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Image and Social Sciences: The Trajectory of a Difficult Relationship

Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
Online publication date: 13 July 2010
To cite this Article Novaes, Sylvia Caiuby(2010) 'Image and Social Sciences: The Trajectory of a Difficult Relationship',
Visual Anthropology, 23: 4, 278 — 298
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DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2010.484991
Image and Social Sciences: The Trajectory

of a Difficult Relationship
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Sylvia Caiuby Novaes
Following the Anthropology of the Senses [Howes 1991], I try to understand the visual
and textual biases of the Western episteme that goes along with a certain closure of
the eyes when social scientists have to look at images. I am not discussing percep-
tion or cognition, which have been dealt with by Psychology. My interest, as Howes
says, is ‘‘the modes of knowing, and the place of the body in the mind’’; how are our
five senses hierarchically represented, socially and culturally appreciated? We know
that none of the senses operates autonomously. As Merleau-Ponty [1969: 105] has
already said, perception is not the sum of visual, tactile and auditory data: percep-
tion has a joint property, it is my self as a whole that perceives a single unique struc-
ture of the thing, a unique way of being, that speaks simultaneously to all my
senses. Having these premises in mind I will try to understand the way we social
scientists differently value each of the senses and how we perceive the senses in
our scientific activities.
Certainly, there is no one who would not choose to lose hearing and smell rather
than sight. He who loses sight loses the spectacle and beauty of the universe, and comes
to resemble someone who has been buried alive in a tomb in which he can move and
survive.
Leonardo da Vinci [2001: 21]
The early results of a study done by Christopher Tyler [1980], of the Smith-
Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in California, show that the most diverse pain-
ters, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, always put in their
portraits one of the sitter’s eyes in the center of the canvas. A broader study
shows that the same was true of works by painters going back over more than
600 years. ‘‘If analyses of art omit eye-centering as a principle of composition,
its manifestation throughout the centuries and the varieties of artistic styles must
be fundamentally subconscious’’ [Caderno-Mais 1999: 11]. To explain these
results, Tyler, a neuroscientist, would conduct brain mapping studies to try to
identify the areas of the brain that are stimulated when a person sees the eye
in the center of the canvas or off-center. In his opinion, this fact is also connected
SYLVIA CAIUBY NOVAES is a professor of the Department of Anthropology at the Universidade de

São Paulo and founder of LISA—Laboratório de Imagem e Som em Antropologia. She is the author
of The Play of Mirrors [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997]. E-mail: scaiuby@usp.br
278
Image and Social Sciences 279
to common forms of communication: ‘‘I think that this situation does not occur
only in portraits. I believe that people position themselves in such a way as to
have an eye in the center, as a corporeal standard, a form of communication.
They tilt their heads a bit, turn their bodies as they interact [. . .]. People generally
do this subconsciously’’ [idem].
I cannot evaluate perception processes by way of functional magnetic reson-
ance imaging (fMRI), which allows one to determine which areas of the brain
respond to certain stimuli. What this study demonstrates to us as social scientists

has been the topic of courses, debates and seminars: namely the importance of
visuality, vision and the association that we Westerners make between vision
and knowledge. As an anthropologist, I would gladly do research based on the
early results of this study, aiming to identify the relationship that exists among
forms of communication in different cultures, body postures during the act of
communication, and the way in which these cultures favor the sensory organs
(the value that they attribute to each of them). Anthony Seeger [1980] has already
demonstrated that the ornamentation of an organ can be related to its symbolic
significance in a society and that, for this reason, ‘‘ornaments should be treated
as symbols with a variety of references and examined as a system.’’ Thus ‘‘The
ornamentation of the ears and mouth may perfectly indicate the symbolic impor-
tance of hearing and speech to the extent that these faculties are defined in a
specific society’’ [Seeger 1980: 44–45].
In this sense, the results of Tyler’s study, though intriguing, are not surprising.
In the West today, our perception is above all visual and spatial, and our relation-
ship with the world is eminently visual; sight is the faculty that common sense
favors as the organ of knowledge. We know that even in the Western tradition
this has not always been the case.
In the 16th century it was hearing. And that was already a change. Of a wise man the
Romans said, ‘‘He has a fine nose.’’ Horace said, ‘‘Homo naris emunclae, homo obesae naris.’’
Today we say: ‘‘He is a man of vision.’’ And our forebears in the 16th century said: ‘‘He
has an astute ear; he can hear the grass grow. . . .’’ It is a curious progression. First was
smell, the animal sense; then hearing, a more refined sense. Finally, sight, the intellectual
sense. [Febvre 1953: 5, my trans.]1
Lucien Febvre adds that even the invention of the printing press did not
immediately lead to the favoring of sight, given that in the 16th century people
read aloud rather than silently—or were read to. The Restoration was in full
swing, and the Bible was the foundation of religious beliefs. Luther, Calvin
and Zwingli were drawn with a large book in their hands, the printed Bible.
But they invoke the Word. ‘‘They do not read the Epistles of Paul. They hear
the word of God through the voice of St. Paul, [. . .]. Faith was hearing [. . .].
The organs par excellence of the Christian are the ears’’ [idem].2
By the 19th century sight had become not only a means of knowledge but
equally the object of knowledge and research. Nélia Dias [1999] shows the extent
to which French anthropologists such as Paul Broca, of the Anthropological
Society of Paris, sought to study visual acuity, vision problems, color perception,
eye color, and the anatomic evolution of the eye, at the precise moment when
280 S. Caiuby Novaes
they were proclaiming the methodological predominance of observation. It is

