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Visual Anthropology

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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 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2010.484991 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2010.484991

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Visual Anthropology, 23: 278298, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2010.484991

Image and Social Sciences: The Trajectory of a Difficult Relationship

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 perception 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: perception has a joint property, it is my self as a whole that perceives a single unique structure 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.

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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 SmithKettlewell Eye Research Institute in California, show that the most diverse painters, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, always put in their portraits one of the sitters 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 rio o Sa Paulo and founder of LISALaborato 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

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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 resonance 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 importance of hearing and speech to the extent that these faculties are defined in a specific society [Seeger 1980: 4445]. In this sense, the results of Tylers study, though intriguing, are not surprising. In the West today, our perception is above all visual and spatial, and our relationship 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 silentlyor 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. Nelia 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

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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 knowledge, 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 hierarchical classification of the races, putting into evidence physical and intellectual characteristics associated with each race. Nelia 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 signature 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 inseparable from the question of method [2001: 20]. Since the second half of the 19th century, with the invention of new technologies 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 knowledge. 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 1895the same year ` as the Lumieres cameramade it possible to see that which is not immediately visible in the human bodyto 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 association between vision and knowledge can be noted from some indicators, such as the name of various informational magazines: Veja (See), Visao (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.

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. . . 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 senseswhich practically leaves all the others with a secondary role when the act of knowledge is at stakeis 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 categoriessweet, sour, acidic, bitter and saltybut frequently the contrast among these terms is not clear (the cashew apple, for example, is somewhere between sweet, acidic and sour). On the other hand, language has its

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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 impressions 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 perceived 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 doesnt learn anything, seems deaf. There is to be sure an inevitable relation between the value attributed by common 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 consequence of the favoring of vision is that the images we produce end up dominating 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 Sao Paulo, Lucas Fretin affirms that the visual language, associated with dirtiness and vandalism, became a spoken language used at meetings of the graffiti writers. Through graffiti, a complex network of sociability encompassing different 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 graffiti 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 Mara Santi Buhler 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 [Buhler 1999: 16]. If we turn our attention to the use of images for the purpose of scientific knowledge, 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 knowledge. 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.

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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 anthropology, 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 a theory itself derives from a fusion of the (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 phenomena should be observed by the sociologist. Only in this way, in Durkheims 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 experience 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 temporal continuity and coexistence between the Knower and the Known [Fabian 1983: 109]. In other words, if the objectivity of knowledge depends on spatial distance, 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? Anthropologists, 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 observeda spectacle from which they necessarily

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distance themselves in order to observe.11 The product of knowledge translates not into images but into words, sentences, textstexts 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 methods 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, penetrating 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 Shelleys novel Frankenstein [1818], with its dream of the possibility of overcoming 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 manifestations [idem: 113]. The principal scientists of the 19th century demanded methodological rigor and were steeped in rationalism to the point where they reached

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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 technological 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 Chaplins 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 professional 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 camera, 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 identification, 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 Lumieres 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

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to oneself than in relation to each other. The visible emphasizes what one is not [MacDougall 1997: 280]. Anthropologys 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 anthropometric 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 aforementioned 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 Meads 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 behavior and the way in which socialization practices are fundamental to the formation of the cultural ethos of a people. World War II caused many American anthropologists, among them Margaret Mead, Rhoda Metraux, Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson, to utilize films for the analysis of cultural standards that could not be observed in locomainly the films and cultures of Germany and Japan.13 Like literature and folklore, cinema, they argued, would allow for the projection of images of human behavior that, if properly analyzed, would allow for assessing and predicting, in the context 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.

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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 anthropology was his advocacy of shared anthropology, in which the subjects of the research actively participated in the process of filming and editing. His -transe ended up having much more influence on filmmakers like Truffaut cine and Godard (the latter a one-time anthropology student, though) than on anthropologists 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 disciplines history, it essentially ended up using them much more as a method of recording, and even then with great parsimony. Margaret Meads 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 insistence 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

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not in sciences but in those discourses undertaken with great commotion and gesticulation. 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 imagefrom 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 becontrary to what is customarily thoughtnot a restitution, but rather a reconstructionalways a voluntary or involuntary

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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 scientists 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 tradition 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 meanings 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 physicians, 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 industrializing social order and that imply a new notion of subject, now diluted in `ces the masses and in the laws of the market. The Paul Valery epigraph [from Pie sur lArt, 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

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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 Vincis 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 representatives 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 reproduction 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 woodcuts, the etched impressions that effectively came to be utilized starting in the 15th century and that meant, in terms of communication, a revolution comparable 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 botany, 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 manipulation have become more sophisticated. Of all the arts, it was surely cinema that best served the most diverse political ideologies, parties and governmentsfrom Soviet to German cinema, from Italian neo-realism to Brazilian Cinema Novo. It forged and spread a new lifestyleas with Hollywood, which in the years following World War II expressed the emptiness of a generation. Having to compete with television sets, which began to invade American households, the United

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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 documentaries 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 reality17cinema 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 mannerin a way that causes admirationand 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 information 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 condense meaning, dramatize situations of daily life and representor 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 constitute 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 isfor us, social scientistseffectively an act of knowledge. 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 lookand even more so, to look in an investigative mannerwe 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.

