Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image*

AN41CH14-Edwards ARI 16 August 2012 15:43

Objects of Affect:Photography Beyond theImage∗

Elizabeth EdwardsPhotographic History Research Center, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH,United Kingdom; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:221–34

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145708

Copyright c© 2012 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/12/1021-0221$20.00

∗This article is part of a special theme onMateriality. For a list of other articles in thistheme, see this volume’s Table of Contents.

Keywords

photographs, material culture, social relations, senses

Abstract

This review considers the impact and efficacy of material thinking in an-thropological studies of photographs and photographic practices. Suchanalytical strategies have moved the analysis of photographs beyondthat of the visual alone and illuminated the cultural work required ofphotographs. After reviewing key analytical positions of social biogra-phy, visual economy, and photography complex, I explore the materialwork of photographs through two registers: the idea of “placing”, inwhich photographs become active in assemblages of objects, and theprocesses of material repurposing and remediation of the humble IDphotography. These strands are drawn together in the idea of a sensoryphotograph, entangled with orality, tactility, and haptic engagement.The article argues that photographs cannot be understood through vi-sual content alone but through an embodied engagement with an affec-tive object world, which is both constitutive of and constituted throughsocial relations.

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THE SHAPE OF THE QUESTION

In his essay on the material sign, Keane(2005) asks, “What do material things makepossible?” (p. 191). I use this question as aspringboard to consider the impact and efficacyof material thinking in anthropological studiesof photography, photographs, and photo-graphic practices: What does material thinkingmake possible? Central to this discussion arequestions of what people do with photographs,or what “work” is expected of photographsas objects—in albums, on walls, at shrines, inpolitical protest, as gift exchange. Under whichmaterial conditions are photographs seen?In which ways are they things that demandembodied responses and emotional affects?

This is a field of inquiry that has establisheditself strongly in the past two decades, with no-table studies of both historical and contempo-rary photography in India, Indonesia, Vanuatu,and Australia for example (Pinney 1997, 2004,2008; Lydon 2005; Deger 2006; Geismar 2009;Strassler 2010; Geismar & Herle 2010), all ofwhich address the material and affective dynam-ics of photographs in some form or other. Al-though the emergence of such an approach has alonger history (see for instance Bourdieu 1965),it is no coincidence that the rise of a newlyfigured and newly theorized, Marxist-derivedmaterial culture studies in the 1970s and 1980s,which provided “a powerful critique of therole of objects in symbolic systems and socialstructures” (Buchli 2002, pp. 10–11), emergedat the same time as the increasing recognitionof the work of photographs. Although the firstengagements with photographs were in relationto anthropology’s own history framed largelythrough a politics of representation and adisquiet with anthropology’s own claims to au-thority (see Edwards 1992, 2011; Pinney 1992,2011), of the anthropology of visual systems,and in particular of photographic practices,had emerged strongly by the 1990s (Banks &Morphy 1997, Poole 1997, Pinney & Peterson2003). In their varying ways, such studiesbrought the material practices of photographyinto the center of the analysis. As part of that

broader material turn, anthropologists recog-nized the constitutive importance, agency, andaffective qualities of things in social relations.These approaches placed the photographicimage centrally within the complex relationsbetween humans and nonhumans, people andthings (Latour 2005). This position was com-plicated in intellectually important ways by thefact that photographs, especially in their globalconsumption, are often of people, thus blur-ring the distinction between person and thing,subject and object, photograph and referent insignificant ways. These relations circumscribethe interlinked dynamics of the photograph’ssocial use, material performance, and patternsof affect as they are put to work through theirmaterial substance (Belting 2011, p. 11).

This complex relationship is grounded inthe laminated quality of the nature of photog-raphy itself and photographs as objects, and theconsequent analytical positions on the circula-tion and use of, and engagement with, the mate-rial qualities and performances of photographsare premised on this lamination. Two key andrelated models have framed the field, modelsthat continue to have resonance. First is that ofsocial biography. Although this is somethingof an old war horse in material culture studiesnow, it nonetheless works as an effective tool inrelation to photographs because photographsare objects specifically made to have socialbiographies. Their social efficacy is premisedspecifically on their shifting roles and meaningsas they are projected into different spaces to dodifferent things. Kopytoff ’s (1986) biographicalmodel argued that objects cannot be under-stood through only one moment of their exis-tence but are marked through successive mo-ments of consumption across space and time.

Although taken up in relation to a wide rangeof cultural objects and institutions, such as mu-seums, social biography provided a productiveway of thinking about the lives of photographs.Pinney’s Camera Indica (1997), on the sociallives of Indian photographs, exemplifies this ap-proach, concerning itself with the “concrete”circulations of photographs (p. 10). Edwardsand others also applied this model to museum

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collections to explore the institutionalizationof anthropological photographs, for instance,the dynamics and material practices throughwhich “touristic” photographs of “native types”could become “scientific” through acts of con-sumption, archiving, or the shifting apprehen-sion of photographs as they were displayed indifferent institutional contexts (Edwards 2001,2002; Boast et al. 2001; Kratz 2001; Edwards &Hart 2004a; Geismar 2006). It was also a modelthat could accommodate, intellectually, the in-creasing demands on photographs to becomesomething else again through indigenous de-mands for access to and rights over photographswithin repatriation projects and highly chargedreclamations of history (Fienup-Riordan 1998;Edwards 2001; Bell 2003; Peers & Brown 2003;Brown & Peers 2006; Isaac 2007, pp. 116–18;Geismar & Herle 2010).

