Saturday, February 21, 2015

Iconophobia in anthropology

A picture from my project on street musicuans in Budapest

The role of visuality in anthropology is the topic of endless discussions. One way or another, they move around the attempts to define the specificity of anthropology as a discipline which is also a quite problematic topic, particularly taking into account that anthropological questions are more and more often being asked by diverse disciplines and ethnography is more and more included in different kinds of research projects. Nevertheless, fieldwork is still perceived as the “last stand” of anthropology (Hirsch et al, 2007). So, the question is how visual data are produced and used in the fieldwork and in the subsequent reports from the fields.

On the one hand, the connection between anthropology and visuality is essential. Anthropology was born and developed together with photography and film making. Early anthropologists did include visual records in their research. But on the other hand, if we talk about the status of visual data in anthropology, it is obvious that everything what is visual has much less significance in comparison with the written word. “The language is paradigmatic for anthropology,” Taylor says trying to find an explanation to what he calls “iconophobia”, or a fear of anthropology to visuality (Taylor 1996, 83). The fear emerges at that moment when visual data move beyond the simple illustrative role and start to compete with the written words for their authority and capability to convey the experience from the field. Isn’t it the reason why, as Margaret Mead observes in 1975, though the situation has not changed much since that time, the “departments of anthropology continue to send fieldworkers out with no equipment beyond a pencil and a notebook, and perhaps a few tests or questionaries” (Mead 2003, 4). In his exploration of iconophobia Tylor summarizes the key discussions of the opposition text vs image (film and photography) in anthropology and shows that it is the text which is believed to be reflexive, deep, human and objective, while an ethnographic film is criticized as “bossy, one-eyed, distortingly beautiful, simplyfying, and disarming” (Taylor 1996, 72).

Here we inevitably come to even a more complex problem of truth and objectivity in research. The harsh critique of visual tools in anthropology comes from a certain vision of a “proper” fieldwork and “proper” knowledge – a pencil can convey the data that the camera presumably cannot. It is particularly paradoxical taking into account that an observation, an essentially visual activity by definition, constitutes the core of the fieldwork. Why an observation and a written account are more valuable means of ethnographic knowledge production than shooting a film and making a photo essay?
 
As Susan Sontag once famously said, “photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention» (Sontag 2005, 8). There is a definite problem with engagement into the field as a flow of events. But the very idea of engagement is also not so obvious. Salzman prevents that the engagement will never be full, that the gap between the flow of events and the ethnographer's presence will never be overcome. The explanation is simple: "…the people we must engage, wherever we are doing research, are busy trying to lead their lives against difficult odds, and our project rarely if ever speaks to their needs… our work remains marginal to their lives, and we must consistently impose our research on the activity flow of local life" (Salzman 1994, 31). Life forces us to make choices to pursue our goals and needs, and the needs and goals of an ethnographer definitely differ from the ones of an informant. So, it is no matter if an anthropologist comes into the field with a pencil or a camera, a certain extent of non-intervention, of the impossibility of full engagement will always remain. In this sense, I don’t find persuasive the reasoning against the usage of visual tools which is based on the idea that camera creates unnecessary distancing and mechanical attitude. An anthropologist needs to recognize the fact that she will never be fully present in the flow of the field and thus will never get full knowledge.

And what is a full knowledge? In the discussion of pros and cons of visual vs textual accounts from the field it is easy to forget that all kind of knowledge is profoundly “situated” as Donna Haraway called it. She brought the metaphor of human eye as an organ that always has a limited vision as opposed to a theoretical “eye” that possesses a kind of total vision. And then by drawing the analogy to the science, Haraway calls for that kind of embodied knowledge(s), that kind of truth an of objectivity that are always limited and situated, not because of the researcher’s preference but because of (biological and cognitive) inevitability. The inevitable embodiment does not lead to the justification of a bias but instead demands greater reflexivity and responsibility in the process of knowledge production.
 “We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision.(Haraway 1988, 582-3). 
The Haraway’s paradigm of the production of situated knowledge and embodied objectivity is an important ground for the revision of an idea of ethnographic fieldwork. It is the only way to overcome the claims for a kind of total and full knowledge of a cultural scene, and what Tylor called “naive realist theories of visual representation” (Stuart hall called it “reflective approach” in representation when a record functions like a mirror to the world). And it is the only way to move beyond the discussion of text vs images to a search of more productive ways to integrate and recognize visuality in anthropology. And it is particularly important taking into account the “literary turn” in anthropology when the discipline’s self-reflexivity made it eventually possible to recognize the role of writing as the same way “bossy, one-eyed, distortingly beautiful, simplyfying, and disarming” as the visual narration can be. “The dominant metaphors for ethnography shift away from the observing eye and toward expressive speech”, James Clifford says in the introduction to the famous “Writing Culture” (Clifford 1986, 12). Various literary devices, like as metaphor, metonymy etc, affect the way cultural phenomena are registered (4) in written accounts (to put simply, an anthropologist always brings a kind of story from the field). And in happens in the same way when an anthropologist applies the conventions of visual narrations known in her culture to explore visually un unknown cultural scene.

Clifford, James. 1986. Introduction: Partial Truths. In: Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (eds). Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Pp. 1-26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. doi:10.2307/3178066.
Hirsch et al (2007) Anthropologists are Talking on Anthropology After Globalization. Ethnos 72(1):102-26.
Mead, M. 2003 (1975). Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words. In Hockings, P. Principles of visual anthropology, 2nd ed. pp. 3-12. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Salzman, Philip.1994. The Lone Stranger in the Heart of Darkness. In: Borofski, Robert (ed.) Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Cambridge, Mass: MacGraw and Hill pp 29-39
Sontag, Susan. 2005. On Photography. New York: Rosetta. Taylor, Lucien. 1996. “Iconophobia.” Transition, no. 69 (January): 64–88. doi:10.2307/2935240.

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