ANTH 233 Ethnographic Studies
Winter 2019
I acknowledge that St FX is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People.

MARCH 4, 2019: Last day to drop second term 3-credit courses

Feb. 25, 28, Mar. 4, 7: Ways of seeing: Still and moving ethnographic representations,  reflexivity, debate and voice
How might the way data are recorded, especially through visual images, constitute a subject of ethnographic research, and how might these data affect the subject peoples and the anthropologists?
Still photographs: Are photographs true images of their subjects, or are they constructions, with social and political meanings?
    READ: Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins. 1991. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: the Example of National Geographic.” Visual Anthropology Review 7(1): 134-149.

Berger (2002: 47): “What makes photography a strange invention – with unforeseeable consequences – is that its primary raw materials are light and time. ... Every photograph presents us with two messages: a message concerning the event photographed and the another concerning the shock of discontinuity.”

Bourdieu (1991): photographs as reflective of the habitus of the social group that produced them

[E.g. Ways of Seeing (John Berger’s 1972 series): Part four comparing pictures in ads with European oil paintings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY]

What do photographs or pictures mean? Are they “facts,” data, objects to be analysed?

How do we read them? What does it mean when we take them?

Lutz and Collins: Distinct “gazes” that can be analyzed in a National Geographic photograph. [Note some of the same themes as in our other readings about whether the photograph is an objective image, or is both subjectively constructed and read, as well as about the multiplicity of interpretations.]
Lutz and Collins review how the “gaze” has been analysed:
    - gaze as power: masculine, racial
    - Lacan: gaze as anxiety related to knowing we are looked at, while we look at others
    - Bhabha: colonial power/but also colonial power viewed
    - Foucault: technique of power; surveillance
They propose that there is more than one gaze that needs to be analysed, and in nuanced ways:
1) photographer’s gaze through the viewfinder (issues of the control of the photographer – who can gaze at whom?)
    E.g. Ways of Seeing (John Berger’s 1972 series): Excerpt on the nude – Men looking at women http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u72AIab-Gdc
2) institutional or magazine gaze, through choice of picture, cropping, etc.
3) reader’s gaze
4) non-Western subject’s gaze
5) gaze of Westerners captured in the photo
6) gaze returned or refracted by mirrors or cameras shown in many photos
7) our own, academic gaze

In class exercise:
Form groups. Bring a photograph you have taken during a vacation. The photograph should contain one or more “locals” from your vacation spot. In groups in class, using your photograph, and two others I will give you, apply Lutz’ and Collins’ conceptual framework of the different gazes. How do you, as academics, interpret the meaning of the photographs?
Write your answers on a sheet of paper, along with names of your group members, and submit it.

Berger, John (2002) “The ambiguity of the photograph.”  In Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk, eds. The Anthropology of Media, A Reader.  Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 47-55.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) “Towards a Sociology of Photography'.” Visual Anthropology Review 7(1): 129-133.