Ethnographic Images Research Articles

Central Asia in Russian descriptions of the 18<sup>th</sup> century: On an anonymous note from the non-church calendar of the Enlightenment Era

There is a lot of interest in travelogue in the research environment today. Russian oriental travelogues, associated with the Central Asian region, have not been studied sufficiently before, besides a certain number of substantive works primarily of a historiographical nature. A special body of problems here is related to the origins of the Russian Central Asian travelogue formation as a genre structure. One of the texts, related to the “origins of the genre” and taken for consideration in this article, is a note by an anonymous author-compiler entitled “News of Bukharia”, published in the “Monthly Historical and Geographical Dictionary for 1779” (St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences). The article is a kind of commentary on this note. We characterize the journal in which it was presented – the printed secular calendar of the 18th century, it differs from the religious ones. The article determines historical, cultural, landscape and geographical realities, reflected in it, and identifies the ideological position of the compiler in the context of the eastern imperial policy of those years. We cautiously assume that when writing the text, the author could use materials on Central Asia from Western sources. There is no literary element as such in the described note. This is not a travelogue in the exact meaning of the term, but a concise informative essay on a regional topic, in which, however, there is no strategy for an objective scientific narrative (“pure curiosity”). We can clearly see the journalistic (state) ideologems of its era, combining the economic aspirations of Russia and its geopolitical attitudes (it is significant that in the note the reader he does not even find any ethnographic images of Central Asian people, their portraits, morals and everyday habits). At the same time, the text of the “News of Bukharia” includes separate general literary components– strict composition, laconism of speech style and logical sequence. The text is important as an early stage in the formation of a scientific and artistic Central Asia modus, as a phenomenon of “documentary literature”, not “fictional literature”.

"Ethnographic Romanticism" in N.A. Durova’s Stories "Sulfur Key" and E.A. Gans’s (Gan`s) "Utballa"

The article considers N. A. Durova's novels "The Sulphur Key" and E.A. Gan's "Utballa". A. Gan's "Utballa" as an example of romantic prose and, at the same time, the presence of ethnographic elements in the novels gives grounds to speak of "ethnographic romanticism". Romantic poetics demonstrated a strong interest in national originality of the people. This explains the presence of ethnographic elements in the novels, which describe the way of life of foreign ethnic groups (Cheremis and Kalmyks), customs, rituals, traditions and their mythology, and which function in the novels in different ways: in "Sernyi Kluch" they help create a romantic twoworld and its "peak" - the main character's character, whereas in "Utballa" ethnographic elements create an image of a diverse world full of vicissitudes, in which a real man in the guise of a woman preserves her deep spirituality to the end. The novels of Durova and Gan investigate the similarities and differences in the representation of the image of a foreign ethnic group and the archetype of national consciousness. The stories have much in common, which is due to the gender peculiarities embodied through ethnographic images. Ethnographic elements allow one to see a people and its traditions in all their identity and beauty. In the novels, ethnography is used as a leading expressive medium, providing information on the mentality of the people, their moral norms and national history. In their everyday scenes and pictures, the authors saturate the narration with folk tales that are an integral part and essential element of the characterization of the hero. The description of everyday life is given in realistic tones (rituals of religious services, weddings) and filled with rich colours and vivid details. The life of the people, legends, nature and people's characters merge, conveying the uniqueness of everyday life and a vivid picture of life. Ethnography is a marker of national culture that develops under specific conditions that define its uniqueness: long-established customs and habits, moral notions, everyday life, etc., and it reflects and explains through fiction the realities of life and the characters of its characters as typical representatives of a particular nation. Understanding the life and culture of the people is always based on the writer's life experience and fiction.

