Discuss the relevance of the ‘material turn’ for the anthropological study of photographs.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century a significant degree of attention

was paid to the role played by material artefacts in shaping culture. There was a

growing sense of a mutual engagement between persons and things and

recognition that this relationship contributes to culture (Graves-Brown, 2000).

Simultaneously, traditional thinking regarding objects as passive vessels to be

‘filled’ with cultural meaning was replaced with a view of objects as actively

containing social agency (amongst material anthropologists at least). Positioned

along with humans on a continuum of social action, objects are recognised as

being socially ‘alive’ (Knappett, 2002). Knappett notes that in material culture

studies the notion that ‘objects have social lives’ has become a mantra and that

we need to push the exploration of just how objects, including photographs, are

involved in social networks. In this essay I will demonstrate with a few key texts

from the ‘material turn’ period how we are to apply such exploration to

photographic objects.

Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume published in 1986 contained essays which

proved important to the development of the study of material culture. Included

in this volume is Igor Kopytoff’s essay where he posits a biographical approach

towards reading objects. All aspects of an object’s ‘career’ should be looked at,

from the object’s creation right up until its ‘death’ or the point at which it is no

longer useful (it is only at this point, Bruno Latour argues, that it can be termed

an actual ‘object’, as I will discuss below). Objects such as a museum archive box

containing a mixture of photographs, as in the example of Box 54 from the Pitt

Rivers Museum analysed by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (2005), come

with a relatively readable biography as recorded in museum accession records

and in annual reviews of movements of objects. It is unclear however how we are

to go about piecing a biography together for an object lacking such detailed

biographical evidence. A photograph, or indeed any object, which is not part of

an organised museum or private collection would be much more difficult to

examine biographically. I shall return to Kopytoff’s paper towards the end of my

essay.

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Bruno Latour argues that an artefact can only be considered to be a so-called

‘object’ in the instant when it lacks any human interaction – for example an

archaeological find before being discovered would be an ‘object’ – hidden and

invisible underground and removed from chains of association. Latour denies

the status of ‘object’ to anything which is involved in these chains of association

with humans, arguing that both human and non-human agents work together,

shaping behaviour and therefore society as a whole. He gives the example of the

Berlin key which controls the way in which people must lock their apartment

building door at night as a simple tool which ‘assumes all the dignity of a

mediator, a social actor, an agent, an active being’ (Latour, 2000, p.19).

In terms of the anthropological study of photographs, say for example a

collection of ethnographic photographs in a museum archive as in the example of

Box 54, these photos can been seen to have agency by influencing the viewer’s

perception of the people that they represent. We can go further and argue that

colonial photographs can be viewed as not simply referential to colonial

discourse but as actively shaping it, through their consumption (Morton, 2010).

For researchers consulting these photographs they mediate understanding of

both the people represented and of the author of the photograph – their

intentions and their ways of seeing – at the same time as actively constructing

notions of colonialism. The photograph links the viewer in a chain of association

not only with those pictorially depicted but also with the invisible photographer

behind the lens. Latour’s chains of association can therefore been seen to stretch

back and forwards in time and space with photographs acting as mediators in

networks of humans studying other humans.

In Pierce’s terms as discussed by Knappett, the processes through which these

archive photographs act could be said to be iconic (they carry a visual similarity

to the people they represent) and also they are indexical (they depict people

along with their clothing etc. which can act as indices of the social person).

Perhaps analysis should move beyond these terms if we are to gain insight into

photographs as complex historical documents, deserving of attention as objects

in themselves and not only as containers for the forms they depict (Morton,

2010).

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Edwards and Hart note that the portraits contained within Box 54 could be read

in Foucauldian terms since they conform to formal stylistic features, rendering

the photos to the ‘oppressive and repressive discourse’ (2005, p., 52) of

historical anthropological photography. The subjects of these photographs are

transformed into anthropological objects in the vast majority of the images. It is

interesting to note the paradox that anthropological objects, especially

photographs, contain the agency to objectify individuals. However, Edwards and

Hart suggest, perhaps somewhat weakly, that the contextualising information

provided along with the photographs - individuals’ names and ages etc. - restore

their humanity.

