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Colonialism, racism and visual anthropology in Japan: Photography, Anthropology and History part II

Published on December 28, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, history, indigenous people / minorities, Visual Anthropology

Here is the second part of the review of the book Photography, Anthropology and History, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards.

This time, Tereza Kuldova reviews Ka F. Wong’s article about one of the first Japanese anthropologists, who became popular in Japan because of his use of photography: Torii Ryūzō.

Wong shows in his article how Ryuzo’s photographs illustrate the colonial relationships at that time. Ryuzo went on fieldwork two decades before Malinowski in order to document the indigenous Taiwan population.

Tereza Kuldova questions some of Wong’s conclusions:

Review (Part II): Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame (eds. Morton, Ch. & Edwards, E.), Ashgate. 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-7909-7.

Tereza Kuldova, PhD fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

The article Visual Methods in Early Japanese Anthropology: Torii Ryuzo in Taiwan by Ka F. Wong discusses the beginnings of the Japanese anthropology and the personality of one of the first Japanese anthropologists, who became popular in Japan because of his use of photography, as a ‘scientific’ method of investigation and documentation of the Other, during his fieldwork.

We are talking here about Torii Ryuzo, a truly self-made anthropologist, born in 1870 in Tokushima in Shikoku, he received only second-grade education, but that did not prevent him from reading and educating himself on his own.

Torii was hired as a specimen classifier in the Anthropology Research Institute at the Tokyo Imperial University by the professor in physical anthropology Tsuboi Shogoro. “Under his mentor’s patronage and encouragement, Torii began his anthropological career, first as a fieldworker, and eventually as one of the most prominent Japanese anthropologists of the twentieth century” (Wong 2009:173). Eventually, “in 1922, he became associate professor at the Tokyo Imperial University and succeeded Tsuboi as the second chair of the Anthropological Institute” (Wong 2009:185).

As Wong notes, he was a rather special occurrence in the Japanese anthropology, because he was “a Japanese anthropologist working in the manner of a European ethnographer within a colonial context” (Wong 2009:180).
His popularity and rise as an anthropologist can be related firstly to his use of photography, in the manner of the Western anthropologists, as a tool of scientific understanding and documenting of the Other and secondly it can be related to the emergence of Japan as a colonial power.

Wong focuses on the analysis of the photographic legacy of Torii Ryuzo in the context of the modernization of Japan and the era of Japanese colonization.

Wong tries to view the photographs in the light of their own ‘agency’ and thereby to understand the nature of the contact between Ryuzo and the indigenous Taiwanese. When Japan became colonial power it could “count itself a member of the once exclusive Western club of colonial empires, and the native population of Taiwan provided fresh material for Japanese anthropologists to exhibit their intellectual virtuosity” (Wong 2009:175). Ryuzo thus set out for a fieldwork in Taiwan, two decades before Bronislaw Malinowski, and began documenting the indigenous Taiwan population, mostly within the Western style framework, using the methods of natural sciences, such as anthropometric and statistical techniques. “The camera was Torii’s tool for disseminating a vision of indigenous life of this newly colonized island to wider Japanese public” (Wong 2009:177).

Drawing on the western scholarship Torii divided the indigenous people of Taiwan “along perceived racial lines – such as by physical type, language, costume, body, decoration, architecture and material culture – into nine major groups: the Ami, Bunun, Yami, Paiwan, Tayal, Tsou, Siuo, and Salisan” (Wong 2009:177). Most of the photographs that he took were of anthropometric imagery, but he took pictures of people in various social contexts, pictures of landscape and houses, of material culture and the Japanese presence, as well.

Wong shows in his article how the photographs illustrate the colonial relationships. He points out the anthropologist in Western clothes standing and posing with the natives mostly sitting or squatting dressed in indigenous clothing. He argues, in rather classical manner, that “Torii’s anthropometric images mirrored a legitimized racial superiority in the name of scientific representation, and the subjects thereby became ‘dehumanized’ as ‘passive objects of the study’” (Wong 2009:179-80). He observes that the natives “seem to be purposely lined up in formation or staged for display, implying a power relation at play for the camera. Even those pictures that were meant to capture the natives in their natural milieu seem to project rigidity and theatricality” (Wong 2009:180).

Wong shows how photographs can be perceived as ‘social artefacts’ that convey political and personal agendas of their creator. In case of Torii the visualization of himself on the photographs with the natives certainly helped to establish him as a professional anthropologist.

