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1. Gordon& Breach.?28.
2. do., ?45 hardback,?17
paper.
3. Cf. HenriettaMoore's
guest editorial,'When is
a faminenot a famine?'"
in A.T.,February1990,
which focuses on de
Waal's book.
4. Brasseys,?24.50.
Defiant
images
Mokukawith Granada
Television cameramen
....
Television.)
The emphasis on processes of productionand reception, and on media as 'mediation' provides a useful
point of departurefor my account of Kayapo video, but
'mediation' is a Proteannotion that can subsume many
specific meanings. As I proceed it will be necessary to
emphasize a numberof differences between the sorts of
mediation going on in indigenous, or at any rate
6
come for the asking, it's all of ours, for any one of us with
enough understandingto come here to look at these videos
of ourselves.
Look, everybody, at all these videotapes of us here. See!
They're all about us. This row of tapes are all pictures of
us Kayapo.
These in the next section are of other indigenous people,
our relatives.
These tapes aren'tjust left here idly.
From here our videos of ourselves are sent far away to the
lands of the whites, so our [white] relatives can see how
Sg~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.
we truly are.
This is what I want to explain to you today, what this editing studio and these video tapes are all about, so you will
understand.
Do Whites alone have the understandingto be able to
operate this equipment?Not at all! We Kayapo, all of us,
have the intelligence. We all have the hands, the eyes, the
heads that it takes to do this work.
. .:
.... ..
.....
Tamokediting on the
portable high-eight deck in
Redencao.
Anteatermasksdancing
j-.l
....................................~~~~~~~~....
........M
l
. ;e
.............
..
...............
u:
Monkeymasks clowning
with a woman:they are
pretendingto be doctors
makinghouse calls.
10
.:
..
.....
....
tween Kayapo self-dramatizationin these political encounters, many of which have taken on an aspect as
guerilla theatre,and the Kayapo use of video media. On
the one hand, Kayapo leaders have plannedpolitical actions like the Altamira rally partly with a view to how
they would look on TV (or video). On the other hand,
Kayapo video camerapersons have been included in
these actions, as I have described earlier, not merely as
recorders of the event but as part of the event to be
recorded.
This synergy between video media, Kayapo self-representation, and Kayapo ethnic self-consciousness is
well broughtout in the two clips I want to discuss next.
Neither were photographedby Kayapo; the first was
shot by the Brazilian crew who went in my stead to
record the new village of Juary at the community's invitation. The second is a moment of the Altamirarally,
shot by a Brazilian from one of the indigenist support
groups. Both were edited by me. The point of interest
in both clips, then, is neither the camera work nor the
editing per se, but ratherthe way Kayapodramaticselfrepresentationin contemporarycontexts of inter-ethnic
confrontation continues traditional cultural forms of
mimetic representation.It is importantto recognize this
continuity in order to understandhow the increasedobjectification of Kayapo consciousness of their own culture and ethnic identity in the contemporaryinter-ethnic
context has not been merely the effect of Western
media or cultural influences, but has drawn upon
powerful native culturaltraditionsof representationand
mimetic objectification. These traditional mimetic
modes continue to influence Kayapo video makers in
their use of the video medium, as they have influenced
the specifically Kayapoforms that the objectificationof
cultural self-representation has assumed in Kayapo
political and social action.
[Video cut 9: skit of capture of gold miners]
The first cut shows part of a dramatizationby the
Kayapo of Juary of the way they would capture and
expel gold miners who invaded their territory.The idea
of the skit was suggested by the Brazilian video crew,
but the Kayapo carried the idea much fartherthan the
Brazilianshad imagined.They were totally surprisedby
the final scene of the Kayapo performance.Following
the capture of the miners at their camp, the Kayapo
men bring the captives back to their own village to be
gone over by the women, who await them, knives in
hand. The irony of this dramatizationis that the miners
are played by real miners who were living and working
only a kilometre from the community, with the full
consent of the community leader, who was receiving a
10%cut of the proceeds. The episode dramaticallycondenses the ambiguitiesof the contemporaryrelationship
of the Kayapo with Brazilian miners and loggers, some
of whom are repelled as invaders but others invited as
royalty-payingconcessionaires, with identical environmentaleffects.
