The Return of the Past: On Drawing and Dialogic History

Abstract

Drawing is a fundamentally dialogic activity and yet it remains largely absent from anthropology's own accounts of its field practices and its history. The early Russian anthropologist of Oceania, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, employed drawing as a strategy to initiate dialogue with new interlocutors, often in the absence of a common language. My research on the history of Lelepa Island, Vanuatu, has built a series of conversations around Miklouho-Maclay's 1879 sketches of the community, mimicking the strategy of drawing-as-dialogue to develop a collaborative or dialogic account of the past.