Becoming a Visual Anthropologist

Abstract

Histories are full of pitfalls, especially if written by those who have had a part in them.- David MacDougall1I have decided to use biography as the framework for this essay. Ethnographic film has been central to my engagement with anthropology since first coming from University College London to The Australian National University as a graduate student in 1973. My career as an anthropologist has been unusual in that I have always been in environments where ethnographic film was considered an integral part of at least some of my teachers' and colleagues' conception of anthropology.I came to University College London as an undergraduate to study social anthropology. My aim was to learn as much as I could about the ways of life of people of the 'developing' world as preparation for a career helping alleviate hunger and disadvantage. While I like to think I have never lost the motivation to work with people for the betterment of the world, I developed a specialist interest in the anthropology of art and material culture as a result of the courses I studied and the charismatic teaching of a young lecturer, Peter Ucko. The first ethnographic films that I watched were part of the courses that he taught. The films were made under the auspices of the Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen at Gottingen in Germany. The emphasis of the institute was on scientific purity and the comparative method.2 The films selected focused on technical processes in the manufacture and use of material-culture objects. Science in this context often seemed too objectifying, looking at the technical processes of distant cultures as if they were disconnected from the overall life of the society. Nonetheless, while sitting in the darkened lecture theatre with the films in glistening black and white, I found the magic of film was not entirely absent.I was also able to experience films of a very different genre: John Marshall's The Hunters and Robert Gardner's Dead Birds.3 These films were gripping in their narrative structure and in the raw emotions they conveyed. Belonging to a genre of films influenced by Flaherty's pioneering feature Nanook of the North (1922), they sat on the borders between documentary and narrative cinema, opening up ethnography to a wider audience.4Peter Ucko had close links to the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI). In British anthropology the RAI has always had a dialogical relationship with the academy. The RAI has carried the history of anthropology forward by keeping alive interests that the university academics have left behind. Arguably the RAI maintained the interdisciplinarity of anthropology at times when social anthropologists, archaeologists and biological anthropologists felt they had little in common. Yet the RAI was also sensitive to emerging issues arising from the grassroots of popular interest in areas ranging from child abuse, race relations and human rights to the teaching of anthropology in schools. The RAI maintained close links to museums and libraries and built significant archives of its own. It is not surprising, given its role in British anthropology, that in the 1970s it created two speciahst research panels, one in art and the other in ethnographic film. The leading protagonists included Peter Ucko, Anthony Forge and James Woodburn. The two panels held regular meetings in London and, to an undergraduate student, they provided privileged access to two of the strands of the emerging discipline of visual anthropology. Sometimes they sat jointly as when Adriaan Gerbrands came to show his film Matjemosh.5I saw two films in the early 1970s that had a great impact on me: David and Judith MacDougall's To Live with Herds, on the pastoral Jie of Kenya,6 and Ian Dunlop's Towards Baruya Manhood.7 The MacDougalls' film was of almost transcendent beauty, attuned to the aesthetics of the Jie. More than that it allowed the viewer to see the world from the perspective of the Jie as it emerged in dialogue with the filmmaker - how they coped with the difficulties of life facing drought. …