[Video cut 10: war cry and enactmentof killing at Altamira]
The second cut of this set shows an episode at Altamira in which the Kayapo, representedby Pombo, a
senior chief, demonstratedthe connotations, and by inference the implications for their own conduct towards
the Brazilians, of naming the proposed dam near Altamira 'Karara'o' as the Brazilian government had
planned. 'Karara'o' is in fact a Kayapo war cry, as
Pombo demonstrates as he enacts the killing of a
Brazilian enemy, and Payakan rather redundantlyexplains from the podium. Karara'ois also the name of a
Kayapo village located near the dam site. The villagers
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new paramountchief and spokesmanof the Kayapo nation (fictitious positions to which Ropni himself had
never pretended). The Brazilian press gleefully fell in
with this campaign, but Pombo failed to win support
from the Kayapo themselves, and eventually FUNAI,
through its then Kayapo representativePayakan, was
forced to arrangethe meeting of which this video was
made, formally bringing the dispute to an end with a
public acknowledgement of Ropni's victory and
Pombo's ignominiousdefeat.
Mokuka's video was made as a record of this event
for Kayapo who were not able to attend the meeting
itself. He begins by showing the arrival of the main
Kayapo chiefs in a sequence indexing their relative importance.Next he shows the arrivalof the FUNAI officials, including an episode of horseplay with Ropni in
which they act like old friends: the scene is cut on the
sentence, 'The most importantthing in life is friends'.
The irony is not lost on Kayapo audiences, fully aware
that the whole attack on Ropni had been instigated by
FUNAI to begin with. The deft framing of the event by
these two opening sequences is immediately followed
by an interludeof ceremonialdancing. This might seem
oddly irrelevantto a Western viewer, but to a Kayapo
audience it appears as an integral part of the proceedings, since the joining of the representatives of the
communities of the disputing leaders with members of
the host community in the common ritual performance
prefigures the reaffirmation of collective peace and
solidaritythe meeting was called to confirm.
Finally, the meeting itself is edited to show those features of greatest significance to Kayapo viewers. Only
the speeches of the more senior chiefs are included,
with Mokuka explaining in his Kayapo narrationthat
the younger men respectfullyrepeatedwhat was said by
their elders. Most of the content of the speeches was
cut, but the introductorypassages in which the speakers
itemize and affirm their kinship relations with one
another are carefully preserved. Important Kayapo
metaphors of solidarity and community are also included when employed by a speaker. The extended interplay of metaphors of sexual potency, self-restraint
and fertility through which the two main protagonists,
Ropni and Pombo, code their respective victory and
concession, never once making explicit referenceto the
actual dispute at issue, is employed as the frameworkof
the final segment of the video. Throughout,the content
and sequential orderingof the video follow the rhetorical tropes and structuringforms of Kayapo oratoryand
political procedure.
'Voices', 'other' and otherwise
Letting the Others' voices be heard, or at least read
alongside that of the ethnographerin heteroglossic or
polyphonic texts, is one of the distinctive themes of
what has been called the 'new ethnography'.The use of
media like video by indigenous peoples shares with this
new ethnographicturn a concern with the expression of
indigenous voices, but the similarity between the two
genres stops here. Indigenousfilm- or video makers are
not interestedin producing 'dialogical' texts, with their
overtones of subtle cooptation of the so-called Others'
voices, which implicitly serve by their presence to
legitimize the voice of the ethnographer within the
same text. Nor are they concernedwith the political and
epistemological questions currentlybedevilling Western
ethnography.They are, on the other hand, clearly interested in not leaving to Western commentatorsthe 'last
word' about themselves (Tyler's rationale for the
polyphonic text as an ethnographicform: Tyler 1986),
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13
more implacablycorrosive Foucauldiancritiquesof representation and subjectivity, with sceptical epistemological flourishes from StephenTyler. All of this is
couched in a confused pastiche of claims drawn from
various post-modernistcanons, mostly simply asserted
rather than argued, with no consistent attempt to confront the realities of any empirical (perish the word)
case.
