Jacknis

Jacknis and Ginsburg both stressed the impact that Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson had on anthropology during their two-year study of the Balinese people. The married couple used photographic stills and film to record what they studied while living there. Film and photos were used in anthropology before, but Mead and Bateson were revolutionary with their work because they used visual anthropology as a primary recording device rather than just illustrations. Mead and Bateson had a team split up in different locations, which came together for a final product. Mead organized her work through “running field notes” that were observations shown in a chronological narrative and were supplemented with daily diaries.

Mead and Bateson found that objectivity in portraying the Balinese people was still out of reach with photographs and film, but they recorded as much of their biases as they could. The fact that anthropologists were in the village with cameras changed the Balinese people’s daily life, but the cameras were around so often, it was hard for the subjects to be conscious of the cameras all the time. They wrote down if the subject knew photos were being taken and if the photographer posed the subject or not. The anthropologists showed the Balinese people the films they took, and sometimes they filmed the subjects watching the films of themselves, which was “film elicitation.” Mead and Bateson recognized that their work wasn’t objective, but by writing down the context and ways the material was recorded, they tried to document the biases they had. This was a start to “disciplined subjectivity,” which is described considering the role of the observer instead of ignoring him or her completely.

Mead always tried to circulate her work into the public eye, and made six different films focusing on character formation, but since there were no film guides, there was no clarification on details or contexts. Mead believed visual anthropology was important to capture the “ethos of culture,” things that couldn’t be expressed by the written word. Is it possible for anything made to be completely objective? Is an ethnography more objective just because the observer has stated his or her role?