Photography in Latin America: Images and Identities Across Time and Space 9783839433171

Table of contents :
Contents
Photography in Latin America
Of Photography and Men
Unfixed Images
Recognizing Past and Present through Photography
Appropriating an Image
Unexpected Memories
Gazing at the Face of Absence
Disputing Visual Memories in the Peruvian Andes
Contributors

Citation preview

Gisela Cánepa Koch, Ingrid Kummels (eds.) Photography in Latin America

Postcolonial Studies | Volume 24

Gisela Cánepa Koch, Ingrid Kummels (eds.)

Photography in Latin America Images and Identities Across Time and Space

Supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation and the Institute for Latin American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: A tablet at the »Touching Photography« exhibit with the photograph of a Kadiweú woman taken by Guido Boggiani at the end of the 19th century. Photographer: Sebastian Bolesch. 2013 © Humboldt Lab Dahlem/Ethnologisches Museum – SMB. Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3317-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3317-1

Contents

Photography in Latin America Images and Identities Across Time and Space – An Introduction

Ingrid Kummels and Gisela Cánepa Koch | 7 Of Photography and Men Encounters with Historical Portrait and Type Photographs

Michael Kraus | 33 Unfixed Images Circulation and New Cultural Uses of Heinrich Brüning’s Photographic Collection

Gisela Cánepa Koch | 65 Recognizing Past and Present Through Photography Temporality and Culture in Konrad Theodor Preuss’s Images

Aura Lisette Reyes | 105 Appropriating an Image A Study of the Reception of Ethnographic Photography Among the Zapotec Indigenous People of Mexico

Mariana da Costa A. Petroni | 139 Unexpected Memories Bringing Back Photographs and Films from the 1980s to an Asháninka Nomatsiguenga Community of the Peruvian Selva Central

Ingrid Kummels | 165 Gazing at the Face of Absence Signification and Re-signification of Family Photographs of Disappeared University Students in Peru

Mercedes Figueroa | 195

Disputing Visual Memories in the Peruvian Andes The Case of Huancasancos, Ayacucho

María Eugenia Ulfe and Ximena Málaga Sabogal | 219 Contributors | 239

Photography in Latin America Images and Identities Across Time and Space – An Introduction I NGRID K UMMELS AND G ISELA C ÁNEPA K OCH

Case studies tracing current uses of historical photographs taken several decades ago in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil demonstrate their value as key sites of memory politics, ethnographic imagination and the negotiation of identity. Anthropologists who participated in these processes and analyzed them as part of their ethnographic research are the contributing authors in this volume. During this time the photographs were resignified, attributed new uses and given a new thrust of public distribution across time and space. The photographs and photographic collections were rediscovered by such diverse actors as European and Latin American museums, online communities, anthropologists, members of indigenous ethnic groups – descendants of those once portrayed by anthropologists –, the nonindigenous local elite and middle class, traditional religious and political authorities, and families who had lost a relative to the violence of civil war. By engaging in exchange and dialogue with transnational actors and intervening in their publication at exhibitions and on Internet websites, where historical photographs are stored in novel digitized archives, all of these actors have ascribed new functions, meanings and values to these images against a backdrop of crisis, both past and present. The contributors and editors of the volume draw on different theoretical approaches and strands of analysis as their point of departure, such as Deborah Poole’s (1997: 7-8) concept of “visual economy,” which foregrounds the political uses of images and their relationship to power. Gaining percep-

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tion of the meanings and values attached to photographs as they move across cultural and national boundaries calls for exploration of the social relationships, inequalities and power constellations that prevail in the “visual economy.” In the course of mobility, pictures not only move between locations and time frames, but also between different regimes belonging to the realm of science, art or the market (Cánepa Koch, this volume). Most actors addressed in this volume actively look for memory, history and identity. As a result of the meanings attributed to them, photographs intervene in social reality and develop “small narratives” that act as “visual incisions through time and space” (Edwards 2001: 3). Depending on the actors that enter into dialogue with each other, on the specific location of the pictures in operation and on the historic moment, distinctive “ways of seeing” emerge, visual conventions that persuade people to see and represent themselves and others in particular ways (Berger 1990; Strassler 2010: 18). Actors also form political subjectivities by appropriating global flows such as photographic technology, knowledge, genres, and local marketing modes. This allows them to create media spaces with leeway to reposition themselves in terms of collectivity, social status, ethnicity, and gender in a way that exceeds simplistic dichotomies and binary codes (Kummels 2012). The processes under consideration in this volume span a time period in which temporality and historicity themselves undergo transformation. The contributions center on pictures taken during the comparatively long era of analog photography: the century from the 1880s to the 1980s. At the same time, these images have been resignified in the present, that is, in the digital age. Digital technology should be understood as constituting what McKenzie (2001) considered the technological dimension of the “performance stratum,” where power and knowledge intersect to configure a new order governed by the principles of performativity. Thus the current use of historical photographs is inspired by the opportunities digital technology offers, but constrained by its new imperatives, new media forms with the potential to affect conventional practices. “Today” (i.e., between 2008 and 2015) images are circulated, publicly exhibited, openly commented on and used politically. The change in significance generally attributed to photography in the present age – one that varies according to locality, culture, history, and the constellation of power and actors concerned – must therefore be taken into account.

