Lucien Taylor
As I see it, for a practice-based visual anthropology to flourish, I consider it essential, albeit apparently paradoxical, that it cultivate a relationship to its mother discipline that in certain respects might be characterized, in the words of creole linguist Jean Bernabe, as one of ‘deviance maximale…’ that it experiment and innovate with its figural and phenomenological properties, before the discursive and the analytical; that it privilege the particularities of person and place over the abstractions of culture and society; that, in William James’ memorable phrase, it accentuate the ‘radically empirical’ over the explicitly interpretive; that it indulge what Keats called life’s ‘negative capability,’ or John Dewey’s capacity of ‘accept[ing] life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge;’ that (in Foucault’s neo-Kantian terms) it attend to the seeable (and soundable) before the sayable; that it foreground the iconic rather than the symbolic, and so on and so forth. But this begs a number of questions: such characteristics (staking out ‘deviance maximale’ from certain discursive characteristics of written anthropology) are par for the course for art work and for independent and experimental non-fiction film and video (though by no means for the expository generalities of broadcast journalism), so how might visual anthropology distinguish itself from the latter, of which it is also, crucially, a part? Cultural differences are neither the peculiar preserve of anthropologists, nor do they exhaust our attention. An observational mode of filmmaking – still today the default style for visual anthropologists – has been elaborated with greater assurance and keener insight by documentarians than by academically trained visual anthropologists. To my mind, if visual anthropology is to come into its own, or make any distinctive contribution to the larger field of cultural production of which it is a part, and not to do so by slavishly or mimetically replicating discursive qualities of anthropological monographs, before which it will always pale in comparison, it must nonetheless be wholly committed to ethnographic methods, namely participant observation and long-term ethnographic fieldwork. It is through this, and this alone, that ethnographic media may claim anthropology’s particular purchase on the lived experience of its subjects. To date, anthropological methodologies have been honored more in the breach than in their observance, even within the academy, but without them visual anthropology is divested of any distinctiveness, any raison d’etre, and should be subsumed willy-nilly into the larger, and more vital, field of media practice.
At the same time, there is a still largely unexplored history of correspondences (which does not of course mean equivalencies) between artistic and ethnographic practices, as such recent works as Alex Coles’ Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn and Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright’s Contemporary Art and Anthropology have noted, and which contemporary ethnographic media practice might surely exploit. In other words, if it should seek to be more methodologically rigorous, it should surely also be more formally inventive, more open to cross-pollination from the arts. The frequently observed ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary international art practice (which in fact turns out for the most part not so much to be ethnographic in its methods or style but rather in its staging of the stereotypically ‘ethnographic’ in its choice of subjects – the ‘primitive,’ the colonial, the ‘exotic,’ and such) invites visual anthropologists to consider modes, forms, and styles of creating and exhibiting work which may be a far cry from the canonical veristic ethnographic documentary. Chris Wright advocates for practices that ‘point beyond the textual linearity and rigidity of the anthropological monograph, which attempts to subsume visual material into its narrative structure without exploring its potentials, and beyond those art practices that claim to be ‘informed’ by anthropological debates but effectively only reference a series of keywords, or invoke an aura, and do not really engage productively with anthropological arguments or methodologies’ (Schneider and Wright 2006: 26). I think what I have taken from this meeting is the realization that exploring the reciprocal provocations between artistic and anthropological endeavours does not mean the literal borrowing or slavish application of something deployed in one group by the other (anthropologists presuming art to be inherently more creative or less disciplinarily disabled than their own work, or artists imagining that fieldwork represents or delivers some panacea of profundity or ethical engagement), but rather that what will count is not the pronouncements or ideas in the abstract, which remain necessarily programmatic, and may even tend to the prescriptive, but rather the work itself. The work will surely emerge piecemeal, in manifold interstitial configurations which are, for the most part, yet to be imagined. For my own part, in my own practice, I would hazard that while I’ll remain deeply invested in depicting what phenomenologists call the ‘flesh of the world,’ engaged first and foremost with embodied and intersubjective dimensions of human existence before their cultural or social manifestations – with instances of Merleau-Ponty called ‘wild meaning,’ glimpses of Kristeva’s ‘signifiance,’ and ‘obtuse’ revelations of Barthes’ ‘third meaning’ – I am increasingly interested in artistic forms, styles, and genres other than those species of realism that have loomed large in anthropology and documentary, and I am increasingly interested in situating human existence within a larger ecological and natural matrix, in which the ‘culture’ of humanity is relativized as but one element among many.