GRAMMATICAL VARIABILITY OF THE UKRAINIAN TRANSMIGRATORY MICRODIALECT IN BASHKORTOSTAN

The article deals with the question of variability – a structural and typological universal feature of most dialects, which is caused by the oral form of their existence. The subject of the study is grammatical variability, which was considered on the basis of one translocalized (transmigratory) Ukrainian microdialect of Stepanivka village, Aurgazinsky district, the Republic of Bashkortostan. The majority of the population of Stepanivka are Ukrainians, at the same time representatives of other ethnic groups live in the village too, which creates conditions for close contacts. The source of the study were the corpora of dialectal texts of coherent speech of Ukrainians in Stepanivka, recorded in 2012 during the dialectological expedition, and narratives published in the book "Ethnographic image of Ukrainians abroad" (Kyiv, 2019). The study was carried out taking into account the features of the maternal basis of this microdialect: the source for the Bashkirian Stepanivka is Slobozhansky dialect with some Middle Dnieper features.
 Analysis of the dialectal texts corpora from the Stepanivka microdialect allowed to identify invariant and variant grammatical forms of different parts of speech. Variant grammatical forms occur due to various factors: most variants, or so-called doublet grammatical forms, correspond to the dialectal norm of the microdialect, and since this microdialect is translocalized, to the original system of its maternal dialectal basis; the other ones are the result of contacts with another idiom, primarily with the Russian language. An important factor in the manifestation of grammatical variability is the peculiarities of the idiodialects of the dialectal speakers.
 The variant forms are found within different parts of speech. The verb system is the most stable to the influence of contact idioms, while there are many variants in the case system of noun parts of speech, which is the result of adopting grammatical features of contact Russian language; the analysis of the context of using of such forms testifies to their equal function with original grammar forms.

Arctic Exploration and the Mobility of Phrenology: John Ross's Ethnographic Portraits of the Netsilingmiut

ABSTRACT Analysing a set of ethnographic images and illustrations resulting from John Ross’s second voyage to find a Northwest Passage in 1829–1833, this article considers the ways in which Arctic exploration intersected with emergent scientific thinking about race and ethnicity in Britain. In particular, it examines how mobility impacted ideas of phrenology and scientific imaging in the context of the Arctic. As a practitioner of phrenology and member of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, Ross’s expertise in this new mental science certainly travelled with him to the Arctic. As his field drawings and book illustrations testify, however, Ross’s knowledge was also affected by his immediate contact with the Inuit in Boothia Peninsula in Nunavut. Comparing Ross’s field drawings and illustrations in his two-volume Narrative and Appendix to their accompanying texts and to select ethnographic illustrations produced by his fellow Arctic explorers, this article uncovers the material and conceptual transformations Ross’s scientific visualisation of Inuit underwent during his physical movement between Britain and the Arctic.

Daguerreotypes and Humbugs: Pwan-Ye-Koo, Racial Science, and the Circulation of Ethnographic Images around 1850

Daguerreotypes and Humbugs: Pwan-Ye-Koo, Racial Science, and the Circulation of Ethnographic Images around 1850

Male Costume of Serbia and Montenegro on the Frontispieces of 19th Century Books (From the Slavic Literature Fund of the Russian Academy of Sciences Library)

The article analyzes eight frontispiece portraits of Serbian and Montenegrin statesmen from the 12–19th century as well as one collective ethnographic image of an inhabitant of the Bay of Kotor. These consist of prints found in seventeen Serbian and Montenegrin 19th century publications which were found in the Slavic Literature Fund of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg). The portraits are considered as works of book graphics, as historical and ethnographic sources. They were compared with other pictorial sources — originals of portraits, images of genuine clothing and jewelry, as well as ethnographic materials. There are detailed descriptions of the costumes depicted in the portraits, the names and characteristics of the clothes, hats and decorations. As a result of the comparison, it was found that some engravings are fictitious images, while others, made from pictorial lifetime originals, can serve as important material for the reconstruction of Serbian and Montenegrin appearance and costume, including specific historical figures. An attempt was made to reveal the relationship of the costume of the ruler at the end of the 18th — first half of the 19th century both with the fashion trends of the era, and with his national identity and political views. These aspects manifested themselves with particular vividness in the portraits of Milos Obrenovich, Karageorgy, Vladyka Daniel and Peter Petrovich Njegos. The analysis of portraits in chronological order made it possible to touch upon the theme of Serbian and Montenegrin costume history, which has been insufficiently studied in the Russian press.

СЛОВО З ЧУЖИНИ

[Ethnographic Image of Ukrainians Abroad: the Corpus of Expeditionary Folklore and Ethnographic Materials. Part 1. Culture of Life Necessities and Traditional Socio-normative Practices (Еd. by H. Skrypnyk; National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, M. Rylskyi IASFE. Kyiv, 2019. 676 p.: ill.)]

The Weight of Words: Co-Analysis of Thick Ethnographic Description and "Friction" as Methodological Strategies in a Health Policy Research Partnership.

Co-production partnerships between policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are designed to facilitate production of relevant and readily usable research in health policy and practice contexts. We describe methodological strategies for in-depth collaborative analysis based on a co-produced ethnography of health promotion practice, involving ethnographic researchers and government-based research partners. We draw on a co-production dialogue to reflect critically on the role and value of co-analyzing research findings using thick ethnographic descriptions. The ambiguity of ethnographic imagery allowed flexibility in interpretation of findings and also generated friction. Specific ethnographic images became focal points for productive friction that crystallized ethical and analytical imperatives underpinning the diverse expertise in the team. To make the most of co-analysis of thick ethnographic descriptions, we assert that friction points must be reflexively considered as key learning opportunities for (a) higher order analysis informed by diverse analytical perspectives and (b) more cohesive and useful interpretations of research findings.