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Several contributions draw attention to this starting point. Photographic techniques, practices, products and filing methods are now ubiquitous, as exemplified in cell phone photography and its dissemination via the Internet. Taking, sending and viewing pictures has quantitatively higher temporal (“always on”) and spatial (“almost everywhere”) dimensions (Hepp 2010). At the same time, the quality of these images, e.g., their ascribed temporality, has altered: capturing memorable moments and “freezing” them is no longer common practice. New practices of mobile phone photography and the publishing and filing of images on specialized websites such as Flickr and Facebook no longer center on documenting exclusive moments. Instead they celebrate countless instants that evoke the more ordinary and ephemeral moments of people’s lives (Murray 2008: 151). Besides, the photographers themselves have become a major motif. “Pictures of life” have moved on to become “living pictures” (Van Dijck 2007). In other words these pictures have acquired a life of their own and escape control in the course of digital circulation, since they are reshaped ad infinitum and rearranged by a few mouse clicks along their countless intermediate stations. A similar distinction is suggested for “images of the world” (“imágenes del mundo”) and “images in the world” (“imágenes en el mundo”) in order to explain the new functions, uses and appreciations of pictures in transit from a representational to a performative regime (Cánepa Koch 2013). The mouse click synthesizes the performative dimension of the Internet. The Internet user, who is constantly in action (e.g., he/she searches, downloads, comments, evaluates, shares), travels along a complex grid of routes where images function as a repertoire for action. In this logic structure the user’s actions are guided by the principles of efficacy and efficiency. In this new landscape the images in each stage are no longer relevant as objects of representation in terms of verity but are used and defined as repertoires of digital performance. Hence the presence of the Internet actor and the effectivity of his/her actions are legitimized by the “like” tag mediated by the mouse click (Cánepa Koch/Ulfe 2014). In the case of photography, the digital era implicates a transformation that Joan Fontcuberta (2015) has coined the “post-photographic condition.” Against this background, new and perhaps even greater expectations have been set in historical images and channeled into their new uses. The contributions in this volume substantiate that, based on individual, nonprofessional initiatives, these pictures now travel more easily between geo-

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graphic spaces, between continents and between the traditional archives of specialized institutions such as museums and new filing spaces on the Internet; they can be filed in large numbers on a hard disc and exchanged or disseminated in the public sphere. Thus to a certain extent historical pictures have escaped the custody of museums, private family archives and the hitherto regime and hierarchy of the visual that these archives have helped to maintain, and their new mobilities “democratize the archives” (GardeHansen 2011).1 The authorship and defining power of image interpretation is now negotiated in wider circles and on circuits with more leveled hierarchies; traditional specialists, such as professional photographers, scientists and curators, can no longer smoothly claim exclusiveness to expertise on these matters. Yet the visual heritage of humanity recorded during the analog era is still archived in a highly inequitable manner, albeit individual actors are introducing major changes in this context. In the context of digitization even cropping and resolution choices constitute a first reinterpretation of the photographic object. New forms of diffusion facilitated by digitization, such as the vast transfer of photographic files, further contribute to roughing up the world’s visual heritage and making headway on its reconfiguration. Following on the argument that historical photographs move between different scientific, aesthetic, economic and cultural regimes, it should be noted that with every move they enter a new realm of power, where surveillance and normalization is performed. Neither should it be forgotten that Internet platforms are widely designed and administered by hegemonic consortiums like Google and regulated by the state. In a similar vein the mobility of digitized photographs made possible by the digital regime should also be seen as operating within a given frame that not only creates and defines mobility but also specifies its terms. Although technical features are responsible for these conditions, they are also shaped by the contested interventions of social actors and their agendas, among them corporations, state

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Edwards (2001: 4) warns against overemphasizing the homogeneity and inactivity of museum archives. These tend to be characterized by the “dense multidimensional fluidity of the discursive practices of photographs as linking objects between past and present.” Yet photography expertise in the museum context was long conceptualized as a one-way flow of information through which the subject of investigation enhanced the anthropologist’s knowledge. This procedure allowed the latter to underline their authority.

