingambitions of the project. As a result, Edwards

wryly comments, the colonial office's archiveof this project about race contains many morephotographs of buildings than of people or

races.From its beginnings,

race was aboutrevealing or making visible what lay hidden underneath the untidy surface detailsthe messy visual excess of the human, cultural body (Spencer 1992,Wallis 2003).Wellbefore the invention of photography, Cuvier,for example, had instructed the artists whoaccompanied expeditions to eliminate bothersome details of gesture, expression, culture,or context from their portraits of natives sothat the underlying details of cranial structureand "race" might be more readily revealed(Herv 1910).Whereas photography held outthe promise of facilitating this anthropological quest for order through the elimination ofdetail or "noise," the same machine that had

made it possible to imagine a utopia of complete transparency also introduced the twin

menace of intimacy and contingency andwith them, the possibility (however remote)of acknowledging the coevalness and, thus,the humanity of their racial subjects. It isperhaps for this reason that anthropologists began by 1874 (with the publication o Notes andQueries) to express an interest in regulating thetypes and amount of visual information theywould receive through photographs. By the1890s, although photography continued to

be used in anthropometry, there was a general decline in interest in the collection anduse of photographs as ethnological evidence

(Edwards 2001, Griffiths 2002, Poignant1992, Pinney 1992).

ContingencyAn arguably even more important slippagebetween the classificatory or stabilizing ambitions of photography and its political effects can be located in the unique temporality of the photograph. Both the evidentiarypower and the allure of the photograph aredue to our knowledge that it captures (orfreezes) a particular moment in time. Thistemporal dimension of the photograph introduced awhole other layer of distracting detailinto the anthropological science of race. Convinced of both the inevitability and desireability of evolutionary progress, nineteenthcentury anthropologists (like many of theirtwentieth-century descendants) were convinced that the primitives they studied wereon the verge of disappearing. Ethnologicalencounters acquired a corresponding urgencyas anthropologists scrambled to collect whatthey imagined to be the last vestiges of evidence available on earlier forms of humanlife.

For at least some of those who held thecamera in their hands, however, the photograph carried a latent threat for anthropology. The Dutch ethnologist Im Thurm, forexample, famously cautioned anthropologistsagainst the dangers of erasing the human, aesthetic, and individualizing excess of photographic portraiture in favor of a too rigorouspreference for "types" (Thurm 1893, Tayler1992). Anthropometry, he added, was proba

bly better practiced on dead bodies than onthe human beings he sought to capture in hisportrait photography from Guyana. At thesame time, however, Thurm (1893) himselfoften blocked out the distracting backgroundsand contexts surrounding his photographicsubjects. His focus was on the "human," buthis anthropological perception of photography excluded, as did the racial photographyhe opposed, the "visual excess" of context andthe "off-frame." Thurm's cautious embrace of

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photography speaks clearly to its suspect status at a time when all fieldwork was ifnot directly animated by a concern for finding racialtypes, then at the very least carried out underthe shadow of the idea of race.

In other cases, photographers most fa

mously, Edward Curtis made skillfuluse of

aesthetic conventions such as soft focus andvignette to transform the inevitability of extinction into the tragic romance of nostalgia. On one level, Curtis's photographs canbe said to have harnessed the aesthetic of portrait photography aspart of abroader, politicalframing of Native Americans as the sad, inevitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely

manifest destiny. On another level, however,Curtis's photographs are also of interest forwhat they reveal about the distinctive temporality of the "racializing gaze." AlthoughCurtis's photographs have been criticized as

inauthentic for their use of costume and tribalattribution (Gidley 2003, Lyman 1982), theirpower and massive popular appeal had muchto do with theways inwhich hewas able to distill contemporary fascination for a technologythat allows one to gaze forever on that whichis about to disappear.

