Imagined Ethnographies
Friday February 17th from 10am-4pm
(All events will take place in 2115 Tawes)
A Joint Workshop of the Program in Comparative Literature and the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures
Morning Session: A Film Screening and Discussion
10:00 am - Noon
Caitlin McGrath and Oliver Gaycken: Through Other Eyes: From Salvage Anthropology to Indigenous Aesthetics
This opening session will pose the question of how ethnography imagines its subjects through photographic media. An overarching issue is how images provide an avenue for a form of response from the subjects of representation.
In the first part of the session, we will present some of J. K. Dixon’s work. Dixon made three expeditions between 1908 and 1913 to American Indian reservations to record films and photographs of a way of life he described as “vanishing.” Dixon brought these images back to the east coast where they were used alternately as supporting evidence in the case for enfranchisement and as entertainment and education in the Wanamaker department stores, where Dixon was employed as lecturer and head of the store’s educational department. These documents, which have been dismissed as “salvage anthropology,” nevertheless constitute an important moment in the history of the forms American Indian imagery took, informing both the nascent field of anthropology as well as figuring prominently in the discourse of public education at the turn of the last century.
As a counterpoint to Dixon’s paradigm of representation from without, we will then present some of the films from the “Through Navajo Eyes” series. In 1966, Sol Worth and John Adair began a NSF-funded project that involved providing Navaho students with 16mm film equipment and limited instruction in filmmaking basics. The purpose of the project was to see if these Navaho, most of whom had little exposure to moving-image media, would reveal aspects of how they understood the world that might not be evident in verbal exchanges. Did the moving image, in other words, constitute another form of language through which the Navaho could express themselves in a novel way?
The session will thus describe an arc from images of to images by but will also question whether this trajectory can be aligned with a narrative of unambiguous progress.
Lunch Break
Noon - 1:00 pm
Lunch will be served for all conference participants.
Afternoon Session: Roundtable Presentations
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
(Each presentation will last about 10 minutes, followed by a general discussion open to audience participation.)
Jeremy Metz: Reverse ethnographies in Françoise Ega's Lettres à une noire and Andrea Levy's Small Island.
In these texts, relatively disenfranchised black women journey from their homelands in the Caribbean to their respective metropoles where they produce meticulously observed commentary on the social practices of the white societies in which they find themselves. In so doing, they reverse the objectifying gaze of the white ethnographer en voyage, while their commentaries have the effect on the reader of exoticising and defamiliarizing the habits of the whites whom they encounter.
Valérie Orlando: Frobenius, Gobineau and Negritude Intellectuals
"Frobenius, Gobineau and Negritude Intellectuals" will discuss the debates generated by Negritude poets and intellectuals in the inter-war period around certain theories pertaining to "African peoples" proposed by these two ethnologists. Notably, how do Léopold S. Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire and other leading poets, authors and intellectuals of the Négritude movement in the 1930s engage with Western ethnologists who sought to explain the ‘hierarchies of the races’ in the early 20th century? From Arthur de Gobineau’s treatises in the mid-1850s to Leo Frobenius’s early writing in the 1930s touting the existence of an “African Soul”, Negritude intellectuals challenged Western ethnology for having, as Senghor states, impeded the independence of “African consciousness and other ways of being”. For Senghor, Western ethnology was an institutional practice that continued to dominate and colonize others through a form of Hegelian rationalism that discounted other possibilities of being.
Noah Fabricant: Privileged European and Marginalized Jew: Benjamin of Tudela’s Ethnographies
In the mid-12th century, a Spanish Jew named Benjamin of Tudela made a grand journey through parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe. His Book of Travels (in Hebrew) records the demographics and organization of the medieval Jewish world. But Benjamin's vivid observations extend far beyond the Jewish community. As an ethnographer, he provides one of the first Western descriptions of the Druze of Lebanon, the Ghuzz Turks, and the Assassins of Persia. In the great cities—Rome, Constantinople, Cairo, and Baghdad—Benjamin is a reverse ethnographer. Part of a persecuted minority, he details the customs and character of the hegemonic cultures. From this middle position—both a privileged European and a marginalized Jew—Benjamin's ethnographic writing poses productive questions of genre, audience, historical representation, and literary style.
Sheila Jelen: “Unconscious Literacy” and Salvage Ethnography
In 1952, Elizabeth Herzog and Mark Zborowski published Life is With People, a work of salvage ethnography on the Eastern European Jewish “shtetl.” Having been written in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Zborowski and Herzog relied on informants who had lived in America for many years, and the portrait of the “shtetl” that developed in Life is With People was largely based on nostalgic readings of popular Yiddish literature from the turn of the twentieth century, written by the “classic” Yiddish writers Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Y.L. Peretz. In this brief exploration of the literary backbone of Life is With People we will consider the imagined ethnographies that grow out of “unconscious literacies” within the American Jewish community, and interrogate the place of literary criticism in the science of cultural salvage.
Rachel Jablon: Jewish Web Genealogies and Virtual Ethnographies
Jewish genealogical Web sites are hubs for Jews seeking to understand their ancestral origins. Many of the sites offer what are essentially ethnographies of Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to and during the Holocaust; they function as windows into cultures that no longer exist. Through witness testimonies, photographs, and even contemporary reflections on the “vanished communities,” visitors to the sites gain a sense of what life might have been like for their parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ generations. In effect, Jewish genealogical Web sites are the only means of learning about these communities, serving as virtual ethnographic material.
Future Directions
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