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institutions and online communities. Bearing in mind Livingstone’s (2010) critical reflections on the e-democracy debate, this approach allows us to discuss in more depth the democratizing potential of digitized photographs and their circulation on the Internet, in each case considering historical and cultural contingencies, as well as national and transnational power constellations. Following on the discussion of the contributions assembled in this volume, we argue for an understanding of the movement of historical photographs as strategic displacements, while taking account of the complex power relations involved in the multidirectional trajectories they follow between space and time, and between diverse regimes. Similarly, the understanding of making greater use of historical photographs to intervene in the contemporary public sphere coincides with the notion of public culture, defined by Appadurai and Breckenridge (1995: 5) as a “zone of cultural debate.” This notion not only accounts for the public debate on cultural content, but also the emergence of and conflictual relation between new publics and new repertoires for argumentation arising from the “experiences of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life” (Appadurai/Breckenridge 1995: 4-5). It tallies with a conceptualization of culture as porous rather than bounded. We contend that photographs are likewise “busy intersections,” that is, a “…porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders” to cite Renato Rosaldo’s (1993: 20) concept of culture as constituted by sites where cultural and social processes intersect. These developments give rise to a set of questions: What do these shifts in time and space and across regimes imply for the role of photography in memory politics, ethnographic imagination and the negotiation of identity? In what way are the social relations of anthropological museums, anthropologists and members of ethnic and social groups, and those between families and the state transformed by new uses assigned to historical photographs? All of the case studies refer to memory politics as a field of intense but also tense negotiations, in which new forms of remembering via historical photographs emerge and take center stage. At the same time, these processes shed light on the way in which memory and processes of identity are interwoven and realigned. The first group of authors worked on – and some of them arranged – exhibitions of ethnographic photographs as part of their

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field research. In most cases the images concerned had once been collected by museums or were stored in the private collections of individual scholars. The contributions of Kraus, Cánepa Koch, Reyes, Petroni, and Kummels show that even today access to and circulation of these historical photographs by no means occurs on equal terms. In particular the descendants of the subjects portrayed in ethnographic photographs or people who identify with the settlements, landscapes, and objects they depict were either ignorant of their existence or had hitherto had no access to them. Hence they were not in a position to even consider them as visual heritage. The ethnographic collections amassed primarily from the 19th century onwards in European museums founded specifically to house them have triggered debate on cultural property rights. This is particularly true of contemporary mega-museums such as the Quai Branly, which opened in Paris in 2006 (Price 2007; Brown 2009) and the forthcoming Humboldt-Forum in Berlin to be opened in 2019. Debates of this kind on political and ethical issues of museum objects and new postcolonial sensitivities have led to an increase in novel forms of collaboration between museums, investigators and source communities, among them “visual repatriations” of a dialogic quality (Brown/Peers 2006; Bell/Christen/Turin 2013). Some of the contributions deal with treading new paths in the context of ethnographic pictures that open space for collaboration, dialogue among stakeholders and in many instances aspirations to visually decolonize European collections (Kraus, Reyes, Kummels). They therefore provide valuable clues to the interaction with photographs as a constitutive element of field research practices. Such interactions are not confined to photoelicitation as a tool used by the researcher unidirectionally to extract information and document historical “facts.” Instead, the historical photographs researchers brought into the field developed a social life of their own. Looking at photographs taken by German anthropologist Konrad Theodor Preuss in Colombia, Aura Reyes detected a wide array of topics that she did not originally have in mind when she discussed these photographs with her research subjects. The Kogi people broached the legitimacy of pictures taken by Preuss and the permission to do so, and pondered over the political posture of the Kogi authorities at the time, who seem to have been more permissive than today’s authorities in terms of foreigners taking pictures. This they did against the backdrop of current debate on the patrimonial rights to the collection, which is in the possession of the Stiftung

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Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin but claimed by both Kogi communities and the Colombian government. With the aid of these photographs Reyes’s interlocutors analyzed the uneven relationship. Their interpretation of images was also influenced by changes that occurred as a result of negotiations between this indigenous group and the states of Colombia and Germany. In the case of Ingrid Kummels, who brought pictures taken by anthropologist Manfred Schäfer back to the source communities of the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga in Peru, the photographs unfurled an agency that cannot be characterized readily as a unidirectional act of visual repatriation, since the circumstances under which they traveled across time and space are too varied and their layers of meaning plurivalent. She delivered photographs of the 1970s and 1980s to a society that had undergone radical transformation since then. Besides, this society did not consider photographs of great value and had therefore not demanded their return. Up until today the dominant medium of historical remembrance in the community is orality, with which images cannot compare. On the one hand, this case of “repatriation” points to the fact that numerous anthropologists are in possession of photographs from a time when they were often in the privileged position of being the chief photographer in the indigenous communities. It also raises questions on the potential place value of such images and their processes of appropriation for societies whose influence during their production was limited and that have hitherto not availed of them as a medium for retrospection. Here, too, the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga interlocutors first used the returned photographs for political purposes: they saw their potential to further community development and modernization, and to substantiate claims vis-à-vis the Peruvian state. This motivated some of the people portrayed and their relatives to gain access to and control of the photographs. In the case study of the identitarian movement of the Muchik in Northern Peru, Gisela Cánepa Koch discusses the appropriation and resignification by current actors of photographs taken by German businessman Hans Heinrich Brüning in the region of Lambayeque. She traces the role played by ethnographic studies on Brüning’s photographs, published in the late 1980s, and the activism of local Muchik anthropologists in shaping the discourse on Muchik identity and legitimizing Brüning’s photographic work as a principal source. The author later focuses on Internet users and owners of domains from the regional middle class who digitize Brüning’s