Within anthropology, however, this "temporality of the moment" served only to increase anxieties about the utility of the photographic image as an instrument of scientificresearch. For one thing, the sheer number ofphotographs that became available to the anthropologist seemed to belie the notion thatprimitive people were somehow disappearing,as evolutionary theory had led them to believe.Poignant suggests that it was in response tojust such a dilemma that anthropologists atthe RAI came to favor studio portraits over

photographs taken in the field because theclear visual displacement found in the studioportrait between the primitive subject and theworld allowed the anthropologist "to imposeorder on people too numerous to disappear"(1992, p. 54). Pinney suggests that this tension

between actuality and disappearance playedout in the case of India through two photographic idioms. The "salvage paradigm" was

applied to "what was perceived to be a fragile tribal community," whereas the "detectiveparadigm," premised on a faith in the evidentiary status of the photographic document,"was more commonly manifested when faced

with amore vital caste society." He further associates the detective

paradigmwith a curato

rial imperative of inventory and preservation,and the salvage paradigm with a language ofurgency and "capture" (Pinney 1997, p. 45).Although the particular mapping of the twoidioms on tribal and caste society is, in many

ways, peculiar to India and Pinney even goesso far as to suggest that uncertainty about visual evidence is somehow peculiar, or at leastpeculiarly marked, in India the general tension between ideas of racial extinction, thetemporal actuality of photography, and anxiety about the nature and truthfulness of the

perceptual world was clearly present in othercolonial and postcolonial settings.

When viewed in this way, the understanding of race that emerges from a history of anthropological photography is clearly asmuchabout the instability of the photograph as eth

nological evidence and the unshakeable suspicion that perhaps things are not what they appear to be as it is about fixing the native subjectas a particular racial type. Yet, recent criticalinterventions have paid far greater attentionto the fixing. What would have to be done,then, if we were to invert the question thatisusually asked about stability and fixing andinstead ask how it is that photography simultaneously sediments and fractures the solidityof "race" as a visual and conceptual fact. Putsomewhat differently, how can we recapturethe productive forms of suspicion with whichearly anthropologists greeted photography'sunique capacity to reveal the particularities of

moments, encounters, and individuals?

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELDFor an answer to this question, we might wantto begin by looking at some early attempts tointegrate photography into the ethnographictoolkit. Recent studies of early fieldwork



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photography stress the extent to which photography offered anthropologists a guiltypleasure. On the one hand and to an evengreater extent than with the archival collections just discussed anthropologists wishingto use photography in the field were faced

with the problem of weeding out the extraneous contexts and contingent details captured by the camera. This problem was at oncetechnical an artifact of the unforgiving "realism" of the photographic image and conceptual, in that the subjects of anthropology(first race, then culture and social organiza

tion) were themselves statistical or interpretive abstractions. As such, their perceptionand documentation required a temporalitythat was quite different from that of photographs, whose

contentspoke only of themute and singular existence of particular ob

jects, bodies, and events. Indeed, earliest usesof photography infieldwork made every effortto erase the contingent moment of the photographic act. In his Torres Straits fieldwork,

Haddon, for example, made wide use of reenactment and restaging as ameans to documentrituals andmyths (Edwards 2001, pp. 157-80).

Hockings also suggests that W.H.R. Riversused mythical allegories drawn from Frazer'sThe Golden Bough in his curious photographsof Todas (Hockings 1992).Whereas Riverssought to place natives in a mythical past,

Haddon sought to use photography to portraywhat the natives "saw" when they talked ofmythology. Both produced photographs thatwere concerned to erase evidence of the moment at which the image was taken.On the other hand, along with contingency, photography also brought the troubling specter of intimacy. Thus, although visual description was recognized as importantfor the scientific project of data collection andinterpretation, photographs could also be readas documents of encounter, and encounter, inturn, contained within it the specter of com

munication, exchange, and presence all factors that challenged the ethnographer's claimsto objectivity. The tension between these twoaspects of ethnographic practice is perhaps

best captured in Malinowski's now famousterm "participant observation." Whereas observation appeals to the ideal of the distanced,objective onlooker, participation clearly invokes the notion of presence and, with it, acertain openness to the humanity of the (stillracialized) other.

