Directions and Diversions
in Visual Anthropology            
  1. Introduction
  2. Objects of Affect
  3. The Burden of Representation
  4. Uncertain Evidence
  5. Digital Media Infrastructure

  6. Collaboration
  7. Sovereign Vision(s)
  8. Opacity and Refusal
  9. Alter-Futurisms
  10. Visual Anthropology beyond the Visual

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CC BY-NC-SA 2024 Isaac Marrero Guillamón

3. The Burden of Representation


In addition to their material and objectual qualities, images are powerful representational devices. As such, they are inevitably entangled in the production and reproduction of relations of power/knowledge. In anthropology, more specifically, images have played a central role in the racialisation, exoticisation and othering of peoples. This session discusses the critique of representation as an important site of anti-colonial, anti-racist work. It will also address the continuing bearing of the discipline’s often unmarked “white gaze”.

Required reading:
  • Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnograhpy.” In The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, 99–126. Durham: Duke University Press.

Part 1/2 (19’): unpacking the politics of representation; the crisis of representation in anthropology; ethnographic taxidermy.



Key films:
  • Asch, Timothy, Linda Connor, and Patsy Asch. 1981. A Balinese Trance Seance & Jero on Jero: A Balinese Trance Seance Observed. US, 48 min.
  • MacDougall, David and Judith MacDougall. 1991. A Wife among Wives. Australia/US, 72 min. 
  • Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 1983. Reassemblage. US, 40 min.

Part 2/2 (16’): reappraising the critique of representation; critical artistic interventions in the colonial archives.



Activities:
 
  • Further reading:
  • Blight, Daniel, ed. 2019. The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization. London: SPBH Editions and Art on the Underground.
  • Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Edwards, Elizabeth, ed. 1994. Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. New Haven; London: Yale University Press; Royal Anthropological Institute.
  • Fabian, Johannes. 1983. “The Other and the Eye: Time and the Rhetoric of Vision.” In Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 105–42. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Green, David. 1984. “Classified Subjects: Photography and Anthropology.” Ten.8: Photographic Journal, no. 14: 30–37.
  • hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. 
  • Lewis, Dave. 2015. “Field Work.” FocaalBlog. August 3, 2015. http://www.focaalblog.com/2015/08/03/dave-lewis-field-work/.
  • Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 1990. ‘Documentary Is/not a Name’. October 52: 77–98.
  • Mercer, Kobena. 1990. “Black Art and the Burden of Representation.” Third Text 4 (10): 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829008576253.
  • Poole, Deborah. 2005. “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (1): 159–79.
  • Roth, Lorna. 2009. “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity.” Canadian Journal of Communication 34 (1). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2009v34n1a2196.
  • Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. London: Vintage.
  • Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter): 3–64.
  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
  • Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London: Macmillan.
  • Wolukau-Wanambwa, Stanley. 2015. ‘The Lives of Others’. Aperture. 22 October 2015. https://aperture.org/editorial/lives-others/.
  • Yancy, George. 2012. Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.