Although of course photographs can havelives and “come alive” (Knappet 2002, p. 98)in many ways, the biography model, while ef-fective, is, however, perhaps too linear to ac-commodate the analytical needs of the complexflows of multiple originals of photographs. Forphotographs have divergent, nonlinear, socialbiographies spread over divergent multiple ma-terial originals and multiple, dispersed, and at-omized performances. Nonetheless, it offereda way in which the temporal dynamics of pho-tographs could be integrated with the potentialof their materiality. The challenge in the mate-rial apprehension of photographs is for a modelthat can accommodate the double helix of thesimultaneous existence of objects that are bothsingular and multiple.

A closely related model to that of socialbiography, but one more specifically photo-graphic in its conception, and thus more ableto accommodate that demand for multiplicityof lives over a number of dimensions, is that ofvisual economy. Developed by Poole in rela-tion to the Peruvian Andes, this model presentsan alternative to what Poole argues is the morestatic and leveling model of visual culture(Poole 1997). This latter approach, she argued,fails to account for asymmetries on which somuch imaging practice is premised. Although

Materiality: thephysical and discursivecondition of havingmaterial substance

emerging strongly from a Foucauldian senseof the scopic regime and discursive practicesof knowledge, visual economy was nonethelessa strongly material argument, based in the cir-culation of images. Poole placed the meaningof photographs not in content alone but inthe fluid relationships between a photograph’sproduction, consumption, material forms,ownership, institutionalization, exchange,possession, and social accumulation, in whichequal weight is given to content and use value.

If these two models have largely come toform the standard analytical framework for thephotographic objects, a reformulation of the so-cial and material work of photographs emergesin Hevia’s more recent model of “photogra-phy complex.” This model gives Poole’s visualeconomy a more expansive dimension (Hevia2009). Taking a Latourian model, drawn fromactor network theory, this model maintains thatthe social saliency of objects and their efficacyis activated by networks of humans and nonhu-mans, people and things. It not only accountsfor the flow of photographs as material objects,but encompasses, and gives a more dynamicrole to, the technologies and structures thatgive photographs meaning. The photographycomplex constitutes a “novel form of agency”(Hevia 2009, p. 81) in which sets of photo-graphic relations and the complex purposes andpractices that entangle the photographic imagehave the capacity to mobilize new material real-ities. Given the nature of photographs and theirrelationships with concepts of the past, of mem-ory and more particularly anticipated memory,based in the photographic trace, such a modelof material efficacy and affect promises to be es-pecially productive. The network model placesphotographs in a fluid set of productive rela-tionships that “link or enumerate disparate en-tities without making assumptions about levelor hierarchy” (Strathern 1996, p. 522). Strath-ern argues that networks are socially expandedhybrids, and indeed hybrids are condensed net-works. This concept would appear to work wellwith photographs and the inherently hybridrange of values, relationships, desires, ideolo-gies, and representational strategies that are

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mobilized and performed through the multiplematerial forms of the photograph.

However, Strathern also cautioned thatnetworks might present endlessly proliferatinghybrids intersecting with an inherently “fragiletemporality” (1996, p. 523) in that networks arenot stable entities. This position resonates withthe recodable, repurposed, and remediatedphotograph, which functions ambiguously andsometimes precariously in shifting patterns ofsocial use. Also pertinent in this connection isGell’s model of the “distributed object.” The“distributed object,” created through differentmicrohistorical trajectories, yet discursivelyunited as a single object, is another usefulframework (Gell 1998, pp. 221–23) becauseit opens the space for a divergent, nonlinear,social biography of photographs spread overdivergent multiple material originals and mul-tiple, dispersed, and atomized performancesof photographic objects, which themselvesinitiate and act in social relations: “In theprocess [of viewing], photographs emerge asrelational or distributed objects enmeshed withinvarious networks of telling, seeing, and being,which extends beyond what a photograph’ssurface visually displays and incorporates whatis embodied in their materiality” (Bell 2008,pp. 124–25, emphasis in original). The mean-ing of photographs, material forms, and ideasof appropriateness shift through the doublehelix of image biography and the biography ofmaterial refiguration and remediation.

