visual anthropology

135 Pages·2011·9.05 MB·English

VISUAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
Photography as a Research Method
Ik
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REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
John Collier, Jr., and Malcolm Collier
Foreword by Edward T. Hall
Photography
as a Research Method
REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
John Collier, Jr., and Malcolm Collier
Foreword by Edward T. Hall
University of New Mexico Press
Albuquerque
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xl
Foreword—Edward T. Hall xiii
Introduction
1 The Challenge of Observation and the
Nature of Photography • • • • 5
—The Image with a Memory
—The Camera as a Research Tool
2 The Camera in the Field 15
3 Orientation and Rapport 19
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data —Social Orientation
—The Photographer: A Participant Observer
Collier, John, 1913-
Visual anthropology. —Photography and Rapport
Bibliography: p. 4 Photographing the Overview: Mapping and
Includes index.
1 Photography in ethnology. 2. Moving-pictures in ethnology. Surveying 29
I. Collier, Malcolm, 1948- . II. Title.
GN347.C64 1986 306'.0208 86-6926 —Mapping
ISBN 0-8263-0898-8 —The Photographic Shape of Community Designs
ISBN 0-8263-0899-6 (pbk.)
—Photographic Surveys
©1986 by the University of New Mexico Press.
Previously published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, ISBN 0-03-065245-6.
All rights reserved.
Third paperbound printing, 1990 V
5 The Cultural Inventory 45 —Visual Anthropology's Contribution to
Ethnographic Film
—The Vicos Inventory
—The Relocation Study
14 Principles of Visual Research 161
6 Photographing Technology 65 —Basic Considerations in Visual Research
—Researchable Visual Data
7 Photographing Social Circumstance and —The Range of Photographic Recording
Interaction 77 —The Organization of Research
—The Significance of Open Observation
—Social Relationships
—Structured Research
—Observations of Social Relationships
—Analysis
—Social Interaction and Process
—Designs for Analysis
—The Order of Analytic Activity
8 Interviewing with Photographs 99
—An Example of the Use of Photographs in 15 Analysis of Still and Moving Images 175
Interviews
—Organizing the Data
—How Photographs Function in Interviewing
—Open Viewing Procedures
—A Photo Essay Approach to Photo-Interviewing
—Structured Analysis
—Photo-Interviewing in Preliterate Cultures
—Microanalysis
9 Psychological Significance and Overtones of Visual
16 Practical Procedures in Analysis 185
Imagery in Projective Interviewing 117
—Organizing Mapping and Survey Photographs
—The Position of Photographs in the Scale of
—Inventories and Social Process
Projective Tools
—Logging Film and Video
—Counting and Measuring
10 Risks to Rapport in Photographing Probing 133
—Mass Files
—Sound and Images
11 Film and Video 139
—Team Analysis
—What Happens When the Image Moves
17 Finding Patterns and Meaning 195
12 Film and Video in Field Research 145
—Making Comparisons
—Considerations in Field Recording
—Creative and Artistic Approaches
13 Ethnographic Film and Its Relationship to
18 Making Conclusions 203
Film for Research 151
—Are Anthropological Films Distorted and
19 Technical Considerations in Visual Anthropology 207
Unreliable Records?
—Some Crucial Factors
—How Impartial Is the Ethnographic Record —The Relationship of Photographic Skill to Rapport
—Alternative Models —Cameras for Anthropology
-How Can Films be Made from the Inside Out? —Motion Picture Cameras
VÜ
—Super-8 Equipment for Field Research
DEDICATION
—Video Equipment
—Technical issues in Panoramic Studies
—Problems of Portraiture
—Sound with Still Photographs
—Technology in Action
—Photographing with Little or No Light
—How Reliable Is Flash
—Problems of Heat and Cold
—Photographic Processing in the Field
—The Photographic File
References
Index
This writing is dedicated to Alexander H. Leighton for insights
and enthusiasm for research into photography's contribution to
anthropology
and to: Edward T. Hall for years of stimulation and insights into the
silent language of culture and visual anthropology.
Special acknowledgment must also be given to:
The late Roy E. Stryker for bountiful photographic opportunity and
for human integrity in photography,
Walter Goldschmidt for his support and editorship of our first re
search report in The American Anthropologist, in 1957, and
George and Louise Spindler for the publication of the first edition
of Visual Anthropology as part of the series "Studies in Anthropolog
ical Method" in 1967.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The, roots of this book lie in the Farm Security Administration and
the photographic foresight of Roy E. Stryker. The book's scientific
basis began with the Sterling County Study under the direction of
Alexander H. Leighton and continued through other field research
efforts including: the Fruitland Navajo Project with Tom Sasaki and
William A. Rose, the Cornell-Peru Project in Vicos under Allan R.