worth noting that these studies were done with the objective of determining
how the senses can confer authenticity, given that the senses themselves are
affected by the physiological and subjective dimension. The conclusions of these
studies point to the priority of sight as the favored organ of knowledge, and one
of the reasons is that it is sight that allows for the distance necessary for knowl-
edge, without the need for touch.3
‘‘The scientism and objectivity typical of the 19th century presuppose the
spatial distance and ‘neutral’ position of the observer, requisites that only the
eye, of all the sensory organs, can provide’’ [Dias 1999: 28, my trans.].4 Associated
with other anthropometric criteria, eye color was one of the elements of the hier-
archical classification of the races, putting into evidence physical and intellectual
characteristics associated with each race. Nélia Dias also reminds us that for more
than a century eye color was considered an identification index for the purposes
of political, social and police control. It is worth noting that this index has not lost
its legitimacy. The color and shape of the iris are among the most considered
elements for future identity cards, even more so than fingerprints or the signa-
ture of the bearer.
The topic of vision was central in 19th-century England as well. Reports from
the expedition to the Torres Straits organized by the University of Cambridge,
which I had the opportunity to examine, are full of images and data concerning
the visual acuity of the peoples studied in Australia. This was a pet topic of
W.H.R. Rivers, a psychologist on that expedition. As Anna Grimshaw points
out, ‘‘Vision was a central question in the Torres Straits expedition. It was the
focus of a substantial part of the scientific enquiry into native life, and it formed
an important theme underlying the mode of enquiry itself. Vision was insepar-
able from the question of method’’ [2001: 20].
Since the second half of the 19th century, with the invention of new technolo-
gies for image reproduction, such as photography and later cinema, there has
been a clear association between vision and knowledge. It is telling that the first
images made possible by the invention of the cine camera were connected with
scientific work. As Maresca [1996] shows, the still image quickly established itself
too, by way of progress in microscopy and astronomy, as an auxiliary to knowl-
edge. Of the various scientific disciplines, medicine was among the first to value
seeing as an act of knowledge. The invention of the X-ray, in 1895—the same year
as the Lumières’ camera—made it possible to see that which is not immediately
visible in the human body—to see the body directly, without opening it. This
valuing of vision was not limited to official medicine.5
Of all the senses, it is sight to which we attribute the greatest value. The associ-
ation between vision and knowledge can be noted from some indicators, such as
the name of various informational magazines: Veja (See), Visão (View), Nouvel
Observateur, Look, etc. Thus it is not surprising that this highly valued organ is
placed by painters, subconsciously, in the center of a canvas.6
More than a few authors sought to understand this favoring of sight in Western
societies through the visual theory of linear perspective developed in the
15th century by the Italian painter Leon Battista Alberti, who, in his Treatise on
Painting, written between 1435 and 1436, deepened the ideas of Brunelleschi.
. . . I will tell what I do when I paint. First of all about where I draw: I inscribe a quadrangle
of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an opened window through
which I see what I want to paint. Here I determine as it pleases me the size of the men in
my picture. I divide the length of this man in three parts. These parts to me are
proportional to that measurement called a braccio, for in measuring the average man it
is seen that he is about three braccia. [Alberti 1967: 55]
With this theory, perspective vision goes from being understood as optical
vision to being understood as a visual function in which the eye ‘‘is merely an
instrument, because in reality we see with our intellect, [. . .] something that
comes out of us and goes to the outside’’ [Argan 1999: 32, my trans.].
In mathematical terms, perspective is seen as leading to the intersection point
of a pyramid, and thus of isosceles triangles, which are always proportional.
‘‘Within this landscape of linear perspective vision, the self becomes a spectator
ensconced behind his or her window on the world; the body, now divorced from
this self, becomes a specimen, and the world, as a matter for this detached and
observing eye, becomes a spectacle’’ [Romanyshin 1989: 31, cited in Howes
1991: 5].
In addition to transforming the world into a spectacle and separating the
observer from that which is observed, there are other implications of this manner
of observing the scene as though we are watching what is happening from
behind glass. We know that ‘‘what takes place cannot involve us, and thus we
have immunity. Certain that we will not be involved in the scene, we can calmly
judge what we see’’ [Argan 1999: 33, my trans.].
My objective, following the paths opened by Howes [1991] when he proposed
an ‘‘Anthropology of the Senses,’’ is to understand how the favoring of sight as
the organ of the senses—which practically leaves all the others with a secondary
role when the act of knowledge is at stake—is accompanied in the social sciences
by a certain closing of the eyes to images. It is worth clarifying that I am not
referring here to the phenomena of perception or cognition, areas that have been
studied by classical psychology. Rather, my objective is to understand how the
five senses are perceived, hierarchically ordered, represented and differently
valued socially and culturally. We know, on the other hand, that none of the
senses operates in isolation. As Merleau-Ponty put it, perception ‘‘is not a sum
of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole
being; I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which
speaks to all my senses at once’’ [Merleau-Ponty 1964: 49].
It is with these underlying assumptions then that I intend to understand the
way in which we social scientists value each of the senses differently and how
we perceive them in the activities to which we devote ourselves, in the
approaches valued for successful conduct of scientific activity. In this sense it
is notable that the lexicon for the visual is infinitely richer and more complex
than that for our impressions of taste, smell or even hearing. For example, as
for the natural discontinuities characterizing taste, Westerners distinguish among
five basic categories—sweet, sour, acidic, bitter and salty—but frequently the
contrast among these terms is not clear (the cashew apple, for example, is some-
where between sweet, acidic and sour). On the other hand, language has its
‘‘tricks,’’ as the entire lexicon connected with taste seems to be adequate for
describing experiences unrelated to taste: ‘‘a sweet girl,’’ ‘‘the man who woke
up sour,’’ ‘‘a bitter experience’’ and ‘‘a salty price,’’ to cite a few examples. There
are also associations between the universe of taste and moral assessments: in the
expression ‘‘it left a bad taste in my mouth,’’ for example. The lexicon for impres-
sions of smell is equally minimal and is also used to refer to things other than
smell: ‘‘that stinks!’’ for example.
Smell, taste and touch are the senses that imply proximity, and for this reason
they are thought to be the senses most characterized by subjectivity and most
present in our relationships of affection. In the West, sight and hearing are per-
ceived to be the senses that are the most abstract and distant and for this reason
most closely linked to the intellect. We speak of ‘‘a man of vision,’’ as opposed to
another who ‘‘doesn’t learn anything, seems deaf.’’
There is to be sure an inevitable relation between the value attributed by com-
mon sense to sight as a sensory organ of the act of knowing7 and the proliferation
of images (a sort of record of vision) in our societies. In this sense, another conse-
quence of the favoring of vision is that the images we produce end up dominat-
ing our daily lives, sometimes even substituting for experience.8
On the other hand, there are some urban segments that fundamentally utilize
visuality as a form of communication. Some recent studies done by my students
reveal this clearly. In analyzing his research material on graffiti writers in the city
of São Paulo, Lucas Fretin affirms that ‘‘the visual language, associated with dirti-
ness and vandalism, became a spoken language used at meetings of the graffiti
writers. Through graffiti, a complex network of sociability encompassing differ-
ent regions of the city was established.’’ The graffiti, preferably done on large
roads that connect the periphery to the center, are difficult to decipher; only graf-
fiti writers, themselves accustomed to writing graffiti, can read the stylized letters
in a blink of an eye [Fretin 2001]. Meanwhile, the drag queens researched by
Maı́ra Santi Bühler construct a feminine identity that is absolutely virtual and
rooted in imagery, a simulacrum with no referent. ‘‘The woman constructed by
the drag queen cannot ever be attained. It is, therefore, a virtual sexuality,
symbolic fatality. It is all about enchantment, fascination, deceit, seduction.
Simulacrum’’ [Bühler 1999: 16].
If we turn our attention to the use of images for the purpose of scientific knowl-
edge, it is worth noting that images are widely utilized by different disciplines in
different moments of the 19th century; only the natural sciences, such as botany,
geology and zoology, continue still today to utilize images as auxiliary to knowl-
edge. The disciplines most closely related to the humanities quickly abandoned
the possibility. In psychoanalysis, for, example, images are seen as illusionary
in the extreme and sight gives way to hearing as the sense that is valued in
the relationship between the analyst and the patient. In sociology, the use of
images in scientific articles also disappears at the beginning of the second decade
of the 20th century. Statistical tables and theoretical-methodological discussions
become ever more valued, making sociology an eminently verbal discipline.
Anthropology too, as we will see, starting in the 1930s, abandons the intensive
use that it had made of images since the invention of the photographic camera
and later of the cine camera.
Despite spurning images and sight as important elements of scientific research,

