Social Analysis

Visual images are ubiquitous which, inevitably, is part of their appeal and their difficulty. As is the case with all sensory experience, the process of sight becomes naturalized for us, and it is easy to forget that how we interpret what we see is historically and culturally specific (Banks 2001). Similarly, the representations of what we see are influenced by our historical and cultural perspectives. In the forms of photographs, video, film, and new electronic media, these representations increasingly and apparently, often unproblematically, play a central role in the work of researchers, not just from anthropology, but also from a range of disciplines. As part of a broader ethnographic methodology, photography, film, and video have now been embraced by anthropology, sociologists, cultural studies, media studies, geographers, and other social scientists. The visual images are present in the form of cultural texts or they represent aspects of ethnographic knowledge and methodological tools. They can exist as the basis for the sites of social interaction amongst the informants or between the researcher and the researched. They can take the form of pre-existing images, such as television programs or contemporary or archival photographs and films (Banks 2001). It is hardly surprising, then, that visual images have become so important to the ethnographic endeavor. Yet, as Mac- Dougall laments above, relatively little has been written about how best to analyze and interpret the visual images, not only in anthropology, but indeed, in all of the social sciences.

This essay addresses anthropological engagement with photography in indigenous Australian contexts. Following the work of Gell and Edwards, and drawing on the history of photography and ethnography in central Cape York Peninsula, I explore some ways that photographs may exceed relations of objectification and exoticism. Many ethnographic photographs have continued to circulate within and beyond Cape York Peninsula, while others have been returned to the descendants of those portrayed. This process of circulation may be accompanied by shifts in the meanings drawn from images, and increasing numbers of photographs are being taken by Aboriginal people themselves. Both these photographs and the engagement of earlier photographs by Aboriginal people demonstrate differences with the ways that photographs are dealt with in ‘Western’ contexts. Whether as ‘social things’, as objects, or as distributed aspects of the agency of those taking or featuring in them, photographs remain active in their interaction with viewers and demand a more nuanced analysis of colonial relationships.

This article reports on an unusual participant observer study of a union campaign. The researchers are an academic with an interest in union strategy and a visual artist/community arts trainer. We used a multi-method approach, with a focus on ethnography. Visual mater- ial (including many photographs) and ephemera were collected as part of the study. The essay examines how the use of visual repre- sentations contributed both to the unfolding methodology of the study and the theoretical analysis. It enabled us to develop a complex cultural materialist framework to analyze the campaign, bringing together a variety of theoretical approaches that have not hitherto been used in the field of study of industrial relations. We began the research with a 'simple' desire to collect illustrative material of a col- orful and interesting campaign. The research led us to conclude, however, that visual data can contribute in important ways, in the words of Stallybrass and White (1986), to a deeper understanding of “the politics and poetics of union transgression.”

In this article I draw from my research about gender, identity, and the home, to discuss the visual and the other senses in ethnographic experience and anthropological representation. First, I discuss how visual ethnographic research might appreciate the sensory nature of experience. Seeing the home as both the context and subject of field- work, I shall introduce the idea of the ‘sensory home’. This refers to the home as a domain composed of different sensory elements (smell, touch, taste, vision, sound) that is simultaneously understood and created through the sensory experience and manipulation of these elements. I then explore how such visual and sensory research might best be represented as text that is conversant with mainstream anthropology. I shall suggest that while film and writing have both tackled this theme, hypermedia offers new possibilities that might bridge the gap between written and visual anthropology.

How can visual ethnography help us to understand the nature and the complexity of the (ethnic/gendered/classed) experience of growing up? Drawing on two ethnographic projects, we discuss the purposes and the difficulties of the particular methodology of auto-visual ethnography which we deployed. Our specific focus was the relation- shipand the tension between the representation and the individual everyday experiences. Through focusing upon the micro worlds of the young people themselves within their wider ‘parent’ cultures, their engagement with home, school, and outside leisure activities, were revealed to be strategically (if sometimes unconsciously) part of much larger overlapping social spheres and powerful cultural influ- ences. The pre-teenage and teenage female participants were invited to document any aspects of their worlds on cameras and video.

This article considers the broad historical and ideological processes that participate in forming the continuities and discontinuities of Australian egalitarian nationalism. We draw attention to its forma- tion and re-formation in the debates surrounding the so-called Han- son phenomenon. Hansonism refracts the crisis of what we regard as the Australian society of the state in the circumstances of the devel- opment of neoliberal policies and the more recent neoconservative turn of the current Howard government. Our argument is directed to exploring the contradictions and tensions in Australian egalitarian thought and practice and its thoroughgoing creative reengagement in contemporary postcolonial and postmodern Australia.

Both community activism and anthropological research affect local communities materially, whether this research is conducted by ‘ac- tivists’ or ‘objectivists’. It is ethically and methodologically important that these activisms be recognized and built into the subject of the research. Aboriginal rights litigation entails both explicit and implicit activism by all concerned, although few admit as much. In this light, some of the effects of such activism on a local community engaged in aboriginal rights litigation in Canada are discussed in the form of a dia- logue between an anthropologist and a community activist who is now working in aboriginal law.

On 2 December 2001, four days after its credit rating had been downgraded to junk bond status, the Enron Corporation of Houston, Texas, filed the biggest bankruptcy petition in the history of the United States. On the 14 March 2002, Enron’s accountants, Arthur Anderson, were indicted by a federal grand jury on the criminal charge of obstruction of justice for “knowingly, intentionally and corruptly” inducing employees to shred documents relating to Enron. Enron was thus both a stock market bubble that burst and a perpetrator of frauds that involved the complicity of many outside the company itself. The fraud element turned Enron from a flagship of the “new economy” into a “corporate scandal,” the first of several. By the end of 2002, the distinction of being the United States’ biggest bankrupt company had passed to the telecoms giant, Worldcom. When Worldcom’s accounting fraud was originally identified in June 2002, its scale was estimated at $3.8 billion. Six months later it was clear that the misreporting was vastly higher, a staggering $9 billion. The New York Times headlined the affair thus: “The Latest Corporate Scandal is Stunning, Vast and Simple” (Eichenwald and Romero 2002).

Fred Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 410 pp. ISBN 0-8223-2949-2.

Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 286 pp. ISBN 08-2233-1136.

Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 270 pp. ISBN 1-85973-497-9.

Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles, Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 234 pp. ISBN 185973-408-1.

Reimar Schefield and Han F. Vermuelen, eds., Treasure Hunting? Collectors and Collections of Indonesian Artefacts (Research School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies [CNWS], Leiden: University of Leiden in association with the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, 2002), 324 pp. ISBN 90-5789-078-x.

H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 281 pp. ISBN 0-8078-5430-1.

Mary Bouquet, ed., Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), 239 pp. ISBN 1-57181-321-7.

Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas, eds., Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 288 pp. ISBN 1-85973-464-2.

Notes on Contributors