In his own fieldwork photography, Malinowski seems to signal an awareness of theproblematic status of photography in the negotiation of this contradictory charge of being simultaneously distant and close (Wright1991, 1994; Young 1999). Among his Britishcontemporaries, Malinowski made the mostextensive use of photographs in his published

work, averaging one photo for every sevenpages inhis published ethnographies (Samain1995).Yet his careful selection of photographsseems to replicate the strict division of labor by which he separated affective and scientific description in his diaries and ethno

graphies (Clifford 1988, Malinowski 1967).For example, despite having taken numerous, elaborately posed photographs of himself and other colonial officials, he seems tohave carefully edited out the presence of allsuch nonindigenous elements when illustrating his books (Spyer 2001, p. 190).The distancing effect created by such careful editingwas further reinforced by Malinowski's preference for the middle to long shot in his ownphotography (Young 2001, p. 18). Studies ofEvans-Pritchards' field photography reveal asimilar preference for long shots, aerial shots,and a careful avoidance of eye contact inwhatWolbert (2001) interprets as an effort by theethnographer to erase his own presence inthe field, thereby establishing the physical or"ecological distance" required to sustain hisown authority as ethnographer.

No matter how distant the shot, however, the very medium of photography contained within it an uncanny ability to index the presence of the photographer. The"strong language" of race helped ethnographers to silence this technological register of encounter, often with great effect. In

Argonauts, for example, Malinowski (1922,166 Poole


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pp. 52-53) comments on the "great variety inthe physical appearance" of the Trobrianders."There are men and women of tall stature,fine bearing and delicate features ... with anopen and intelligent expression ... [and] otherswith prognatic, Negroid faces, broad, thicklipped mouths,

narrow foreheads, and a coarseexpression." Through such language, itmightbe argued, Malinowski avoided physical description of individuals something that re

mains rare in ethnographic writing in favorof the distancing language of race. Similarly,to support the more personal observation thatthe women "have a genial, pleasant approach"(1922, p. 53), he again relies not on languagebut on two photographs: One (taken by hisfriend Hancock) he captions "a coarse butfine looking unmarried woman" (plate XI inMalinowski 1922), and the other (his own) isa medium-long shot of a group of Boyowangirls (plateXII).

Although such a division of labor betweentext and photo may well speak to the affinityof photography for the sorts of racial "typing" towhich Malinowski gestures inhis text,in fact, very few ofMalinowski's photographsconform to the standard racial photograph(Young 2001, pp. 101-2). Instead what seemsto be at stake inMalinowski's use of photography is his inability to engage or make senseof that moment in which he first perceivedsome aspect of the people he met. Repeatedly in his opening descriptions of both natives and landscapes,Malinowski speaks of theinsights that seem to evade him in the formof fleeting impressions or glimpses. Horizons are "scanned for glimpses of natives"(1961, p. 33); natives are "scanned for thegeneral impression" they create (1961, p. 52);and the entire Southern Massim is experienced "as if the visions of a primeval, happy,savage life were suddenly realized, even ifonly in a fleeting impression" (1961, p. 35).Malinowski is intrigued by such impressions,however, not for what they tell of the momentin which they occur, but rather because theyhold the promise that theymay someday become legible as "symptoms of deeper, socio

logical facts" (1961, p. 51). "One suspects," hewrites, that there are "many hidden and mysterious ethnographic phenomena behind thecommonplace aspect of things" (p. 51).

On the one hand, then, the reservationsexpressed byMalinowski and others (Jacknis1984,1992; Wright 2004; Young 2001)

aboutthe use of photography in fieldwork speak tothe unsuitability of a visual medium that isabout surface, contingency, and the momentfor a discipline whose interpretive task wasto describe the hidden regularities, systemic

workings, and structural regularities that constituted "society" and "culture" (Grimshaw2001). On the other hand, however, as a realist mode of documentation, the photographalso contained within it the possibility of authenticating the presence that constituted thebasis of the ethnographer's scientific method.

