THE CORPOREAL IMAGE X THE CORPOREAL IMAGE FILM, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SENSES X David MacDougall PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD COPYRIGHT 2006 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM:PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA MACDOUGALL, DAVID. THE CORPOREAL IMAGE :FILM, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SENSES / DAVID MACDOUGALL. P. CM. INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX ISBN-13:978-0-691-12155-0 (ALK. PAPER) ISBN-10:0-691-12155-9 (ALK. PAPER) ISBN-13:978-0-691-12156-7 (PBK.:ALK. PAPER) ISBN-10:0-691-12156-7 (PBK. :ALK. PAPER) 1. VISUAL ANTHROPOLGY. 2. PHOTOGRAPHY IN ETHNOLOGY. 3. MOTION PICTURES IN ETHNOLOGY. I. TITLE. GN347.M32 2006 301—DC22 2004060754 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-INPUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN SABON PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER. ∞ PUP.PRINCETON.EDU PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 13579108642 In Memory of Jean Rouch 1917–2004 John Marshall 1932–2005 CONTENTS X Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION Meaning and Being 1 PART I: MATTER AND IMAGE 11 1 The Body in Cinema 13 2 Voice and Vision 32 PART II: IMAGES OF CHILDHOOD 65 3 Films of Childhood 67 4 Social Aesthetics and the Doon School 94 5 Doon School Reconsidered 120 PART III: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION 145 6 Photo Hierarchicus: Signs and Mirrors in Indian Photography 147 7 Staging the Body: The Photography of Jean Audema 176 viii CONTENTS PART IV: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION 211 8 The Visual in Anthropology 213 9 Anthropology’s Lost Vision 227 10 New Principles of Visual Anthropology 264 Filmography 275 Bibliography 283 Index 299 ILLUSTRATIONS X 1.1 From Le sang des beˆtes (1949) 14 1.2 From Les yeux sans visage (1959) 15 3.1 From Ze´ro de conduite (1933) 69 3.2 From Jeux interdits (1952) 83 3.3 From Ivan’s Childhood (1962) 84 4.1 Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru visiting Doon School in 1957 101 4.2 The blue and gray shirt of the Doon School games uniform, from Doon School Chronicles (2000) 103 4.3 Students near Doon School’s Main Building 104 4.4 Measuring a student at Doon School, from Doon School Chronicles (2000) 105 4.5 “Toyes” at Doon School 110 4.6 Stainless steel tableware at Doon School 112 4.7 A group of first-year boys in Foot House 115 5.1 A Doon School dormitory, from Doon School Chronicles (2000) 124 5.2 Karam during his last lunch as a Foot House boy, from With Morning Hearts (2001) 130 5.3 Abhishek, from The Age of Reason (2004) 135 6.1 The Maharao Raja Raghubir Singh of Bundi with some of his possessions, 1912 149 6.2 Studio portrait of a working-class man. France, ca. 1910 150 6.3 Plate from Watson and Kaye’s The People of India, 1868–1875 151 6.4 Painted photograph of a young prince 153 6.5 Bharat Kumar, street photographer, at work in Dehra Dun, 1989 157 x ILLUSTRATIONS 6.6 Photograph of the author by a street photographer, using the paper negative process 159 6.7 Four young princes of Kapurthala 161 6.8 Tourist in costume with water jar 166 6.9 Tourist posing as a Pathan 167 6.10 Photograph of a missing boy shown on Indian television, November 1989 170 6.11 R. S. Sharma at the door of his studio, Mussoorie, 1988 171 6.12a A married couple from Garhwal 172 6.12b A married couple from Garhwal 172 7.1a “Un Campement dans la Valle´e de la Moundji Mayumbe,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 177 7.1b “17. Un Campement dans la valle´e de la Moundji,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 177 7.2 “Guerriers Oudombo – Region de l’Ogooue´,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 180 7.3 “Guerrier Yenvi,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 182 7.4 A 5-centime stamp issued by Postes Congo Franc¸ais Gabon, February–March 1910, based on a photograph by J. Audema 183 7.5 “Type Bakamba,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 184 7.6 “Indige`nes du Congo Franc¸ais,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 186 7.7 “Types N’Goundis, Re´gion de Nola,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 188 7.8 “Types N’Gombe`s – Rive gauche de l’Oubangui,” postcard by J. Audema, ca. 1905 189 7.9 “Femme Banziri – Oubangui,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 190 7.10a “Type Banziri – Bas-Kouango,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 191 7.10b “Type Banziri – Bas-Kouango,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 192 ILLUSTRATIONS xi 7.11 Portrait of Jean Audema by F. Cairol, Montpellier, France, ca. 1909 194 7.12 “Le Vapeur ‘Brettonet,’ de la Cie des Messageries Fluviales du Congo a` Brazzaville,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 199 7.13 “Une chasse a` l’e´le´phant,” Jean Audema appearing in one of his own postcards, French Congo, ca. 1905 200 7.14 “Un Tailleur Loango (Congo Franc¸ais),” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 201 7.15 “Femme Coumbe´ – Congo Franc¸ais,” postcard by J. Audema, French Congo, ca. 1905 205 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS X HIS BOOK was made possible by the