the social sciences continue to have strong indications of vision as an organ of
knowledge, mainly in the lexicon used to denote the approach expected of the
researcher. Our texts are full of vocabulary that refers to ‘‘visuality.’’ In anthro-
pology, we talk much of observation and, since Malinowski, we seek to capture
the point of view of the native; we try to reconstruct his view of the world; we look
for empirical evidence for our generalizations, which do justice to a scientific
perspective; such is our language. It is also worth remembering that the word
‘‘theory’’ itself derives from a fusion of théa (see) and ora (unveil). All of our
verbal discourse seems much more adapted for describing what we see than
what arrives to us from other senses.
It is not only that which is expected of the observer that reveals visualism9 (as
defined by Fabian [1983]) in our disciplines. There are various artifices that we
use to ‘‘visualize’’ a culture or a society that we study: graphics, tables, kinship
diagrams, the famous map of the village. ‘‘To ‘visualize’ a culture or society
almost becomes synonymous for understanding it’’ [idem: 106].
‘‘The FIRST RULE and the most fundamental is to consider social facts as
things,’’ affirmed Durkheim [1966: 13], because social phenomena are things
and should be treated as such. It is in the form of information that imposes itself
upon observation, as things that are found in our line of sight, that these phenom-
ena should be observed by the sociologist. Only in this way, in Durkheim’s view,
would it be possible to avoid the preconceptions that so hinder scientific analysis.
The great paradox is that this visualism not only alters our own visual experi-
ence profoundly but also annuls all experience that comes to us through senses
other than sight when we are in the field. Another important point noted by
Fabian is that this discourse ‘‘always seem[s] to work against the grain of tem-
poral continuity and coexistence between the Knower and the Known’’ [Fabian
1983: 109]. In other words, if the objectivity of knowledge depends on spatial dis-
tance, this spatial distance seems to lead to temporal distance as well. ‘‘[. . .] the
Other, as object of knowledge, must be separate, distinct, and preferably distant
from the knower’’ [idem: 121]. In museums, in travel accounts, and in large global
expositions, this Other is effectively transformed into something exotic, beyond
contemporaneity, distant from us in terms of both space and time.
There are innumerable works, in the academic field as well as in the artistic
field, on sight10 and vision. Why then have there been until very recently so
few social scientists who have dedicated their studies to the image, through
either its analysis or its production in the form of photos or films? Anthropolo-
gists, sociologists and political scientists seem not to perceive in the image that
which leads art critics, art historians, semioticians and psychologists to analyze
it closely. It is as though the image were not a legitimate area of reflection, much
less of production, in the social sciences.
Why is this the case? We social scientists too believe that knowing implies an
observation process. We observe in detail, we establish correlations among the
data observed, we note the contexts, we infer. For social scientists, knowing
implies observing, even though the final objective is to go beyond that which is
immediately visible. Social scientists, too, assume the posture of transforming
the world into a spectacle to be observed—a spectacle from which they necessarily
distance themselves in order to observe.11 The product of knowledge translates not

into images but into words, sentences, texts—texts that inevitably take on different
styles in the various disciplines and that are marked by the era in which they are
written as well as by the author, as demonstrated by the postmodernists. Texts
translate our attitude of rational reflection about what is observed, thus making
intelligible the phenomena that we endeavor to explain.
Though marked by visuality (the observation and description of eminently
visible elements, from which we seek to arrive at an underlying and non-visible