In Daniel Miller’s (1987) examination of Nancy Munn’s work concerning the

central Australian aboriginal group the Walbiri, he asserts how objectification

within the landscape serves to anchor both individual and group identity. Social

relations are constituted through relationships with the environment and

specific objects such as rocks and streams which are symbolic of different

dreamtime ancestors. Objects simultaneously exist as persons and as landscape

features and the Walbiri navigate within this network. In terms of the

anthropological study of photography, it may be useful to think about this kind of

externalisation and objectification of identity when investigating the ways in

which people assert their own constructed notions of themselves, for example

through personal photograph collections or though online social networking

sites such as Facebook. Like the dreamtime there is a digital non-physical world

in which, via a mixture of photographs and text, identities are objectified. A web-

like structure is maintained through mutual interaction between these online

points of information and individuals.

Miller (1987) discusses processes of exchange of objects within webs of agency

as presented in Munn’s work among the people of the island of Gawa (located to

the north-east of New Guinea) who participate in the kula exchange cycle in their

provision of canoes. Munn argues that self-identity and hierarchies are created

and maintained by the creation of the canoes and their eventual insertion into

the kula ring. In a similar way anthropological photographs taken by

ethnographers in the field and yielded up to museum collections for the use of

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others establishes the anthropologist in a network of exchange – often museums

funded such trips in return for ethnographic objects. Here we do not escape the

economic aspect of material culture; the museum photographs and the

anthropologist are part of a system of commodity exchange.

Finally, returning to Kopytoff’s argument about biographies of objects, he

examines the opposition between classifications of the singular and the

commoditised in complex societies. He suggests that we can observe the

biography of an object in these terms as it passes through various phases of

reclassification, its identity shifting along a continuum of commodity and

singular object, with the force behind commoditisation being society and with

the individual driving singularisation. Photographs in today’s world are

commonly valued as commodities and often used in the promotion of

commodities in the form of advertising. As anthropologists we can trace the life

of an image as it passes through these phases of singular object to commodity,

for example with the production of popular material goods printed with

photographic depictions. The image may have begun its life as a singular object

and may have transformed into a commodity in the form of a Che Guevara T-

shirt. The nature of the agency of the image changes dependent on the

materiality of its presentation - we experience and interpret the images

differently depending on their materiality. In some ways a photograph’s

production can be seen to be continued by its consumption in the way in which it

is contextualised and re-invented in different formats.

We are also able to trace developments within wider contexts by focusing on

material objects. Edwards and Hart suggest that evident in the biography of Box

54 are the different curatorial practices through which it has passed (towards

greater degrees of conservation) which can be seen as a trace of the paradigm

shifts which have occurred in the treatment of photographs within

anthropological discourse. Photographs are now treated as ethnographic objects

in their own right rather than simply as evidential copies and documentation of

other ethnographic objects (Edwards and Hart, 2005, p.58). They are objects that

can have indexical and iconic meaning and which are located in networks of

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agency along with other human and non-human actors (Knappett, 2002; Latour,

2000).

Bibliography

Edwards, E and Hart, J. 2005. Mixed Box: the Cultural biography of a box of ‘ethnographic’ photographs. In Edwards and Hart (eds.). Photographs Object Histories. London: Routledge

Graves-Brown (ed.). 2000. Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London : Routledge

Knappett, C. 2002. Photographs, Skeuomorphs and Marionettes: some thoughts on Mind, Agency and Objects. Journal of Material Culture 7: 97-117.

Kopytoff, I. 1986. The cultural biography of things. In A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 

Latour, B. 2000. The Berliner Key or How to Do Words With Things. In Graves-Brown (ed.). Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London : Routledge

Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford : Blackwell 

Morton, C. 2010. Personal communication.

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