The Anthropological Lens: Rethinking E. E. Evans-Pritchard by Morton Christopher;

Author:Morton, Christopher; [Morton, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198812913
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2019-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

The relational image

Throughout this book I focus on the archival photograph as a highly revealing relational and biographical object through which new histories can be written, tracing the complex archival relations between some of Evans-Pritchard’s well-known published photographs. My use of the term ‘relational’ here refers to the way in which photographic meaning emerges from an individual image’s relationship to others in a series. Fieldwork photographs are relational in a number of different ways and on a number of different levels, both spatially and temporally. For instance, they may form part of a sequence of images relating to an event or ritual, or a technological theme such as pot making, which is more fragmented over the course of fieldwork. Images also usually contain relations to other images in time and space through the process of inscription. The relational dimension of a photograph is here a recognition of the way in which any photograph is suggestive of relationships beyond itself to other photographs, rather than merely within its own frame. Materially, photographs are related as numbered frames on a film, or dated slides, or as digital images with embedded metadata about their production, and hence have relationships to other images. It is only by examining the archival image in this relational context that we can investigate the question of indigenous agency on a sound methodological footing, because the relationships between moments of inscription are particularly revealing about the social and cultural contexts that surround particular photographs. The relational understanding of photographs is also connected to ongoing debates about the ‘agency’ of the image within social relations, or their role as social objects that are entangled with material and sensory processes in the communication of meaning. Ethnographic studies have shown, for instance, how photographs sometimes stand for deceased kin within existing social networks, as well as the social incorporation of archival photographs of deceased relatives by families as part of processes of so-called visual repatriation.36 Other studies have focused on the use of photographs of deceased family members and elites as part of processes of commemoration, in which the mobilization of the photograph effectively extends the social agency of the deceased person beyond death. Outlining the relevance of Gell’s concept of agency to photographic studies, Richard Vokes has argued that the agency of the photographer’s subject is also readily emergent from the process of photographic inscription: ‘practically all photographic theory begins from a reading of the photographer’s intentions, and all photographs may also be interrogated in terms of their subjects’ intentionality’.37

In the last chapter I looked in detail at the archival relations between twelve photographs that Evans-Pritchard took of the initiation of Kamanga into the Zande corporation of witch doctors, and the textual account of events that they relate to. This case study enables us to gain a widened understanding of how photographic intentionality interweaves with indigenous agency in such contexts. These images cannot simply be read in terms of Evans-Pritchard’s intention to visually represent stages of a Zande ritual, but must

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