reality), knowledge in the social sciences since the 1920s and 1930s, with few
exceptions, which we will discuss shortly, abdicated itself from images both as
a field of analysis and as a way of communicating knowledge. Images are seen
as eminently belonging to the sensory realm, and to social scientists this is a
realm in which only artists have legitimacy. As John Wagner says [1979: 13, cited
in Maresca 1996], the social sciences are blind.
I want to focus on this issue so as to understand, given the tense relationship
that exists between verbal text and visual text, social scientists’ resistance to the
image, as well as to demonstrate how much the social sciences and particularly
anthropology would gain if they were to overcome this resistance. If academic
writing, especially ethnographic writing, has undergone extensive revision by
the so-called postmodern authors, maybe new experiments in narrative meth-
ods that incorporate the image, both still and in motion, can contribute to a
new form of dissemination of knowledge that would be less authoritarian, more
interactive, and possibly clearer in its process of reconstruction of the reality
that is to be revealed. Let me be clear that my position is that images do not
substitute for verbal text, contrary to the popular saying that an image is worth
a thousand words. Images can and should work in tandem with the text, pen-
etrating it in a closer relationship, rather than being relegated to the appendices
of our publications.
Let us consider how anthropology has related to the image over time.
The scientism that marked the 19th century, present in the ideas of progress
and modernity, seems to have had as one of its icons in the field of literature
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein [1818], with its dream of the possibility of over-
coming death and even creating life from death. Experimentation, and the quest
to overcome death and to know the reality that follows the end of life, seem to be
distinguishing characteristics of that century. Also the works of Jules Verne, such
as Five Weeks in a Balloon [1863], From the Earth to the Moon [1865], Journey to the
Center of the Earth [1869], Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues under the
Sea [1870], and The Green Ray [1882], are works that inaugurate science fiction
and predate a series of inventions and spectacular events (such as the Moon
landing in 1969).
Scientism was present even in the field of religion. All of the Spiritist work of
Alan Kardec has the mark of this era. To him, Spiritism is the ‘‘science that deals
with the nature, origin, and destiny of spirits, and their relation with the
corporeal world’’ [Medina 1998: 121, my trans.]. Spiritist science aimed precisely
to observe the spirit and to understand the moral laws that govern its manifesta-
tions [idem: 113]. The principal scientists of the 19th century demanded methodo-
logical rigor and were steeped in rationalism to the point where they reached
quite deterministic conceptions. Alan Kardec believed that this new science
should view with a critical eye the animistic, magical, mythical and religious
explanations of the supernatural, in order to reach knowledge of the laws of
the spiritual principle.
In the same vein, what also marked the 19th century were the great technologi-
cal inventions and the accelerated change that they imposed on daily life. It is
enough to remember that the telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-ray, the
bicycle, the car, the railway and the airplane are all products of this era. Machines
overwhelmed 19th-century man and imposed a new rhythm on work. Charlie
Chaplin’s Modern Times [1936] clearly illustrates the repetitive and fragmented
tasks imposed by mechanized work. On the other hand, all that previously
was thought to be eternal is no longer so, and the objective seems to be to register
and to understand that which is fleeting or momentous. This perspective unfolds
and accentuates among the Impressionist painters the ‘‘attraction’’ to velocity, a
product of an eye moved by the movement of trains and, in the burgeoning
urban space, of carriages. It is in this context of the mid-19th century, and attuned
to the era and its preoccupations, that anthropology arose as a new scientific
discipline or, in other words, as a specific set of issues and a method, with pro-
fessional associations.12
Three great inventions, all from that era, make it possible to perceive the extent
to which attention was paid not only to capturing that which is fleeting but also
to bringing closer distant realities, traveling great distances, crossing in a short
time a space that previously was impossible. These inventions are the still cam-
era, the cinema and the airplane, inventions that imply not only changes in the
ways that we perceive time and space but also changes in the visual perspectives
that had been known until that point. If literature and religion sought to better
understand the reality that was possible after death, photography, cinema and
aviation, as well as anthropology, would seek to bring closer other different
realities, those distant in space.
Enthralled by the advances of industrialization that completely transformed
the human competencies and capacities that had been known until that point,
intellectuals at the end of the 19th century sought to retrace the history of their
societies, trying to understand the paths that had made it possible to reach this
evolutionary level. ‘‘The use of a dynamic and totalizing form of observation,
the passage ‘through the field,’ and thus experimentation, made cinema and
ethnography the twin children of a common enterprise of discovery, of identifi-
cation, of appropriation, and, maybe, of a true devouring of the world and its
history’’ [Piault 1995: 27, my trans.].
Images were incorporated by anthropology starting from the beginning of the
history of cinema. The great invention of 1895 by the Lumières brothers was an
important piece of equipment in the baggage of the scientists who participated in
the Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898 (led by A.C.
Haddon). Images became ever more frequent as registries of distant societies, like
visual signs of an Other, seen as very close to a natural world. Like collections of
artifacts, avidly sought after by museums, photographs provided the possibility
of organizing societies into types, human models [Edwards 1992, MacDougall
1997]. ‘‘. . . visible signs may be more important in defining people in relation
to oneself than in relation to each other. The visible emphasizes what one is not’’
[MacDougall 1997: 280].
Anthropology’s interest in the use of images for illustrations also came from
the scientific model that the discipline followed at the end of the 19th century:
that provided by the natural sciences. As has already been pointed out, medicine
immediately and successfully incorporated the X-ray which was also invented in
1895. Botany, zoology and geology all used many illustrations as a resource for
classification; in turn, anthropologists sought after photos and illustrations to