This being said, I believe that there is one dimension of the analysis of photography that Wong presented, which is missing. That is the consideration of the technical and practical dimension of taking photography at that point of time. Imagine a heavy machine which for a photography to be taken needs immovable objects. If we think about the ‘theatricality and rigidity’, which Wong describes and attributes it to the demonstration of colonial power over the subjects, is it not also a natural consequence of the nature of the technology used in capturing of the natives?

Further, Wong focuses for example on the clothes worn by the anthropologist as compared to the clothes worn by the natives and interprets this in terms of power relations. At this point, the images from my own fieldwork in the 21st century India came to my mind. When looking at them, you can see me definitely dressed differently that the most of the women in India did. On photographs with them, I definitely look as a foreigner. In the end my photographs are not that different from those of Torii, though maybe his are more ‘rigid’ because of the technology he used, while mine may seem more spontaneous, taken in between conversations.
When turning the attention to the ‘postures’, which Wong notes, when I look at my photographs in that way, I must say that I tend to sit with my leg over the other, while some of the women I was working with tended to sit on the bed or floor with their legs crossed under themselves. However, I cannot claim that any of that, can from my viewpoint be interpreted in terms of power relations (at least in the sense of oppressive type of colonial power relations), though someone may frame it within west vs. rest dichotomy and draw some conclusions from that. At the same time, I believe that these would have little to do with my own relations to the people on the photographs.

Now, using the medium of photography, which at that time needed immovable persons, and objects in front of the objective, and thus necessarily appeared more rigid that nowadays, how could Torii possibly otherwise represent what he encountered? Whatever picture he would have taken would be by Wong and possibly by others necessarily interpreted in the context of the era of Japanese colonial power.

Now I do not want to say that this critique or line of thought is unproductive. What I want to point out is that, instead of looking at the photographs of the anthropologist and the natives and judging from his and their clothes or postures, when trying to understand the messages of the photographs which Torii took, we have to look firstly at what he did not take photographs of as compared to what he wanted us to see, as it is there, where the agenda and context lies. This line of thought is somehow present in Wong’s text, but in my view it should have come out stronger, as it is this what gives us the insight into the practices of representation.

>> Part I of Tereza Kuldova’s review about “Anthropology and the Cinematic Imagination”

>> more information about the book

>> read the introduction by Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton

SEE ALSO:

Anthropology, photography and racism

Kerim Friedman’s dissertation: Learning “Local” Languages: Passive Revolution, Language Markets, and Aborigine Education in Taiwan

Photography as research tool: More engaged Kurdish anthropology

Karen Nakamura’s Photoethnography blog

Visual Anthropology of Japan blog

Here is the second part of the review of the book Photography, Anthropology and History, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards.

This time, Tereza Kuldova reviews Ka F. Wong's article about one of the first Japanese anthropologists, who…

How can anthropology help us understand Swat and Taliban?

Published on October 2, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, journal articles / papers, politics

The Swat Pathan have been the subject of classic ethnographies in anthropology for many years. Now they are at the centre of a bigger battle for control between Taliban, Pakistan, the U.S. etc. – a <a href="conflict that forced more than one million people to flee their homes.

What, if anything, can anthropologists contribute to understand and ameliorate the conflicts that rage in this region that in December 2008 was captured by the Taliban? In an interview with Gustaaf Houtman in the new issue of Anthropology Today, anthropologist Akbar Ahmed looks at the latest developments among the Swat Pathan.

He says, anthropologists can help in two ways – one of them is visiting Swat:

Anthropology can help on two levels. Anthropologists can use the internet, broadcast media and the press – and conferences – to argue for a strong, clean judicial and administrative structure in Swat. They can use their understanding of Swat social structure and history to explain why it collapsed and what can be done to replace it. They must not underestimate the power of outside comment on the bureaucrats and politicians of Islamabad. To their own home audiences, they can explain the significance of Swat in the larger context of Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan).

On another level, anthropologists can help by visiting Swat, in the safe areas of course, and arranging for colleagues and students to help in the reconstruction of the educational system. Girls’ schools in particular need to be rebuilt and then organized. A visit to Swat will thus not only provide moral satisfaction but also the promise of advancing anthropological knowledge of a fascinating area.

“Swat was an anthropologist’s paradise waiting to be discovered when Fredrik Barth first went there to conduct fieldwork in the 1950s”, he says. “It was a remote, tiny and scenic state up in the foothills of the Himalayas in north Pakistan”:

Here, the legendary Wali of Swat ruled over fiercely independent tribesmen who lived according to custom and tradition. Following his fieldwork, Barth wrote Political leadership among Swat Pathans (summary), published in 1959. In it he analysed the political alliances and networks around ‘the Pakhtun chief, with his following, and the Saint with his following’ (ibid.: 4). The book became an instant classic in the discipline and established Barth as a towering figure in it.