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photographs as a means of participating in the public debate on Muchik identity. Their aim is to articulate a particular version of this identity, one they can feel part of and that allows them in terms of class and gender to remain distinct from other groups in the region claiming to belong to the Muchik people. In doing so, they contest ethnographic discourses on Muchik identity first introduced by Muchik anthropologists and that argue for continuity between the indigenous and rural populations depicted in the photographs and the Muchik people of today. Together these contributions present a novel approach to the movement of the photographs and their role in forging an ethnographic imagination and defining the field “as site, method, and location” (Gupta/Ferguson 1987). A second group of authors examines interventions in memory politics that individuals and members of families develop as part of their daily life and their political actions. Mercedes Figueroa investigated the photographic strategies of families of disappeared or murdered family relatives (university students) in connection with the civil war and (state) terror in Peru, which reached its peak in the 1980s. In this context they negotiated the status of the disappeared as civil war victims. Family members resorted to ID photographs or pictures taken for family albums in order to render their absence publicly visible and transform the perfidious strategy of disappearance into its antithesis. Onlookers were compelled to gaze at the “face of absence.” Family and ID photographs are recontextualized on moveable altars that can be assembled rapidly in the public sphere and used at regular demonstrations in front of the Palace of Justice and the Congress to remind a larger audience of the disappeared students. Hence images are used as a means of denouncing the state, particularly ID photographs, which the state monopolizes for purposes of verification and control. On the other hand, actors also integrate these photos and practices into their daily lives. The constant visual remembrance of their deceased relatives cements the bridge between the past and the present – producing a new temporality. María Eugenia Ulfe and Ximena Málaga saw themselves likewise faced with photographs from Peru’s civil war period due to the agency of local people who referred to them. Nilton Saucedo, a citizen of Huancasancos, the province in Ayacucho most affected by this violent period, emphasized vis-à-vis the researchers the importance of local photography as a key to understanding the history of the province and its inhabitants. The photographs that Huancasancos residents keep in private albums narrate their own stories of

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the continuities of this period, such as the annual beauty pageant to elect a local beauty queen and soccer games played during the reign of terror. One of the issues explored by the first group of authors refers to the conditions and social relations of production under which ethnographic photographs – currently being resignified – were once produced. In the context of scientific and commercial photography at the beginning of the 20th century, scholars like Deborah Poole (1997) have up to now highlighted the notable extent to which these ethnographic photographs constructed ethnicity and race in their intention to create and freeze rigid hierarchical categories. Such images were produced in situations with a clearly biased distribution of power between those who took pictures and those who had to be content with their role as photographic subjects. This disparity can be conceptualized as a “visual divide,” since inequality is not merely inscribed in representations, but also in the materiality and social practices of audiovisual media, such as in media training and the organization of work (Kummels 2015; n.d.). Yet the analysis of this volume shows that it is worth examining the variety of motives and negotiations involved in ethnographic photography, depending on the actors’ interventions on both sides of the camera to discern subtle shifts in power. The contributions of Michael Kraus, Gisela Cánepa Koch and Aura Reyes, who deal with this early period of anthropological photography, point to the diversity of picture-taking situations, which ranged from colonial encroachment on the part of photographers vis-à-vis their subjects to efforts to achieve a balanced relationship, even a degree of collaboration between the photographer and those he portrayed (all of the photographers concerned were men). Kraus stresses that the blanket categorizing of photography from that period as a form of “visual colonization,” that is, as a regime that served to execute and legitimize a (neo)colonial order would imply overlooking and thus negating indigenous agency. The overall picture becomes even more complicated when the subjects’ interest in the photographs at the time is taken into account. This is particularly the case with people who cooperated with the photographer and those who saw photography as an opportunity to present themselves as hybrid and modern, as in Reyes’s case study. The second half of the 20th century saw the anthropological use of photography to decolonize the relationship between researchers and research subjects. In the 1970s and 1980s, German anthropologist Manfred Schäfer, for example, pursued an action anthropology approach that sought to empower the

