Griffith

Alison Griffith's two chapters from Wondrous Differencestake a detailed look at how two different venues display and promote ethnographic exhibits. The first chapter addresses museums, specifically focusing on the American Museum of Natural History. Griffith writes about early anthropological exhibitions and the various ways in which ethnographic findings were presented. The museum itself wished to promote exhibits that would inform as well as entertain; however, as Griffith describes, there seemed to be a struggle in finding that balance. Some curators and anthropologists believed that the displays, whether they be tableaux-vivants, taxidermied animals or a diorama, should be completely realistic, creating a perfect illusion. Others argue that simply because of the setting – the museum – the exhibits cannot be made too real. The surroundings of the museum spoil the intended effect of transporting viewers into another life. Another concern of this latter group is that by vivifying a culture, the scientific value of the exhibit is lost. The attempt to find the middle ground between entertainment and education of an exhibition is addressed further in the second chapter which focuses on world fairs. At the world fairs, the displays and performances of the so called native people also tread a fine line between informative and carnivalesque. Oftentimes the anthropologists who arrange the displays discovered the unusual and bizarre aspects of a culture's life created the biggest draw. These types of displays were engaging but also lacked a realistic depiction of everyday life of that society. Finding an equilibrium that would attract a crowd and was accurate was the main issue of these two chapters. As a reader, I wonder how modern day museums solve this problem or if they even encounter anything of this nature today. Griffith also writes about early anthropological films that were mostly spectacle and inaccurate, leading me to question whether the films of present day have improved in this way at all. Are they still merely spectacle, meant to solely entertain, or can we really walk away with a greater knowledge than we started?

Turner and Ginsburg

The Ginsburg article addresses the debate concerning the impact of media created by indigenous peoples and the affect the exposure to Western technology may have. According to Ginsburg, having the ability to film and record daily occurrences among an indigenous group results in a kind of Faustian dilemma. For something to be considered faustian it usually implies some moral integrity has been compromised in order to achieve a higher level of success or recognition. To call this particular situation faustian is apt: on the one hand media allows indigenous people to translate their own identity as well as create films that serve their own purposes while on the other hand the spread of technology can be seen as an assault to indigenous culture, language, imagery, relationship between generations and respect for traditional knowledge (96). It's a similar debate that occurs when Westerners make ethnographic studies of other cultures. Are they merely spreading knowledge and creating an awareness of another society that lives in this world? Or is it an affront to the group's way of life, to be exposed like an object to strangers?

Turner, in his article "Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video," in addition to looking at how indigenous people, a group called the Kayapo living in Brazil, dealt with media technology, also wrote about the notion of the representation. He cites another another anthropologist, James Faris, who holds the view that Western produced projects destroy the subjectivity of those being filmed, the 'others,' and reducing them to objects of the Western 'gaze' (14). I don't agree with Faris and neither, it appears, did Turner but the simple act of turning a camera, wielded by a Western camera person, on a non-Westerner subject, does not always produce objectivity. Filmmakers who interact with their subjects - Jean Rouch - avoid this problem of 'gaze' by giving them power over what they are being portrayed as. In essence this is what indigenous media is all about. The ability of a group of people to represent themselves to others in the way they wish to be represented. Of course there are problems and issues but there is no perfect way to depict a culture that is going to be accurate every time, no matter if Western or indigenous.

Pinney, MacDougall

Photography is a multi-dimensional art. What I mean by this is that photography can mean different things to different people. To some, it does not even qualify as art. To others, it is a means of documenting and recording events. In the film Photo Wallas, by David and Judith MacDougall, the meaning and types of photography in India are explored. According to David MacDougall in the article Photo Wallas: An Encounter with Photography, this film is an attempt to learn “how photography differs from other kinds of visual representation, and how different people interpret that difference” (28). Within the confines of Indian culture, the MacDougalls drew the conclusion that photography is used as a medium of both imagination and evidence. This conclusion is supported in the Pinney article “To Know a Man From His Face:” Photo Wallas and the Use of Visual Anthropology. Pinney reviews the film, focuses on specific points that back up the MacDougalls conclusion. He agrees that fantasy and performance is a large part of photography in India, which is a method to reveal a person's 'personality.' The outer appearance is stressed more than what is inside, which is not seen as much in western style of photography. Our culture, I believe, has a desire to find extraordinary things within the ordinary and many photographers focus on taking pictures of everyday life and events. In a still photo it is possible to reveal something that would otherwise go unnoticed. What is usually observed as a mundane action or person can be turned into a stimulating subject. Pinney and MacDougall both recognize that India creates the interest in a person through props and settings – like the photographers who reside on Gun Hill – stressing the fantasy and preparation of the photograph. However, not all Indian photographers act in this manner and neither do all Western photographers. There are overlaps between the two places which again emphasizes the point that photography holds a variety of meanings for different cultures.