When Akbar Ahmed registered for a PhD in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1973 he read Barth’s work on Swat “with admiration”. But Barths “neat theoretical constructions” did not match the Swat society that he knew through his wife Zeenat, who was from Swat, so he went on to research and write Millennium and charisma among Pathans: A critical essay in social anthropology that was published in 1976.

Since then many articles and several books have been written about Swat. One of the two he mentions is written by a native female anthropologist of Swat Amineh Ahmed (his daughter actually). Her book “Sorrow and Joy among Muslim Women The Pukhtun’s of Northern Pakistan” gives us, he says, “fascinating insights normally denied to men”.

How has Swat changed from the time of Barth, Gustaaf Houtman asks. Akbar Ahmed answers:

Barth wrote over half a century ago. Swat then had a clear-cut political structure in place: the central authority of the Wali in alliance with the powerful Khans. Religious clerics worked for the Wali in his mosques or were hired locally by the Khans. There was little challenge to the Wali’s rule. He could impose his will on the state. He introduced compulsory education for both boys and girls. He invited Catholic nuns to open a girls’ school and gave them protection. He encouraged archaeologists to come and dig for ancient Greek and Buddhist statues and stupas. The magnificent statue of Buddha at the entrance of Swat came to symbolize the spirit of the state and its ruler.

I was fortunate in having visited Swat during the rule of the Wali, after he was removed and after his death. Over the last few decades I have seen a steady decline. The Wali’s rule was replaced by officials of the government of Pakistan. Pakistani bureaucracy became increasingly known for its incompetence and corruption. A disputed case between two parties which would have normally taken a couple of hours in the Wali’s courts would now drag on for years. The Khans too began to leave Swat for the bigger cities of Pakistan. Absentee landlords soon found their authority challenged. Their relationship with their tenants began to break down.

Why could this happen. Into the vacuum created by the disappearance of the Wali and the fading of the Khans stepped the religious clerics, he explains:

Mullah Fazlullah grew in importance over the years and gained notoriety in Pakistan through his FM radio station: to Swatis he came to be known as ‘Radio Mullah’. He thundered against the corruption and incompetence of the administration. He incited tenants against the Khans and their un-Islamic ways. He said he would bring the Sharia or Islamic law which would ensure justice and law and order for ordinary people. Swatis flocked to the Mullah’s standard. Women gave him their jewellery, with prayers that he succeed in his mission.

The Taliban now saw Swat as a safe haven and flocked to it. They came from the tribal areas in Pakistan and beyond. Soon Swatis were getting a taste of life under the Taliban. Over 200 girls’ schools were closed. The Wali’s special projects, the convent and statue of Buddha at the entrance to the state, became targets for Taliban wrath. The Taliban now felt confident enough to march into neighbouring Buner. They were within striking distance of Islamabad, the capital of a nuclear state.

The Pakistani military was alarmed, as was the US administration. The Pakistani army launched a military operation and Washington promised financial and military aid. As a result almost the entire population of Swat fled to neighbouring districts in the south. Swat was then sealed off from the outside world and an ominous silence descended upon it. Reports suggested that Swat society was being turned upside down.

Swat has seen the dramatic decline and collapse of all the pillars of authority over the last decades. Today’s Swat has neither the authority of the Wali nor that of the central government that replaced it, nor of the Khans. The Taliban, who dominated Swat for a few months, giving a taste of their brutal administration, have also been toppled. The only authority in Swat today is the army. There are already rumours of mass graves and extra-judicial killings in Swat. Some blame the Taliban, others the army. Neither is popular.

This is only an excerpt of the interview. ~~Unfortunately it is available online for subscribers only~~. Just found out (via media/anthropology) that it is a free article. Read Swat in the eye of the storm: Interview with Akbar Ahmed here (pdf).

Anthropology Today has by the way started up at forum for readers and authors at http://anthropologytoday.ning.com/ And the Swat Pathans have their own Facebook group – a global network “to unite against the stereotypical portrayal of Swatian and to let the world know the true beauty and harmony of the people and area”.

Akbar Ahmed is an active blogger. He runs his own blog called Latest News and Commentary by Akbar Ahmed and has also started a (group) blog about his recent project Journey Into America, a new book and film, an anthropological study of American identity as seen through the eyes of Americans – both Muslim and non- Muslim (is also reviewed in Anthropology Today).

In my archive, I found also an interview with anthropologist Saadia Toor about the situation in Swat.

