Documenting Indigenous Culture

Having spent several decades trying to eliminate the unself-conscious “colonial gaze” characteristic of so many early ethnographic films, visual anthropologists from the industrialized West who study indigenous cultures are presently struggling with an even more profound transformation of their discipline. Because inexpensive video equipment is now available throughout the world, many indigenous cultures. Reaction to this phenomenon within Western anthropological circles is sharply divided.

One faction, led by anthropologist James Weiner, sees the proliferation of video and television as the final assault of Western values on indigenous cultures. Weiner argues that the spread of video represents “a devaluation of the different,” culminating in the replacement of genuine historical, linguistic, social, and cultural difference with superficial difference truth value to these films simply because they are made by indigenous peoples are theoretically naive.

But Weiner’s opponents contend that his views betray a certain nostalgia for the idea of the “noble savage.” One such opponent, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, concedes that no Western object that has entered cultural circulation since the fifteenth century has been neutral, but she considers it little more than boilerplate technological determinism to affords societies—especially oral ones—an invaluable opportunity to strengthen native languages and traditions threatened by Western exposure.

The Brazilian fieldwork of anthropologist Terence Turner, who studies the relationship between traditional Kayapo culture and Kayapo videotapes, lends credence to Ginsburg’s position. Primarily an oral society, the Kayapo use video to document both ceremonial performances and transactions with representatives of the Brazilian government (this latter use is intended to provide legally with Kayapo culture, it seems, that it transforms any Kayapo who uses it into a Westerner.