here

2011-07-04T21:12:00.001-04:00

2011-05-27T13:14:00.000-04:00

2011-01-02T14:22:00.001-05:00

2011-01-02T14:19:00.000-05:00

2010-12-29T22:59:00.000-05:00

2010-12-28T22:58:00.000-05:00

2010-11-21T19:58:00.000-05:00

2010-11-04T21:45:00.000-04:00

2010-10-25T18:27:00.000-04:00

2010-10-25T17:41:00.003-04:00

Guardians of wastelands. A nuclear priesthood. -Peter Galison

2010-10-17T22:41:00.000-04:00

2010-10-15T13:37:00.000-04:00

As Galvin Miller wrote in a review of Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer, “It has as its aim not ‘truth’ but the many truths out of which a picture of reality can be built.”

2010-09-12T21:40:00.003-04:00

I made a joke: "You guys should start a tooth pick factory with those thorn bushes." Later I knelt to take a photograph of a girl enacting her vision of environmental disaster and one of those thorns slid inside me, behind my right patella, above the top of my femur. I pulled it out. The taxi driver said spirits would help. I fainted. And for weeks I wondered if I still had a piece stuck in me.

2010-09-09T11:50:00.004-04:00

It was a sunny day. I wasn't sure where we were going. We stopped at his friend's home but she had locked herself inside. He had to talk to her through the bars.

2010-09-08T21:32:00.002-04:00

The make-shift safari car with a top that opened like a sardine can broke down and I thought an elephant might get us.

2010-09-01T11:21:00.000-04:00

2010-09-01T11:05:00.000-04:00

2010-08-09T16:32:00.000-04:00

2010-08-09T16:07:00.000-04:00

2010-07-31T11:19:00.000-04:00

2010-07-28T15:35:00.000-04:00

2010-07-27T13:34:00.000-04:00

2010-07-25T16:20:00.000-04:00

2010-07-25T16:15:00.000-04:00

2010-07-22T14:16:00.002-04:00

2010-07-18T03:00:00.000-04:00

2010-07-15T12:37:00.000-04:00

2010-07-13T12:20:00.002-04:00

2010-07-13T12:03:00.001-04:00

2010-07-12T09:54:00.000-04:00

2010-07-04T08:10:00.001-04:00

2010-07-02T11:53:00.002-04:00

2010-07-01T15:01:00.000-04:00

2010-06-30T14:20:00.000-04:00

2010-06-30T14:15:00.000-04:00

2010-06-28T14:57:00.000-04:00

2010-06-28T14:53:00.001-04:00

2010-06-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

2010-06-25T05:26:00.000-04:00

2010-06-22T01:31:00.000-04:00

2010-06-17T14:45:00.000-04:00

2010-06-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

2010-06-12T12:01:00.000-04:00

2010-06-10T14:55:00.000-04:00

2010-06-01T16:53:00.000-04:00

2010-05-23T02:21:00.001-04:00

2010-05-16T10:09:00.000-04:00

2010-05-05T10:30:00.001-04:00

"Every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer, neither of whom can, on their own, determine how this meeting will be inscribed in the resulting image. The photograph exceeds any presumption of ownership or monopoly and any attempt at being exhaustive. Even when it seems possible to name correctly in the form of a statement what it shows –‘This is X’ –it will always turn out that something else can be read in it, some other event can be reconstructed from it, some other player’s presence can be discerned through it, constructing the social relations that allowed its production." -Ariela Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008

2010-05-03T09:22:00.001-04:00

“Since the photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions. …The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it.” -John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 1966

2010-04-29T21:06:00.000-04:00

2010-04-28T19:19:00.000-04:00

2010-04-21T11:17:00.002-04:00

"A historical ethnography, then, must begin by constructing its own archive. It cannot content itself with established canons of documentary evidence, because these are themselves part of the culture of global modernism-- as much the subject as the means of inquiry. As anthropologists, therefore, we must work both in and outside the official record, both with and beyond the guardians of memory in the societies we study." Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, 1992

2010-04-20T15:49:00.001-04:00

2010-03-31T21:05:00.002-04:00

"Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."-Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 1982