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Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga. Although he was the principal photographer, he discussed the photographic messages to be conveyed and, given their common interest, selected photographs in cooperation with the research subjects, as demonstrated by the exhibition Somos Asháninca (We are Asháninca) shown in Lima’s Biblioteca Nacional in 1981. The images deliberately document the “good life” of the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga and their accomplishments associated with the concept of a sustainable, self-determined life adapted to the rainforest environment. This was part of their struggle against the Ene 40 dam project, which was backed by the Peruvian and German governments. All of these examples illustrate the usefulness of analyzing photographs according to Rosaldo’s (1993: 17) concept of culture as constituted by sites or “busy intersections,” where numerous cultural and social processes crisscross. In the context of production, the images are not exclusively linked to the photographer as the main actor. Instead several actors contribute to reinterpreting meanings at these crossroads, including the photographic subjects, other members of their society and the intended audience of the images in question. The choice of publication ranged from scientific monograph through political journal to specific websites, and suggests the target audience. Even in the case of early anthropological photographs, dialogically inscribed messages – to a certain extent at least – invite people in the present to identify with the image and ascribe a similar function to it. The contributions indicate that despite the passing of several decades and given their production contexts and processes of negotiation, images do not lose their reference to reality entirely (as Baudrillard suggested with regard to how representation is handled during the third stage of the Age of Simulation). Actors who tend to identify as successors of the people photographed or relate to the photographers as their “heirs” take on a leading role in the resignifying process. The contributions of Reyes, Petroni and Kummels demonstrate how repatriation and elicitation processes trigger different paths of identification. Debates in the respective source communities help to foster an exchange of theories about images from the past and the topics of their representation. Theories inscribed in the production process and those voiced today either converge or are positioned at a distance from one another. These discursive practices of interpreting historical photographs, that is, “practices of knowing, explaining, justifying” (Hobart 2005: 26, in: Postill 2010: 5) trace the diachrony of visual narratives from the “Time

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Back Then” to the perceptions of actors “Today.” Orality and photography engage in a complex interplay as media of recollection and identity (Freund/Thomson 2011), which these authors have investigated in depth. One example of this dialogue of theories refers to women’s attire in the Zapotec-speaking town of Yalálag, Mexico, which unfurled in the context of Mariana Petroni’s showing of early pictures taken by anthropologist Julio de la Fuente. De la Fuente’s hypotheses see clothes interpreted along a continuum of acculturation and classified from indigenous to mestizo, contingent on the ethnic identity of the wearer. This allowed him to index whether Zapotec culture has been sustained or lost. These ideas now converge with those of specific groups in the town, such as the political wing of the Grupo Comunitario that engages in identity politics with a view to preserving and strengthening Zapotec culture. In this instance of resignifying historical images, the concepts of the photographer impact on those of the Grupo Comunitario and converge. Yet another case deals with the incipient political use of images once captured by anthropologist Manfred Schäfer with his Nikon camera in the Asháninka Nomatsiguenga community of the Peruvian Selva Central. Within the frame of the then novel approach of action anthropology, Schäfer conceptualized the photographs as instruments of community empowerment, given state policies that denied ethnic minorities their cultural rights and questioned their existence. The photographs were once conceived as visual evidence of the community’s creation, its right to existence and its excellent quality of life. In view of their efforts to enhance the political position of the community, local authorities appreciate this same message today. The residents were reminded of their humble origins and the adverse circumstances under which their village evolved. At the same time they interpreted these images as speaking of their determination and their social mobility, an interpretation also influenced by aesthetic devices once used in the pictures. The choice of motifs and aesthetic devices as well as the political uses inscribed in them during their production evoked similar interpretations of the images vis-à-vis contemporary observers, who are too young for personal testimony. Yet there is nothing “natural” about an observer identifying with his or her “former self” in historical photographs, with the clothes worn by the people portrayed or with the objects, houses, and landscapes they display. It calls for socialization in “ways of seeing” (Berger 1990) and in the devices of photographic cultures, such as family albums, family pictures in plastic

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bags, shoe boxes and drawers or today more contemporary forms such as photobooks, Facebook and mobile camera phones. Kummels’s case study on Matereni, Peru, reminds us that even identifying with “one’s own” picture can cause considerable effort: when she encouraged them to interpret these hitherto unknown photographs as images of themselves during their childhood and youth, the adults of Matereni were forced to reconstruct their image of the self. In all other cases it was not the genealogical continuity between the subjects portrayed and the next generations of their source communities that sparked identification. Petroni documents that the inhabitants of Yalálag, Mexico, privileged women’s attire as the point of reference for identification with de la Fuente’s photographs as “their” cultural heritage. They did this against a backdrop in which Yalálag and the surrounding communities of the Sierra Norte once fashioned women’s (but not men’s) garments in a way that distinguished the community from others, rendering them a symbol or form of flag. While donning this attire has become less popular in everyday life, it is now given major ethnopolitical significance by the Grupo Comunitario, which pushes for identification with it and thus with one of de la Fuente’s favorite photographic motifs. In the case of women from the local elite of Lambayeque, Peru, their relationship on Facebook to Brüning’s photographs of rural women in pastoral surroundings, in contrast, is one of distancing from this past, as Cánepa Koch discovers. For these contemporary urban, middle-class women of Lambayeque, the female subjects portrayed in the images index a nostalgic and romantic past as inherent in Muchik identity, but they do not actually identify with them. As argued in her article, the different attitudes of female as opposed to male members of Facebook groups towards these photographs speaks for the fact that gender is vital to defining Muchik identity. This kind of indexing has become a powerful instrument in constructing a locally based identity that now claims continuity from the pre-Columbian archaeological cities of the Moche across Muchik culture of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century as captured by Brüning’s camera lens. In all of the case studies the actors concerned have now assigned historical photographs a new place in the public sphere and in public debates, one that goes beyond the traditional institutional spaces they once occupied, such as museum archives and private family collections. This coincides with new forms of using photography in the digital era. Clear distinctions

