1 Discuss the relevance of the material turn for the anthropological study of photographs.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century a significant degree of attention was paid to the role played by material artefacts in shaping culture. There was to a growing sense of a mutual 2000). engagement between persons and things and recognition that this relationship contributes culture (Graves-Brown, Simultaneously, traditional thinking regarding objects as passive vessels to be filled with cultural meaning was replaced with a view of objects as actively containing social agency (amongst material anthropologists at least). Positioned along with humans on a continuum of social action, objects are recognised as being socially alive (Knappett, 2002). Knappett notes that in material culture studies the notion that objects have social lives has become a mantra and that we need to push the exploration of just how objects, including photographs, are involved in social networks. In this essay I will demonstrate with a few key texts from the material turn period how we are to apply such exploration to photographic objects. Arjun Appadurais edited volume published in 1986 contained essays which proved important to the development of the study of material culture. Included in this volume is Igor Kopytoffs essay where he posits a biographical approach towards reading objects. All aspects of an objects career should be looked at, from the objects creation right up until its death or the point at which it is no longer useful (it is only at this point, Bruno Latour argues, that it can be termed an actual object, as I will discuss below). Objects such as a museum archive box containing a mixture of photographs, as in the example of Box 54 from the Pitt Rivers Museum analysed by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (2005), come with a relatively readable biography as recorded in museum accession records and in annual reviews of movements of objects. It is unclear however

2 how we are to go about piecing a biography together for an object lacking such detailed biographical evidence. A photograph, or indeed any object, which is not part of an organised museum or private collection would be much more difficult to examine biographically. I shall return to Kopytoffs paper towards the end of my essay. Bruno Latour argues that an artefact can only be considered to be a so-called object in the instant when it lacks any human interaction for example an archaeological find before being discovered would be an object hidden and invisible underground and removed from chains of association. Latour denies the status of object to anything which is involved in these chains of association with humans, arguing that both human and non-human agents work together, shaping behaviour and therefore society as a whole. He gives the example of the Berlin key which controls the way in which people must lock their apartment building door at night as a simple tool which assumes all the dignity of a mediator, a social actor, an agent, an active being (Latour, 2000, p.19). In terms of the anthropological study of photographs, say for example a collection of ethnographic photographs in a museum archive as in the example of Box 54, these photos can been seen to have agency by influencing the viewers perception of the people that they represent. We can go further and argue that colonial photographs can be viewed as not simply referential to colonial discourse but as actively shaping it, through their consumption (Morton, 2010). For researchers consulting these photographs they mediate understanding of both the people represented and of the author of the photograph their intentions and their ways of seeing at the same time as actively constructing notions of colonialism. The photograph links the viewer in a chain of association not only with those pictorially depicted but also with the invisible photographer behind the lens. Latours chains of association can

3 therefore been seen to stretch back and forwards in time and space with photographs acting as mediators in networks of humans studying other humans. In Pierces terms as discussed by Knappett, the processes through which these archive photographs act could be said to be iconic (they carry a visual similarity to the people they represent) and also they are indexical (they depict people along with their clothing etc. which can act as indices of the social person). Perhaps analysis should move beyond these terms if we are to gain insight into photographs as complex historical documents, deserving of attention as objects in themselves and not only as containers for the forms they depict (Morton, 2010). Edwards and Hart note that the portraits contained within Box 54 could be read in Foucauldian terms since they conform to formal stylistic features, rendering the photos to the oppressive and repressive discourse (2005, p., 52) of historical anthropological photography. The subjects of these photographs are transformed into anthropological objects in the vast majority of the images. It is interesting to note the paradox that anthropological objects, especially photographs, contain the agency to objectify individuals. However, Edwards and Hart suggest, perhaps somewhat weakly, that the contextualising information provided along with the photographs - individuals names and ages etc. - restore their humanity. In Daniel Millers (1987) examination of Nancy Munns work concerning the central Australian aboriginal group the Walbiri, he asserts how objectification within the landscape serves to anchor both individual and group identity. Social relations are constituted through relationships with the environment and specific objects such as rocks and streams which are symbolic of different dreamtime ancestors. Objects simultaneously exist as persons and as landscape features and the Walbiri navigate within this network.

4 In terms of the anthropological study of photography, it may be useful to think about this kind of externalisation and objectification of identity when investigating the ways in which people assert their own constructed notions of themselves, for example through personal photograph collections or though online social networking sites such as Facebook. Like the dreamtime there is a digital nonphysical world in which, via a mixture of photographs and text, identities are objectified. A web-like structure is maintained through mutual interaction between these online points of information and individuals. Miller (1987) discusses processes of exchange of objects within webs of agency as presented in Munns work among the people of the island of Gawa (located to the north-east of New Guinea) who participate in the kula exchange cycle in their provision of canoes. Munn argues that self-identity and hierarchies are created and maintained by the creation of the canoes and their eventual insertion into the kula ring. In a similar way anthropological photographs taken by ethnographers in the field and yielded up to museum collections for the use of others establishes the anthropologist in a network of exchange often museums funded such trips in return for ethnographic objects. Here we do not escape the economic aspect of material culture; the museum photographs and the anthropologist are part of a system of commodity exchange. Finally, returning to Kopytoffs argument about biographies of objects, he examines the opposition between classifications of the singular and the commoditised in complex societies. He suggests that we can observe the biography of an object in these terms as it passes through various phases of reclassification, its identity shifting along a continuum of commodity and singular object, with the force behind commoditisation being society and with the individual driving singularisation. Photographs in todays world are

5 commonly valued as commodities and often used in the promotion of commodities in the form of advertising. As anthropologists we can trace the life of an image as it passes through these phases of singular object to commodity, for example with the production of popular material goods printed with photographic depictions. The image may have begun its life as a singular object and may have transformed into a commodity in the form of a Che Guevara T-shirt. The nature of the agency of the image changes dependent on the materiality of its presentation - we experience and interpret the images differently depending on their materiality. In some ways a photographs production can be seen to be continued by its consumption in the way in which it is contextualised and re-invented in different formats. We are also able to trace developments within wider contexts by focusing on material objects. Edwards and Hart suggest that evident in the biography of Box 54 are the different curatorial practices through which it has passed (towards greater degrees of conservation) which can be seen as a trace of the paradigm shifts which have occurred in the treatment of photographs within anthropological discourse. Photographs are now treated as ethnographic objects in their own right rather than simply as evidential copies and documentation of other ethnographic objects (Edwards and Hart, 2005, p.58). They are objects that can have indexical and iconic meaning and which are located in networks of agency along with other human and non-human actors (Knappett, 2002; Latour, 2000).

Bibliography Edwards, E and Hart, J. 2005. Mixed Box: the Cultural biography of a box of ethnographic photographs. In Edwards and Hart (eds.). Photographs Object Histories. London: Routledge Graves-Brown (ed.). 2000. Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London : Routledge

Knappett, C. 2002. Photographs, Skeuomorphs and Marionettes: some thoughts on Mind, Agency and Objects. Journal of Material Culture 7: 97-117. Kopytoff, I. 1986. The cultural biography of things. In A. Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press Latour, B. 2000. The Berliner Key or How to Do Words With Things. In Graves-Brown (ed.). Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London : Routledge Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford : Blackwell Morton, C. 2010. Personal communication.