The other visual technologies such asmuseum displays (Edwards 2001, Haraway1989, Karp & Levine 1990, Stocking 1985),live exhibitions (Corbey 1993;Griffiths 2002,

pp. 46-84; Poignant 2003, Reed 2000, Rydell 1984), and film (Grimshaw 2001, Oksiloff2001, Rony 1996) with which turn-of-thecentury anthropologists experimented offeredeven fewer opportunities to control for thesorts of visual excess and detail that threatenedto undermine the distance required for scien

tific observation. One particularly instructiveset of debates discussed by Griffiths (2002,pp. 3 45) concerned the visual and evenmoral effects of overly realistic habitat andlife groups at the American Museum of Nat

ural History. Although some curators soughtto attract museum goers through the hyperrealism of wax life group displays that "blendedthe uncanny presence of the human doublewith the authority of the scientific artifact"(Griffiths 2002, p. 20), others includingFranz Boas (Jacknis 1985)- expressed concern that these hyperrealist technologies

would distract the gaze of museum goers. As aremedy, Boas sought to create exhibits whosehuman figures were intentionally antirealist,and towhich the spectator's gaze would firstbe drawn by a central focal artifact and then



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carefully guided through a series of relateditems and display cases. Griffiths uncoverssimilar worries about the more obvious perils that theMidway sideshows presented to thescientific claims of ethnology. Whereas othershave pointed toward world's fairs as sites forthe propagation of nineteenth-century racialist anthropology (Greenhalgh 1988,Maxwell1999, Reed 2000, Rydell 1984), Griffiths'(2002) emphasis on the professional suspicionsurrounding such displays reveals the extentto which, for contemporary anthropologists,the concern was with the disruptive potentialof distraction (Benjamin 1968, Simmel 1971,

Crary 1999) as a form of affect that workedagainst the focused visualism required for theeducation of the museum goer. Such worriesspeak clearly to the general nervousness surrounding the visual technologies of photography and film within anthropology and, along

with it, the persistent and perhaps Utopianbelief that the aesthetic and affective appealof the visual could be somehow brought inline with contemporary scientific ideals ofobjective "observation."

Culture at aDistanceThe subfield of visual anthropology emerged

in the mid-1960s in response to this concernabout the viability of visual technologies forethnographic work. Ethnography, of course,deploys a language of witnessing and visualobservation as ameans to defend its accountof the world. Thus, although voice and language are crucial to ethnography, both thedescriptive task and the authorizing methodof ethnography continue to rely in important

ways on the ethnographer's physical presencein aparticular site and her (normatively) visualobservations and descriptive accounts of thepeople, events, and practices she encountersthere. At the same time, and as recent workon anthropological photography and film has

made clear, visual documentation is generallynot considered to be a sufficient source of evidence unless it is accompanied by the contextualizing and/or interpretive testimony of

the ethnographer (AAA 2002). Thus, asmuchas photographs entered as juridical evidencerequire a human voice to authenticate theirevidentiary status in court (Derrida 2002), the"hard" visual evidence of ethnographic photography or film is intimately, even inextricably,

bound up with the "soft" testimonialvoice (or "subjectivity") of the ethnographer(Heider 1976, Hockings 1985, Loizos 1993,

MacDougall 1997, Stoller 1992). Like judiciary photographs as well, the dilemma inethnographic photography is in large part atemporal one. The ethnographer (like the judicial witness) must speak for the photographas someone who was in the place shown inthe photograph at the time when the photograph was taken and this privileged authority of the ethnographic witness seems to holdtrue no matter what the role assigned to his"native" subjects (Crawford & Turton 1992,

Hockings & Omori 1988,Worth & Adair1997). It is thismove that affords decisive status to the photographic image as testimony toan event in a nonrepeatable time. However, itis the photograph not the photographerthat allows for the peculiar conflation of pastand present that renders the photograph aform of material evidence.