capture visual aspects of culture, which provided a basis for classifying the
different stages of social evolution. Photographs, measurements, and anthropo-
metric representations are also important elements of the dialogue that
anthropology was to engage in with the medical and legal sciences [Schwarcz
1993]. During this enthusiastic classificatory effort, in addition to the aforemen-
tioned anthropometric data, various items of material culture, such as weapons,
agricultural instruments, decorations, body painting, basketry, ceramics, and
architectural details, were widely registered in anthropological literature until
the first three decades of the 20th century.
This proximity to the image, which characterizes anthropology at the onset of
its history, is not present in all of the disciplines of the social sciences. Reacting
against biology and against psychology, ‘‘sociology had nearly eliminated the
body completely from its field of study, in favor of all the collective phenomena
that could more easily be analyzed as social facts in themselves. Now, if the body
found itself eliminated from social theory, it was evidently the same for the eye’’
[Maresca 1996: 133, my trans.].
Between 1936 and 1939, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson decided to
record in photos and films ‘‘the relationships between culture and personality,
especially in the education of children, which had already been an important
topic in Mead’s previous works’’ [Heider 1995: 39, my trans.]. If until that era
the objective of the use of images was the visual record of human types for
explicitly classificatory purposes, in Balinese Character [Bateson and Mead 1942]
the image came to serve a very specific function: the visual description of beha-
vior and the way in which socialization practices are fundamental to the forma-
tion of the cultural ethos of a people.
World War II caused many American anthropologists, among them Margaret
Mead, Rhoda Métraux, Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson, to utilize films for
the analysis of cultural standards that could not be observed in loco—mainly
the films and cultures of Germany and Japan.13 Like literature and folklore, cin-
ema, they argued, would allow for the projection of images of human behavior
that, if properly analyzed, would allow for assessing and predicting, in the con-
text of the war, the collective and individual reactions of the societies that were in
conflict. For this precise reason these were analyses that centered on the topical
content of the films, using a methodology that differed little from that which
anthropologists had used for the analysis of the myths, rituals and ceremonies
of small-scale societies, with which they had already been working for quite
some time. In this sense, the objective of the analysis was to find through the
study of films elements that would permit a better understanding of the cultures
in question, and not the inverse.
These pioneering works of Mead and Bateson did not have followers and, from
that era onwards, images practically disappeared from anthropological works.
According to Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, the organizers of an important
collection of essays entitled Rethinking Visual Anthropology,
The shift of focus to social organisation, the importance of the genealogical method, the
emphasis on oral tradition, may all have been contributory factors in the neglect of new
recording technology, since researchers in these areas may have found the notebook an
adequate tool. The neglect of art, material culture, and ritual form, all areas where the
camera comes into its own (and all inherently visual forms of interest to evolutionary
anthropologists), may have been complementary factors. [Banks and Morphy 1997: 9]
The only anthropologist to innovate effectively through the use of the camera
was Jean Rouch. He innovated by suggesting technical changes to the movie
camera that would allow for it to be used without a tripod and therefore closer
to the focus of its attention; he was also among the first filmmakers to make
use of synchronized sound. But the great innovation of Jean Rouch for anthro-
pology was his advocacy of ‘‘shared anthropology,’’ in which the subjects of
the research actively participated in the process of filming and editing. His
ciné-transe ended up having much more influence on filmmakers like Truffaut
and Godard (the latter a one-time anthropology student, though) than on anthro-
pologists who made ethnographic films.14
Here I will not recount the history of ethnographic film; this can be found in
other publications.15 These brief mentions have the sole objective of pointing
out that, despite the great interest that anthropology had in images at the start
of the discipline’s history, it essentially ended up using them much more as a
method of recording, and even then with great parsimony. Margaret Mead’s
introduction to a collection on visual anthropology [Hockings 1975, 1995, 2003],
though emphatic about the need for universities to send anthropologists to the
field armed with equipment for filming sounds and images, and despite its insist-
ence on the documentation, through photographs and films, of cultural aspects of
societies seen as being on the brink of extinction, seems not to have provoked the
desired impact. On the contrary, the analysis of still and moving images seems to
have been restricted to the period of war, and they were considered then for the
simple reason that the conflict only permitted anthropology from a distance.
Verbal text has thus predominated in most anthropological literature until very
recently.
For centuries the relationship between text and image has been characterized
by an enormous dispute and tension. As early as the Renaissance, Leonardo da
Vinci appears as the great defender of sight as the noblest of the senses, and of
painting as an art that in many aspects greatly surpasses poetry. According to
him, painting was in fact superior to all other verbal forms of expression as well.
In one of his manuscripts he affirms:
If you say that sight provides an impediment to sharp and subtle mental reasoning,
through which insight is achieved into the divine sciences, and that this kind of
impediment led a philosopher to deprive himself of sight, the answer to this is that the
eye, lord of the senses, does its duty by obstructing all the confusions and lies which arise
not in sciences but in those discourses undertaken with great commotion and gesticu-
lation. Hearing, which remains most offended by them, should do the same, since it seeks
an accord in which all the senses tally. If this philosopher plucked out his eyes to remove
the impediment to his discourse, you may well consider that such an act fittingly
accompanied his mind and reasoning, since they were equally insane. Could he not have
closed his eyes when he entered such a frenzied state and kept them thus closed until his
fury had abated? But the man was mad, and his ideas were mad, and none more so than
the plucking out of his eyes. [Leonardo da Vinci 2001: 22]
Perhaps now is the time to better understand this dispute between text
and image within our discipline, a dispute in which the text has always held
advantages. Let us begin by understanding our relationship with images.
In every sense, images precede the word. John Berger begins his classic book
Ways of Seeing [1972] by affirming that it is true not only that children see and
recognize what they see before they start to speak, but that it is also vision and
that which we see that establishes our position in the world that surrounds us.
We can explain the world with words, he says, but words can never do justice
to the fact that we are surrounded by the world. The relationship between what
we see and what we know never fully establishes itself [Berger 1972: 7].
It is not only in the development of the individual that the image precedes the
word. Studies on the evolution of different forms of writing show the intimate
relationship between icon and writing and the engendering of writing by the
image—from pictograms, which represent objects from the real world, to
hieroglyphs, sacred images used since the 4th millennium BCE, to finally the
ideogram, the most abstract and simplified form, which has not a representative
function but rather a distinctive one. The ideogram does not have meaning in
itself, as it does not represent an object; instead, it has a distinctive function,
and thus is a form of writing in the modern sense of the term.
The most evident relationship between the word and the image is obviously in
the art of calligraphy, which evokes forms within the text itself. In calligraphy, in
which the meaner is as important as (or even more important than) the meaning
line and language have a plastic relationship and the meaning conveyed is not
purely linguistic.
Images, whether filmic or photographic, are signs whose entire identity
purports to be the thing that is represented, as though they were not signs. They
deceive us with their appearance of naturalness and transparency, which hides
the innumerable mechanisms of representation from which they result. Efficient
in symbolic communication, free of syntactic limitations, images are eloquent.
For this exact reason images maintain a tense relationship with verbal discourse
(in which the meaning appears clear and manifest), as in a territorial dispute. If
the meaning of the text appears to us as unique and fixed (even though it too
may have several readings) and capable of abstractions and generalizations,
images are by their nature polysemic and paradoxically eternally linked to their
concrete referents. However, as Miriam Moreira Leite demonstrates, ‘‘[. . .]
between the image and the reality it represents, there is a series of mediations
that cause the image to be—contrary to what is customarily thought—not a
restitution, but rather a reconstruction—always a voluntary or involuntary
alteration of reality, which one must learn to feel and see [. . .]’’ [Moreira Leite
1998: 40, my trans.].
These are the characteristics of the image that ended up distancing social scien-
tists from a closer relationship with this field, for according to this view, verbal
discourse is associated with the possibility of uncovering the truths underlying
the illusory appearance of reality (and accordingly, only the illusory appearance
of reality can be captured by images). It is also the use of language (an attribute
that distinguishes us from other animals) that positions verbal discourse as

hegemonic in the social sciences, whose rationalist, Cartesian and positivist tra-
dition remains to this day. It is with words that we discuss ideas. Images seem
merely to express the reality that they represent. In addition to this are the mean-
ings of power and control that we attribute to the gaze, from which images are
inseparable. In discussing the panopticon, Foucault [1977] demonstrates that
vision, as an instrument of power, is based at least partially on hiding from sight
the mechanism of sight. We should ask if the anthropologist, for his part, does
not feel more assured as an authority when he does not make public his field
notebooks (records of his observations), thus omitting the images recorded in
the field. Here we return to the origins of perspective in the Renaissance and
the resulting separation between observer and observed, to which we alluded
at the beginning of this article. Our capacity for reflection and interpretation of
a given reality seems admissible to us only when we can guarantee the necessary
distance for discussing it. Descola is categorical on this issue and goes so far as to
make an implicit rule for ethnographic practice:
If one were to risk formulating it by parodying the conciseness of the language of physi-
cians, it could be stated thus: the capacity for objectification is inversely proportional to the
distance of the object observed. In other words, the greater the geographic and cultural
distance that the ethnologist imposes between his place of origin and his chosen ‘‘field’’,
the less will he be aware of the prejudices nurtured by the dominant local population
against the marginal societies which he is studying. [Descola 1993: 16, my trans.]
‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ a classic text of