Faris's basic claim is that representation, as a
'Western project', is absolutely destructive of the subjectivity of those non-Western'Others' unlucky enough
to have their images caught by some representational
medium like film or video, and that the camera (or
camcorder) so fundamentally incorporates Western
categories of visual and spatial ordering as to preclude
the possibility that it could be used to convey or construct a non-Western cultural optic. The true name of
the Western demon that so inexorably reduces all
Others to mere 'projections' of its 'gaze' is, however,
not technology or even political dominationper se but
'consumption', or, more specifically, the 'desire' to
consume Others as fetishized, commodified image-objects (Faris 1922: 171-2). Western consumerist desire
and its objectifying gaze, embodied in Western audiences for films or videos producedby indigenous people,
pre-emptively determine the form and content of such
productions, making the indigenous use of cameras in
itself a mere 'pathetic gesture' (175) devoid of cultural
meaning or political significance.
Consistently with this view, Faris at some points
divides the world into Western representersand nonWesternpresenters:
There has never been, to my knowledge, a film of them by
them (or by us) for them ... Local people present themselves to each other - that is what we call culture - and this
[i.e. their "presentation",TT] ... has not up to now heeded
film or anthropology... (174-5)
At other points, directly contradicting himself, he argues that precisely because the Others habituallyrepresent themselves to themselves anyway, they don't need
Westerntechniquesof representationlike video:
It is not, of course, a matter of people having cameras for
the first time. Nor is it a matter of defining culture or of
new and changing self-definitions of culture. People have
been doing that for ages; they have always represented
themselves to themselves. (176)
Caldarola,Victor J.
1988. Imagingprocess
as ethnographic
inquiry.Visual
Anthropology1:4
(433-451)
Faris,James C. 1992.
Anthropological
transparency:film,
representationand
politics. In Peter Ian
Crawfordand David
Turton,eds, Film as
Ethnography.
ManchesterU.P.
(171-182)
Ginsburg,Faye. 1991.
IndigenousMedia:
FaustianContractor
Global Village?
CulturalAnthropology
14
Which is it to be, the Other as 'presenter'or as 'representer'? The answer, of course, should be, 'both', since
virtually all 'presentation'necessarily involves myriad
embedded representations,linguistic, imagistic, social
and conceptual(that, I would have thought, 'is what we
call "culture"').
These confused and confusing assertions collapse
when confronted with a real case like that of the
Kayapo. Of course the Kayapo 'present' themselves to
one another, but their culture also includes extremely
elaboraterepresentationalforms like those illustratedin
the examples of ritual and oratorypresented(and represented) in this lecture. The Kayapo are so interestedin
video and its representationalpossibilities because they
are keenly aware that the social circumstancesaffecting
their presentation of themselves to one another are
changing in ways that strain the capacity of their traditional modes of representationeither to represent or
reproduce. They are therefore interested in new media
of representation,and are in turnusing these new media
in ways that affect and transformtheir culture and their
conception of themselves. So, yes, it is very much 'a
matterof people having camerasfor the first time', and
using them as tools for 'defining culture', in the process
developing 'new self-definitions' of what their culture
is. Fanis's cavalier assertions to the contrary serenely
6:1 (92-112).
n.d. Mediatingculture:
indigenousmedia,
ethnographicfilm, and the
productionof identity. In
Leslie Deveraux and
Roger Hillman, eds, Film
and the Humanities.
Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural
Identityand Diaspora.In
J. Rutherford,ed., Identity,
Community,Culture,
Difference. London.
Lawrenceand Wishart
(222-237).
1992. CulturalStudies
and its theoreticallegacies.
In L. Grossberg,C. Nelson
and P. Treichler,eds,
CulturalStudies. New
York: Routledge.
Kuptana,Rosemarie. 1988.
Inuit Broadcasting
Corporation.Commission
on VisualAnthropology
Newsletter. May 1988 (3941)
Michaels, Eric. 1984. The
social organizationof an
Aboriginalvideo
workplace.Australian
Aboriginal Studies I
(26-34)
1986. TheAboriginal
inventionof television:
CentralAustralia
1982-1986. Canberra.Inst.
for Aboriginal Studies.
199la. Aboriginal
content: who's got it who needs it? Visual
AnthropologyIV:3-4
(277-300).
1991b. A model of
teleportedtexts (with
referenceto Aboriginal
television). Visual
AnthropologyIV: 3-4
(301-324).
Murin, DeborahLee. 1988.
NorthernNative
structures,
minds,technologies.Theepistemicprivilege...
permeatesand dramaticallyinfluences most possible
projectsof others'presentations
of themselvesto us. [Such
projects]arenotco-constructions,
theyareone-wayfilters.