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between transmitter and receiver and the modes of private and public media have been dissolving for quite some time. A single device such as a cell camera phone or social media integrates their respective dimensions. Facebook and Flickr function at one and the same time as archives and platforms of communication and publication (cf. Adolf 2011: 156). Hierarchies of old between amateurs and professionals have been evened out – this also applies to the expertise in historical photographs once exclusively in the hands of professionals at universities and museums, but now easily executed by self-taught specialists outside of these institutions and asserted vis-àvis others. This notwithstanding, hierarchies in the realm of the visual persist, as Reyes’s chapter confirms. Although numerous photographs by Preuss are circulated in publications and on the Internet, his interlocutors’ descendants were unaware of them, albeit highly interested once privy to them. This immediate interest is linked to hierarchies that are being challenged in the debate on exhibition objects at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, among them two Kogi dance masks. Claiming them as ethnic and national patrimony, the Kogi have demanded their repatriation. Descendants of Kogi mamos or religious specialists relied on photographs to reconstruct how Preuss was able to access sacred places now heavily regulated and to appropriate vital cultural goods such as the masks in question. They expounded their cultural knowledge of the landscapes, objects, and acts depicted in the photographs to the researcher. Based on their own epistemology, Kogi interlocutors were keen to ban pictures of key aspects of their culture, juxtaposing their interest and the photographer’s visual documentation concerns, and discursively renegotiating the prevailing imbalance of power at the time when the photographs were produced. In the process of sharing knowledge about these historical images and interpreting them from a current perspective, the photographs were resignified as intrusive in response to issues raised about the future place and ownership of the cultural goods they portray. This volume’s contributions describe the power shifts that spring from the appropriation, use, exchange, discussion, publication, and insertion of historical photographs in public culture. These shifts in the balance of power provided an opportunity to democratize the archives and led to the loss of institutional supremacy. The interventions of Peruvian families in family memory politics compete with recent state mega-projects and museums founded specifically for this purpose. The latter cannot claim monopoly of

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the politics of remembrance. Parallel to initiatives of the families concerned, the Peruvian civil war period is now commemorated at the museum Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM; Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion) and as part of state policies of remembrance and the attempt to come to terms with a national trauma. In a participative process with key actors from this period, a multidisciplinary team of experts is now curating a permanent exhibition based on historical images. Family and state mega-project interventions are indicative of the use of historical photographs in the interests of the future. Both follow the strategy of shedding light on dimensions of the past that have been suppressed in order to prevent similar acts of violence in the future (Poole/Rojas 2011). In the case of the forthcoming Humboldt-Forum in Berlin, on the other hand, whose inauguration is planned for 2019, one of the main thrusts of public discourse is the accusation of colonial and neocolonial usurpation of ethnographic collections on the part of former German researchers and government institutions, and the repatriation demands made by the ethnic groups and Latin American nation states concerned (see, for example, Schmidt 2015). The future Humboldt-Forum in Berlin is one of the protagonists in Michael Kraus’s chapter. Conceived as a center of art, culture, science, and learning, this museum is where collections from the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin – hitherto classified as “non-European” (außereuropäisch) – will take center stage.2 Based on the experimental exhibition concept designed for the photography collections of the Ethnologisches Museum, Michael Kraus challenges the notion of dual cultural patrimony between the “West and the Rest” (see also Kraus 2015). The exhibition was hosted in the Humboldt Lab, which had the mandate to experiment with new exhibition formats that might influence the exhibition concept of the HumboldtForum. In this first ever exhibition of early historical portrait and type photographs taken in Latin America, visitors to the Humboldt Lab had been led to see them as part of European cultural heritage, that is, as visual objects of their own “source community,” which had produced and consumed them.

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Up until now collections based in the Berlin district of Dahlem have been distributed between the Ethnologisches Museum, the Museum of Asian Art and the Museum of European Cultures. Only the first two museums will be transferred to the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin Mitte.