Walter Benjamin [1994], is the basic reference when the question of the image
ends up focalizing the transformations that inscribe themselves into the indus-
trializing social order and that imply a new notion of subject, now diluted in
the masses and in the laws of the market. The Paul Valéry epigraph [from Pièces
sur l’Art, 1928]16 with which Benjamin begins this work calls attention to the
modification of the very notion of art, introduced by the innumerable innovations
of modern times. It is well known that Benjamin criticizes the reproduction of the
image, which leads to the loss of the aura, or the hic et nunc of the artistic object.
The loss of the aura, he says, causes a work of art to submit to the world of
products, of reproduction in series, of phantasmagoria. The singularity of the
presence of a work of art in the place in which it is found is the guarantee of
its authenticity. The permanent current-ness of an object of art, which methods
of reproduction of image and sound make possible by allowing the object to
be visualized and heard under any circumstances, removes from this artistic
object its authority. If previously art was received as an object of worship, with
the possibility of reproduction it is its exhibition value that takes precedence. The
presence of an artistic object does not depend on the original; the reproduced
object can now be found in places and situations never imagined by the one
who conceived it. We can see Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘‘Mona Lisa’’ reproduced on
a can of oil or on the covers of school notebooks, and we can listen to Bach while
we take a shower or while we are in the car in the middle of a hellish traffic jam.
However, we cannot avoid considering whether the multiplication of images has
had the effect of remaking this relationship in another context: now, after
innumerable exposures to the reproduced images of the works, has this not
created a new necessity, that of needing to see the ‘‘original’’ at least once?
As Ortiz shows, ‘‘the idea of the ‘superiority of art’ is not merely a strategy of
distinction but also an element of criticism. [. . .] The reflections that the represen-
tatives of this sphere make on the development of a market culture [. . .] conclude
a rejection of industrialism that consolidated itself in the 19th century’’ [1991: 91].
But even so, the artistic sphere was not able to escape the logic of the market.
If the technical possibility of reproduction of the image causes the reaction in
the artistic sphere already described innumerable times by social scientists and
art historians, relatively little has been made of the revolution brought about
by the possibility of exact reproduction of the image, in the sense that this repro-
duction allows for a reproducible pictorial discourse. I am referring not to the
techniques that arose in the 19th century and were rapidly incorporated by
anthropologists of the era, such as photography and cinema, but rather to wood-
cuts, the etched impressions that effectively came to be utilized starting in the
15th century and that meant, in terms of communication, a revolution compara-
ble only to the invention of writing. They were not simply small works of art but
rather the tools necessary for thought and modern life. As Ivins [1992] shows,
without these forms of impression very little would remain of our sciences, such
as archaeology and ethnology, and almost nothing would remain in terms of
technology. Ivins demonstrates the extent to which ancient Greece, dependent
on drawings, which are highly subject to variations, could advance little in bot-
any, a classificatory science in which the description of plants, whether through
words or through unreliable drawings, did not allow for demonstrative images.
The difficulties of botany were not very different from those of anatomy, machine
technology, or the art of making knots.
According to Ivins, it is precisely the recognition of the social, economic and
scientific importance of the possibility of printing images that allows us to better
assess the slow progress of science and technology in Classical Antiquity and in
the Middle Ages. The Greeks’ advances in areas of knowledge such as geometry
and astronomy did not depend on words accompanied by demonstrative images.
In our contemporary world images are everywhere, and their presence has
been intensifying notably as the techniques of image reproduction and manipu-
lation have become more sophisticated. Of all the arts, it was surely cinema that
best served the most diverse political ideologies, parties and governments—from
Soviet to German cinema, from Italian neo-realism to Brazilian ‘‘Cinema Novo.’’
It forged and spread a new lifestyle—as with Hollywood, which in the years fol-
lowing World War II expressed the emptiness of a generation. Having to compete
with television sets, which began to invade American households, the United
States adopted giant screens which transformed film viewing into a great
spectacle, thereby disseminating the American way of life throughout the world
in an extremely agile manner.
However, cinema as an instrument of propaganda and of education of the
masses has always been a contemporary of art cinema, in which the author=
director expresses himself without placing himself at the service of a party or
an ideology. However, beyond this the meaning of a film acquires autonomy,
as neither the cameraman nor the director nor the producer holds total control
of the reception of the images shown on the screen.
Documentary films often implicitly give a model of society. So-called fiction
films, or feature films (it is worth noting that the verb ‘‘to feature’’ also means to
characterize, to depict, or to delineate) are, on the other hand, precious documen-
taries about our imaginary, about our values and aspirations. As anthropologists
and social scientists, we are interested in cinema as a field of visual expression of
the values, categories and contradictions of our social reality17—cinema that
reconstructs the real, whether through the documentary or through fiction. We
are interested in cinema that reconstructs categories such as time and space in
an admirable manner—in a way that causes admiration—and that articulates
plans and sequences, producing meanings that come precisely from this setup
or, in another style, from the lack of a setup. We seek images that penetrate us
in various dimensions and that alter our way of being and our way of perceiving
the reality in which we find ourselves.18
As anthropologists we look closely at myths, masks and rituals, seeking
through detailed analysis elements that can give us a better understanding of
the organization of a given society, the values that govern standards of behavior
and the basic categories of typically human thought. We do not perceive the
extent to which filmic and photographic images reveal to us, like these aspects
of social organization and other elements of material culture, fundamental infor-
mation about our own society and about our way of thinking;19 for we rarely look
closely at cinema or at photographs. Like the areas to which anthropologists and
sociologists traditionally dedicate themselves, cinema too, as an artifact and
cultural product, is a privileged means of access to the objectives that the social
sciences aim to reach. Like myths, rituals and experiences, filmic images con-
dense meaning, dramatize situations of daily life and represent—or re-present—
social life. The recurring and subconscious aspects of social action are equally
present in filmic and photographic images; thus it is up to the researcher to
investigate the relationships that are constructed and the meanings that consti-
tute them.
Let us return, then, to our main topic. What is it that social scientists do? They
observe, investigate, scrutinize and analyze based on their observations, and they
aim to generalize. Vision is—for us, social scientists—effectively an act of knowl-
edge. It is not just any sort of vision, but rather a trained, informed, directed
vision. The act of seeing is always a matter of choice, unlike the act of hearing.
Sounds penetrate us, coming from the outside to the inside. To look—and even
more so, to look in an investigative manner—we must direct our eyes attentively.
It is a movement inverse to the act of hearing, in that looking goes from the inside
to the outside.
Perhaps this is one of the great differences between societies based on oral
tradition, in which speaking and hearing are absolutely fundamental, and socie-
ties based on writing. George Devereux [1991] points out the ethno-psychological
aspects of the terms deaf and dumb in different societies in order to discuss mutu-
ally contradictory popular conceptions about stupidity based on the linguistic
use of these terms. He aims to demonstrate how different cultures associate
human intelligence with the capacity to speak or to hear.20
On the other hand, for us Westerners seeing and reading are individual acts,
which implies that they are acts of choice in which the subject emerges as an
individual in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, as defined in the classic
article by Mauss [2003]. The printing press, and later the great proliferation of
printed texts, turned the process of acquisition of knowledge into a much more
private and visual experience, and it also increased the credibility of written
information [Howes 1991].
In societies based on oral tradition, words have another dimension.21 Hearing
necessarily implies presence, proximity and also non-verbal aspects of communi-
cation. It is a communication in which synesthetic effects are always present,
evoking associations among perceptions from different domains, whereby the
individual who listens involves himself by way of an eminently subjective
relationship. It is exactly this subjective involvement that would lead psychoan-
alysis to favor hearing, thus leaving to the medical practices the acts of looking
and touching as the basic instruments of knowledge.
According to Howes [1991: 178] there is a connection between orality and
sociability, as well as a connection between visuality and individuality. The more
a society emphasizes vision, the less communitarian it is, whereas the more it
emphasizes hearing, the less individualistic it will be.22
Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Howes [1991: 171] shows that it was the print-
ing press that was responsible for the bias in favor of thought that is explicit or
objective, causal or sequential, and above all logical—the type of thought that has
been so characteristic of Western culture since the Renaissance. It is a type of
thought that requires distance from what is observed, that aims to make abstract
that which appears as immediately visible. The invention of the printing press
only made more evident a process that had already begun with writing. ‘‘Script,
and particularly the alphabet, converted the dynamic event-world in which
oral-aural man stored his knowledge into a world of static visual record. [. . .]
the alphabet warped sound itself into a visual mode’’ [Ong 1969: 643]. Paradoxi-
cally, it is this visualism, to which Fabian also refers, that distances social
scientists from images.
If social scientists, with rare exceptions, have distanced themselves from the
image, it is because the image gives the impression of proximity to the thing that
it represents. Social scientists, particularly anthropologists, adopted the position
of estrangement and distance in relation to that which they wanted to analyze—
even, and mainly, if the phenomena to be analyzed were otherwise familiar.23
The resistance to a greater approximation to the image is quite probably due
to the association of the image with natural signs, while words are held, in
this perspective, to be conventional signs. What distinguishes us as human
beings is our capacity to communicate through language, while perception of
the image, though also a language, is something that we assume we share with
other animals. This perspective still ignores today a fact that the 15th century
had already unveiled: seeing is not a merely physiological phenomenon, just
as filmic or photographic images are not mere copies of the visible world. Seeing
and producing images imply complex mental processes, and these processes are
connected to our psychological and cultural life. We perceive—especially in what
we know of the world—exactly that which language seeks to structure and
arrange into an order.