Underlying all these positions, as they relateto photographs, is the central ethnographicquestion, why do photographs as “things”matter for people? Mattering claims importantterritory in the debate about materiality, and itsimportance is a register of the shift from askingsemiotic questions about how images signify tocultural and phenomenological questions abouthow things mean (Miller 1998, 2005; Deger2006). Miller has argued that thinking about“how things matter” as opposed to signifybrings things into relations with practices andexperience, rather than, as signifying implies, adistanced analytical category that intellectual-izes responses to objects. The question “why do

things matter?” is therefore a way of allowingspace for the subjective and, as we shall see,it is a crucial one in the consideration of thehuge social and cultural investment made inthe possibilities of photographs. “Mattering”has, he argues, “a more diffused, almost senti-mental, association that is more likely to leadus to the concerns of those being studied thanthose doing the studying” (Miller 1998, pp. 3,11). This notion might be linked, as Pinney hasdone, with Lyotard’s “figure,” which “invokesa field of active intensity,” a “zone where ‘in-tensities are felt’” (Pinney 2005, p. 266). Heremateriality itself becomes a form of “figuralexcess,” which cannot be encompassed withinlinguistic and semiotic practices alone. Suchapproaches place photographs in subjectiveand emotional registers that cannot be reducedto the visual apprehension of an image. Thestories told with and around photographs, theimage held in the hand, features delineatedthrough the touch of the finger, an objectpassed around, a digital image printed andput in a frame and carefully placed, dusted,and cared for, are key registers through whichphotographic meanings are negotiated.

However, in the pursuit of the analyticalpotential of the photograph’s materiality it isimportant not to collapse into a dichotomousmodel that separates systems of abstract signsof semiotic approaches from material forms,because, of course, material properties arethemselves signifying properties. As Keane(2005) has demonstrated, the material doesnot precluded the signifying energies ofphotographs, but rather challenges the “radicalseparation of the sign from the material worldto open the possibility of a better understandingof “the historicity inherent to signs in their verymateriality” as signs exist within the “materialworld of consequences” [Keane 2005, p. 183(emphasis in original), p. 186]. In thinkingabout photographs materially, Keane’s work,though not on photography as such, suggestsnonetheless a fertile analytical ground in argu-ing that the semiotic signs must be understoodnot only as a mode of communicating abstract,linguistically framed, meaning, but as signs that

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function “within a material world of conse-quences” in which materiality is not merely anelement in the way that the sign is interpretedby its ‘reader’ but that it “gives rise to andtransforms modalities of action and subjectivityregardless of whether they are interpreted”(Keane 2005, p. 186, emphasis in original).Photographs behave precisely in this way.

Having outlined the theoretical and an-alytical landscape, I want now to addressmore specifically the ways in which materialapproaches to photographs have enrichedthe anthropological understanding of theseubiquitous objects. As I have suggested, theseanalytical positions constitute an overallunease with the dominant understandings ofphotographs in iconographical, semiotic, andlinguistic models of photographic meaning.Although this unease has a strong interdisci-plinary character, for instance in the work ofBal and of Mitchell who have argued for themultisensory and agentic nature of the visualimage (Bal 2003, Mitchell 2005), the formativeethnographic tradition of anthropology hasboth grounded and demonstrated the method-ological and theoretical potential of materialapproaches to photography, a position thathas become increasingly pertinent in the con-text of the inexorable spread of global media(Ginsberg et al. 2002, Pinney & Peterson 2003).

MATERIAL PRACTICES

The potential range of material practices andmaterial objects that comprises the category“photographs” is massive. Photographs existas contact prints, enlargements, postcards,lantern slides, or transparencies, for example.They exist as professional formats, snapshots,art works, or the products of bazaar and streetphotographers. They are glossy or matte, blackand white, colored or hand-tinted. They arecollaged, overpainted, cropped, framed andreframed, placed in albums, hung on walls,kept in secret places, written on, exchanged,and sometimes destroyed or defaced in anact of self-conscious violence (Batchen 2004,Edwards & Hart 2004b). They are sung to,danced with, paraded, and placed on religious

Index: Inphotographic theory“index” describes therelationship between aphotograph and itssubject, the formerpointing to the latter

objects in assemblages of affect (see, for ex-ample, Peterson 1985, Edwards 1999, Brown& Peers 2006, Deger 2006, Van Dijck 2007,Vokes 2008, Empson 2011). They are joinednow by a whole range of digital images (whichare not in the strictest sense “photographs” butare popularly described as such). These aspectsare beyond the scope of this review; however,digital images are enmeshed in a range ofmaterial practices and formations that bothfulfill and exceed the social practices of analogphotographs (Van Dijck 2007, Rose 2010).Furthermore, photographs, as objects definedin part by their reproducibility and potentialrepurposing, are objects with active biographiesin a constant state of flux. They are reframed,replaced, rearranged; negatives become prints,prints become lantern slides or postcards, IDphotographs become family treasures, privatephotographs become archives, analog objectsbecome electronic digital code, private imagesbecome public property, and photographs ofscientific production are reclaimed as culturalheritage (Bell 2003, Edwards 2003, Brown &Peers 2006, Geismar 2006, Geismar & Herle2010, Strassler 2010).

