Recreating First Contact

Recreating First Contact

Author: Joshua A. Bell

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution

Published: 2013-11-06

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1935623249

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Recreating First Contact explores themes related to the proliferation of adventure travel which emerged during the early twentieth century and that were legitimized by their associations with popular views of anthropology. During this period, new transport and recording technologies, particularly the airplane and automobile and small, portable, still and motion-picture cameras, were utilized by a variety of expeditions to document the last untouched places of the globe and bring them home to eager audiences. These expeditions were frequently presented as first contact encounters and enchanted popular imagination. The various narratives encoded in the articles, books, films, exhibitions and lecture tours that these expeditions generated fed into pre-existing stereotypes about racial and technological difference, and helped to create them anew in popular culture. Through an unpacking of expeditions and their popular wakes, the essays (12 chapters, a preface, introduction and afterward) trace the complex but obscured relationships between anthropology, adventure travel and the cinematic imagination that the 1920s and 1930s engendered and how their myths have endured. The book further explores the effects - both positive and negative - of such expeditions on the discipline of anthropology itself. However, in doing so, this volume examines these impacts from a variety of national perspectives and thus through these different vantage points creates a more nuanced perspective on how expeditions were at once a global phenomenon but also culturally ordered.


Beyond observation

Beyond observation

Author: Paul Henley

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-01-20

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1526131374

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont. Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.


From Dust to Digital

From Dust to Digital

Author: Maja Kominko

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2015-02-16

Total Pages: 724

ISBN-13: 1783740620

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Much of world’s documentary heritage rests in vulnerable, little-known and often inaccessible archives. Many of these archives preserve information that may cast new light on historical phenomena and lead to their reinterpretation. But such rich collections are often at risk of being lost before the history they capture is recorded. This volume celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, established to document and publish online formerly inaccessible and neglected archives from across the globe. From Dust to Digital showcases the historical significance of the collections identified, catalogued and digitised through the Programme, bringing together articles on 19 of the 244 projects supported since its inception. These contributions demonstrate the range of materials documented — including rock inscriptions, manuscripts, archival records, newspapers, photographs and sound archives — and the wide geographical scope of the Programme. Many of the documents are published here for the first time, illustrating the potential these collections have to further our understanding of history.


Material Encounters

Material Encounters

Author: Bronwen Douglas

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-24

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1000993167

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This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea, Australia, and Myanmar. The authors consider how materiality mediates the ways in which knowledge is generated or acquired in encounters and becomes expressed through things and material forms of inscription – charts and maps; journals, letters, and reports; drawings; objects; human remains; legends, cartouches, captions, labels, marginalia, and notes; and published works of all kinds. The essays further address processes whereby materialized knowledge is archived, conserved, distributed, restricted, or dispersed – through serendipity, excess, loss, silence, absence, and suppression. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in History, Anthropology and Oceania Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.


Indigenous Archives

Indigenous Archives

Author: Darren Jorgensen

Publisher: Apollo Books

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9781742589220

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The archive is a source of power. It takes control of the past, deciding which voices will be heard and which won't, how they will be heard and for what purposes. Indigenous archivists were at work well before the European Enlightenment arrived and began its own archiving. Sometimes at odds, other times not, these two ways of ordering the world have each learned from, and engaged with, the other. Colonialism has been a struggle over archives and its processes as much as anything else.The eighteen essays by twenty authors investigate different aspects of this struggle in Australia, from traditional Indigenous archives and their developments in recent times to the deconstruction of European archives by contemporary artists as acts of cultural empowerment. It also examines the use of archives developed for other reasons, such as the use of rainfall records to interpret early Papunya paintings. Indigenous Archives is the first overview of archival research in the production and understanding of Indigenous culture. Wide-ranging in its scope, it reveals the lively state of research into Indigenous histories and culture in Australia.


