Christopher Pinney . Photography and Anthropology Oxford University Press
2011 Rs. 1595/-

The World as an Image and Idea

Christopher Pinney's rigorous account of anthropology's fraught relationship with photography is too tightly framed, states Rahul Srivastava.

In the early '90s, when the discipline of popular cultural studies in South Asia was just about consolidating its theoretical ammunition, students of anthropology started to have conversations with higher subjects like art and literature, but with considerable hesitation and uncertainty. What made this possible at all was a willingness to speak across disciplinary boundaries.

I remember coming across the genre of calendar art through the collection of Patricia Uberoi. It was strange to confront these images from my world: they were imprinted in personal memory from trips to north Indian towns and visits to relatives' homes. Images that a 'colonised' me had feverishly kept at a distance. Now, they took on a new avatar and broke through my carefully guarded, aspirational world shaped by a formal, Englishlanguage higher education.

I was able to overcome all the embarrassment that accompanied this confrontation because it was facilitated by the gentle voice of a White, Australian, Punjabified, anthropologist settled in Delhi. It was apparent (even then) that had it not been for Uberoi introducing us students at JNU to the nuanced meanings hidden in this garish landscape, we wouldn’t have taken it seriously. The eye of the ‘outsider’ helped to neutralise the tainted associations that existed in our own colonized gaze.

Christopher Pinney’s work had a similar influence on scholars of my generation. While his perspective was exoticising, it was tempered by a sharp political awareness and a genuine connection with subjects. This made it easier to digest his elaborate theoretical frameworks and his showcasing of the powerful imagology of Indian popular (or mistakenly, ‘low’) culture. (See Pinney’s Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image And Political Struggle In India, 2004; and Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, 1998.)

Paradoxically, the presence of such mature interlocutors made us wary of the agony-filled hyper-theorising that anthropology was obsessed with during those years. James Clifford, Georg Marcus and a host of others were hell-bent on crucifying the discipline's methodologies and its connections with the colonial enterprise - stabbing at fieldbased traditional ethnography as its dominant form, opening up the subject-object debate and highlighting the anthropologistnative dichotomy. The native anthropology students' slippery and equally angst-ridden point of view was not as important as the grand battles between the prejudices of the scholar and the representation of the native context. No wonder the debates became alienating after a while.

Now, more than two decades later, I am mildly disappointed by Pinney's latest offering, Photography and Anthropology. It cannot be faulted in terms of scholarship or the deep perspective the author brings to the theme. The book brilliantly presents the discipline's history and its ambivalent relationship to the photographic image in three broad strokes: how anthropology tried to work with the camera but rarely acknowledged it; how it distanced itself from that position by extolling the virtues of writing (as if writing were not visual and the photograph did not have analytical powers); and how it came full circle by reabsorbing the visual in deeper and more theatrical ways, allowing the artist and the archivist to appropriate it in powerful and subversive modes.

Through this journey, Pinney takes you through the most significant moments in the discipline's history. You are introduced to its early racist obsession with bodies, where the camera's role was reduced to archiving and documentation. You are familiarised with the work and writing of Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who pioneered the technique of 'fieldwork'. (His adventures in Melanesia make for some of the most entertaining passages in the book.) You see how reason, magic and imagery are explored in James Frazer's classic The Golden Bough (1911), and are encouraged to smile and frown at the hundreds of anecdotes about native fear and alarm at the disembodying properties that emerging technologies were believed to have.

The book insightfully revisits Roland Barthes' observations about photographs and concludes with a commentary on the native artist's and enlightened non-native scholar's/ collector's clever re-appropriation of the ethnographic image. A long section on artist Pushpamala N.'s parody of the ethnographer-photographer's position makes for some incisive analysis.

Pinney concludes with a meditation on the idea of the image as a two-dimensional expression that has always tried to transcend its spatial limitation within anthropology's history. As anthropology's reference point has always been the 'real world', the only way it can be both an independent discipline as well as a chronicler and analyst of Other worlds is by approximating the reality of the world it engages with. The more accurate the rendering, the more confident its theory and analysis. According to Pinney, however, following this conceptual path is inherently self-defeating, and he uses photography as a practice and allegory to prove this point. The photograph, like the monograph, he says, is at once more than what it represents and therefore the idea of making it more attuned to perceived reality only leads to greater distortions. The move towards accurate representation is not simply a mechanical addition of depth; it is not a move towards three-dimensionality.