IMAGING ANTHROPOLOGY.

Picturing Culture: Explorations in Film and Anthropology

by Jay Ruby 

Chicago: University of Chicago Press 

339 pp./$19.00 (sb)

Picturing Culture: Explorations in Film and Anthropology collects two decades of Jay Ruby's essays on ethnographic film, the anthropology of visual communication and the ethics and politics of reflexivity and collaboration as they inflect documentary and ethnographic film practices. The essays address a broad range of issues, from the historically diverse practical and theoretical trajectories informing the genre of ethnographic film, to considerations of the ethics of filmic representation, theoretical and methodological arguments for reflexive cinematic practices and detailed considerations of the works of several filmmakers, educators and ethnographers.

Ruby is a major figure in anthropological and documentary film circles. He co-founded (with Richard Chalfen) Temple University's program in visual anthropology, which he now directs, and in the early 1970s established the journal Studies in Visual Communication with Sol Worth and Larry Gross. His contributions have been extremely influential over the past two decades in challenging and enriching how we understand the relationship between ethnography, anthropology and film, and the essays collected here are valuable examples of this thinker's perspective. The collection itself does little to historically contextualize its various essays--a lacuna that, at times, makes its arguments appear polemically strident and dated. However, Ruby's insightful arguments and the formative influence of his work mark this collection as one that merits close attention from anthropologists and filmmakers alike.

Ruby's lengthy introduction lays the groundwork for the essays that follow by presenting his paradigm for an "anthropological cinema a filmic practice that looks to anthropology for its "critical reception and validation." Arguing that "ethnographic and documentary film, as commonly practiced, is only marginally related to anthropology and that these film forms are actually an impediment to the development of an anthropological cinema," Ruby seeks to debunk what he perceives to be a too-frequent conflation between ethnographic and documentary film, whereby ethnographic films are understood merely as documentaries "about exotic people." Ruby situates his argument by briefly sketching an ethnographic film "canon" that begins with Felix-Louis Regnault's filmic "scientific inscription" of body locomotion and moves through Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's research-oriented and pedagogical films from Bali and Papua New Guinea to the more recent innovations of Jean Rouch and Tim Asch. Ruby thus links the specifi c theoretical and pedagogical concerns of ethnographic researchers, teachers and filmmakers with the social formations and paradigmatic epistemologies that informed their work such as early anthropological and modernist "salvage" paradigms, the development of documentary realist conventions and positivist understandings of film technologies. This chapter also provides an overview of Ruby's textual (and actual) interlocutors by referring readers to the work of such scholars and filmmakers as Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, Faye Ginsburg and David and Judith MacDougall.

Ruby conjoins this history with a discussion of the institutional framework that he asserts makes a truly "anthropological cinema" difficult to achieve. Ruby argues that structures of funding, exhibition, distribution and the high cost of film technologies have historically marginalized ethnographic film within anthropology and subordinated it to a documentary genre that itself has been either deeply tied to the strictures of television marketing concerns or to the social, cultural and political interests of independent filmmakers--interests that, Ruby asserts, "are parallel to, but separate from, the interests of most anthropologists." Thus, "[e]thnographic film production has been dominated by the professional expectations of the film world regarding equipment, production values, and consequently, costs, not by the interests and needs of anthropology." Thus he describes ethnographic films as embodying a contradiction: While these films have often been rooted in scientific or ethical concerns to represent t he cultural worlds and social realities of their subjects, market demands and institutional strictures have suppressed the filmic exploration of these concerns in favor of the objectifying and misleading hegemonic conventions of documentary realism.

Ruby's polemic stance in the introduction may alienate many readers with its fierce policing of the boundaries of anthropological film, in spite of his call for ethnographic filmmakers to heed the formal innovations of such filmmakers as Maya Deren, Chick Strand or other "dissonant elements from within the documentary community." Indeed, at times this text reads as though Ruby were attempting to define a new ethnographic avant-garde to exclude non-anthropological filmmakers and films. Ruby's "anthropologically intended cinema," however, has a much broader goal and deeper historical location and his call for anthropologists to attend to the formal specificity of filmic representation is grounded in a long standing marginalization of film by what Lucien Taylor calls an "iconophobic" disciplinary mainstream. [1] Ruby's concern to articulate the need for truly anthropological film, film that "pictorially satisfies the requirements of ethnography," evinces his commitment to anthropology's ethnographic methodology and his desire to subvert what he perceives to be a disciplinary logocentrism, thus stressing the contributions that filmic knowledge production may make to "an anthropological discourse about the human condition." Thus, despite Ruby's insistence on the need for an anthropological film addressed to a "tiny audience of specialists" and his assertion that "ethnographic film is too serious a thing to be left to filmmakers," he does present a clearly argued and well-documented overview that he himself complicates and deepens in subsequent chapters, all the while raising important questions of how ethnography and critical film practices connect.

In the first chapter, "Researching with a Camera: The Anthropologist as Picture Taker," Ruby tracks ethnographic film's antecedents in the works of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne Jules Marey and Regnault, all of whom used cinematic tools to explore human locomotion and behavior "beyond the range of human vision." Ruby historically situates these early uses of film by reference to positivist understandings of the camera as an objective tool for the "scientific inscription" of visible "data" and attempts to generate researchable film material for the study of body movement and the culturally particular use of space. This early history is complicated by a discussion of Franz Boas's initial filmic explorations, which Ruby sees as being informed by his attempts to use film to demonstrate the cultural (as opposed to biological) ground of gesture and expressive behavior. This historical account grows yet more nuanced in the three chapters that follow, in which Ruby considers the work of Robert Flaherty, John Gardner a nd Tim Asch.

