Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record by Gregg Mitman & Kelley Wilder

Author:Gregg Mitman & Kelley Wilder [Mitman, Gregg & Wilder, Kelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226129259
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-12-20T08:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

What are the consequences of reanimating the life of the Harvard expedition footage, which had long been dead and forgotten? In 2012, I traveled to Liberia with the expedition footage on a laptop and an iPhone. I was accompanied by Emmanuel Urey, a member of the Kpelle people, who grew up in Liberia during a brutal fourteen-year civil war. Through a triangulation of the motion picture record with expedition diaries, we began retracing the expedition journey. We were eager to find what historical memory remained of people and places documented in the expedition footage, whose voices had been silenced, first by the expedition members themselves, and then by the ravages of war.

Everywhere we traveled, paramount chiefs, clan chiefs, elders, and local villagers clamored to watch the footage and share their stories with us. We met a paramount chief who cried upon seeing his father alive once more on film. “My heart is like my face smiling,” he explained to us in Kpelle. We met women eager to reclaim the scenes of traditional weaving practices documented by the Harvard expedition as they seek to revive craft traditions in their efforts toward cultural renewal and women’s empowerment. We met communities of people, like the Bassa, evicted from their ethnic homelands with the arrival of Firestone, who spoke painfully upon watching traditional dances being performed by their great grandfathers and grandmothers, of the wounds yet to heal. Even Emmanuel’s father, who was around sixteen years of age when the expedition passed within a day’s walk to his village, relived in the memory of his body the scenes of building roads by hand.

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