Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology by Marcus Banks & Jay Ruby

Author:Marcus Banks & Jay Ruby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

Native Intelligence: A Short History of Debates on Indigenous Media and Ethnographic Film

FAYE GINSBURG

In the three final decades of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, as indigenous people began to gain control over film and video, technologies of representation that had long objectified them, a series of debates emerged that challenged this project. Some scholars questioned whether the radical alterity of indigenous cultural life might translate to the screen, some could scarcely tolerate the idea of natives using cameras and thought the very idea of indigenous media was an oxymoron, and some took more celebratory approaches, imagining that this work had displaced that which ethnographic film had previously engaged in. Now, as indigenous people are showing feature films at Cannes and starting their own national television networks—such as the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN), founded in Canada in 1999, and Maori TV, established in 2004—the debates have moved on. Is the separatism implied by the term “indigenous media” still appropriate in cases of deep collaboration, such as The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, which the Inuit filmmakers of Igloolik Isuma co-produced in collaboration with a Danish team, relying for their story and visuals on Rasmussen’s ethnographic journals? On the other hand, will initiatives such as APTN, Maori TV, and the more recent Australian Aboriginal television station—National Indigenous Television—create sequestered media worlds that will become the televisual equivalent to “reservations”? This essay addresses this history of debates and the current issues that are shaping contemporary work.

The Anxieties and Possibilities of the Parallax Effect

In May 2007 a newspaper article in the Australian announced an indigenous protest in the real world concerning the virtual appropriation of a major Aboriginal sacred site into the trendy online world of Second Life 3-D (created in 2003). The protestors’ concern was directed against Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications corporation and creator of The Pond, a virtual island and popular destination representing things Australian on Second Life. The Anangu people, indigenous owners of Uluru in South Australia (well-known to tourists and others by its English name, Ayers Rock), were concerned about the possible desecration, albeit virtual, of the online representation of the site, a dramatic geological formation and part of their sacred ancestral heritage. The virtual Uluru, like its physical counterpart, was protected by barriers to discourage people from walking or flying over the site. Nonetheless, “representatives of the traditional owners . . . warned that even with the restrictions, it may be possible to view sacred sites around [the virtual] Uluru.”

In the physical world, non-Aboriginal visitors have, since 1987, faced strict prohibitions against photography or filming without consent of the indigenous landowners. Telstra’s spokesperson confirmed that the company had not sought the permission of Uluru’s landowners to use images of the site for commercial purposes (Canning 2007). The case heated up in October 2008 when the telecommunications corporation posted billboards advertising its Big Pond Internet service in front of the virtual Uluru, as well as serving grog—alcohol—at the Billabong Bar, an adjacent pub. If the rules of the

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