Construction of the Ethnographic Visual Image of Komi-Zyrians in the “Artistic Ethnology” of the Late 19th – 20th Centuries

Abstract The article discusses the history of construing and representing the ethnographic image of Komi-Zyrians in popular and academic literature of 19th and 20th centuries by analysing painted, porcelain and postcard images of Komi-Zyrians of the 19th – early 20th century. Special attention is paid to how Komi ethnicity was visualized on the basis of reproducing stereotypically the “Depicted Zyrian” images. On the basis of these images, the topic of the possible influence of retrospective ethnographic research on the popular beliefs of how a Komi-Zyrian should look like is raised and discussed. It is suggested that both Russian and Western scholars followed the ideology of “Finno-Ugric authenticity” in the ethnographic visual images of Komi they constructed: all the artefacts, which could be associated with Russian or other not Finno-Ugric cultures were literally or symbolically removed from the images or downgraded to “insignificant texts”. Finally the possibility of a correct translation of the ethno-cultural heritage by the means of the modern media technologies – the ones that promote ethnic images into virtual images of the cyberspace – is critically discussed.

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

Инновационный потенциал формата фотокниги в этнокультурной коммуникации

The features of such a widely used format as a photo book in the context of visual ethnography were reviewed in the article. It is noted that the photobook is studied as a tool for creating visual ethnographic materials that allow to conduct a research on modern cultures and ethnic groups to form a cultural identity. Methods. As the subject of analysis, modern photobooks created by the photographer from Japan Ikuru Kuwajima were selected. Results. The potential of the photobook as an author's work is revealed and its communicative potential in ethnocultural interaction is described. An ethno-photo book is defined as a format of visual communication in which each photograph has an ethnical meaning, which contributes to the creation of author's photo narration, as a specific form of reflection of an ethnos, with a representation of ethnic images. The special functions of the ethno-photo book, which are realized upon activation of the author’s principle, are highlighted: the search for their own identity; pictorial (plot) narrative about an ethnic group; creating the integrity of ethno-narration; increment of information about the ethnic group; ethnos research by means of a photo image; details of the ethnic world view; preservation of ethnic pictures of the world; comprehending the culture of another. It has been determined that a modern photo book is distinguished by documentary content and multimedia features that give its content traits of pragmatism and streaming. An ethno-photo book is manifested as a meaningful substantial work in which the author narrates a pictorial story about an ethnos through photographs, creating a holistic artistic and semantic image of the ethnos. It is concluded that all this contributes to a special emphasis of the reader on certain elements of the ethnographic image and contributes to the creation of new information about the ethnos. It is mentioned that one of the varieties of photobooks is the author's photobook, as an in-depth study of oneself in the context of the ethnicity of the territories reflected in the photo-chronicles of the photographer.

Les archives à l’épreuve du temps : les recadrements temporels des courts métrages de la sérieSouvenir

This article examines how “colonial time” is called into question in two short films of the National Film Board of Canada’s series Souvenir, from 2015. The question of time lies at the heart of this series, for which the NFB commissioned contemporary Indigenous filmmakers to take up their archives of visual material on Indigenous peoples. The colonial temporal framework is at work in the vast archives of ethnographic and documentary film and photography on Indigenous peoples dating back to the early twentieth century, in which Indigenous people are often represented as part of “vanishing” cultures. Thus, in this article, I underscore the temporal interruptions that occur when ethnographic visual material of Indigenous peoples is put into the hands of contemporary Indigenous artists. I focus first on what it means to repurpose dehumanizing colonial archives and ask whether visual sovereignty is in fact possible within the archives. By analyzing the reappropriation of archival footage in the short films Mobilize by Caroline Monnet and Etlinisigu’niet ( Bleed Down) by Jeff Barnaby, I elucidate how the filmmakers break with modes of colonial time through what I propose to call “reframings” that offer alternative ways of conceiving of time. By rehabilitating ethnographic images, these filmmakers refuse to project the material into the distant past and complicate the readability of Indigenous images in the archives, revealing how the reappropriation of old images can be just as powerful as the production of new ones.