support and hospitality of a number of institutions. The Centre for Cross-Cultural Research T at the Australian National University has provided a collegial envi- ronment for my writing and filmmaking activities over the past eight years. I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for a Queen Eliza- beth II Fellowship and an Australian Professorial Fellowship, under which much of this work was done. A part of the book was written at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, where I held a visiting fellowship in 2000–2001. I am grateful to the Kolleg and to the fellows for their support and interest. Among other institutions that have contributed directly or indirectly to the writing of these essays are The Doon School in India, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, the Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico in Sardinia, and the University of Tromsø in Norway. I owe thanks to a number of friends and colleagues who have helped me with advice and encouragement during the writing of the book. Among them are Roger Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Faye Ginsburg, Chris Gregory, Gary Kildea, Judith MacDougall, Howard Morphy, Nicolas Pe- terson, Rossella Ragazzi, Peter Read, John Shannon, Sanjay Srivastava, Lucien Taylor, and Salim Yusufji. Others not mentioned here have given me valuable comments and information on particular subjects. Their con- tributions are acknowledged in the notes for the essays concerned. Several chapters in the book have appeared elsewhere in somewhat dif- ferent versions. For permission to reprint them here, I should like to thank the original publishers of the following:“Social Aesthetics and The Doon School,” reprinted from Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 15, no. 1:3– 20, with the permission of the American Anthropological Association, 2000 American Anthropological Association; “Photo Hierarchicus:Signs and Mirrors in Indian Photography,” 1992 from Visual Anthropology, vol. 5, no. 2, reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, Inc., http:// www.routledge-ny.com; and “The Visual in Anthropology,” reprinted from Rethinking Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks and How- ard Morphy, Yale University Press, 1997 by Yale University. THE CORPOREAL IMAGE X INTRODUCTION MEANING AND BEING X HE ESSAYS in this book address the corporeal aspects of images and image-making.This is not to say that they are indifferent to T the meanings and associations that images awaken in us—far from it—but they are concerned with the moment at which those meanings emerge from experience, before they become separated from physical en- counters.At that point thought is still undifferentiated and bound up with matter and feeling in a complex relation that it often later loses in abstraction.I am concerned with this microsecond of discovery, of knowl- edge at the birth of knowledge. Our consciousness of our own being is not primarily an image, it is a feeling.But our consciousness of the being, the autonomous existence, of nearly everything else in the world involves vision.We assume that the things we see have the properties of being, but our grasp of this depends upon extending our own feeling of being into our seeing.In the process, something quintessential of what we are becomes generalized in the world.Seeing not only makes us alive to the appearance of things but to being itself. One of the functions of art, and often of science, is to help us under- stand the being of others in the world.However, art and science are only part of this; it depends as much on how we go about the daily practice of seeing.In this, the meaning we find in what we see is always both a neces- sity and an obstacle.Meaning guides our seeing.Meaning allows us to categorize objects.Meaning is what imbues the image of a person with all we know about them.It is what makes them familiar, bringing them to life each time we see them.But meaning, when we force it on things, can also blind us, causing us to see only what we expect to see or distracting us from seeing very much at all. My reasons for writing about this come from a background of trying to use images in an academic discipline.Images reflect thought, and they may lead to thought, but they are much more than thought.We are accus- tomed to regarding thought as something resembling language—the mind speaking to itself or, as dictionaries put it, a process of reasoning.But our conscious experience involves much more than this kind of thought.It is 2 INTRODUCTION made up of ideas, emotions, sensory responses, and the pictures of our imagination.The way we use words all too often becomes a mistaken recipe for how to make, use, and understand visual images.By treating images—in paintings, photographs, and films—as a product of language, or even a language in themselves, we ally them to a concept of thought that neglects many of the ways in which they create our knowledge.It is important to recognize this, not in order to restrict images to nonlinguistic purposes—this merely subordinates them further to words—but in order to reexamine the relation between seeing, thinking, and knowing, and the complex nature of thought itself.