As Herbert Read put it,
We see what we learn to see, and vision becomes a habit, a convention, a partial selection
of all there is to see, and a distorted summary of the rest. We see what we want to see, and
what we want to see is determined not by the inevitable laws of optics or even (as may be
the case in the wild animals) by an instinct for survival, but by the desire to discover or
construct a credible world. [1991: 12]
We conceive of the world, space, time, the person, and the very notion of the
image by way of values that guide our gaze, our perception, and our represen-
tation, which are not therefore universal or natural activities.
NOTES
1. ‘‘Au XVIe siècle, c’était 1’ouı̈e. Ce qui déjà constituait un changement. Car d’un
homme subtil, les Romains disaient: ‘il a le nez fin.’ Homo naris emunclae, homo obesae
naris, c’est de I’Horace. Nous disons, nous: il voit juste. Et nos pères du XVIe siècle: il a
l’ouı̈e fine; il entend l’herbe pousser . . . Curieuse progression. L’odorat d’abord, ce
sens animal; l’ouı̈e ensuite, ce sens déjà plus raffiné. La vue enfin, ce sens intellectuel.’’
2. ‘‘Ils ne lisent pas les épitres de Paul. Ils entendent Dieu parler par la voix de Saint Paul,
[. . .]. La Foi était audition. [. . .]. Les organes par excellence du Chrétien, ce sont les
oreilles’’ [Febvre 1953: 6].
3. ‘‘. . . il faut procéder comme les voyageurs, c’est-à-dire à distance, sans s’approcher, ni
entrouvir les paupières avec les doigts, ni analyser les détails photographiques de la
surface de la iris’’ [Topinard 1885: 600, in Dias 1999: 28]. The need for a minimum
distance for correct observation had already been pointed out by Leonardo da Vinci
several centuries earlier: ‘‘If the eye sees a body situated too close, it cannot distinguish
it well; the same occurs with someone who tries to see the tip of his own nose. For this
reason, and as a general rule, nature teaches us that an object will never be perfectly
seen if the space between the eye and the object is not at least the same size as the face’’
[Leonardo da Vinci, Atl. l38b, in Carreira, 2000: 102, my trans.]. It is also worth noting
that of all the senses touch is for us the one in which subjectivity is the most present,
and for this very reason it is the dominant sense in affectionate relations.
4. ‘‘Or, les canons de scientificité et d’objectivité au XIXe siècle supposent la distance
spatiale et la position ‘neutre’ de l’observateur, réquisits que seule la vision, parmi
tous les autres organes des sens, peut fournir’’ [Dias 1999: 28].
5. Melvina Afra Mendes de Araujo, one of the researchers who participated in our first
thematic project, demonstrates in her Master’s thesis, Das ervas medicinais à fitoterapia.
Encontros e desencontros. Entre as lógicas biomédicas e popular (From Medicinal Herbs to
Phytotherapy: Convergences and Divergences; between Biomedical and Popular
Logic), defended in 1998, the importance of vision in the construction of the very
notion of illness, as well as in the mechanisms utilized for diagnosis. Araujo shows
that even today, for biomedical scientists and doctors as well as for the general popu-
lation, ‘‘seeing means knowing.’’ Among the women interviewed by Araujo, this
vision does not come from academic knowledge, but rather from a ‘‘divine gift,’’
and it is this vision that evidences illness and that characterizes the popular concep-
tions of illness and cures. For biomedical scientists and doctors, on the other hand,
it is images such as those provided by ultrasonography, tomography, X-ray, micro-
scope, etc., that make it possible to demonstrate that a certain disease is or was in
the body.
6. An interesting study that could deepen the initial results of Tyler’s discovery would
be, in this sense, to verify if painters from cultures that do not have vision as the most
valued organ nevertheless always place one of the eyes in the center of the canvas.
7. ‘‘Sight has today become the principal avenue of the sensuous awareness upon which
systematic thought about nature is based’’ [Ivins 1975: 13]. See, regarding the relation-
ship between vision and knowledge, the wonderful article by Marilena Chaui: ‘‘Janela
da Alma, Espelho do Mundo’’ (Window of the Soul, Mirror of the World), in the
collection organized by Adauto Novaes [1990].
8. Many authors have emphasized this aspect. See, among others, Barthes 1984; Benjamin
1994; Blonsky 1985; Sontag 1986.
9. ‘‘The term is to connote a cultural ideological bias toward vision as the ‘noblest sense’
and toward geometry qua graphic-spatial conceptualization as the most ‘exact’ way of
communicating knowledge’’ [Fabian 1983: 106].
10. See, among others, Foucault 1977; Howes 1991; Novaes 1990 and 2004. In the field of
cinema, three documentaries were recently produced about vision, or about its
absence: Janela da Alma (Window of the Soul), by João Jardim and Walter Carvalho,
A pessoa é para o que nasce (The person is for what he was born to do), by Roberto
Berliner, and Reminiscência (Reminiscence), by Eduardo Nunes. See the article about
Ensaios sobre a Cegueira (Blindness), Estado de São Paulo, Caderno 2, November 23, 1999.
11. Even anthropologists, proponents of participant observation, should work with their
data and reflect on it at a distance from that which was observed.
12. The Ethnological Society of London, for example, was founded in 1843 [Pinney
1992: 74].
13. See, regarding the filmic analysis done by anthropologists during this period, the
article by Weakland [1995].