Holmberg, the American Indian Urban Adjustment project with James
Hirabayashi, and the National Study of American Indian Education
with John Connelly and under the direction of Robert J. Havighurst
and Estelle Fuchs. A special thanks to the staffs and fieldworkers of
these projects, particularly Ray and Carol Barnhardt, Luis Kem¬
nitzer, Gordon Krutz, William Mcgill, Richard Moore, Frank Nor-
rick, Daniel Swett, Robert N. Rapaport, Seymour Parker, Marc-Adelard
Tremblay.
The book draws on independent research projects funded by
the National Institute of Education, the Wenner-Gren Foundation,
the Spencer Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation, the Foundation for the Study of Man, the American
Philosophical Society, and the Spencer Foundation. These projects
were aided by a number of individuals, of particular importance are
Cam and Anita Pfeiffer, George K. Woo, Marilyn Laatsch, Pat Fer-
rero, and Stephen Wallace.
We are indebted to colleagues who have enriched this book,
many of whom have generously allowed us to use their work as
examples. These include: John Adair, Scott Andrews, Lorenzo Avila,
Peter Bella, Paul Byers, Rafael Cake, Alyce Cathey, Bernard S. Cohn,
George Collier, Paul Ekman, Celeste Greco, Byron Harvey, William
FOREWORD
Heick, Dwight Heath, John and Patricia Hitchcock, Heidi Larsen,
Russell Lee, Michael Mahar, Margaret Mead, Steve Mitchell, Gunvor
Nelson, Morris Opler, David Peri, Pat Rosa, Arthur Rotman, Ron
and Don Rundstrom, Bernard Siegai, Hubert Smith, Naomi Togashi,
Robert Wharton, Sol Worth, and Peter Yaple.
The content and organization of this book reflects years of teach
ing and the many students whose work and questions have assisted
in defining methods and concepts. Particular respect is paid to the
memory of Adan Treganza for his imagination and foresight in lay
ing the foundation for this teaching experience.
In its two editions this book has drawn on the editorial skill
and critical reading of: John and Casey Adair, Mary E. T. Collier,
Tink Pervier, John and Patricia Hitchcock, Edward T. Hall, and George
and Louise Spindler for the first edition; and Mary E. T. Collier,
Irene Dea Collier, Allison Jablanko, and Heidi Larsen for the second
edition, with the clerical assistance of Alice Lee. Elizabeth Hadas
and Dana Asbury carried out the final editing for the University of
New Mexico Press, to whom we give a final thanks for their interest
Visual Anthropology is an updated, much expanded and clarified re
in supporting the publication of the second edition.
vision of the original version published in 1967. What the two Col
liers, John and Malcolm, have produced is a manual on the two
interlocked processes of observation: how to get information on film
and how to get information off film. There are chapters covering
virtually every aspect of filmic research, including the more difficult
and abstruse epistemological issues of filmic studies which are con
stantly being raised by the practitioners of this field. However, there
is more to this volume than method and epistemology. An important
milestone in John Collier's distingushed career—he began as a pho
tographer for the great Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Adminis
tration, then worked for Standard Oil in Latin America, Alexander
Leighton in Nova Scotia, and the Holmberg's Vicos study in Peru,
and in his New Mexico homeland as well as with his talented son
Malcolm in Alaska with the Eskimo—this book treats the subject on
a deeper, much more basic level than one is accustomed to find in
works of this genre. Most important is the breadth and depth of
insight which the Colliers bring to their work. Few can match them
in this matter.
Sorting the wheat from the chaff, I will try in this introduction-
letting the reader discover for him- or herself the richness and rel
evance of this work—to make some basic points concerning a few
of the elements that have figured in the Colliers' contribution. The
story begins at age seven when John was hit by an automobile,
suffering a fractured skull and what later was demonstrated to be
severe damage to the left hemisphere of his brain; he became se-
xii
verely handicapped in spelling and mathematics, both of which are "noncontact" cultures extend their basic mode through all relation
essential to normal schooling. The hearing centers were so trau ships. The data were obviously proxemic, which was what I was
matized as to impair permanently the integration of auditory infor looking for at the time. Other related disciplines might have been
mation. Severe dyslexia, as well as difficulties integrating auditory looking for other data. It was all there—and Goffman—as acute an
information, has, since that tragic event, been a heavy cross for John observer as he was—might have benefited from what the Colliers
to bear. There were unforeseen consequences of the accident which have to offer. In the aforementioned case the data were primarily
were to be quite extraordinary in their implications. This personal surface manifestations. But there is more to it than that because
disaster explains in part, if my interpretation is correct, not only there is another dimension—another way of slicing the cake—which
some of the depth and importance of his photographic imagery but pertains to the artificially created discontinuity between the manifest
of his thinking as well. image or statement and its deeper latent meaning where my own
work and that of the Colliers overlap.