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Perhaps this is one of the great differences between societies based on oral tradition, in which speaking and hearing are absolutely fundamental, and societies 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 mutually 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 communication. 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 psychoanalysis 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 printing press that was responsible for the bias in favor of thought that is explicit or objective, causal or sequential, and above all logicalthe 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]. Paradoxically, 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

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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 perceiveespecially in what we know of the worldexactly 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]

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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 representation, which are not therefore universal or natural activities.

NOTES
` ` 1. Au XVIe siecle, cetait 1oue. Ce qui deja constituait un changement. Car dun homme subtil, les Romains disaient: il a le nez fin. Homo naris emunclae, homo obesae ` ` naris, cest de IHorace. Nous disons, nous: il voit juste. Et nos peres du XVIe siecle: il a loue fine; il entend lherbe pousser . . . Curieuse progression. Lodorat dabord, ce ` sens animal; loue ensuite, ce sens deja plus raffine. La vue enfin, ce sens intellectuel. 2. Ils ne lisent pas les epitres de Paul. Ils entendent Dieu parler par la voix de Saint Paul, [. . .]. La Foi etait audition. [. . .]. Les organes par excellence du Chretien, ce sont les oreilles [Febvre 1953: 6]. ` ` 3. . . . il faut proceder comme les voyageurs, cest-a-dire a distance, sans sapprocher, ni ` entrouvir les paupieres avec les doigts, ni analyser les details 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 scientificite et dobjectivite au XIXe siecle supposent la distance spatiale et la position neutre de lobservateur, requisits 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 Masters thesis, Das ervas medicinais a fitoterapia. gicas biome dicas e popular (From Medicinal Herbs to Encontros e desencontros. Entre as lo Phytotherapy: Convergences and Divergences; between Biomedical and Popular Logic), defended in 1998, the importance of vision in the construction of the very

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S. Caiuby Novaes 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 population, 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 conceptions 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, microscope, etc., that make it possible to demonstrate that a certain disease is or was in the body. An interesting study that could deepen the initial results of Tylers 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. 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 relationship 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]. Many authors have emphasized this aspect. See, among others, Barthes 1984; Benjamin 1994; Blonsky 1985; Sontag 1986. 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]. 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 Joao Jardim and Walter Carvalho, A pessoa e para o que nasce (The person is for what he was born to do), by Roberto ncia (Reminiscence), by Eduardo Nunes. See the article about Berliner, and Reminisce o Ensaios sobre a Cegueira (Blindness), Estado de Sa Paulo, Caderno 2, November 23, 1999. Even anthropologists, proponents of participant observation, should work with their data and reflect on it at a distance from that which was observed. The Ethnological Society of London, for example, was founded in 1843 [Pinney 1992: 74]. See, regarding the filmic analysis done by anthropologists during this period, the article by Weakland [1995]. Four researchers from our thematic project, Ana Lucia 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 Sztutmans Jean Rouch, um antropologo 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. In Portuguese there are articles by various authors in no. 1 of Cadernos de Antropologia e Imagem, published by UERJ in 1995. 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 modern knowledge and power. Neither matter, nor space, nor time are, after twenty years,

6.

7.

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

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18.
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19.

20.

21.

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23.

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 Valery, `ces sur lArt, 1928: Conquete de lUbiquite, 103104, my trans.]. Pie ncia (The Projection of See the Masters thesis of Mirela Berger, A Projeca da Deficie o Deficiency, 1999), in which the researcher analyzes the way in which mainstream box office cinema, mainly American, deals with the representation of congenital physical deficiency, imprinting on the protagonists of these films the recurring stereotypes about the bearer of the deficiency. See also Cinema e Imaginaca oA imagem do ndio no cinema brasileiro dos anos 70 (Cinema and ImaginationThe image of the native Indian in the Brazilian cinema of the 1970s), the Masters 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. ncia (ImageViolence, 1998), in See also the Masters thesis of Hikiji, ImagemViole 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 imagesviolence-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. o See, for example, the doctoral dissertation of Andrea Barbosa: Sa Paulo, Cidade AzulImagens da cidade construidas pelo cinema paulista dos anos 80 (Sao Paulo, Blue CityImages of the city constructed by the Sao Paulo cinema of the 1980s; 2002). 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. See, regarding the word in the Dogon society, the chapter Ouvir (Hearing) in the rios da loucura em territo rios Dogon (Itineraries of insanity in Dogon book Itinera territories) by Denise Dias Barros [2004]. 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]. In analyzing the work of Walter Benjamin and the epic theater of Brecht, John Dawsey [1998: 3638] 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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FILMOGRAPHY
Chaplin, Charles 1936 Modern Times. Director, Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard and Henry Bergman; camera, Rollie Totheroh and Ira Morgan. Cunha, Edgar Teodoro da, Ana Lucia Ferraz, Paula Morgado, and Renato Sztutman 2000 Jean Rouch, subvertendo fronteiras. Sao Paulo: LISA-USP; color, 41 mins.