Naturalist Histories

Naturalist Histories

Author: Jamon Alex Halvaksz

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2024-03-31

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0824888790

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From early explorers to contemporary scientists, naturalists have examined island flora and fauna of Oceania, discovering new species, carefully documenting the lives of animals, and creating work central to the image of Oceania. These “discoveries” and exploratory moves have had profound local and global impacts. Often, however, local knowledge and communities are silent in the ethologies and histories that naturalists produce. This volume analyzes the ways that Indigenous and non-Indigenous naturalists have made island natures visible to a wider audience, their relationship with the communities where they work, as well as the unique natures that they explore and help make. In staking out an area of naturalist histories, each contributor addresses the relationship between naturalists and Oceanic communities, how these histories shaped past and present place and practices, the influence on conservations and development projects, and the relationship between scientific and indigenous knowledge. The essays span across colonial and postcolonial frames, tracing shifts in biological practice from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century focus on taxonomy and discovery to the twentieth-century disciplinary restructurings and new collecting strategies, and contemporary concerns with biodiversity loss, conservation, and knowledge formation. The production of scientific knowledge is typically seen in ethnographic accounts as oppositional, contrasting Indigenous and western, local and global, objective and subjective. Such dichotomous views reinforce differences and further exaggerate inequities in the production of knowledge. More dangerously, value distinctions become embedded in discussions of Indigenous identity, rights, and sovereignty. Contributors acknowledge that these dichotomous narratives have dominated the approach of the scientific community while informing how social scientists have understood the contributions of Pacific communities. The essays offer a nuanced gradient as historical narratives of scientific investigation, in dialogue with local histories, and reveal greater levels of participation in the creation of knowledge. The volume highlights how power infuses the scientific endeavor and offers a distinct and diverse view of knowledge production in Oceania. Combining senior and emerging international scholars, the collection will be of interest to researchers in the social sciences, history, as well as biology and allied fields.


Expedition into Empire

Expedition into Empire

Author: Martin Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-04

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317630122

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Expeditionary journeys have shaped our world, but the expedition as a cultural form is rarely scrutinized. This book is the first major investigation of the conventions and social practices embedded in team-based exploration. In probing the politics of expedition making, this volume is itself a pioneering journey through the cultures of empire. With contributions from established and emerging scholars, Expedition into Empire plots the rise and transformation of expeditionary journeys from the eighteenth century until the present. Conceived as a series of spotlights on imperial travel and colonial expansion, it roves widely: from the metropolitan centers to the ends of the earth. This collection is both rigorous and accessible, containing lively case studies from writers long immersed in exploration, travel literature, and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter.


The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter

The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter

Author: Richard Cavell

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0228023092

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Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922–2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career. As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953–59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork for media studies. After ten years teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto, hosting radio and television shows on the CBC, and doing major research in the Arctic, Carpenter left Toronto and became an itinerant anthropologist. He took up a position in Papua New Guinea, where he countered anthropological practice by handing his camera to the Papuans. Carpenter’s marriage to the artist and heiress Adelaide de Menil made him a truly independent scholar. With the support of the Rock Foundation, founded by de Menil, he collected ethnographical art, curated exhibitions, and edited the materials for a twelve-volume study of social symbolism based on the massive archives created by Carl Schuster. Richard Cavell shows Carpenter – austere, generous, and unpredictable – to also be unwavering in working throughout his career within the framework established by Explorations. The anthropological impetus for media studies has largely been forgotten. This study restores that memory, tracing Carpenter’s work in media and in anthropology over a lifetime of cultural achievements and intellectual convolutions.


Ethnographic Returns

Ethnographic Returns

Author: Anne Gustavsson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1108915841

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In the past decades cultural heritage stored at museums and archives has been returned to source communities in various forms and under diverse circumstances. This contribution to the Elements series explores and discusses specifically the return of digital 'ethnographic' images to indigenous and non indigenous people that share a common recent history of coexistence and dispute over the same territory that is to be understood in the light of the consolidation of a Nation State with a settler colonial logic. The author argues that the affective reception of what a given archive labels as tangible and intangible heritage varies according to each audience ́s particular memory practices, historical experience and way of relating to shared hegemonic notions of 'whiteness' and 'indigeneity'.


Collecting, Ordering, Governing

Collecting, Ordering, Governing

Author: Tony Bennett

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-01-06

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0822373602

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The coauthors of this theoretically innovative work explore the relationships among anthropological fieldwork, museum collecting and display, and social governance in the early twentieth century in Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, and the United States. With case studies ranging from the Musée de l'Homme's 1930s fieldwork missions in French Indo-China to the influence of Franz Boas's culture concept on the development of American museums, the authors illuminate recent debates about postwar forms of multicultural governance, cultural conceptions of difference, and postcolonial policy and practice in museums. Collecting, Ordering, Governing is essential reading for scholars and students of anthropology, museum studies, cultural studies, and indigenous studies as well as museum and heritage professionals.