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The photographers originally tended to fade out the portrayed individual from Amazonia and instead construct the subject as a “representative of the ethnic group.” The exhibition sought to give current visitors to the museum the visual and written means (by animating photographs, integrating them in tablets and complementing them with explanatory texts and excerpts from the explorers’ diaries) of deconstructing this theoretical operation on the past. Not a single original photograph was exhibited – an unusual procedure for museum exhibitions, given their propensity to display originals as treasured possessions and their raison d’être. Interestingly, the visual device of animating selected photographs sparked the biggest controversy. Although the critique referred to the ethical questions involved (altered facial expressions of those portrayed through animation), it also seems to point to the fact that “frozen” photographs are indeed still perceived as reproducing reality. New archive forms are emerging against the backdrop of the Internet, such as websites and social media, and raise interesting questions about objects, practices and expert knowledge pertaining to the digital archive and its potential to promote democratic processes. Gisela Cánepa Koch traces how the photographs of Heinrich Brüning acquire new life as they travel on pathways beyond long-standing archive and publication practices. Brüning’s pictures have been published in several German and Peruvian books and their ethnological and documentarian character emphasized. In the meantime, however, Internet users of Peruvian websites have scanned some of these iconic publications and posted them on websites such as Antiguas Photos de Chiclayo or Imágenes de Lambayeque in the pursuit of identitarian objectives. Scanning has thus facilitated the creation of a digital archive for Brüning’s photographic collection and corresponds to a method of “informal repatriation,” despite the fact that the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin has made its collection available to the public on the museum website as part of its institutional policy of accessibility. Moreover, photographs kept as digital Facebook page files now play a major role in the public culture of Lambayeque, where Muchik identity is in the process of being shaped. Public culture has become a space for digital performance; there Brüning’s photographs are posted, shared, grouped, discussed, and valued. New archival objects are created and grouped into new archives that are, in turn, interconnected further and emerge as a reality. Digital performance creates its own interpretive contexts and references of authenticity that challenge

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the hegemony of the museum. While previous discussion has argued for the democratizing potential of digital archives, here attention is also drawn to its limits. The digital archives administered by the two Facebook groups mentioned above involve the capacity to know and appreciate photographs and the ability to use and comment on them professionally, all of which leads to the creation of hierarchies that exclude those who fail to perform to satisfaction. To the extent that these performances connote class and ethnicity, Cánepa Koch argues that the Muchik identity revitalized through these digital files can be seen as suited to urban middle-class male professionals. ***

In sum, this volume seeks to highlight new approaches that explore the current use of historical photographs in the context of memory politics, ethnographic imagination, and the negotiation of identity. The way in which diverse actors conceptualize memory and collective identity has itself undergone transformation in this process. We arranged the contributions in chronological order beginning with the production period of photographs that have become historical. All of the chapters build a bridge between the “Then” of production and the “Now” of resignification by raising and systematically answering questions such as: Who created the images and what was the context? To what extent have these pictures been given new meanings and do viewers and users identify with them? How are new uses brought about and publicly disseminated? In the first chapter, Of Photography and Men. Encounters with Historical Portrait and Type Photographs, Michael Kraus examines the historical portrait and type photographs that European explorers, collectors of ethnographic objects and professional photographers took of members of ethnic groups in the Colombian, Peruvian and Brazilian Amazonian lowlands at the turn of the 20th century. These photographs were stored at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin where systemization takes “alone the ethnicity of the photographed person, the place the photograph was taken and the name of the photographer” into account. Kraus, however, looks at the circumstances surrounding the emergence of certain pictures. Notwithstanding the fundamental bias in the relationship between European photographers and the indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest as their motif, the finely graduated distinctions of how they met and negotiated with each other and

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the respective outcomes are discussed. These distinctions refer to relations between members of both groups, local people’s understanding of photography and the scientists’ degree of reflexivity. In addition, fragments of the individual life courses of the people portrayed have been unearthed through these pictures. In the frame of an experimental exhibition by the Berliner Humboldt Lab (Touching Photography; see also Humboldt Lab Dahlem 2015: 93-101) historical portrait and type photographs now rarely circulated in the public sphere were showcased. The exhibition ultimately challenged museum visitors and exhibition critics to take a stand on these photographs. As heirs and – in a manner of speaking – source communities of the photographers of old, they grappled with these images for the first time. In Unfixed Images: Circulation and New Cultural Uses of Heinrich Brüning’s Photographic Collection, Gisela Cánepa Koch traces the production, circulation and reception of pictures taken by the German engineer and businessman Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848-1928). In 1875, Brüning moved to Peru and worked as an engineer on the haciendas of sugar cane plantations in Lambayeque. There he engaged in archaeological exploration, studied the Muchik language and photographed the local cultures of the Lambayeque region. While the bulk of his photographic collection is divided between the ethnological museums of Hamburg and Berlin, some photographs can be found scattered in albums assembled by other researchers of the time, in various publications and on the Internet. At the core of this scattering are other sets of circumstances such as Brüning’s personal and scientific agendas; the acquisition, preservation and dissemination policies of museums; the social uses of photography and its mediation in creating subjectivities, social relationships, communities and audiences; finally, technological change. Thus, the article problematizes the mobility of Brüning’s photography, not only across time and space, but also between different scientific, artistic, commercial, and technological regimes. Finally, Cánepa Koch discusses the tensions and contradictions involved in the appropriation and resignification of the photographs, such as those of members of the local Lambayeque elite, including intellectuals, schoolteachers, journalists, and communicators, who use them as identity anchors of the emerging Muchik ethnopolitical movement. Analyzing its circulation through websites, she highlights the democratizing potential of digital media to open the photographic collections to new audiences, uses and expert