Looking to Flaherty's well-known and much-discussed work Nanook of the North (1922), Ruby takes this revered ancestor to task in a balanced and insightful discussion of three aspects of Flaherty's work: narrative form, the tension between "Art and Commerce" and the collaborative relationship between Flaherty and his Inuit subjects that enabled the film's production. Detailing Flaherty's absolute reliance on Inuit technical help in maintaining and operating the technology in the arctic conditions of northern Quebec, his attempt to narrativize the subjective elements of Inuit life-worlds, and his conflicting desires for economic gain and prestige, Ruby's discussion stresses how Nanook of the North embodies a collaborative endeavor and makes clear what such luminaries as John Grierson and Rouch found so valuable in Flaherty's work.

His discussion of Asch's filmic and pedagogical commitment, originally published in a 1995 special edition of Visual Anthropology Review devoted to Asch, is a valuable introduction to Asch's remarkable work. Based on a 1993 interview with Asch, the essay explores the collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker that Asch advocated (and later expanded upon to include his filmic subjects). It also provides detailed discussions of Asch's event-sequence filming and editing practices, his collaboration with anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon on The Feast (1970) and The Ax Fight (1975), and the post-production editing technique of screening versions of the film-in-progress to successive university classes. Ruby's extended treatment of The Ax Fight also provides readers with an invaluable and detailed account of a very early engagement with the limits of realist ethnographic representation. For Ruby, Asch's films "remain among the best of what ethnographic filmmakers should strive for," and Asch's practice and f ilmic innovations might serve the reader as a prototype of Ruby's own model.

Moving from historical and biographical foci to a more theoretical one, Ruby's subsequent four chapters cover, respectively, ethics, reflexivity, reception and "questions of voice, authority, and authorship." "Exposing Yourself: Reflexivity, Anthropology, and Film," first published in Semiotica in 1980 and reworked for this collection, constitutes an early and significant contribution to critiques of realist conventions and to emergent ethical and epistemological issues of filmic and ethnographic reflexivity. This essay historicizes anthropological engagements with self-reflexive representational strategies and is usefully read beside chapter eight, "Speaking for, Speaking about, Speaking with, or Speaking Alongside," which brings Ruby's arguments into the 1990s and explores the increased availability and use of electronic visual media by groups marginal to dominant circuits of film practice. Ruby surveys these developments, addressing collaborative works between anthropologists, filmmakers and their subject s from such programs as the Canadian Film Board's Challenge for Change project (which, under the direction of George Stoney, produced such works as You Are On Indian Land [1974]) to the more recent adoption of video technologies by Kayapo and Australian aboriginal communities.

More recently, critical perspectives on film form and cultural difference have informed ethnographic projects addressed to the production of visual imagery, exemplified for Ruby in the work of Worth and John Adair and Eric Michaels. Yet these early ethnographies of media production and the social ground of visual communication inaugurated a much wider array of work than Ruby's text suggests. These include ethnographic writings addressing not only media reception, but video production by AIDS activists by Alexandra Juhasz, the social life of Indian photography by Christopher Pinney and the significance of indigenous filmmaking for the constitution of community and new sorts of collectivity and historical consciousness by Beth Conklin, Rosalind Morris and Terence Turner. Such ethnographic explorations of film, video and television elsewhere place Ruby's book at some distance from many ongoing discussions that conjoin film and anthropology. While some of this work is cited and (briefly) addressed, the temporal diversity of his essays (e.g., a discussion of reflexivity from 1982 and of collaborative cinema from 1995) means that this book must be read with a sharp eye on the footnotes and the relatively spare comments that situate these essays in their historical contexts of production.

The final chapter articulates Ruby's own sense of anthropological cinema. He first presents a synthetic account of anthropological approaches to performance as a means of understanding culture and making it "filmable." This is followed by a critique of the still-common equation of film's indexical link to the world with a notion of transparent objectivity. Drawing primarily on Victor Turner and Erving Goffman, Ruby utilizes drama as a hermeneutic to grasp how social life is both narratively structured and performatively constituted, and makes a strong argument for the import and specificity of cinematic representations and explorations of such performances. Further, stressing his sense of audiences' continued faith in documentary films' objective mimesis, he argues that "film realism needs to be refrained for audiences as a social convention" by a cinematic tromp I'oeil that subverts the givenness of ethnographic films' truth value by drawing attention to their positioned and conventional construction--" [f] ilmic codes and conventions must be developed to frame or contextualize the apparent realism of the cinema and cause audiences to understand the images as anthropological articulations."

This collection provides a comprehensive introduction to the ideas of one of the major figures in the field of visual anthropology. As the "ethnographic" achieves more cachet as a touchstone for aesthetic practices, and as mainstream fiction film and dominant representations of "reality" naturalize formal techniques developed by reflexive film producers (e.g., The Blair Witch Project, Cops, Forty-Eight Hours), the long-standing commitment to collaboration and critical ethnographic practice represented in the essays collected here prove prescient and provocative reading.

DANIEL FISHER is a Social Anthropology Ph.D. student in New York University's Culture and Media program.

NOTES

(1.) Lucien Taylor, "Iconophobia: How Anthropology Lost It At the Movies" in Transitions 69 (1996), PP. 64-88.