Photography and Anthropology Christopher Pinney No digital rights Photography and Anthropology EXPOSURESis a series of books on photography designed to explore the rich history of the medium from thematic perspectives. Each title presents a striking collection of images and an engaging, accessible text that offers intriguing insights into a specific theme or subject. Series editors: Mark Haworth-Booth and Peter Hamilton Also published Photography and Spirit John Harvey Photography and Australia Helen Ennis Photography and Cinema David Campany Photography and Science Kelley Wilder Photography and Flight Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox Photography and Literature François Brunet Photography and Egypt Maria Golia Photography and Italy Maria Antonella Pelizzari Photography and the USA Mick Gidley Photography and Death Audrey Linkman Photography and Japan Karen M. Fraser Photography and Anthropology Christopher Pinney reaktion books For Roslyn Poignant –with belated thanks Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2011 Copyright © Christopher Pinney2011 Some illustrations were supplied with the support of the following institutions: All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China by Eurasia British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pinney, Christopher. Photography and anthropology. –(Exposures) 1. Photography in anthropology. 2. Photography in anthropology –History. I. Title II. Series 301-dc22 isbn978 1 86189 804 3 Contents Prologue: Images of a Counterscience 7 one The Doubled History of Photography and Anthropology 17 two The Trouble with Photography 63 three The Problem with Anthropology 106 Epilogue: The Holograph 147 References 155 Select Bibliography 163 Acknowledgements 167 Photo Acknowledgements 168 Index 169 No digital rights Prologue: Images of a Counterscience Consider four moments, and four images, that catapult us along a trajec- tory of transformation into the history of anthropology’s relationship with photography. The first of these images (illus. 1) is a line drawing of an anthropologist at work in the mid-1880s.1Drawn by a Nicobarese artist whose name is unknown to us, it shows a police orderly and a servant who holds an umbrella, assisting Edward Horace Man in his photographic endeavours. Man’s face is hidden in the cloak of his camera, which points at three children posed at the base of a tree. All this occurs in the top of three horizontal registers. In the middle register, and subsequently numbered by Man, is a range of Nicobarese sea life including a dugong, crocodile, turtle and ray. In the lower register is the steamer Nancowrywith a Malacca village, Spiteful Bay and Leda Point visible in the background. This drawing, pasted in at the beginning of one ofE. H. Man’s remarkable photographic albums of late nineteenth-century life in the Nicobar Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, mixes several genres. Most obviously it is a drawing that engages photography. Less obviously it juxtaposes the ‘screen’ imposed by the camera with the rigid frames of an enduring Nicobarese representational tradition, the henta-koi. The three frames transfer onto paper the horizontal frames that characterize the wooden shields installed by shamans in Nicobarese homes afflicted with sickness and designed to ward off evil spirits. Henta-koiusually incorporated depictions of aquatic life-forms (crabs, male mermaids, squid) and symptoms of the Nicobar Islands’ long history of cultural 1 Unknown Nicobarese artist, drawing of contact with Burmese, Malay and Ceylonese traders, Jesuit missionaries E. H. Man at work, c. 1880s. 7 and the detritus of sundry shipwrecks. These include sailing ships, ship’s compasses, pocket-watches, telescopes, envelopes and mirrors whose very exotic hybridity seemed to be a source of strength to preserve the Nicobarese.2 The protective potential of photography, its apotropaic qualities that enabled it to ward off evil, lies at the heart of Queensland aboriginal people’s engagement with it in the early part of the twentieth century. Aborigines who commissioned bourgeois portraits of themselves and their families, the Aboriginal curator Michael Aird notes, ‘felt a very No digital rights real need to state their successes in the European community to ensure protection from oppressive “protection” policies’.3The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897was one element of a colonial legal apparatus that endured through to the 1960s and which made it possible for Aboriginal children deemed ‘neglected’ to be forcibly removed from their parents and their communities. Adults who requested assistance from the state could be forcibly relocated to Aboriginal stations.4 Photographs, Aird notes, indexed success according to European norms, and staged displays of middle-class white 2 Peter Hyllested, Emily and William respectability were used to distance the Aboriginal subjects from the Williams photographed at Beaudesert, c. 1910, hand-coloured photograph. possibility of punitive state action. William Williams’s family, from the Upper Logan River, for instance, ‘lived and worked on their own land’ and Aird’s suggestion is that they managed to continue to do this is in part because they were able to mobilize photography in their defence. Their children were stockmen, drovers, axmen and housekeepers. Their descendants continue to live in Queensland and ‘proudly identify themselves as Munanjahli’.5In a hand-coloured photograph dating from about 1910William Williams stands next to his seated wife, Emily Jackey: he faces the world, staring down its threat, Emily regarding him anxiously. 8