A major anthropological contribution tothinking on photographs and photographymore generally has been through its engage-ment with the social saliency of the photo-graph’s material significance. Anthropology hasproduced ethnographically grounded accountsof photography as an everyday phenomenologyof the photographic object, considered in con-junction with a careful attention to the photo-graph’s ontology. This work has constituted ananthropological decentering of the normativeassumption about the nature of photographsand has challenged and complicated the domi-nant categories of Western photographic anal-ysis: realism, referent, trace, index, icon, and thepower of representation. For instance, in somepopular practices in India the “reality” effectof a photograph is not located in the indexicaltrace of the image itself but in the way an imag-ined and dreamlike self is constructed throughadditive techniques of overpainting and collag-ing, practices that have strong parallels in West


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Africa (Pinney 1997; Wendl & Behrend 1998;Haney 2010, pp. 126–50). Such work points tothe provincial nature of Eurocentric notions ofphotography (Pinney & Peterson 2003, Wright2004) and demonstrates the inseparability ofsocial practices, material practices, and imagingpractices, as material forms are used to expand,enhance, and cohere the image content itself.

I explore briefly two interconnected ele-ments of the material practices of photography,which have marked the anthropological liter-ature in different ways. In both, the materialqualities of photographs are laden with signi-fying properties and demonstrate the ways inwhich photographs are put to work in social re-lations. First is the idea of “placing.” I use thisterm to mean the work of a photographic ob-ject in social space through which questions ofmateriality, adjacency, assemblage, and embod-ied relations frame the meaning of the image.Second, to consider the material conditions ofphotographs themselves, I consider the remedi-ation and repurposing of photographic images:the material translation of a photograph fromone kind of object to another, and from onepurpose to another. My example is the ubiqui-tous ID card photograph because it exemplifiesthe complex double helix of a photograph’s ma-terial biography. In the following section I thenconsider the embodied and sensory encoun-ters with the photographic image implied byboth these performances of photographs: plac-ing and remediation.

Material culture studies have stressed theimportance of the spatial dynamics of objects.The placing of photographs as objects in an as-semblage of other objects and spaces is integralto the work asked of photographs and humanrelations with them. Placing is defined as asense of appropriateness of particular materialforms to particular sets of social expectationand desire within space and time. Such ideasof appropriateness and affordance in materialforms saturate the ethnographies of photo-graphic practice. As Drazin & Frohlich (2007)argue in their analysis of the practices of familyphotographs in British homes, photographs“demand of us that they be treated right”;

that is, there is a sense of “morally correct”material practices around photographs (pp. 51,54). This notion relates to Rose’s conceptof “affordances” and to Goffman’s notion of“appropriateness”—the culturally determinedaccordance of content, genre, and materialperformance, in that the social work of pho-tographs as material objects allows for them tobe treated only in certain ways (Rose 2010).

Appropriateness is often articulated throughmaterial forms and additive material interven-tions in relation to the image itself, such asoverpainting or collaging. But these materialinterventions are activated through the plac-ing of photographs appropriately into wider as-semblages. The processes is well demonstratedin Empson’s (2011) study of the photomon-tages developed by Buriad nomads in Mongolia.These photographic constructions are carefullyplaced, both within the frame itself and withinthe broader assemblages of domestic space. As-semblages of images, often arranged to expresskin links and social networks, are placed fordisplay on the household chest, where “itemsof wealth and prestige are deliberately dis-played on the chest’s surface” and visitors areinvited to admire and to touch (Empson 2011,p. 117). The placing exactly replicates that ofthe shamanistic ancestral figures of pre-Sovietdays (p. 125). Through placing, the photographbecomes a statement of its social importanceand efficacy because it carries too a sense ofthe placing of the image within social rela-tions. Photographs are used to cohere both kinand other relations through practices of adja-cency and exchange. Photographs to be “treatedright” must be in the “right place” and withthe “right people,” in that inappropriatenessof forms and treatment can perhaps have seri-ous consequences. For conversely, in many in-stances a “misplacing” or “mistreatment” of theimage risks the potential for witchcraft and in-appropriate or undesired control; Behrend de-scribes, for instance, the connection betweenwitchcraft and the material destruction of pho-tographs in Uganda (Behrend 2003).

Viewing photographs demands a certainform of behavior and etiquette in how images

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are both viewed and managed. For instance,Empson (2011) notes how “[d]ifferent imagesare. . .displayed at different seasonal places, al-lowing for change and adaption according todifferent needs” (p. 132). In another example,Vokes has explored ways in which albums aredeveloped in the final months of the life of AIDSvictims in Uganda (Vokes 2008). These albumscarry sets of social relations and intersubjectivi-ties. They are carefully crafted self-conscious“biographical objects” through which storiescan be told (Hoskins 1998)—statements of selfand experience, intended as image-objects thatwill outlive their makers. These albums are af-fective objects because they are conceived of as,on the one hand, objects with a cathartic af-fect for the bereaved, and on the other, they“confer upon the deceased a particularly ef-fective on-going ‘presence’ and ‘agency’ in thelives of the living” as an indistinguishable “life-form,” articulated through the material object(Vokes 2008, p. 361). As is often so in the caseof albums, to fulfill their social role, the albumsmust be in the right hands, both literally andmetaphorically.

