How to See a Scar: Humanitarianism and Colonial Iconography in the Putumayo Rubber Boom

Abstract

This paper examines Irishman and British consul Roger Casement’s photographs of Indigenous people of the Putumayo Amazonian region. Casement traveled to the Putumayo in 1910 to investigate the crimes committed by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company. I argue that both Casement’s photographs and his writings on the role of visual perception in his travel diaries shed light on a crucial concept of visual evidence often eclipsed in scholarship on early photography and the desire for empirical proof. Although Casement insisted that it was necessary to register, in writing and photography, the marks of torture on the bodies of Huitoto and Bora people, he also declared that seeing their scars was a question of ‘point of view.’ In analyzing Casement’s concept of point of view and its relation to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the role of experience in the production of knowledge, I argue that photography, for Casement, not only shows, but also teaches the public how to see the indigenous body. I examine Casement’s negotiations with various iconographic traditions – like the anthropometric and the picturesque – and demonstrate how the British consul used the indigenous body to impart upon the public a specific pedagogy of the gaze.