The message is that Western representation,in some
way which Faris never feels the need to explain, is irresistible and absolutely dominatingwherever it comes
in contact with non-WesternOthers.Resistance is hopeless, for the very subjectivity of the Others is suborned
and transformedinto a mere projectionof the dominant
West. There is a powerful feeling of magical thinking
about all this: the vampirishpower to suck the subjectivity of the Other, reducing her/him to a mere objectified 'projection' of the desire of the Western consumer, which Faris attributesto the camera,is essentially akin to the belief so widely associated in the popular
mind with the magical thinking of primitives and
savages that the camera steals the souls of those whose
picturesit takes.
Faris dismisses the employment of media technologies like video by indigenous peoples as 'arrogation ... by an expansionist capital', but his argument
derives from Foucault ratherthan Marx. For Faris, it is
consumptionby a Western audience, not productionby
whoever may actually make the video, that determines
its characteras representation,which in this case means
its character as a commodity. Consumption in turn,
Faris tells us, is the product of desire, and desires are
felt by individual subjects. Production, with all its
specific relations and conditions, is of no consequence.
We have, then, a market-drivenmodel, in which the
products on offer are determined in form and content
by their utility in satisfying individualconsumers' subjective desires. Marginal utility, not social relations of
production or political economic forces, or indeed social forces of any kind, drives Faris's recension of 'expansionist capitalism'. In its post-modernguise as the
Evil Empire of representation,this 'capitalism' is envisioned as imposing itself in an inexorableprocess untroubled by internal contradictions, or the awkward
propensity of historical capitalism to arouse resistant
forms of subjectivity,critical representationsand political activity in its exploited victims. Faris's 'capitalism'
thus betrays its lineage, not from Marx, but from
Foucault's notion of power, as a quasi-mystical, inexorably effective force, unlocatable in specific social
relations, which ultimately reduces itself to a sort of
negative mana, an immaterial miasma of generalized
Mokukafilming at the great nastiness.
Given these assumptions, the possibility that nonrally at Altamira in 1989.
$
tB
hegemonic status
quo.
15
Broadcasting.Canada.
RungeP.
Pereira,Renato.n.d. Como
os Indiosse Travestem
de Indios.
Ruby,Jay. 1991. Eric
Michaels:An
Appreciation.Visual
AnthropologyIV: 3-4
(325-344).
Tyler, StephenA. 1986.
Post-Modem
From
Ethnography:
Documentof the Occult
to OccultDocument.In
JamesCliffordand
GeorgeMarcus,eds,
WritingCulture:The
Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography.Berkeley.
U. of CaliforniaP.
Worth,Sol and John
Adair. 1972. Through
NavajoEyes.
Bloomington.Indiana
U.P.
their
pay
anthropologists
respondents?
Should
VINAYKUMARSRIVASTAVA
I
I began thinking of the issue of payment to respondents
VinayKumarSrivastava is
in
the initial phases of a fieldwork with the Raikas a doctoral candidate in
the caste of traditional camel-breeders - of western
social anthropologyat
King's College Cambridge. Rajasthanin north-westIndia.
My stay in their hamlet, which I had first studied in
Bikaner,was facilitatedby a local Raika school teacher.
He mostly lived in Bikaner town, and on week-ends he
visited the hamlet where he owned one of the three cemented (pacca) houses. He not only introducedme to
his extended family, but also provided me with an outhouse to live.
After a few days of fieldwork I discovered that the
others in this hamlet apart from his family were not
particularlyfriendly. Whenever I went to their male
gatherings, they would all turn quiet, and if I stayed,
one by one they would leave. Frustratedand dismayed,
I would return to my outhouse. A couple of weeks
elapsed. I was unable to breakthe barrier.
I might have been able to think of a strategy to
befriend them had I known why I was being treatedin
such a manner. Having conducted fieldwork in other
parts of India, I intuitively knew that it was not the
usual lukewarmresponse anthropologistsreceive at the
beginning of their research. My salutations
(Ramashama, namaskara) to them did not go unanswered; however, they lacked the warmth I expected
after having been there for weeks. My interactionwas
painfully confined to the teacher's family, and I was
sensitive to being labelled as 'the teacher's friend from
Delhi' (master-ji ra Dilliwala bhaila). I knew that this
reputation would destroy my chances of becoming
familiarwith the rest of the hamlet.
I quickly learned that there were two factions in this
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