African Photographer J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial

African Photographer J.A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial

National in Front of the Camera, Soviet Behind It: Central Asia in Press Photography, 1925–1937

National in front of the Camera, Soviet behind it: Central Asia in Press Photography, 1925–1937 While photography in early Soviet Union is a well-researched field, researchers addressed hitherto mostly Soviet Russia. The history of photography in the Central Asian Soviet Republics, though, lacks research. This article focuses on the means of production and distribution of photographs taken in Uzbekistan 1926–1937. With Roland Barthes theory of «connotation», it interprets the visual invention of the Soviet Orient. Photographs by Georgij Zel'ma and Maks Penson of Uzbekistan that were published in Soviet mass media are analyzed, determining style, content and function. Through additional textual analysis, I discuss the network of photographers on the periphery and image agents on the centre. Socialist connotations are derived from appropriations of pre-revolutionary photographs accompanied by false textual framing, innovative compositions of ethnographic images and combinations of local cultural symbols with Soviet modernity. As photographers, primarily from Moscow, travelled to Central Asia, they greatly dominated its visual depiction. Although they emphasized Soviet modernity, they also reproduced older stereotypes about the Orient. Besides offering a history on photography, this article also discusses the establishment of Soviet cultural structures between the centre and the periphery as well as the subordinated agency of local actors at the periphery.

Leading in the Context of Immigration: Cultivating Collective Responsibility for Recently Arrived Immigrant Students

Although school based discourses often frame immigrant students as in need of intervention, leaders can challenge this exclusionary logic, encouraging educators to help students develop linguistic and academic skills while affirming students' rich transnational experiences. This article provides ethnographic images from schools that are effectively serving recently arrived immigrant youth to consider the dimensions of leadership that engender collective responsibility for immigrant youth. In doing so, it considers how school leaders influence how immigrant students are positioned within the sociocultural practices of schools, as well as structures and practices that empower teachers to develop rigorous and responsive curriculum and to support students varied needs.

Empire’s Trail of Bodies: A Review Essay

Empire’s Trail of BodiesA Review Essay Dinah T. Roma (bio) nerissa balce Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. 223 pages. victor roman mendoza Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2015. 286 pages. e. san juan jr. Racism and the Filipino Diaspora: Essays in Cultural Politics Naga City: Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2017. 79 pages. [End Page 517] “History has moving, inexhaustible frontiers,” writes historian and cultural critic Resil Mojares (1981, 178). His remark refers to an earlier body of works on Philippine historiography that witnessed the rise of new methodologies in the study of local and national history. Yet Mojares’s words may aptly echo an urgency among contemporary Filipino American scholars whose efforts at demythicizing the US empire have led to groundbreaking works. Three recently published books—Nerissa Balce’s Body Parts of Empire, Victor Roman Mendoza’s Metroimperial Intimacies, and Epifanio San Juan Jr.’s Racism and the Filipino Diaspora—locate history’s “inexhaustible frontiers” in the archives that have largely been the source of so-called official historical narratives. For these authors, to read the US colonial archives anew is to illumine the violence of empire if Philippine history were to retrieve bodies that had been ravaged and whose stories had been silenced on account of imperial modernity. The works are the outcome of the authors’ long engagement in the academe and advocacy to disclose the US empire’s machinations as it ceaselessly impacts on the Filipino global diaspora. Nerissa Balce is an associate professor of Asian and American studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Victor Roman Mendoza holds an appointment as associate professor of women’s studies and English at the University of Michigan; while Epifanio San Juan Jr. is a multi-awarded academic and staunch public intellectual on Philippine–American relations and the Filipino diaspora, who carved his career teaching at key American universities. The three books rupture the munificent veneer of the US empire. They expose the “cracks in the façade” (Fast and Francisco 1974, 350) through methodologies that are cognizant of the self-serving knowledge produced by colonial functionaries and orthodox historians. The books’ arsenal of interdisciplinary critical tools is wide-ranging—postcolonialism, literary studies, cultural studies, area studies, historical materialism, feminism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies. The concomitant use of these critical tools highlights how complex the undertaking is to categorically unmask the American colonial legacy for what it really was—brute force and rhetoric. To do so is vital in putting into perspective the invasion of the Philippines not as a discrete historical occurrence in the name of a noble mission but one in the same expansionist spirit as the conquest of the Native [End Page 518] Americans, Africans, and Mexicans (San Juan 2017, 5). The three books thus foreground the genocidal nature of these imperial subjugations to assert that the Philippine conquest is a major period in US imperial history and one that is unique in the Asia-Pacific, whose aftermath is still evident in the phenomenon of Filipino migration and diaspora to the US. Body Parts of Empire, which won the 2018 Best Book award in Cultural Studies from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies, unravels the “complicity of culture in historical violence” (Balce 2017, 15). It consists of five chapters that stand for an inventory of the colonial cultural products teeming with literary and cultural tropes through which the Filipino native body has been vilified. Each chapter analyzes the particular rhetoric that produced the tropes of abjection of body parts which Balce (ibid., 17) catalogues in the following pairings: face (colonial photographs), skin (newspapers), bile (women travel writings), and blood and bones (race romances and ethnographic images). Metroimperial Intimacies, Mendoza’s landmark work, shares Balce’s stance of delving into culture but this time “to look for the queer in the colonial” (Claudio 2016). Mendoza reexamines the colonial archives to dissect the menace of same-sex intimacies between the Filipino male native...

