Glenn Bowman

University of Kent

glb@ukc.ac.uk

There is a long and effectively substantivist debate pertaining to the relation of visual and textual materials in anthropology. This struggle over the value of the visual image is well exemplified in two significant articles written respectively by Margaret Mead and Kirsten Hastrup (1). For Mead the image is a repository of information which cannot be translated into text (2) whereas for Hastrup it is merely the surface level of phenomena which cannot 'speak' for themselves but must be ferreted out through textual contextualisation and exegesis. These takes on the image - which are in effect obverse versions of each other - evolve out of the long and somewhat problematic history of anthropology's relation to the visual image. Throughout most of the discipline's history the image has been something abstracted from the social field it reflects, and has been used metonymically to stand in for that field - either as an illustration in a text which then provides the context within which the image should be read or as one element in a series of images in ethnographic film which, through their juxtapositioning, 'deliver' - as it were - the experience of the disjunct place. The virtue of (in Mead's case) and the problem with (in Hastrup's) the visual image is that it is a trace of a place which is unavailable to the viewer; in the former case that trace allows a partial recuperation while in the latter it is inadequate to do anything more than point to an absent presence.

Both approaches take the image as a thing in itself whereas, I will argue in this paper, the image can be seen as a tool to be wielded in heuristic practices designed less to set forth than to elicit knowledge. John Collier (3), like Mead in other places (4), has shown that the photograph in anthropology is as much a means of discovering information as it is of presenting that which has been found. Collier demonstrates how the photograph can provide a site around which ethnographers and informants can gather to discuss what is going on in the photograph, and thus shows the image as a locus for dialoguing rather than as a source of information in itself. The value of the image in ethnographic fieldwork is here precisely in its indeterminacy insofar as that allows processes of interpretation (both those of informants and those of the ethnographer) to go on around it, recorded - it is hoped - by the anthropologist. Unfortunately Collier's dialogic insights are embedded in a text which comes across to students - as well as, on the first take, to professional ethnographers - as drily positivistic. Other approaches to photographic (and video?) elicitation tend as well to seem outdated to students of contemporary anthropology; I think, for instance, of the Rorschach cognitivism which penetrates much of Mead and Metraux's theorizing. The apparent outdatedness of ethnographic image elicitation techniques combines with the spectacularism of the contemporary post-modern cult of the autonomous image to drive students of visual anthropology either into straightforward illustrationism or, in the more creative cases, into projects involving digital manipulation as means of allowing images to speak of hypothetical situations (5).

I would like, in this presentation, to examine and assess some of the techniques of teaching the use of ethnographic image which I have developed in collaboration with my undergraduate students over the past several years of presenting a course in visual anthropology. Although an element of the photographic module of the Visual Anthropology third year course at Kent is camera and darkroom techniques, the main focus of the course is on thinking the role of the image in ethnographic fieldwork. By necessity, most of the projects students carry out in this course are 'anthropology at home' applications since few of our students have the time or the money to leave the country to do fieldwork. As a result, one issue we deal with intensively is 'defamiliarisation' - the process of ostranenie (‘making strange’) which the Russian formalist Victor Shklovskij articulated as a method both for poetry and film-making:

Rather than translating the unfamiliar into the terms of the familiar, the poetic image ‘makes strange’ the habitual by presenting it in a novel light, by placing it in an unexpected context....By tearing the object out of its habitual context, by bringing together disparate notions, the poet gives a coup de grâce to the verbal cliché and to the stock responses attendant upon it and forces us into heightened awareness of things and their sensory texture. The act of creative deformation restores sharpness to our perception, giving ‘density’ to the world around us (6).

This process is something which the students, of course, must engage so as to begin to see anew the social detail which surrounds them; in that it is a correlate to the physical displacement anthropologists working in foreign climes go through. It is, also, however, something which I encourage my students to catch their informants in through interviewing around photographs - photographs taken by the students, photographs taken by informants either under the encouragement of the students or on their own volition, and photographs circulating as common currency in the area. In this manner informants are driven to reflect on social practices they have very much taken for granted, and I would argue that these reflections are the foundations on which anthropological analyses are erected. Techniques of inquiry, and of recording, are thus fundamental parts of the pedagogy of visual anthropology, even though these are technically audio and textual methods. Students are furthermore pushed, through 'interviews' with other students on the course focussed on prints and proofsheets, to distance themselves from their initial interpretations of their own work and to see it, as it were, from different angles. Project presentations, which consist of photographs and text, are designed to make manifest not only the social field in which the students engaged but also the ways images served to open perspectives on this.

I want to propose in this presentation means of bringing together the empiricism celebrated by positivist interpretants of photography's use in anthropology with the interpretivism and reflexivity which are the contributions post-modern anthropologies have made to the recording of social realities. I feel the photographic image is at the core of this conjunction. It is hoped that in setting forth an agenda for the photographic image in anthropology I will be able to provoke discussion of whether or not video or filmic imagings are as well capable of eliciting as well as presenting knowledge of what passes before the lens.