Mulvey, Lutz, Collins

This week's articles address the subject of the gaze and how it affects people's perceptions of what they are viewing. In Mulvey's chapter Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, she focuses on the area of film and the ways in which it is viewed. She also looks at how women are portrayed in films which refer directly to how men perceive women. According to Mulvey there are two ways to derive pleasure from films. The first is scopophilia, meaning the pleasure that is taken from viewing people as objects and subjecting them to a controlled and curious gaze (Mulvey 835). The second way allows the viewer to identify with what they are seeing, to in some way relate to the character on screen (Mulvey 836). Mulvey then goes on to discuss how women are portrayed in cinema. She notes that primarily men are active viewers, the ones doing the looking and women are passive, the ones being looked at (Mulvey 837). On a psychoanalytical basis, taken from Freud, women are shown in films in a certain way due to 'castration complex' (Mulvey 840). Because women are sexually different, it causes men to become anxious. In film this is addressed in two different ways; either by investigating and demystifying the woman, followed by the punishment, devaluation or saving of her or turning the woman into an object, a fetish (Mulvey 840). Mulvey brings to light the inherent sexuality and desire seen in films, one that is often directed at the male gaze. I find her work to be interesting and relevant to today's media, especially in advertising, which is often created specifically for the male gaze and constantly objectifies women.

In the Lutz and Collin's article, photographs and the gaze afforded to them is addressed. This article explores “the significance of "gaze" for intercultural relations in the photograph” (Collins Lutz 134) as well as the seven kinds of gaze – photographer's, magazine's, reader's, non-Western subject's, explicit looking done by Westerner's framed in photo, gaze in mirror's or camera's shown in photo and finally the academic gaze (134). All of these gazes have different perspectives towards a photograph and shape how it is perceived. Like Mulvey, Lutz and Collins also address the male gaze. Since they are speaking about photos in a widely read magazine, National Geographic, they can rule out a separate category of male or female gaze since the audience is a large demographic containing both. While each author is addressing different media and slightly different subject matter, Mulvey, Lutz and Collins make the point that the gaze of the viewer and who that viewer is has an effect of how the film or photograph is perceived by that person.

Barthes

In Rhetoric of the Image by Roland Barthes, images and their associated meanings is explored. According to Barthes, there are a variety of methods through which a message can be transmitted via an image. In our world, we are constantly bombarded with images, mostly in the form of advertisements. We take various meanings away from these pictures, some of the direct, some indirect. There is the linguistic message, the denoted image and the connoted image (Barthes 273). He specifically looks at advertisements because, "...in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the signifieds of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible” (Barthes 270).

While Barthes writing is slightly difficult to follow, I agree with the general point that images have specific meanings. I believe that who views the images and that person's beliefs will also give a depiction a certain interpretation as well. I like how Barthes talks about the connoted meanings of the image and how a symbolic interpretation can be made about aspects. This can relate to other parts of society and draws on a person's knowledge and experiences. As I said, this can mean that an image will hold different meanings for different people, since we do not all have the same lives. Some meanings of images may be lost on people who do not recognize the symbolic images in the picture. I think it is very interesting how the message of a picture can be changed simply by altering one word or color or object.