Ethnographic Heritage as a Branding Strategy: A Case Study of Yogurt in Bulgaria and Japan

This article explores the various ways in which ethnographic images are deployed in branding strategies by Bulgarian and Japanese companies to frame industrial food as cultural heritage. Examining the history and marketing strategies of yogurt in Japan, I demonstrate how international marketing and cooperation has influenced the definitions, meanings and values of yogurt. In Japan, companies turn to ethnographic images of Bulgaria to sell their products, emphasizing visions of rural life over Bulgarian yogurt-making technology. At the same time, the fact that Bulgarian yogurt has turned into a symbol of health and wellbeing in one of the world’s economic powers is a source of national pride for consumers in post-socialist Bulgaria. The branding strategies of yogurt show how companies transform foods into culturally meaningful products, thereby doing much more than making profitable commodities of them. In educating and offering consumers new lifestyles, they change established systems of consumption and influence people’s imaginations.

The face of the other: the particular versus the individual

Abstract Five interrelated case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries develop the dynamic contrast between portraiture and pictorial genres newly invented in and about Latin America that do not represent their subjects as individuals despite the descriptive focus on the particular. From Jean de Léry’s genre-defining proto-ethnographic text (1578) about the Tupinamba of Brazil to the treatment of the Creole upper class in New Spain as persons whose individuality deserves to be memorialized in contrast to the Mestizaje, African, and Indian underclass objectified as types deserving of scientific study, hierarchical distinctions between portraiture and ethnographic images can be framed in historical terms around the Aristotelian categories of the universal, the individual, and the particular. There are also some intriguing examples that destabilize these inherited distinctions, such as Puerto Rican artist José Campeche’s disturbing and poignant image of a deformed child, Juan Pantaléon Aviles, 1808; and an imaginary portrait of Moctezuma II, c. 1697, based on an ethnographic image, attributed to the leading Mexican painter Antonio Rodriguez. These anomalies serve to focus the study on the hegemonic position accorded to the viewing subject as actually precarious and unstable, always ripe for reinterpretation at the receiving end of European culture.

Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology

Contents Introduction: The Passamaquoddy Experiment 1. Media Evolution: Indians, Alphabets, and the Technological Measures of Man 2. Representing Plains Indian Sign Language 3. Originals and Aboriginals: Race and Writing in the Age of the Phonograph 4. Race, Empire, and the Skin of the Ethnographic Image 5. Local Colors: The Work of the Ethnographic Autochrome Postscript: Fictions of Permanence Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Visualizing Seoul’s Landscapes: Percival Lowell and the Cultural Biography of Ethnographic Images

Scenic views of Seoul’s palaces, gardens, and gates have attracted scholars, collectors, artists, conservators, and millions of tourists for more than a century. As iconic markers confirming and promoting national identity at home and abroad, the physical monuments as well as their images reproduced as postcards, posters, and dioramas are embraced as tangible sources of the continuity of Chosŏn dynastic traditions and popular “must-see” destinations. This article investigates one of the oldest intact photographic collections of Korea assembled by Percival Lowell in 1883–84. As the first American diplomat armed with a camera, he is known to have taken the earliest portraits of King Kojong, photographs of the inner sanctums of palaces and gardens and officialdom, and snapshots of street life in and beyond the capital’s gates. Lowell’s 1885 publication, Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm, published by the leading literary press in Boston, Ticknor and Company, was well received as the first eyewitness account of Korea richly illustrated with twenty-five full-page original photographs. At the time, Lowell’s travelogue was not only regarded as the definitive scholarship on Korea but also influenced the circulation of ethnographic images of the “the Land of the Morning Calm” in the Western imaginary. This article analyzes the subjects and objects of his “camera-eye” as not only personal mementos of Lowell’s trip but also as the earliest visual guides to the Hermit Kingdom that had just opened up to the outside world.