Questions of identity and the social agencyof photographs bring me to the second exampleI consider. As I have suggested, photographsare called on to do their work in a multiplicity ofways, and these serial demands of repurposingcarry an implicit requirement for remediationor re-placing. The material performance of im-ages over space and time is amply demonstratedby one of the most widespread photographicforms but also one of the most widely ap-propriated and remediated: the humble andubiquitous ID card photograph. ID cardsphotographs, as instrumental visual forms, areassociated with the definition, registration,and control of the civil identity by the state,from everyday banal state management to theloathed and contested passbooks in apartheidSouth Africa. But as a highly normalized andaccessible visual form, ID card photographyhas had a major quantitative and qualitativeimpact on photographic practices and practicesof visual consumption globally, part of thesocial, economic, and commercial processes

and networks through which images areobtained.

ID photographs are a form found extensivelyin photographic montages and albums, becausethey remain, for many people, the only accessto photographs and photographic memorializa-tion. For instance, a number of anthropologistshave noted the way in which ID cards are cutup on the death of its holder to retrieve thephotograph, often the only one in existence, asa memorializing object within the family andhousehold. Unlike the replaceable and repro-ducible object of Western assumption, the pho-tographic print becomes a precious object thatcarries a direct physical connection with the de-ceased. In such uses, the role of the ID cardphotography is realized not necessarily throughremediation of the image itself into another for-mat through its reproducibility, but through theremoval of what is perceived as a unique pho-tographic object into other social uses.

Whatever the precise processes throughwhich new uses are achieved, ID card pho-tographs famously fit Sekula’s notion of “re-pressive” as opposed to “honorific” portraiture(Sekula 1992, p. 345). Although photographshave always encompassed a dual possibilitybetween the poles of repressive and honorific,what is significant is the way in which therepurposing of photographs into newly desiredfunctions is effected by material practices suchas enlargement, overpainting, recoloring, fram-ing, reframing, photocopying, juxtaposing,pasting into albums, collaging, or transfor-mation into objects of political confrontation(Pinney 1997; Werner 2001; Noble 2009,pp. 68, 70). These material processes shapethe signifying possibilities of the photographand allow the image to be “transposed fromone realm of significance to another” (Strassler2010, p. 27), from the state management ofits citizens to the world of affect and intimatesocial relations, and from public to privaterealms. As such ID photographs demonstratethe way in which photographs are revalorizedand reimagined, and new identities and sets ofconnection forged, through material practicesthat mobilize content in different ways. These


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Haptic: while usedprimarily of touch, invisual theory it is usedto imply a widermultisensoryembodied perception

practices “demonstrate how the state’s gazeis both extended and refigured as it seepsinto popular ‘ways of seeing’” (Strassler 2010,p. 147), while at the same time changes in stateregulations around ID cards, from black andwhite to color for instance, inflect the wayin which those seepages work (Werner 2001;Zeitlyn 2010, p. 454).

Such processes are not, of course, confinedto ID cards, but the radical shifts in meaningand the reinstrumentalizing that accompaniesthe repurposing and remediation of these pho-tographs and the claims made of them high-light the process of a material, visual economyand social biography, the analysis of which hasshaped so much anthropological work.

THE SENSORY PHOTOGRAPHWhat is clear from these examples is that theunderstanding of photographs cannot be con-tained in the relation between the visual andits material support but rather through an ex-panded sensory realm of the social in whichphotographs are put to work. The shifts frommeaning alone to mattering and from contentto social process are integral to material ap-proaches to photographs and have demandedan analytical approach that acknowledges theplurality of modes of experience of the photo-graph as tactile, sensory things that exist in timeand space and are constituted by and throughsocial relations.

Emerging from debates on materiality andthose around the primacy of vision, especiallyin cross-cultural environments, there has beenan increasing analytical interest in photographyas a phenomenologically and sensorially inte-grated medium, embodied and experienced byboth its makers and its users. It is a position thatemerges from a confluence of work that, on theone hand, challenges the assumed hierarchy ofthe senses and the primacy of vision, positionedin a broader notion of sensory scholarship(Feld 1990, Stoller 1997, Howes 2003) and, onthe other, phenomenological approaches to thework of affect in the apprehension of objects.The idea of photographs as agentic objectsthat elicit affect has its roots in Gell’s analysis

of the art object but is heavily inflected withideas from phenomenological anthropologyconcerned with embodied constructions andnegotiation of experience—a “being in theworld” (Feld 1990, Csordas 1994, Jackson1996, Ingold 2011). The development ofthese ideas has progressed within the emerg-ing debate on materiality. What Keane hasdescribed as “bundled” signifying qualitiesare also affective qualities, hence efficacy oftheir signifying properties as the bundling ofsensory and material affects in which an objectis defined through the copresence of the visualwith other qualities—such as texture, weight,or size—which invite tactility, gesture, andembodied apprehension (Keane 2005, p. 188).