2010-03-31T15:51:00.000-04:00

2010-03-25T11:19:00.002-04:00

"For it is only through repetition that things cease to be perceived or remarked, that they become so habituated as no longer to be noticed. At the same time, however, no hegemony is ever total (Williams 1977:109); it constantly has to be made and, by the same token, may be unmade." -John and Jean Comaroff, 1992

2010-03-23T00:36:00.002-04:00

"Well, anthropology is not on the verge of disintegration. Institutional inertia alone will keep it going for some time. More significantly, anthropology has useful and important things to teach the world, but more pressing is what it has to teach itself." -George Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, 2008

2010-03-13T21:00:00.000-05:00

2010-03-11T20:14:00.001-05:00

"Photographs and voice are integral to the performance of one another, connecting, extending and integrating ways of telling histories."-Elizabeth Edwards, 2006

2010-03-07T12:13:00.001-05:00

"When change reaches a certain pace, reference works become impossible." -William Reddy, The Structure of a Cultural Crisis: Thinking About Cloth in France Before and After the Revolution, 1986

2010-03-05T19:37:00.000-05:00

BATTLE HYMN OF THE RESEARCH EXPERTS

Some talk of race relations, and some of politics,
Of labour and migrations, of hist'ry, lice and ticks,
Investments, trends of amity
And patterns of behaviour
Let none treat us with levity
For we are out to save 'yer.

When seated in our library-chairs
We're filled with righteous thought’ho,
We shoulder continental cares
Tell settlers what they ought to,
We'll jargonize and analyse
Frustrations and fixations,
Neuroses, Angst and stereotypes
In structured integration.

Strange cultures rise from notes and graphs
Through Freud's and Jung's perception
Despite your Ego's dirty laughs
We'll change you to perfection,
We've read Bukharin, Kant and Marx
And even Toynbee's stories
And our dialect'cal sparks
Will make explode the Tories.

Rhodesians hear our sage advice
On cross-acculturation,
On inter-racial kinship ties
And folk-way elongation,
On new conceptual frame works high
We'll bake your cakes of custom,
And with a socialising sigh
We'll then proceed to bust 'em.

Our research tools are sharp and gleam
With verified statistics,
Our intellectual combat team
Has practiced its heuristics
From value judgments we are free,
We only work scientific
For all-round global liberty
and Ph.D.s pontific.

-anonymous, Northern Rhodesia Journal, 1959

2010-03-04T11:20:00.003-05:00

"In order to escape the realism of the structure...it is necessary to pass from...statistical regularity or algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order, and to construct a theory of practice, or, more precisely, the theory of the mode of generation of practices, which is the precondition of establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality..." -Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

2010-02-26T10:24:00.003-05:00

"Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each merges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are." -Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1923

2010-02-25T11:21:00.002-05:00

"The truth of any event is predicated on the addition...of that invisible part of every fact, and it is this part, therefore, which the historian has to add. Regarded in this way, he does become active, even creative – not by bringing forth what does not have existence, but in giving shape by his own powers to that which by mere intuition he could not have perceived as it really was. Differently from the poet, but in a way similar to him, he must work the collected fragments into a whole." -Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Historian's Task, 1821

2010-02-19T12:22:00.004-05:00

"...Western notions of occularcentrism and the primacy of the visual in thinking about photographs has elided the sensory and emotional impact of photographs as things that matter. I use the world 'matter' intentionally for it suggests the emotional and the sensory ...As such, it might be said to explore photography beyond the visual: photography whose social meanings are not necessarily dictated exclusively by the visual but also by their perception as objects through which the visual is performed and understood."-Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Sound of History, 2006.