In ethnography, however, as we have seen,the photograph's evocation of an off-framecontext and a particular, passing, moment has

most often been seen to pose a debilitatinglimit to the task of ethnographic interpreta

tion. Rather than thinking about how voiceand image work together to create the evidentiary aura and distinctive temporality ofthe photograph, ethnographers, as we haveseen, have instead looked to photography as a

means to discipline the visual process of observation. Occupying an uneasy place at the origins of the visual anthropology canon, the 759photographs published in Bateson & Mead'sBalinese Character (1942) represent one extreme solution to taming visual evidence forethnographic ends. Bateson and Mead initially began using photographs to supplementtheir notetaking and observations and to reconcile their disparate writing styles (Jacknis

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1988, Sullivan 1999). As work progressed onthe photographie index that was to comple

ment their written fieldnotes, however, theyquickly came to see photographs, first, as anindependent control on the potential biasesof visual observation (Sullivan 1999, p. 16)and then, somewhat later, as a form of documentation through which to capture "thoseaspects of the culture which are least amenableto verbal treatment and which can only beproperly documented by photographic methods" (Bateson & Mead 1942, p. 122). In herlater work on child-rearing practices, Meadextended this understanding of the supple

mental character of photography in an attempt to replicate precise temporal sequencesof practices (Mead &MacGregor 1951).

Wliat is perhaps most intriguing aboutMead's Balinese work is the lengths towhichshe goes to transform photographs into

words. As "objective" traces of the temporalsequences of gestures, poses, expressions, andembraces that together add up to somethinglike "character" or "child-rearing," the photographs construct their meaning as a narrative. Photographs thus remain as "raw material" or "facts" whose "meaning" lies not in thedetail they reveal of particular encounters, butrather in the narrative message they conveyabout the sequence (and presumed outcome)of many different events and encounters.

That the ideas of narrative and informationlay at the heart of early visions of visual anthropology is suggested by the fact that thesubfield's first professional organization wasthe Society for the Anthropology of Visual

Communication, founded in 1972. As containers of information indexed through language, photographs were meant to communicate the broader message lurking behindthe surface rendering of the event, person, or

practice they portrayed.InMead &Metraux's (1953) textbook, TheStudy of Culture at a Distance, photography,film, and imagery were held up as privilegedsites for communicating a feeling of culturalimmersion, a sort of substitute for the personal experience of fieldwork. "The study of

imagery," Metraux writes, "is an intensely personal and yet a rigorously formal approach toa culture." Although "every cultural analysisis to a greater or lesser extent built upon workwith imagery," in the study of culture froma distance, imagery comes to constitute "our

most immediate experience of the culture"(Metraux 1953, p. 343;Mead 1956).The image, in this early approach to visual anthropology, was imagined as both an expression of theperceptual system shared by the members ofa society and as a surrogate for the experiencethat would allow one to access, and describe,that perceptual system or "culture." As various authors have subsequently argued (e.g.,Banks &Morphy 1997, Edwards 1992,Taylor1994), this approach to the visual is "racialized" both in the sense of a subject/objectdivide and in the idea that there is an in

ner "meaning" hidden beneath the surface ofboth culture and the image.What is lost insuch an approach is the immediacy of sightas a sensory experience that could speak tothe ethnographic intangibles of presence andnewness (Edwards 1997). Instead, imagesphotographs, gestures, films are scrutinizedfor clues to the cultural configuration they express.

