Rethinking Visual Anthropology (review)

Rethinking Visual Anthropology. Edited by Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. x + 306 pp., illustrations, introduction, index, $18.00 paper.)

This volume, the cloth version of which was published in 1997, is a collection of essays dating from the early to mid-1990s. It is simultaneously an attempt to summarize the field of visual anthropology at that time and to provide an agenda for the future. The contributors are from Britain, Canada, the United States, and Australia. The tone and historicity of its perspective are taken from the development of British social anthropology rather than from Americanist cultural anthropology. Still, the volume is of general interest, especially for those who know little about visual anthropology and think it is only about the creation and use of ethnographic film. The breadth of the volume alone will convince the reader otherwise. The volume also demonstrates the impact of cultural studies and some strains of poststructuralism on the field in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the interesting essay that introduces the book, the editors make visual anthropology an icon for anthropological representation itself. By extending "the visual" as metaphor, they explain their choice of essays and link them to the anthropology of art, media, and material culture; linguistic anthropology; the anthropology of religion; fieldwork; and the major historical anthropological ancestors. Thus, rather than a peripheral sub-subfield in anthropology, visual anthropology becomes part of the decentering practice of postmodernism and also a newly created focus of methodological and theoretical energy. The two main areas of interest in the essays as presented by Morphy and Banks are the construction of visual systems of meaning by both anthropologist and cultural participant and the different ways of "seeing" associated with the views of different societies.

It is impossible to summarize and evaluate each of the remaining thirteen essays for this brief review. They vary from theoretical and historical musings to ethnographic analyses. One may explore examples ranging from New Guinea myths to computer software, and Japanese quiz shows to Jain statues. Among the essays of more general interest are those by Grimshaw, Edwards, Loizos, Dussart, Gillison, and MacDougall. Grimshaw's essay juxtaposes several anthropologists and filmmakers, comparing their visions of the other and the self. It is fascinating to realize that Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific were both out in 1922 and also to compare Malinowski and Rivers on subjectivity and reflexivity. In her essay, Edwards reminds us that we still very much take for granted a realist perspective of still photography, disregarding our own constructivist notions. Photographs are as ideological as any ethnographic text.

Loizos writes of experiments in ethnographic filmmaking. He provides us with historical information about changes in documentary films as well as specific interpretations of films such as O'Rourke's Cannibal Tours. Dussart, in perhaps my favorite essay in the book, describes a Warlpiri body painting design through three transformations: presented first as traditionally applied on the body during ceremony, second as part of canvas art sold to outsiders, and third as filmed by outsiders for international distribution. The dialogical and discursive interplay between the Warlpiri and others is shown to constantly redefine the creative process. Gillison's essay is perhaps the most extreme metaphoric extension of the visual. Using a neopsychoanalytic framework, she examines the mythology of the Gimi of the New Guinea highland and their ideas about "seeing" and sexuality.

MacDougall provides the concluding essay to the volume. He notes that anthropology has not known what to do with the visual or what to do about the person. The two elements were brought together in a problematic way first with living people in exhibits, then with museum objects, photographs, and films. Visual representations almost replaced the people themselves, and more recently written texts have even effaced this visual representation. MacDougall argues that visual anthropology should develop its own goals and methodologies and should promote a major rethinking of anthropology through the visual.

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