Anthropological activism in Pakistan with lullabies

Akbar Ahmed’s anthropological excursion into Islam

Correction (and Update): “Army-Anthropologists don’t call Afghans “Savages”

Published on October 2, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, ethics, politics, Us and Them

My most recent post Army-Anthropologists call Afghans “Savages” received a lot attention, so it might be necessary to write a new post after the debates in the comment field and via email.

It seems that the Sydney Morning Herald reporter misunderstood. The part about the The Zadran who are called “utter savages” and “great robbers” who live in a country that was “a refuge for bad characters” is not written by contemporary Human Terrain Team (HTT) army anthropologists. The quote is 90 years old!

As I was told, the HTT-report was quoting an old British ethnography “to highlight the terrible quality of historical documents on the area”.

If you google “Zadran” and “utter savages”, Google Book Search directs you to ‪Historical and political gazetteer of Afghanistan ‎Volume 6
by India. Army. General Staff Branch, Ludwig W. Adamec (1985).

Adamec compiled his data from a 1919 British ethnographic survey.

The HTT-report quoted this book extensively – but as I was told – in order to question such notions as the Zadrans as savages.

I hope this is correct. For there are other researchers who use the same sources less critically.

Googling “Zadran” and “Savages” directed me also a a kind of fact sheet about the Zadranby the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies, Naval Postgraduate School that states:

They are probably a very small tribe living in very small villages; some of them cultivate the little land they have, but they appear chiefly to depend on their flocks for subsistence. They live, some in houses and some in tents. It was said that they are “great robbers”, and their country was formerly refuge for “bad characters”.

Here, these 90 years old characteristics are presented as facts.

What kind of institution is the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies?

Here is an extract from their self-description:

The Program for Culture & Conflict Studies (CCS) conducts research in support of United States initiatives in Afghanistan. Our research provides comprehensive assessments of provincial and district tribal and clan networks in Afghanistan, anthropological assessments of Afghan villages, and assessments of the operational culture of Afghan districts and villages.

(But although they conduct “anthropological studies, none of their researchers seems to be an anthropologist)

Then I stumpled upon a comment by a former army HTS-~~anthropologist~~ researcher in Afghanistan on the Open Anthropology blog. He writes:

“These insurgents are throwbacks to the Stone Age with very different ideas and convictions than we have. (…) Want to talk to them about gay rights, women’s rights, democracy, live and let live, respect for the rights of others, etc. with these insurgents? Go ahead!”

Maximilian Forte, editor of Open Anthropology, comments:

One of the things achieved by the new imperialism is an ideological expansion: the high civilizations and monotheistic religions, such as those of Islam, were the focus of Orientalism in the 1800s and much of the 1900s. So called “primitive tribes” were a concern of the kind of Savagism at the heart of early anthropology. What statements like yours do is to combine/confuse the two, and that is novel. Now there are no other civilizations, no competing ideas of complex society, it’s just “us” and the rest are “savages.”

There we have the term again! Savages!

UPDATE: I’ve found the book in question – the Historical and Political Gazetteer of Afghanistan, Volume 6, in our library and found out that the quote about those “utter savages” is even older. The book refers to Mountstuart Elphinstone, who lived between 1779 and 1859 and later became the Governor of Bombay. The whole quote goes like this:

Elphinstone says their manners etc resemble the Wazirs, and Broadfoot, those of the Kharotis, from which we must infer that they are utter savages, and, as Elphinstone says more like mountain bears than men.

According to the Gazeteer of Afghanistan, the Zadran “are of no importance whatever, and only in the case of the Dawar route being used to Ghazni…”.

And here from the preface of the 1985 version som general information about the Gazetteer of Afghanistan:

This work is based largely on material collected by the British Indian Government and its agencies since the early 19th century. In an age of Imperalism, Afghanistan became important as the “Gateway to India” and an area of dispute between the British and Russian empires. It is therefore not surprising that much effort was expended by various branches of the British Indian government to amass information regarding the country’s topography, tribal composition, climate, economy, and internal politics.

Thus, an effort which began with military considerations in mind has now been expanded and updated with maps and data complied by both Western and Afghan scholarship to serve the non-political purpose of providing a comprehensive reference work on Afghanistan.

Sheds light on the collaboration between science and colonial administration in Naga ethnography

Jack Goody: “The West has never been superior”

Cooperation between the Pentagon and anthropologists a fiasco?

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

My most recent post Army-Anthropologists call Afghans "Savages" received a lot attention, so it might be necessary to write a new post after the debates in the comment field and via email.

It seems that the Sydney Morning Herald reporter…

Army-Anthropologists call Afghans “Savages”?