Rouch

Jean Rouch was an influential and innovative man. It is obvious to conclude this from the articles written about him; from the Loizos's chapter to the nine articles brought together by Faye Ginsburg and Jeff Himpele to the discussion conducted by John Marshall and John W. Adams with Rouch. He was a very intelligent filmmaker, well known for his use of new technological methods like synchronized sound and lighter weight cameras. He brought his own style to ethnographic film. As noted in the article by Jean-Paul Colleyn, “He [Rouch] never tried to be the unnoticed observer, the invisible witness, or the neutral narrator” (113). This style of filming, of being directly involved with the subject matter of his own films, was and still is very controversial. I completely understand why this is an issue for anthropologists cannot then discern what is truth and what is fake. If the ethnographer places himself or herself in the context of the film, sometimes the viewer sees the message of the film as skewed in favor of one bias or another. In some ways, however, Rouch helped anthropologists improve the use of film as a device to convey information because he exposed its limitations. Rouch believed that “....academic ethnographic description not only freezes the situations described, but if those situations are 'tragic' as they so often are, that it is only by introducing fantasy and role-playing that the participants can transcend them and begin to discover a 'way out'” (Marshall 1005). Rather than shunning techniques used by non-ethnographers and documentary filmmakers, Rouch saw all of the abilities we are capable of, from dreaming to improvising, as valid methods to use in film to reveal something about another group of people.

Loizos

The Loizos' chapters focus specifically on what makes an ethnographic film distinct from a documentary. According to Loizos in "Innovation in Ethnographic Film," in some sense all ethnographic films are documentaries in that they provide evidence of some reality, yet only a small number of documentaries are ethnographic films (Loizos 7). In this chapter, Loizos explains how an ethnographic and documentary film differ, citing Jay Ruby's and Karl Heider's guidelines for doing so. Ruby classifies ethnographic films as having four criteria: "they should be films about whole cultures, or definable portions of cultures; informed by explicit or implicit theories of culture; explicit about the research and filming methods they had employed; and using a distinctively anthroplogical lexicon" (Loizos 7). Heider has similar classfications but adds that these films are most informative when they reveal "whole bodies, and whole people, in whole acts" (Loizos 7). Loizos decides that these qualifications are satisfactory enough to use them in later chapters as criteria for judging a number of films.
This is seen in the other Loizos' chapter "For the record: documentation filming from innocent realism to self-consciousness." In this section, he discusses the various film techniques that affected the value of the work as an ethnographic study, like synchronized sound, subtitles, faster film speeds and lighter and smaller cameras. Loizos also looks at films by Timothy Asch, Napoleaon Chagnon, Ian Dunlop and Robert Sandall to name a few. Using Ruby and Heider's guidelines, Loizos analyzes what helped or hurt an anthropological film. For instance, Chagnon's Yanomano films, through the use of synch sound and subtitles, gave viewers a sense of immediacy as if they were actually there. Overuse of commentary, something that Margaret Meade was fond of, could hurt a film by appearing to tell the viewers what they should be seeing. Overall, Loizos gave a proficient analysis of what makes an ethnographic film good and how various developments aided or hindered this. I liked how he wrote about different filmmakers rather than just focusing on one, which gives a broad spectrum of what the process of filming an ethnographic work is like. I would like to know what Loizos's own argument is towards documentary versus ethnographic film, but he does mention in the first chapter that no matter what definition one tries to apply there are always difficulties in making the guidelines clear and concise.

Tomaselli, Garland, Loizos

Tomaselli, Garland and Gordon and Loizos all address how being under scrutiny affects the actions of the scrutinized. Loizos writes about various ethnographic films and whether or not each film falls into the category of purely documentation, entertainment or a mixture of the both. In the case of a film being a partly fictionalized documentary, the film loses value as being an anthropological work. The problem of analyzing these types of films is that is impossible to determine what is the factual and what is contrived for the purpose of entertainment.

Loizos's chapters, while solely addressing documenting realism, relates to the content of Tomaselli's and Garland and Gordon's articles as well. Rather than focusing on various filmmakers and their works, these articles take a different look at derived culture, seen in the tourism industry. Both articles focus on the group of people in Namibia known as the bushmen. Here the tourism industry markets a 'rich cultural heritage' by promoting an inside look at the authentic, primitive culture of the bushmen. Same as with ethnographic films, what the people see is not always what is the truth. The bushmen are well aware of their marketability as a commodity and cater to what tourists wish to see. They understand that cultural tourism will yield profits for them, if they play up that they are a 'dying culture,' or a simple, nature loving, live on the land type of people, all the while knowing that they are in fact very modernized. This type of tourism attracts those looking for an adventure, or who wish to get closer to the land, or discover themselves through the simplicity of another society. In Tomaselli's article, it is noted, "Cultural or eco-tourism is basically the commodification by capital of the romance of anthropology” (Tomaselli 189). The bushmen are profiting from the Western desire to seek the untouched, the so-called 'primitive.' My thought is to wonder if they are somehow morally wrong to do this. Does this have a negative impact on the actual record of the bushmen's place in history? With something like this happening, I'm sure Namibia is not the sole example, how can authenticity be proven? As Garland and Gordon pointed out, “authenticity is not the same thing as primitivity, ethnic originality, or historical stasis” (Garland & Gordon, 280).