14. Four researchers from our thematic project, Ana Lúcia Ferraz, Edgar Teodoro da
Cunha, Paula Morgado, and Renato Sztutman, made the video Jean Rouch: Subvertendo
Fronteiras (Jean Rouch: Subverting Boundaries), in which they sought to analyze the
work of this anthropologist-filmmaker. See also Renato Sztutman’s ‘‘Jean Rouch, um
antropólogo cineaste,’’ in which, after analyzing in depth the trajectory of the work
of Jean Rouch, he ends by questioning some of the parameters that guided the work
of the so-called postmodern authors.
15. In Portuguese there are articles by various authors in no. 1 of Cadernos de Antropologia e
Imagem, published by UERJ in 1995.
16. ‘‘Our fine arts were instituted, and their types as well as their uses were established,
during an era that was quite different from ours, by men whose power of action over
things was insignificant as compared with ours. But the astonishing increase in our
means, the flexibility and precision that they have attained, the ideas and the habits
that they have introduced, assure us of imminent and profound changes in the ancient
craft of the Beautiful. There exists in all arts a physical aspect that can no longer be
regarded or dealt with as before, that cannot be exempted from the enterprise of mod-
ern knowledge and power. Neither matter, nor space, nor time are, after twenty years,
what they had always been before. We must be aware that if these great innovations
transform the entire technique of art and, in this sense, act on the invention itself, they
may reach the point of modifying tremendously the very notion of art’’ [Paul Valéry,
Pièces sur l’Art, 1928: Conquête de l’Ubiquité, 103–104, my trans.].
17. See the Master’s thesis of Mirela Berger, A Projeção da Deficiência (The Projection of
Deficiency, 1999), in which the researcher analyzes the way in which mainstream
box office cinema, mainly American, deals with the representation of congenital physi-
cal deficiency, imprinting on the protagonists of these films the recurring stereotypes
about the bearer of the deficiency. See also Cinema e Imaginação—A imagem do ı´ndio no
cinema brasileiro dos anos 70 (Cinema and Imagination—The image of the native Indian
in the Brazilian cinema of the 1970s), the Master’s thesis of Edgar Teodoro da Cunha
[2000], in which the author reflects on the imaginary of the societies that produce these
films ‘‘taking on a projective character, of one self-reflection after another.’’
18. See also the Master’s thesis of Hikiji, Imagem—Violência (Image—Violence, 1998), in
which the author identifies in recent production (1980s and 1990s) the presence of
violence not only as a theme but in the very form of the images—violence-images.
How does one communicate the incommunicable, she asks? It is because they
communicate with violence that these films can reflect on contemporary man and
his relationship with violence itself.
19. See, for example, the doctoral dissertation of Andréa Barbosa: São Paulo, Cidade
Azul—Imagens da cidade construidas pelo cinema paulista dos anos 80 (São Paulo, Blue
City—Images of the city constructed by the São Paulo cinema of the 1980s; 2002).
20. For example, the English word dumb is also used in that language to mean ‘‘stupid’’ or
‘‘incapable of learning.’’ It would be interesting to understand why in Portuguese the
word for deaf (surdo) is used to insult someone as stupid, someone who cannot
understand what he hears.
21. See, regarding the word in the Dogon society, the chapter ‘‘Ouvir’’ (Hearing) in the
book Itinerários da loucura em territórios Dogon (Itineraries of insanity in Dogon
territories) by Denise Dias Barros [2004].
22. Hearing, according to Howes, is omnidirectional and synthetic, and sounds always
have an emotional impact; sight is unidirectional, analytical, and distanced. If sound
surrounds, encircles, and penetrates the hearer, vision situates the seer outside what
he sees [Howes 1991: 171].
23. In analyzing the work of Walter Benjamin and the epic theater of Brecht, John Dawsey
[1998: 36–38] shows the effect of distancing necessary for avoiding the bottling-up
caused by familiarity. The image, analogue of the real that it represents, seems to
impede this distancing. ‘‘The theater of Brecht provokes more than it interprets’’
[idem: 38]. Would this be impossible with filmic or photographic images?
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Image and Social Sciences: The Trajectory of a Difficult Relationship

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Image and Social Sciences: The Trajectory

Sylvia Caiuby Novaes

SYLVIA CAIUBY NOVAES is a professor of the Department of Anthropology at the Universidade de

respond to certain stimuli. What this study demonstrates to us as social scientists

they were proclaiming the methodological predominance of observation. It is

Despite spurning images and sight as important elements of scientific research,

distance themselves in order to observe.11 The product of knowledge translates not

visible elements, from which we seek to arrive at an underlying and non-visible

classification; in turn, anthropologists sought after photos and illustrations to

that distinguishes us from other animals) that positions verbal discourse as

‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ a classic text of

arrange into an order.

Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead

Hockings, Paul (ed.)

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