The damage to the left hemisphere promoted a compensatory
This gap—between the manifest and latent interpretation of an
development in the visual and integrative right hemisphere. That
event—separates the compartmentalized, segmented, linear world
is, the holistic right hemisphere took over some of the functions of
of Western thought and reality from the more integrated subterra
verbalized language. Viewing the photographs for this volume (and
nean centers of the mind. Freud developed at some length the dif
I have been stimulated by both the man and his work for thirty-five
ference between the manifest and the latent content of a dream.
years) I was struck again by their richness and depth. A photogra
Jung approached this same discontinuity as a function of the dif
pher myself, I kept finding something else in his images which was
ference between individual consciousness and the collective uncon
not present in either my own work or that of other photographers
scious. Campbell and others have looked at the same theme from
I have known. Though it is something that is not easy to describe,
the point of view of the archetypic character of myths as contrasted
Collier's photographs are not simply visual images; in compensating
with the daily-life preoccupations and clichés of humans.
for his lost hearing, he has managed to incorporate an auditory
quality into his photographic images as well as his vision. People The Colliers have given us ways of penetrating the cultural
have commented repeatedly on how the individuals he photographs cliché—the projection of our own Western patterns for organizing
do not seem to be aware of his presence, an observation I would the visual world onto non-Western peoples. They have also put in
agree with. It is almost as though he were listening instead of seeing— our hands tools which enable the Western viewer to see a little more
projecting that lost ear into the scene. of the worlds that others inhabit. In John Collier's words, "The
auditory is coded language that can directly express mood which is
The auditory and the visual worlds are different. The former is
reinforced by the verbal signals of the listener. With discipline the
more linear and the latter more holistic. And while "a picture may
eyes perceive the factual shapes of realism, but the ear must trans
be worth a thousand words," this is true (if it ever is true) only if
late, for language is a set of abstract symbols. Regardless of this
the picture is taken in a particular way and is then properly analyzed.
evident epistemology, Western people reverse this order and per
One of Collier's contributions has been to teach us how to use
ceive the written word as reality and visual imagery as impression.
photographs in new ways: scientifically for the information that
Navajo observers, by projective test, see photographs as literal in
could be gained from them, and as a means of reinforcing, docu
formation and language as coded interpretation. If you do not know
menting, and checking ethnographic statements.
this you can wholly misinterpret the Navajo message."
One modern cliché is that the validity of a given photographic
statement is measured according to its authenticity. Sounds fair Few of us Westerners are aware of the degree to which our
enough, yet Erving Goffman once criticized a photograph of three visual perceptions are highly selected stereotypes. Yet my own ex
men (a father, son, and a close friend of the father) which had been periments and observations have consistently revealed that two in
taken as a commemorative snapshot—data which Goffman ruled dividuals looking at the same thing can and do see entirely different
out because it was posed and not natural. What Goffman failed to aspects of that event. All of this is supported by the work of the
recognize was that while the pose was arranged, the kinesics was transactional psychologists (Ames, Cantril, Kilpatrick, Ittleson, et
not. In fact the microkinesics and microproxemics, because they al.) following in John Dewey's footsteps. Their results contradicted
were out of awareness, provided an easily decoded record, not only some of the most basic of our core beliefs concerning this underlying
of generational proxemic change but of the fact that "contact" and perceptual relationship between the individual and the surround
xiv XV
(the world). The Colliers state, "Realistically what we perceive may the point is difficult for individuals to understand since it involves
be only part of the reality before us. Science assumes freedom from literally setting oneself inside the other person's visual world; this
this bias, but behavioral scientists in particular form much of their is the very point with which all visual anthropologists must even
belief within the context of their (own) established values." tually come to terms.