2010-02-16T15:30:00.002-05:00

"In fact matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing and that is all we want of it... Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859

2010-01-27T21:25:00.002-05:00

"For every success story, there are other stories..." Barack Obama, state of the union address, 2010

2010-01-25T17:11:00.002-05:00

"Meaning can never be finally fixed. If meaning could be fixed by representation, then there would be no change - and so no counter-strategies or interventions. Of course we do make strenuous efforts to fix meaning - that is precisely what the strategies of stereotyping are aspiring to do, often with considerable success, for a time. But ultimately, meaning begins to slip and slide; it begins to drift, or be wrenched, or inflected into new directions." -Stuart Hall, 1997

2010-01-09T16:42:00.000-05:00

2010-01-01T13:37:00.000-05:00

2009-12-30T18:56:00.002-05:00

"In [news] photographs, the priority seems to be on getting good shots, so to speak, shots of the news moment. And it's a sort of unwillingness to come to terms with what is going on down there in a systematic way. I think photographers sometimes are very short-sighted in looking at causes. They are interested in the more dramatic symptoms of the problem rather than the cause of the problem. There's this sort of refusal to look at patterns. I would opt much more for telling the story with lots of images and text that tries to relate what has been going on in El Salvador with what has been going on in the last 50 years in the world--things like the decline of neo-colonialism and the rise of independent nation-states."-Richard Cross, Photographers of the Vanguard, 1981

2009-12-30T18:55:00.000-05:00

2009-12-29T12:13:00.003-05:00

"Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked-- and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An Image became a record of how X had seen Y." -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

2009-12-27T17:17:00.001-05:00

2009-12-14T21:45:00.000-05:00

2009-12-11T15:34:00.001-05:00

2009-11-30T17:04:00.002-05:00

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."-Joseph Conrad, 1897

2009-11-29T23:17:00.000-05:00

“After a long silence, Yazzie turned to Worth and asked, in Navajo, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any harm?’ Worth replied no, to which Yazzie responded, ‘Will making movies do the sheep any good?’ Again, Worth replied no.
[Yazzie] thought this over, then, looking around at us he said, ‘Then why make movies?” —Sol Worth, 1972

2009-11-23T12:16:00.002-05:00

"We do not demand that a field ethnologist write with the skill of a novelist or a poet, although we do indeed accord disproportionate attention to those who do. It is equally inappropriate to demand that filmed behavior have the earmarks of a work of art. We can be grateful when it does, and we can cherish those rare combinations of artistic ability and scientific fidelity that have given us great ethnographic films. But I believe that we have absolutely no right to waste our breath and our resources demanding them. That we do is the unfortunate outcome of both the European tradition of the overriding importance of originality in the arts and the way in which the camera has replaced the artist's brush and so developed film as an art form." -Margaret Mead, Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words

2009-11-11T22:14:00.000-05:00

2009-11-09T15:18:00.001-05:00

"That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."-Susan Sontag, On Photography

2009-11-05T20:52:00.001-05:00

2009-11-05T15:25:00.001-05:00

“This film is research. The context of this research is Paris. It is not a fictional film. This research concerns real life. This is not a documentary film. This research does not aim to describe; it is an experiment lived by its authors and its actors. This is not strictly speaking, a sociological film. Sociological film researches society. It is an ethnological film in the strong sense of the term; it studies mankind.”-Edgar Morin, synopis for authorization to film Chronicle of a Summer with Jean Rouch

2009-10-22T20:51:00.000-04:00

2009-10-16T20:38:00.000-04:00

2009-10-11T19:14:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-11T10:06:00.002-04:00

"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

2009-10-10T19:31:00.000-04:00

2009-10-10T10:42:00.001-04:00

2009-10-03T17:25:00.002-04:00

"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

2009-10-02T21:34:00.000-04:00

2009-10-02T15:07:00.005-04:00

"...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

2009-10-02T14:55:00.002-04:00

"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

2009-10-02T14:37:00.003-04:00

"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

2009-10-02T14:12:00.003-04:00

"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

2009-09-12T20:34:00.000-04:00

2009-09-12T00:02:00.002-04:00

"Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity."-Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

2009-09-11T20:50:00.002-04:00

"If social analysts realize that they cannot be perfectly 'clean,' they no more should become as 'dirty' as possible than airline pilots, invoking the limitations of human fallibility, should blind their eyes." -Renato Resaldo, Culture and Truth, 1998

2009-09-03T22:52:00.001-04:00

2009-09-02T23:28:00.000-04:00