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Section 2
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Conclusion - Monsters 2
This has taken me quite some distance from visual anthropology. To
try and return to something more along the lines that you were expecting
let us consider Durer’s Rhino as discussed by Gombrich (1960:
70/1). “When Durer published his famous woodcut [1515] of a
rhinoceros he had to rely on second-hand evidence which he filled
in from his own imagination, coloured, no doubt, by what he had learned
of the most famous of exotic beasts, the dragon with its armoured
body.” If we then look at the first drawing [1787] of a rhino
made from a live model we see more the influence of Durer’s woodcut
than representation of the shape of rhino’s bodies. A cultural
representation acts as a sort of template, a way of seeing the world.
Confrontation with a real live rhino was not as powerful as the paradigm
engraving by Durer. When anthropologists study technology and the
different uses people put it to, the patterns of interaction are those
of a century of anthropologising. These are our spectacles.
Yet they are oddly kaleidoscopic. Haddon shot film in the Torres Straits,
others made sound recordings soon afterwards
6. The implications of the
use of these technologies in anthropology are only now beginning to
be perceived (as in Morphy 1994). Perhaps the flexibility of computers
is helping us move beyond the wood print. We can layer representations
and the very act of that sort of compilation helps us be aware and
thus to be well placed to analyse the types of cultural spectacles
that we all wear. Technology and people are mutually implicated in
one another. How we deal with this is a challenge for twenty first
century anthropology.
Consider again the quote from Juniper Wiley but with a slight rephrasing
(replacing 'electronics' with the more general term 'technology'):
[Technologically] mediated communications have proliferated
in recent years, introducing a fragility and tenuousness into traditional
systems of signification, expanding social worlds, and generating
new forms of community, social bonds, networks and intimate relationships.
Wiley 1995: 145
If we read that with the turn of the last century in mind it holds
true and perhaps truer: the combination of railroad, penny post and
telegraph/ telephone have had all the effects identified by Wiley
as relating to computers.
So finally, let me return to Mambila and the fieldwork photos of Farnham
Rehfisch. I showed you a transparency of one of his slides, and commented
that he did not take it. To finish let me demonstrate how I know
he didn’t take it. I have indulged in a classic trick of photographic
cropping. The slide shows Rehfisch and the Mambila man together.
The way we look at the photo is quite different. It is not a sensitive
portrait of an individual but a classic photograph of an anthropologist
‘out standing in his field’.
Finally I end with a reflection which may be nothing but a pious hope:
in effect what I have been suggesting in the different cases considered
briefly above is that we are dealing with at least a century's worth
of technologically mediated communication. Anthropology is, I believe,
supremely well placed to analyse and understand the social, moral
and above all the human consequences of what happens when people and
machines get together.
References
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