There is in our culture a common belief that vision has little or Defined in this way, it is the task of the visual anthropologist
no context, that what we see is the result of a direct stimulus-re to identify the structure points in the system which he is studying
sponse linkage between the image as stimulus and the cerebral inter as well as its contextual components. Context, in the sense that I use
pretation of the stimulus. That is, that a direct connection exists the term, applies to the stored information in the CNS which is
between the external world and what we see, without intervention necessary to give these structure points meaning. The Colliers have
on the part of the culturally conditioned central nervous system. gone farther down this particular road than anyone I know, and it
Ergo, vision is independent of experience—unaltered by experience. may take some time for others to understand what they really have
Yet hundreds of experiments by the transactionalists have demon been doing.
strated that vision, like language, is not only structured but deeply Clearly, the analytic processes I have been discussing are far
contextual. As a consequence, once the grammar of vision has been from simple and mean confronting one's own culture (and fre
mastered, it is possible to manipulate the "meaning" of an image quently one's colleagues) at those levels of meaning and interpre
by manipulating the visual context of which the image is a part. tation of basic issues that are taken as axiomatic. This means that
This means, in the Colliers' words, "Once the grammar of vision is
every culture must be seen in its own terms. Now this can be accom
mastered, not only can photographic imagery be realistically under
plished. For, as the Colliers state, "Through photography it is pos
stood (getting the information off film) but in media it is possible to
sible to learn to see through native eyes. Verbally we can interview
manipulate meaning by shifting the authenticity of the visual con
natives and share the realism of their visual context." Every culture
text."
creates its own perceptual worlds. And until this fact is learned by
Contrast the above with the broader, more inclusive inner world the human species, horrendous distortions in understanding are
of hearing. It is not so difficult for us to believe that sounds are inevitable.
vibrations. We can see it and feel it in the vibrations of the strings The two Colliers have managed in an extraordinary sense to
of the violin as the artist's finger moves from the low notes at the provide a coherent statement concerning what visual anthropology
far end of the neck to the higher notes close to the bridge. Auditory might be. Their potential contributions to this little-known, pioneer
input is experienced as less specific than visual input. There seems ing field could, if things work out, be quite significant. The Colliers
to us to be a greater need to synthesize the auditory message in the believe—and I agree—that visual anthropology is a legitimate field
head than there is with vision. That is, we are more aware of the of anthropological observation in its own right.
relationship between what is going on inside and the stimulus to —Edward T. Hall
those internal processes. The distance between the manifest and the
latent content of music (and speech) is less than for vision. As a
consequence the auditory has the potential for deeper coherence on
the experiential level. In a word, it is somewhat more personal.
One more observation concerning the way in which we believe
the two senses function: when working with people in a foreign
country, most of us have no difficulty accepting the fact that the
noises coming out of the people's mouths are different from what
one hears at home; it is not so easy to grasp the notion that two
individuals from different cultures viewing an identical scene are
not necessarily seeing the same thing. The matter rests on the fact
that seeing is viewed as passive and speaking as active, an assumption
which happens to be blatently wrong, as the Colliers say, "for it
assumes that we cannot see with objective accuracy." Nevertheless,
Introduction:
How to Study This Book
We no longer describe for the sake of
describing, from a caprice and a pleasure of
rhetoricians. We consider that man cannot be
separated from his surroundings, that he is
completed by his clothes, his house, his city,
and his country; and hence we shall not note a
single phenomenon of his brain and heart
without looking for the causes or the
consequence in his surroundings . . . Ï should It is through perception, largely visual and auditory, that we respond
define description: "An account of environment to the humanness that surrounds us. Our recognition of cultural
which determines and completes man." . , . In phenomena is controlled by our ability to respond and understand.
a novel, in a study of humanity, I blame all The camera is an optical system that has no selective process and
description which is not according to that by itself offers no means for evading perceptive sensitivity. Therefore
definition. we begin this book with discussion of observation before going on
to practical field application of the camera, the promise of moving
images, research design, analysis, and the achievement of research
Emile Zola in The Experimental Novel
conclusions. The book is primarily concerned with visual observa
tion and the insights that can be gained through the use of camera
records. Only in the final, but extensive, chapter does the text deal
with the technology of photography, film, and video.
We feel that the humanistic and theoretical issues are more
important than the technology. In our joint years of experience in
teaching ethnographic photography we have rarely found lack of
technical skill to be a serious problem in the use of cameras as a
tool for human understanding. Yet we have frequently found that
fascination with the technology and the mystique of technical par
aphernalia can be a deadly block to making significant camera rec
ords. Hence, the order of our presentation begins with the drama
of the field work experience.
While we suggest that the text be first read in its presented
order, some readers may wish or need to approach the material in
a different manner. One could begin with the chapter on technology
and only later move to those sections that deal with methodological
and theoretical issues. The text is designed to allow this by including