Given what Mead's own Balinese workhad done to divorce still photography fromboth affect and the spontaneity of the mo

ment, it is perhaps, then, no surprise that thefield of visual anthropology had, by the late1970s, come to be dominated by the studyand production of ethnographic film, whereasstill photographs had more or less disap

peared from "serious" ethnographic texts (deHeusch 1962). In explicit contrast to photography (MacDougall 1998, pp. 64,68), film wasseen as a visual technology that could go be

yond "observation" to include explicit, reflexive references to the sorts of intimate relationships and exchanges that bound the filmmaker to his "subjects" (MacDougall 1985,Rouch 2003). The affective power of film,

MacDougall notes, is due to both its immediacy and its nonverbal character in that (for

MacDougall) film unlike photography and



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the forms of "visual communication" put forward by Mead is not mediated by analysis orwriting (MacDougall 1985, pp. 61-62). Film,

in other words, was considered to bear withinit an affective transparency that was deniedto photography as a "frozen" and hence distanced image. Animated by a profound hu

manism, this view of film as universal or "transcultural" (MacDougall 1998) seemed likelyto transcend the forms of racial objectificationand the objectifying "conventions of scientificreason" that many considered inherent to thestillness of photography.This view of film provided the grounds

from which visual anthropologists set out tocounter the anticolonial critique of the 1980s.To the surprise (and, perhaps, dismay) ofmany, anthropology has emerged largely unscathed from the charges of objectification,racialism, and colonialism levied against it inthe 1980s. Few anthropologists today wouldbe at all surprised by the claim that the anthropological project has had a troubling complicity with the racializing discourses and essentializing dichotomies that characterized NewWorld slave societies and European colonialrule. In many cases, the resulting disciplinarysensitivity to both history and politics hasalso helped to establish an activist agendain which ethnography has come to be seenas simultaneously collaborative, critical, andinterventionist. More specifically, within thesubfield of visual anthropology, it led to newparadigms of collaborative media production(Rouch 2003), an effective handing-over ofthe tools of visual documentation to the "native" subject (Ginsburg 1992, Turner 1992,Worth & Adair 1997), and a shift in anthropological focus from vision itself to the distributive channels and discursive regimes ofmedia and the archive (Ginsburg et al. 2002).As the new disciplinary paradigm for visual anthropology, work on indigenous media has tended to focus on the social relations of image production and consumption(Ginsburg 1992,Himpele 1996) and the cultural idioms through which indigenous producers and artists appropriate filmic mediums

(Turner 1992, 2002 a).What unites work onindigenous media, however, is the concept ofthe "indigenous." As a gloss for a particular form of subaltern identity claim, the notion of the indigenous invokes ideals of locality, cultural specificity, and authenticity. Forsome it has functioned as an effective formfor critically rethinking (Ginsberg 1992) oreven rejecting (Faris 2003) the possibilitiesof recuperating photography and film withinanthropology. With respect to the specificproblem of race, however, the notion of the indigenous has functioned primarily as aframefor reinterpreting video contents for insightinto how racial categories and representa

tions are perceived and countered from theperspective of "the represented" (Alexander1998;Ginsburg 1995;Himpele 1996; Jackson2004; Turner 1992, 2002a,b). In this work,

video and other visual media provide anoutlet for the communication, defense, andstrengthening of cultural, national, or ethnic identities that preexist, and thus transcend, the media form itself, as they are si

multaneously shaped by it (Alexander 1998,Ginsburg 1995, Himpele 1996). Underlyingmuch though not all of this is a mappingof identity through scale such that "the mass

media" is said to "obliterate identity" whilethemore portable forms of handheld "videotends to rediscover identity and consolidateit" (Dowmunt 1993, p. 11;Ginsburg 2002).Such claims seem all the more peculiar giventhe premium placed on authenticity and localism within neoliberal multicultural discourse(Hale 2002, Povinelli 2002, Rose 1999). Byignoring the broader political and discursivelandscape within which categories such as "theindigenous" emerge and take hold, much ofthe literature on indigenous media ends updefending an essentialist or primordial notionof identity that comes perilously close to olderideas of racial essences.

