An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual TechnologiesAuthor(s): Deborah PooleReviewed work(s):Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34 (2005), pp. 159-179Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064881 .Accessed: 09/03/2012 12:29

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An Excess of Description:

Ethnography, Race, and

Visual Technologies Deborah Poole

Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218; email: dpoole@jhu.edu

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005. 34:159-79

The Annual Review of

Anthropology is online at

anthro.annualreviews.org

doi: 10.1146/

annurev.anthro. 3 3.070203.144034

Copyright 2005 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

0084-6570/05/1021

0159$20.00

Key Words

photography, visual anthropology, temporality, archive,

ethnography

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of recent anthropological work on

the relationship between racial thought and the visual technologies of photography and film. I argue that anthropologists have moved

away from a concern with representation per se in favor of the more

complex discursive and political landscapes opened up by the con

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

Contents

INTRODUCTION. 160

THE ARCHIVE. 161

EXCESS AND CONTEXT. 163

Contingency. 164

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE FIELD. 165

Culture at a Distance. 168

NOTICING DIFFERENCE. 171

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

posed of skin colors or ritual behaviors was

presumed to contain, as if concealed within

it, 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 emanated

from and, in so doing, constituted the ethno

grapher as a reasoned, thinking subject. Al

though these claims were easily leveled at

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.

16o Poole

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

suality in recent years. In particular, I have not

considered the numerous studies that address

visual images of "others" exclusively in terms

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

www.annualreviews.org An Excess of Description 161

"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.

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 (2 001, pp. 3 8,

133), Poignant (1992), Pinney (1992, 1997), and others point out, anthropologists

were

not naively accepting of the much-lauded

I 2 Poole

"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 conceit of type allowed images of individ

ual bodies to be read not in reference to

the place, time, context, or individual hu

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

tions from the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Societies (Pinney 1992, Poignant 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

thropom trie 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 ... m

tonymie 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

RAI: Royal

Anthropological Institute

www.annualreviews.org An Excess of Description i6$

by imposing the absurd strictures of nude

anthropom trie 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

(Herv 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 o 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

(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

164 Poole

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

framing of Native Americans as the sad, in

evitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely manifest destiny. On another level, however,

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

www.annualreviews.org An Excess of Description 165

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 2 001, pp. 15 7-80).

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

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,

166 Poole

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

the women "have a genial, pleasant approach"

(1922, p. 53), he again relies not on language but on two photographs: One (taken by his

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

www.annualreviews.org An Excess of Description 167

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

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

i68 Poole

1988, Sullivan 1999). As work progressed on

the photographie 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

extended this understanding of the supple mental character of photography in an at

tempt to replicate precise temporal sequences

of practices (Mead & MacGregor 1951). Wliat 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

www.annualreviews.org An Excess of Description 169

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

(Turner 1992, 2002 a). 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

i jo Poole

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

tography (Behrend 2003, Buckley 1999, Jhala

1993, Mirzoeff 2003, Pinney 1997, Sprague 1978). Although emphases in these works

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

www.annualreviews.org An Excess of Description iji

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

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.

172 Poole

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

ize ethnography as a form of both social in

quiry and writing (e.g., Biehl 2005, Das 2003, Ferme 2001, Nelson 1999, Pandolfo 1997,

Taussig 1993). At stake here is not so much

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

visuality of "race." This move also leaves us

open to the sensory and anticipatory aspects

of visual encounter and surprise that animate

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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