An Experiment in Looking: Reexamining the Process of Observation

Abstract

In Autumn I985 Allison Jablonko, an anthropologist, and Elizabeth Kagan, a certified movement analyst and choreographer, set out to explore the possibility of using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to derive meaning from archival footage of the Maring people of Papua New Guinea.1 We wished to broaden the analysis of Maring movement style which Jablonko had completed in 1967 (Jablonko 1968a). Because it had been designed for an anthropological audience unfamiliar with disciplined movement observation, that analysis was strictly limited to counting body parts used, types of forms traced in space, and the degree of synchrony both among individuals and between body parts moving together. The core of the study had been a microanalysis (i.e., frame-by-frame of 5-20 second-long movement segments) of about two-dozen examples of common movements in daily life and in men's dance from the 68,ooo feet of research footage shot by Allison and Marek Jablonko in 1963 and I964 among the Maring. In 1968 theJablonkos had returned to the Maring and filmed an additional 46,000 feet which Kagan and Jablonko used for the present study (Jablonko and Jablonko 1968). A precise application of LMA to this research material promised to be an exciting experiment because, in anthropology, movement per se is rarely examined. Even when dance is the primary focus of a study, details of costuming, story line, and the symbolic meaning of gestures have customarily been more fully treated than the actual movement. Yet, as studies using LMA have revealed, it is also in the movement itself that characteristics of a culture are profoundly embedded (see Bartenieff 1980; Lomax, Bartenieff, Paulay I968). We wanted to ascertain the extent to which a skilled movement analyst could look at culturally unfamiliar behavior and, without knowing anything about the culture, derive useful observations that would extend traditional anthropological analyses. An observer already familiar with a people's social organization, mythology, and so forth, might inadvertently project that knowledge onto the visible behavior, thus failing to notice