By introducing questions of voice and perspective, these studies of indigenous videoand film have effectively (and, I think, inadvertently) destabilized earlier assumptionsabout the necessarily objectifying and hence

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racializing character of still photographictechnologies. Thus, recent work on photography tends to emphasize the "slippery"or unstable quality of the racial referent(Firstenberg 2003, Fusco 2003, Poole 1997),the highly mobile meanings attached to photographs as they circulate through differentcultural and social contexts (Howell 1998,

Kravitz 2002), the importance of gazes as a potentially destabilizing site of encounter withinthe photographic frame (Lutz & Collins1993), or the creative reworkings of the photographic surface in postcolonial portrait photography (Behrend 2003, Buckley 1999, Jhala1993,Mirzoeff 2003, Pinney 1997, Sprague1978). Although emphases in these worksdiffer and I cannot do justice to them all

here the general trend (with some exceptions; e.g., Faris 1992, 2003) is to reclaimsome sort of agency or, perhaps, autonomyfor the photograph in the form of either resistance,mobility, or the fluidity of photographic"meaning." If "race" still haunts the photograph, itdoes so in the form of an increasinglyghostly presence.Other anthropologists have extended theparadigm of indigenous media to explorehow national identities are shaped by television, cinema, and the internet (Abu-Lughod1993,2002; Mankekar 1999;Rajagopal 2001).

These works effectively expand the scale ofvisual anthropology from the local to the national or even the transnational as the focus ofanalysis shifts from the image itself to encompass the relationships that inform and constitute the production and distribution of com

mercial and televisualist media.One troubling side effect of these devel

opments within the visual anthropology ofboth photography and film as in the discipline more generally has been a move awayfrom what we once thought of as "the local."Yet as the terrain of anthropological inquiryhas expanded beyond the traditional village,community, or tribe to embrace the studyof such allegedly "translocal" (Ferguson &

Gupta 2002) sites as the modern state, media, migration, non-governmental organiza

tions, financial flows, and discursive regimes,the burden of evidence collecting in ethnographic work has shifted away from the affective or sensory domain of encounter andtoward a more removed and synthetic modeof description. As such, the handover of technologies and the shift to the translocal do notso much address as circumvent the chargesof (racial) essentialization and (visualist) distancing leveled against anthropology by theOrientalist critique.What has been sacrificedin this move is an attention to the unsettlingforms of intimacy and contingency that constitute the subversive hallmarks (and hencepotential strengths, aswell as liabilities) of theethnographic encounter.

NOTICING DIFFERENCEIn "The Lived Experience of the Black,"Fanon (2001) opens by recounting the effects 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 emphasis on that particular, and very brief, mo

ment when the onlooker's gaze has not yet settled on his body. Hope appears to him in thatmoment when the "liberating gaze, creepingover my body ... gives me back a lightnessthat I had thought lost and, by removing me

from the world, gives me back to the world.But over there, right when Iwas reaching theother 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 solution" (Fanon 2001, p. 184).This briefmomentbefore "thefragments [of the self] are put to

gether by another" constitutes, for Fanon, thesite of betrayal where a chance encounter is soquickly rendered into the paralyzing fixitythe certain meanings of race. Various scholars have emphasized what this sense of betrayal reveals about Fanon's understanding oftheweight of history and the colonial past in

particular on the present. In addition to thisgesture toward the past, however, Fanon alsounderscores the importance of placing history

www.annualreviews.orgAn Excess

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and the past in the service of an "active inflection of the now" (Bernasconi 2001, p. 178).This is achieved through both "the endlessrecreation of himself and a realization that"the universal is the end of struggle, not thatwhich precedes it" (p. 179).

Fanon's insistence on the fleeting temporality of the gaze as a site of ethical possibility offers several important leads for howto rethink the place of visual technologiesand visual perception more generally in thepractice of ethnography. On the one hand,Fanon insists (in this and other writings)on the extent to which perceptual and visual technologies (cinema, in particular) create bodily habits of distancing (Alcoff 2001).