Published on September 28, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, ethics, politics, Us and Them

READ THE COMMENTS BELOW – AND THE UPDATE “Army-Anthropologists don’t call Afghans “Savages”

Do you want to know what anthropologists who work for the US military in Afghanistan write about the people America is at war with? I resist to believe it but according to the Sydney Morning Herald they call some Afghan societies “utter savages”.

Here is an excerpt from the report:

“The Zadran have been written up as a small tribe, but they are the biggest in the south-east. Their manners resemble the Waziris [who straddle the nearby border with Pakistan] and the Kharotis [also concentrated in the east], from which we may infer that they are utter savages. They live in small villages … they are great robbers and their country was a refuge for bad characters.”

Sydney Morning Herald correspondent David Brill who has travelled to Afghanistan’s south-east talked to an anonymous American analyst who refuses to endorse the report’s terminology and can’t believe what he is reading there.

Thomas Ruttig, a member of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, is also “shocked by the anthropologists’ assessment of the locals as savages” and says:

“I have been working in Afghanistan for 25 years. They might look like savages, but they have a sophisticated political understanding. ‘There is great hostility to the Americans, but it is not because the people are savages.”

The ”savage’s” point, and Ruttig’s, is that America’s military tactics have created so much local hostility that it has become difficult, if not impossible, for the locals to accept the US presence and what Washington calls “aid”. The “savages” told Ruttig that they had no option but to join a tribal uprising after a controversial civilian “casualty” (meaning the locals were killed by Americans)

>> read the whole story in the Sydney Morning Herald

A few days ago, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson explained Why the war in Afghanistan cannot be won (by the Americans, I assume)

PS: Maybe this issue makes more sense when we remember what the researchers in militarized institutions like the Centre for Studies in Islamism and Radicalisation write about “Americas enemy”.

UPDATE: Much new information: “Army-Anthropologists don’t call Afghans “Savages”

How the Human Terrain System anthropologists think

Cooperation between the Pentagon and anthropologists a fiasco?

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

“Anthropology = Smarter Counterinsurgency”

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

Thesis: The limits of youth activism in Afghanistan

War in Iraq: Why are anthropologists so silent?

READ THE COMMENTS BELOW - AND THE UPDATE "Army-Anthropologists don't call Afghans "Savages"

Do you want to know what anthropologists who work for the US military in Afghanistan write about the people America is at war with? I resist…

IUAES-anthropologists “praise” Chinese government’s relation to minorities

Published on July 30, 2009 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, ethics, indigenous people / minorities, politics, Us and Them

Chinese authorities continue using the 16th congress by the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) to spread propaganda. This is the most recent article: Overseas anthropologists: Adventure in Chinese ethnic village “eye-opening”

The congress arranged fieldtrips to what Xinhua calls “ethnic villages” nearby Kunming. Among other things the anthropologists were attending a dance presentation by the Axi minority group:

“The dance represented the essence of the Axi culture, such as primitive beliefs, songs, musical instruments, traditional costumes and religious rites.”

Anthropologist Chukiat Chaiboonsvi from Chiangwai University in Thailand said according to Xinhua that “the village’s traditional culture is “under proper protection”:

It looks very likely for the village to protect the culture and pass it to the next generation. The village is a good example of achieving economic development while at the same time protecting the precious culture.

I think the Chinese government has always been trying to support and take care of ethnic minorities. It’s difficult and it takes time, but so long as the government keeps going on, it will have good results.

Anthropologist Hillary Callan from London was according to Xinhua “impressed by the way the ethnic community works together with local government for its prosperity” and says:

China is absolutely one of the most interesting parts of the world for anthropologists. I wish I could stay longer to learn in greater depth about this country.

IUAES President Luis Alberto Vargas told Xinhua that he found the work made by the Chinese government in relation to the minorities was “something to be known world over”:

Many countries have the same situation as China does. That is a country having multi-nationalities. But not all countries have learned to handle this situation. The way that China is doing is just one of several possibilities. I think it has to be known to the world because it’s getting good results.

>> read the whole story

UPDATE: Even more from Xinhua (incl video): Minority culture exhibition described as enchanting and World listens to Chinese voice as Kunming declaration approved

Similar Xinhua articles exist in other languages like French and German. The congress has so far not been covered by other media.

UPDATE: Some impressions by a participant of the conference at Culture Matters: Anthropologists and the Politburo: Ali Adolf Wu writes that “while the Chinese government used this event to boost the standing of its ethnic policy after the events in Xinjiang in Tibet, anthropologists in China may have benefited from this extra attention.” He finds Petr Skalnik’s boycott of the conference very naive.

Anthropology in China: IUAES-conference boycott due to Uyghur massacre

The congress arranged fieldtrips…