Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology by Brian Hochman (review)

The tension at the heart of Brian Hochman's Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technologyis the imperialist notion that declining indigenous cultures could only be conserved by Western intervention. Hochman argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small network of mostly white and mostly male ethnographers, employing the still inchoate technologies of the phonograph, photography, and later motion pictures, were essential to the establishment of these inventions as more than patent novelties. Rather, their deployment in the project of salvage ethnography helped these applications emerge as important tools of seemingly unbiased and accurate documentation that today are at the heart of the media's power to reproduce and perpetuate centuries-old notions of race.

Savage Preservationopens with the efforts of John Wesley Powell, eventual head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to invent ways to document the modes of communication of the indigenous peoples of the western United States. In 1877, Powell published Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages. In so doing, he hoped to ensure that they could be written into the historical record and reproduced for successive generations (though not necessarily by the indigenous peoples perceived to be on the verge of vanishing) as important remnants of Civilization writ large. Yet Powell, and later individuals like anthropologist Garrick Mallery, who worked on Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), struggled to convey these complex language systems through the written word or illustrations alone.

In these opening chapters, Hochman chronicles the limits and frustrations of early ethnographic methods, which made the burgeoning recording technologies like the phonograph and the camera appealing as more precise methodological alternatives. It is the latter chapters of Savage Preservation, however, that may resonate most profoundly for scholars of technology. In chapter 3, Hochman examines the role of the phonograph as an instrument of "mechanical neutrality" in the face of the aural predilections of the ethnographer and the perceived and real reproduction limits of early wax recordings. It's impressive in its use of the work of novelist George Washington Cable, anthropologist Franz Boas, and the observations of British engineers William Henry Preece and Augustus Stroh. But it is chapter 4, with its stunning look at the 1926 film Moana: A Romance of the Golden Ageand the impetus behind the innovative use of panchromatic film stock by its creators Robert and Frances Flaherty (also responsible for Nanook of the North), and chapter 5, with its exploration of National Geographic's early use of the autochrome color photography process, where the technological, ethnographic, and imperialist notions of race synthesize so successfully. Hochman demonstrates how the conscious efforts of individuals like the Flahertys and Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the editor of National Geographic, to "accurately" reproduce highly-theorized constructions of racial hierarchy visually would inform the greater public imagination in the United States and around the world. Savage Preservationis a valuable addition to the history of technology for these chapters alone.

That said, for scholars of the history of technology, the opening chapters of this volume may frustrate. They do lay out a very convincing case as to why these early ethnographers might look to new forms of documentation. Yet in the first two chapters of the book, Hochman doesn't clearly define what he means by technology. Is Sequoyah's Cherokee alphabet both a linguistic innovation and a technological one, for example? This question matters. How technology is defined, who has access to it, and the idea of invention as a "eureka moment" are also components of the larger construction of savage and civilized that Hochman is unpacking here.

In addition, definitions of technology aside, the stakes of the argument remain relatively low—the construction of race in media, the question of salvaging vanishing cultures versus the notion of evolving cultures. Hochman does a wonderful job of tracing the ties that link a small but important matrix of scholars, civil servants, and media brokers...