Jacknis

Both articles assigned this week, Faye Ginsburg's “Now Watch This Very Carefully” as well as Ira Jacknis's “Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film” take a close look at the methods used by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, specifically her contribution to the world of visual ethnography.

According to Jacknis, Mead and her husband, Gregory Bateson,“in many ways [they] began the field of visual anthropology” (Jacknis 160). Jacknis discusses their research in Bali and the ways they went about conducting their study. Mead recorded her findings through what she called 'running field notes' and kept a daily diary while Bateson was largely responsible for using film, both still and motion. The significance of the use of pictures in their study is not that it was actually used but the weight and precedence the photos and videos were given in the final ethnographic study. As Jacknis points out the photos became more than mere illustrations (Jacknis 165). Its important to note that Bateson and Mead were using the cameras as “recording instruments, not as devices for illustrating our theses” (Jacknis 165). When choosing the photos that would be used in the final product, Mead and Bateson aimed to pick ones that would juxtapose and compliment the text in ways that would remain scientific and objective. Additionally both anthropologists put together their own presentations. Mead edited together short films that, while providing a theoretical interpretation of Balinese culture, was not supplemented by the descriptive and scientific texts as done with the research with Bateson. This is where film and photo can harm an ethnographic study, when they are taken at face value without an explanation of what they are representing. In the conclusion of the Jacknis article, Mead is quoted, “There is no such thing as an unbiased report upon any social situation....the surest and most perfect instrument of understanding is our own emotional response, provided that we can make a disciplined use of it” (Jacknis 172). Bateson and Mead differed later in life on the use of photography in anthropology with Mead advocating its use.

In Ginsburg's piece, also on Mead, the impact of Mead's films in today's world is addressed. Despite not receiving the same respect as her male counterparts in her time, Ginsburg makes the point that Mead's work in the visual anthropology field has paved the way for many great things. Her methods opened her field to the greater world through the use of film and pictures. She understood that film has a lasting effect that a written study does not always have. It can be re-analyzed many years later and still possess new meaning. Mead was an anthropologist and yet still brought films to the general public that were interesting to watch. It was even said in the Jacknis article that only the most interesting or unique things were filmed. This, however, raises the question of the value of the work. Does its entertainment value lessen its value as a scientific piece of work? If the film was paired with a detailed description, an explanation of what is being shown, then perhaps not. In any other case, it's a subjective answer.

Errington

The concept of what is authentic primitive art is discussed in the Errington article. In this piece, Errington analyzes how the view of primitive art has significantly changed since the turn of the 20^th century. She distinguishes between the words 'primitive,' 'authentic,' and 'art.' While many pieces can be both authentic and primitive, they can in fact have little to no value as art. She then goes on to examine what is art and how we can qualify an object made for function as a piece of high art. Most primitive pieces that are considered art are art by appropriation, not made for display but to be used. Further along, Errington makes the point that art and collecting go hand and hand, and collectors look for pieces that are portable and durable. Because much primitive art is made of 'soft' materials or are quite large, their value as a commodity goes down. Also, the inferiority of primitive art and primitive cultures is implied because the Western world covets durable, long standing works of art. They are a sign of permanence, of a place in history. Therefore one qualification of authentic primitive art is that which can be transported and stored easily which severely limits the objects included in this category. Another thing that Errington noted was that much of primitive art is of a religious or ceremonial nature. She also discusses the use, or lack of use, of iconicity in primitive art.

The article concludes with Errington's summarization of high authentic primitive art. These are usually ritual objects, made of wood and ideally collected at the turn of the century. Interestingly this category includes works of art that look as if it could have influenced western artists like Picasso. I find this interesting because we are qualifying primitive art based on how it possibly impacted Western art. Errington thoroughly examined how primitive art is categorized, but I would have liked her to expand on the primitive art that could have influenced Western artists. Why is it that primitive art is only considered art because it looks similar to a Western artist's work? Again this brings up the notion that Western cultures are superior, that our art pieces must validate a primitive object in order for it to fall into the category of art.