Through Lens and Text: Constructions of a 'Stone Age' Tribe in the Andaman Islands

Fig. 1.

Sentinel Islands as seen approaching the South Point. Photo: the author.

Introduction: Making Sense of the Image

Pierre Bourdieu has distinguished between 'recovering' the meaning of a photograph – as expressive of a photographer's intentions – and extracting its 'surplus' of meaning – as 'part of the symbolism of an age, a class or an artistic group'.¹ I want to develop this distinction with respect to photographs that accompany texts invested with various kinds of what I call 'truth value'. My point of entry is a series of events from 1974, 2004, and 2006 that reveal images (photographs) and texts (words) as collusive interventions that systematically deny history and agency to a small but significant group of Andaman Islanders: the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island. There are probably fewer than one hundred Sentinelese on this small circular island (above, Fig. 1) in the Bay of Bengal;² the Indian state fiercely protects them, reserving for itself the sole right of contact through carefully orchestrated events and practices. Notwithstanding this official cordon, there has always been curiosity about the island, not only on the part of intrepid travel-writers and earnest anthropologists, but from a fast-developing tourist industry, eager to sell its human wonders to adventurous holiday-makers. There are other stakeholders too: non-tribal Andaman settlers and smugglers who view the island respectively as a zone of unexploited resources and safe haven.

In the context of these diverse interests, the construction and communication of news relating to the Sentinels – through print, television and electronic media – is a subject that invites ethnographic and semiotic understanding. Using my own contact with the Sentinelese as a basis for analysis, I seek to emphasize two things. First, the embedding of cultural interpretations within visualized histories. I will show how images and textual descriptions of contrived 'contact events' work to perpetuate a history and ethnography where the tropes of 'primitive', 'hostile', and 'stone age' remain the ontological point of reference for the people and culture of North Sentinel. In this respect, though photography is dehistoricizing, it is also involved in the historical process of producing 'truth value'. Second, following Clifford Geertz's idea of culture as a self-referential text, I argue that images and descriptions of North Sentinel need to be read simultaneously as texts on text makers.³ The intent of my reading of images and texts of North Sentinel is to bring out some of the nuances of an 'optical regime' that reveals tensions in the state's self-image as protector and provider of its most endangered subjects. I am not suggesting a straightforward salvaging of 'history' from 'culture', but seek to open up methodological possibilities for approaching the multiple histories and cultures of the Andaman Islands.

Sentinelese 'Photemes' and a Constitutive Discourse

To begin this exercise, I would like to draw the reader's attention to two photographs of the Sentinelese taken by the acclaimed Indian photographer Raghubir Singh for National Geographic Magazine (148: 1, July 1975, pp. 66–91). Known for their remarkable photographic merits, these images produced a kind of orthodoxy over the years, establishing the quintessential nature of the Sentinelese as 'hostile'. They were taken during the first-ever visit of a film crew to North Sentinel, in spring 1974, to shoot the documentary Man in Search of Man, accompanied by a few anthropologists and armed police. This was one of the earliest post-colonial attempts at 'friendship' through 'gestures and plenty of gifts'. As the team's motorized dinghy made its way through the coral reefs towards the shore, the Sentinelese emerged from the woods to shoot a hail of arrows. The dinghy proceeded to an out-of-range landing spot, where the police – dressed in padded armour – disembarked and laid gifts on the sand: a toy car, some coconuts, a tethered live pig, a child's doll, and some aluminium cookware. The Sentinelese responded with more arrows, one of which hit the film director in the thigh – his assailant was observed 'laughing proudly and walking toward...