Should Anthropologists Pay Their Respondents?

Abstract

tends to neutralize the constructive ethnographic and analytical possibilities of a focus on constructive activity by employing it only as a principle of deconstruction of anti-constructivist approaches like Malinowskian empiricism. It is possible, however, to move in a different direction from the same point of departure, and approach the ethnography, and theoretical analysis, of cultural representation through the study of the activities of producing them. This is the turn being taken by a number of contemporary theorists in communication and visual anthropology, for instance Caldarola in his call for making the 'imaging process' the focus of ethnographic inquiry or Ginsburg's notion of mediation to which I referred at the beginning of this talk (Caldarola 1988: Ginsburg n.d.). Working with the production of indigenous visual media, observing the techniques of camera work and editing, and also the social activities and relations through which videos are made, used and controlled, provides an opportunity to study the social production of representations rarely approached in non-visual ethnography, and different again from the insights afforded by ethnographic film. I would suggest that approaching the study of cultural categories in this way can be a salutary corrective to the historic bias of the discipline, inherited from both Durkheimian and Anglo-American positivism, towards conceiving of categories only in the static form of classification or collective representations, and not in the active form of schemas for producing classes or representations. A theoretical approach of this kind, as I have further suggested, is not inherently opposed to or exclusive of a political approach to supporting indigenous media as a means of indigenous empowerment and self conscientization. My own involvement with Kayapo media started as a politically motivated effort along these lines, rather than from theoretical premises. I have found, however, that working to promote political empowerment through media has converged both conceptually and practically with the theoretical interests of many visual anthropologists in image production and the role of media (particularly indigenous) as mediators of social and political activity. El Broadcasting. Canada. Runge P. Pereira, Renato. n.d. Como os Indios se Travestem de Indios. Ruby, Jay. 1991. Eric Michaels: An Appreciation. Visual Anthropology IV: 3-4 (325-344). Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. Post-Modem Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document. In James Clifford and George Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley. U. of California P. Worth, Sol and John Adair. 1972. Through Navajo Eyes. Bloomington. Indiana U.P.