This emphasis on distance and on the physical, chemical qualities through which photo

graphic technologies, like the racial gaze, "fix"racial subjects in their skins resonates quiteclearly with the emphasis in somuch of visualanthropology on the classificatory impulses ofracial and anthropological photography. Onthe other hand, however, and along with thisemphasis on distance, Fanon also provides important insight into theworkings of the gaze.For Fanon, the gaze is as much about undoing the corporeal frame as it is about fixing(Bernasconi 2001,Weate 2003). As such, hissense of the gaze is rooted in equal parts in theembodied, sensory, and future-oriented im

mediacy of encounter and the rapidity withwhich this opening slips into the exclusionary distancing of which he speaks.When addressed in these terms, Fanon's insistence onthe visual underpinnings of race offers productive grounds for rethinking the temporality of the ethnographic encounter and the

ways inwhich photographic technologies mayneed to be rethought in conversation with thatparticular understanding of encounter.

As we have seen for much of the twentieth century, anthropologists have workedaround a dichotomy inwhich photographylike seeing was relegated to the domain ofthe fleeting and the contingent, whereas interpretation (and, with it, description) was construed as a process by which the extraneous

detail or noise of vision was to be disciplinedand rendered intelligible. While an interpretive move must, perhaps, inevitably bring withit a reduction of noise, what is perhaps lost inthis transition is the immediacy of encounteras an opening toward both newness and "theother." The challenge, of course, is

to reclaimthis sense of encounter without abandoningthe possibilities for interpretation and explanation.

The relationship of photography to thistask depends on how we think about its peculiar temporality. An anthropology focusedon defining horizontally differentiated formsof life through the language of "race" (or"culture") affords conflicting evidential (orjuridical) weight to the different temporalities involved in the fleeting immediacy of theencounter and the stabilizing permanency ofthe fact. Ethnographers, as a result, tend toregard the surface appearances of the worldand the photographic images that recordthem with a good deal of suspicion precisely because they are seen as being saturated

with the contingency of chance encounters. Inthis respect, ethnography's relationship to thephotographic image continues to be hauntedby the specter of race, in that the photographcan only really be imagined as a form of evidence inwhich fixity (in the form of simplicity or focus) is favored over excess (in the formof contingency or confusion) (Edwards 1997).

As anthropology turns its attention to formsof racial and cultural hybridity, one wondershow anthropologists will address this disciplinary anxiety about surface appearances andthe visible world, or whether hybridity likethe native and Indian before it will come tobe treated as another (racial) "fact" that mustbe uncovered or revealed, as if lying underneath the deceptive surface of the visible world(Fusco 2003). Perhaps what is needed is a rethinking of the notion of difference itself (e.g.,Deleuze 1994, Connolly 2002), a questioningof its stability as an object of inquiry and anew way of thinking about the temporality ofencounter as it shapes both ethnography andphotography.

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Fortunately, the move to reclaim bothethnography and the ethical imperative of description from the Orientalist critique has not

meant a simple return to a "traditional" division of labor inwhich ethnography providedthe empirical observations and descriptionsupon which anthropological theory coulddraw to uncover the hidden rules, orders, or

meanings of specific cultures and societies.Rather, the theoretical work of ethnographyis now more often assumed to be inseparable

from the specific forms of encounter, temporality, uncertainty, and excess that characterize ethnography as a form of both social inquiry andwriting (e.g., Biehl 2005, Das 2003,Ferme 2001, Nelson 1999, Pandolfo 1997,

Taussig 1993). At stake here is not somuch

a rejection of vision as the basis of knowledge as a substantive rethinking of how adescriptive account that is not grounded inthe idea of interpretation or discovery canspeak to such things as experience, uncertainty, and newness in the cultural worlds westudy as anthropologists. By explicitly questioning both the empirical language of positivist science in which physical characteristics are cited as the visible, and irrefutable,evidence of racial difference and the idealistlanguage of Cartesian metaphysiscs, this move

makes it possible to rethink the troublesomevisuality of "race." This move also leaves usopen to the sensory and anticipatory aspectsof visual encounter and surprise that animatethe very notion of participant observation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSIwould like to thankVeena Das, SameenaMulla, Naveeda Khan, andGabriela Zamorano fortheir comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this article.

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