Isaac Candelario

Jacknis on Mead and Bateson

Ira Jacknis writes a history of visual anthropology stemming from a close look at the work of Margaret Mead and Greg Bateson. Mead and Bateson were prolific during a time when anthropological field notes and data collected in the field was romanticized. Anthropologists such as Mead were trying to establish anthropology itself as a pure science, and a romanticising of this "raw data" was one characteristic of the field at the time. many researchers found themselves puzzled as to what they should do with the information they were gathering and how to apply it to good use. The fifties brought about action anthropology and activism anthropology with their groundings in kantian ideas about using other people. Sol Tax, an anthropologist who went through many ideological transformations during this period said, “Community research is justifiable only to the degree that the results are imminently useful to the community and easily outweigh the disturbance to it.” he made this claim at the 1951 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Just one year after Margaret Mead and Greg Mateson finished their first visual ethnography.

When they went to Bali they were thinking in primarily theoretical terms. Looking for some secret of human nature locked away in this far away place. She did initial study through visual representations, film that a student had made. She began her use of film as a way to create data that was somehow free from current theoretical language. Bateson was not a fan of such an empirical approach. His style was more suited towards making just enough observation to make a logical comment. The synthesis of these two styles ultimately shaped their project. They were not the first ones to use visual images in anthropology, but they are the first ones to apply it heavily in research and ask some foundational questions that were not all together unique to their style or mode of anthropology, but they were dealing with problems of anthropology of their time.