These arguments have provided a fertileground from which to consider how pho-tographs are made to mean in relation to socialactions across a range of sensory experienceand in which different perceptual situationsdemand different sensual configurations,composed of sound, gesture, touch, language,song, and haptic relations. These argumentsinsist on a sense of the relationship between thebody and the photographic images, how usersposition themselves in relation to photographicimages, how they view, handle, wear, and movewith photographic images and perform a senseof appropriateness through relationships withthe photographic image (Harris 2004, Brown& Peers 2006). Pinney (2001), concernedto reinstitute the analytical significance andweight of performative embodiment within theeveryday usage of images, and in “understand-ing photographs” in particular, has helped thetheoretical formulation of this position. In anessay, itself a response to Gell’s work, Pinney(2001) developed the term “corpothetics” as“the sensory embrace of images, the bodilyengagement that most people . . . have withartworks.” This position indicates not a lack inimages but a rich and complex praxis throughwhich people articulate their eyes and theirbodies in relation to pictures (pp. 158, 160–61).

Similar ideas of the relation to the multisen-sory nature of images have been argued too inart history and visual culture studies. Mitchell

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(2005) has argued that there are no “visual me-dia” as such, rather that “all media are, fromthe standpoint of sensory modality, ‘mixed me-dia’” (p. 257). Instead he presents images as“braided,” in that “one sensory channel or semi-otic function is woven together with anothermore or less seamlessly” (p. 262). Likewise Bal(2003) had pointed out the absurdity of an es-sentialized or pure form of “the visual”: “Theact of looking is profoundly ‘impure’. . . . [T]hisimpure quality is also . . . applicable to othersense-based activities: listening, reading, tast-ing, smelling. This impurity makes such activ-ities mutually permeable, so that listening andreading can also have visuality to them” (p. 9).Fundamental to these models is the acknowl-edgment that in the apprehension of the visual,one sensation is often integrally related to, andfollowed by, another to form continuous pat-terns of experience, representing a dense socialembedding of an object.

Consequently, there has been, as Taussig(1993) has argued, a rethinking of vision inrelation to other sensory modalities. The rela-tionship between orality and sound has been aparticularly important strand in thinking aboutphotographs and one that has been gatheringwith increasing force within anthropology.This is especially so in work of “visual repa-triation” and the articulation of histories, aspeople use the material forms of photographsas foci for telling stories and claiming histories,singing, and chanting (Poignant 1996, Brown& Peers 2006, Edwards 2006). As anthropo-logical studies, they have addressed the roleof photographs in the processes of identity,history, and memory. What are the materialand affective performances through which pho-tographs might become a form of history orengagement with, and reclamation, of the past(see, for instance, Fienup-Riordan 1998, Bell2003, Brown & Peers 2006, Geismar & Herle2010)? These studies have revealed a range ofcultural responses to the ontological insistenceof photographs—that “it was there”—an“ectoplasm of ‘what-had-been’” (Barthes 1984,p. 87). The apprehension of photographs inthese contexts is premised on the content of

the image (MacDonald 2003; Smith 2003;Wright 2004; Deger 2006; Edwards 2006; Bell2008, 2010; Vokes 2008; Strassler 2010). Thisis not, however, necessarily simply a verbalizedforensic description of the content, but moreimportantly a talking with and talking tophotographs in which photographs becomeinterlocutors. Photographs connect to life asexperienced, to “images, feelings, sentiments,desires and meanings,” but they also havethe potential for “a process of enactment andrhetorical assertion” and as “nodes wherevarious discourses temporarily intersect inparticular ways” (Hoskins 1998, p. 6).

Many studies have focused, for instance, onthe key relations between photographs, theirplace in the negotiation of relations between thepast and the present, the living and the dead, thespirit world and the future (Wright 2004, Deger2006, Smith & Vokes 2008), and the powerfulconnection between the photographic object,as a relic held in the hand and the physical con-nection to the subject. Halvaksz (2010), for ex-ample, has shown how for the Biangai peoplein Papua New Guinea, multiple social identi-ties, the living and the dead, are folded into thevery materiality of photographs, as photographsrender the ancestors literally coeval with theliving. What this example demonstrates is an-other aspect that has informed thinking aboutphotographs, and their social efficacy: the pho-tograph as a form of partible self. This no-tion draws on the work of anthropologists suchas Strathern in which individuals are made upof different composite and divisible relations.Photographs are thus not merely surrogates forthe absent, but powerful actants in social space“intertwined with a larger process of maintain-ing different forms of sociality and personhood”(Empson 2011, p. 109).

