"I once asked the Dogon why they have 5-day weeks, and they asked me how many fingers I had."-Jean Rouch, 1991

"Most importantly, local knowledge would be digested through institutions of learning in Europe and only then re-served as qualified knowledge about Indies "customs," "cultures," and "peoples," ideally shorn of touch and taste and no longer local at all."-Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2009

"Aura becomes visible only as it disappears. Auratic experience cannot be 'salvaged' or resurrected in modernity, but it can be represented in allegorical form." -Catherine Russel, Experimental Ethnography, 1999

"...the story privileges a 'logic of ambiguity'... It 'turns' the frontier into a crossing, and a river into a bridge. It recounts inversions and displacements: the door that closes is precisely what may be opened; the river is what makes passage possible; the tree is what marks the stages of advance; the picket fence is an ensemble of interstices through which one's glances pass." -Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1988

"The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become a mere representation." -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967



"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

"If this ain't the way it was, it's the way it should have been."-Disclaimer from the film, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972

"Although constructing the ethnographic present is no longer considered a viable idea, the notion of asking people to create an image of their lives that represents their view of themselves is very much a part of contemporary practice." -Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology, 2000