The detailed ethnographies of photographicuse also give us a clear sense of the way in whichphotographs are absorbed into other forms andpractices of narration. Photographs are seldomtalked about without being touched, stroked,kissed, clasped, and integrated into a range ofgestures. Furthermore, the flow of narrationand the handling of photographs, as they are


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passed around, is often determined by cultur-ally specific hierarchies of authority, knowl-edge, and the right to speak, notably in kingroups, age sets, or gender divisions (Niessen1991, Poignant 1992, Bell 2003). As such, pho-tographs become important parts of the pro-cesses through which community coherence isarticulated (Brown & Peers 2006). One ex-ample is the way in which photographs workin a number of Australian aboriginal commu-nities, themselves dispersed through attenu-ated kinship ties and urban migration (Poignant1996; Smith 2003, p. 20; Deger 2006). In suchcontexts, the performances of narrated pho-tographs are demonstrated in how photographsbecome embodied within social relations asactive constituents of social networks. Pho-tographs move as tactile objects around groupsof people. It is again in these contexts that thework of Gell on the agency of objects has fo-cused on the ways in which objects, here pho-tographs, elicit both effect and affect, as thingsthat, with echoes of Latour, are integrally con-stitutive of and constituted through social pro-cesses. Its application to photographs intersectswith the ontology of the photographic image it-self in a multisensory mediation in experiencein which sensory effects are social effects.

However, it is important to note here toothat although the literature often equatesorality with the spoken voice and narration (forexample, Langford 2001), in understandingthe use and impact of photographs’ narrativeenvironments, paralinguistic sounds—sobbing,sighing, laughing—are of major communica-tive importance, just as the silences are filledwith gesture and touch (Edwards 2006). Thecrucial point of these ethnographies is thatphotographic meaning is made through aconfluence of sensory experience, in whichthe visual is only a part of the efficacy of theimage. This notion is powerfully demonstratedby an instance when a decayed, much handledphotograph, worn away by touch, handed toChris Wright in the Solomon Islands was stillseen as being of someone and treasured as such,long after the material decay of the photographhad rendered it illegible (Wright 2007).

Finally, these sensory responses to pho-tographs are integrally related to questions ofplacing, discussed above, because the placing ofphotographs and bodily interactions with themdemand specific sets of relations (Hanganu2004; Pinney 2004; Wright 2004, p. 81; Parrott2009). The haptics of placing and adjacency aresignificant in more than just the domestic space,however. They are equally pertinent as formsof political embodiment, such as demonstratedin the parading of photographs or the publicdefilement of photographs in protest (Strassler2010). Such engagements with the laminatedphotographic object are part of a larger photo-graphic claim to citizenship and political power(for an extended discussion of such issues, seeAzoulay 2008). For instance, resonating withPinney’s concept of “corpothetics,” Harris hasdescribed the ways in which Tibetans sleptwith the soles of their feet pointing at pho-tographic portraits of Mao Tse Tung (oftenthemselves heavily materially mediated by over-painting), constituting a major insult (Harris2004), whereas Strassler describes a hapticallyexperienced landscape of images that devel-oped in Indonesia in the political protests ofthe 1990s. This included the Outdoor Exhibi-tion in which students produced a moving ex-hibition of held, framed photographs of protestand violence, which was processed in the streets,and the pictures were held up in moments ofstillness within the procession (Strassler 2010,pp. 246–47).

CLOSING THOUGHTS

All these processes render photographs pro-foundly social objects of agency that cannot beunderstood outside the social conditions of thematerial existence of their social function—thework that they do. The ideas outlined here havebeen engaged with over a wide range of socio-photographic practices. Importantly, some ofthese practices are not, on the surface, primar-ily “photographic”; rather they demonstratethe way that photographs, their material forms,and their social purposes play through a rangeof practices and concepts such as elegance,

230 Edwards

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social exchange, and of course, memorialization(Buckley 2000/2001, 2006; Drazin & Frohlich2007). For instance, Buckley traces the complexrelationship between photographs and theirsocial uses, concepts of elegance and moder-nity, and what he describes as “the aestheticsof citizenship,” which are performed throughsets of relationships between the colonial andpostcolonial imaging practices in The Gambia(Buckley 2006). He also suggests ways in whichanthropological studies of photographic prac-tices can illuminate not only the practices ofphotography itself. They can also furnish waysthrough which material and sensory approachesto photographs might illuminate other broaderanthropological questions, for instance reli-gious experience (Klima 2002), ideas of modernidentity (Hirsch 2004, Buckley 2006), or claimsto sovereignty, cultural property, and land(Bell 2003, Harris 2004, Brown & Peers 2006).

What all this work does is bring a theoryof effects into the center of the understand-ing of photographs and displace the analyticaldominance of looking at the image alone. Thispractice does not, of course, invalidate or elidethe content of the image. Indeed the contentof the image must remain at the center becauseit is the basis through which photographs areunderstood. But what the material turn in vi-sual anthropology has also made possible, to re-turn to Keane’s question with which I started,is the way in which those understandings arematerially grounded in the experience of theworld as users of photographic objects, not sim-ply viewers of images. Arguably too, the ethno-graphic density now emerging in photographicstudies in anthropology presents an opportu-nity to rethink the theoretical tools throughwhich photographs and photography might beunderstood more broadly.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that mightbe perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

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AN41-FrontMatter ARI 23 August 2012 12:10

Annual Review ofAnthropology

Volume 41, 2012Contents

Prefatory Chapter

Ancient Mesopotamian Urbanism and Blurred Disciplinary BoundariesRobert McC. Adams � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Archaeology

The Archaeology of Emotion and AffectSarah Tarlow � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 169

The Archaeology of MoneyColin Haselgrove and Stefan Krmnicek � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 235

Phenomenological Approaches in Landscape ArchaeologyMatthew H. Johnson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 269

Paleolithic Archaeology in ChinaOfer Bar-Yosef and Youping Wang � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 319

Archaeological Contributions to Climate Change Research:The Archaeological Record as a Paleoclimaticand Paleoenvironmental ArchiveDaniel H. Sandweiss and Alice R. Kelley � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 371

Colonialism and Migration in the Ancient MediterraneanPeter van Dommelen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 393

Archaeometallurgy: The Study of Preindustrial Mining and MetallurgyDavid Killick and Thomas Fenn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 559

Rescue Archaeology: A European ViewJean-Paul Demoule � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 611

Biological Anthropology

Energetics, Locomotion, and Female Reproduction:Implications for Human EvolutionCara M. Wall-Scheffler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �71

vii

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Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of theHuman-Primate InterfaceAgustin Fuentes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 101

Human Evolution and the Chimpanzee Referential DoctrineKen Sayers, Mary Ann Raghanti, and C. Owen Lovejoy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 119

Chimpanzees and the Behavior of Ardipithecus ramidusCraig B. Stanford � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 139

Evolution and Environmental Change in Early Human PrehistoryRichard Potts � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 151

Primate Feeding and Foraging: Integrating Studiesof Behavior and MorphologyW. Scott McGraw and David J. Daegling � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 203

Madagascar: A History of Arrivals, What Happened,and Will Happen NextRobert E. Dewar and Alison F. Richard � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 495

Maternal Prenatal Nutrition and Health in Grandchildrenand Subsequent GenerationsE. Susser, J.B. Kirkbride, B.T. Heijmans, J.K. Kresovich, L.H. Lumey,

and A.D. Stein � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 577

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

Media and Religious DiversityPatrick Eisenlohr � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �37

Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaningin the Study of Sociolinguistic VariationPenelope Eckert � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �87

Documents and BureaucracyMatthew S. Hull � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 251

The Semiotics of Collective MemoriesBrigittine M. French � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 337

Language and Materiality in Global CapitalismShalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 355

Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futuresand Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological SurrogatesDavid Zeitlyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 461

Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic EthnographyPaja Faudree � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 519

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International Anthropology and Regional Studies

Contemporary Anthropologies of Indigenous AustraliaTess Lea � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 187

The Politics of PerspectivismAlcida Rita Ramos � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 481

Anthropologies of Arab-Majority SocietiesLara Deeb and Jessica Winegar � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 537

Sociocultural Anthropology

Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal RelationsRebecca Cassidy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �21

The Politics of the AnthropogenicNathan F. Sayre � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �57

Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the ImageElizabeth Edwards � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 221

Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate ChangeHeather Lazrus � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 285

Enculturating Cells: The Anthropology, Substance, and Scienceof Stem CellsAditya Bharadwaj � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 303

Diabetes and CultureSteve Ferzacca � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 411

Toward an Ecology of MaterialsTim Ingold � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 427

Sport, Modernity, and the BodyNiko Besnier and Susan Brownell � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 443

Theme I: Materiality

Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the ImageElizabeth Edwards � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 221

The Archaeology of MoneyColin Haselgrove and Stefan Krmnicek � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 235

Documents and BureaucracyMatthew S. Hull � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 251

Phenomenological Approaches in Landscape ArchaeologyMatthew H. Johnson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 269

Contents ix

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Language and Materiality in Global CapitalismShalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 355

Toward an Ecology of MaterialsTim Ingold � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 427

Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and ContingentPasts. Archives as Anthropological SurrogatesDavid Zeitlyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 461

Theme II: Climate Change

Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal RelationsRebecca Cassidy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �21

The Politics of the AnthropogenicNathan F. Sayre � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �57

Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of theHuman-Primate InterfaceAgustin Fuentes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 101

Evolution and Environmental Change in Early Human PrehistoryRichard Potts � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 151

Sea Change: Island Communities and Climate ChangeHeather Lazrus � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 285

Archaeological Contributions to Climate Change Research:The Archaeological Record as a Paleoclimatic andPaleoenvironmental ArchiveDaniel H. Sandweiss and Alice R. Kelley � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 371

Madagascar: A History of Arrivals, What Happened,and Will Happen NextRobert E. Dewar and Alison F. Richard � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 495

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 32–41 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 627

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 32–41 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 631

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found athttp://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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