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knowledge. At the same time she draws attention to the restoration of old and new forms of classification and social exclusion. In Recognizing Past and Present Through Photography. Temporality and Culture in the Konrad Theodor Preuss’s Images, Aura Reyes relies on photographs taken by the German anthropologist Karl Theodor Preuss (1869-1938) for her research on the tightly knit interrelation between the constitution of anthropology as a systematic discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century and the musealization of the indigenous people of Colombia. Shortly before and during World War I, Preuss supervised archaeological excavations in San Agustín and conducted ethnographic research among the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Most of his vast collection, which includes twenty-one monolithic stone sculptures from San Agustín, is housed at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, while his photographs are preserved at the Världskulturmuseerna in Gothenburg, Sweden. Today the statuary and sacred wooden masks of the Kogi constitute a field of conflict that refers to the controversial history of their acquisition and the current repatriation claims articulated by the Kogi and the Colombian government vis-à-vis the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin as part of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (whose collections are soon to be transferred to the prestigious Humboldt-Forum in Berlin). Aura Reyes brought pictures taken by Preuss to her research field to stimulate narratives on his period of investigation. What began as a method of photo-elicitation progressed to a profound dialogue on a wide range of topics spanning a longer period of time. They addressed the legitimacy of Preuss’s photography activities in the 1910s and the political posture of the Kogi in charge of religious and political affairs vis-à-vis the researcher. These aspects were discussed with the scientist Reyes against the backdrop of the current debate revolving around the patrimony of Kogi sacred objects in the Preuss collection. Mariana Petroni’s contribution on Appropriating an Image. A Study of the Reception of Ethnographic Photography among the Zapotec Indigenous People of Mexico centers on photographic images captured by the Mexican anthropologist Julio de la Fuente (1905-1970) in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the Zapotec-speaking community of Yalálag. Influenced by the school of cultural anthropology and ideas formulated by U.S. anthropologist Robert Redfield, de la Fuente’s lens attempted to capture phenomena marked by a folk-urban continuum. He defined positions on this continuum according to tracers such as the degree of traditionalism (equated with indi-

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geneity) or modernity (equated with Mestizoness) manifested in people’s attire. Petroni rearranged some of the 221 photographs of Yalálag stored in the Fototeca Nacho López collection of the National Commission for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples (CDI in Spanish) in an album she took with her to Yalálag. Her intention was to find out whether and if so how after almost seventy years the residents of Yalálag relate subjectively to these historical photographs. The observers identified the pictures with Yalálag and themselves as its residents, but interpreted them from different perspectives and political stances. The members of one political fraction, Grupo Comunitario, attached major significance to traditional female attire as a Yalálag identity marker – not unlike Julio de la Fuente many decades earlier. This interpretation spotlights their ethnopolitical demands to preserve and strengthen the Zapotec language and Zapotec culture. The meanings that the photographer inscribed into the photographs when he chose to portray residents more as “representatives of the ethnic group” than as individuals contributed to this convergence of ideas across decades. Yet the search for evidence of cultural persistence in the photos has assumed a novel quality, since the images now serve the interests of local residents to formulate self-determined ethnically based goals for the future of the town and the Zapotec-speaking people. In her contribution on Unexpected Memories. Bringing Back Photographs and Films from the 1980s to an Asháninka Nomatsiguenga Community of the Peruvian Selva Central Ingrid Kummels discusses photographs taken by the German anthropologist, filmmaker and activist Manfred Schäfer (1949-2003) between the late 1970s and early 1980s in the Eastern Peruvian rain forest in the community of Matereni. These images are an example of the visual heritage stored in the private collections and legacies of numerous anthropologists as part of a “visual divide” in audiovisual media. In this case the photographs were repatriated twenty-five years after the last picture was taken on the personal initiative of the scientist Kummels. Many of these photographs initially carried political messages that can be contextualized as the commitment of German Völkerkunde (anthropology) students to combat the massive assimilation pressures to which ethnic minorities worldwide were once exposed. They are also related to solidarity with the political movement of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous peoples and its struggle against policies of exploitation and colonization in the rain forest region backed by the then Peruvian president Fernan-

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do Belaúnde. The aim of the dialogical messages inscribed in these photographs was to contradict the romantic German stereotype of indigenous people, empower the people portrayed and visually document their good quality of life. The photographs were reinterpreted from today’s perspective, that is, after the community had overcome the devastation of civil war by their own efforts, sold their timber resources and engendered a process of rapid modernization. Residents interwove these pictures with the prevailing medium of handing down history through oral narratives and realigned them. Although not familiar with the use of historical photographs, the community authorities rapidly used them for political purposes, that is, to highlight the active and progressive role of the village in building the Peruvian nation. In Gazing at the Face of Absence. Signification and Resignification of Family Photographs of Disappeared University Students in Peru Mercedes Figueroa examines the new uses that families give to ID pictures and photographs from their private albums. This refers to family members who were disappeared and murdered during the civil war in the 1980s. At the same time, doubts were cast on their status as victims. They came under general suspicion as a result of the Peruvian state’s Manichean classification of those who disagreed with its policies as guilty of tacit collaboration with terrorists. In a reverse strategy, family members visualize absence with the presence of photographs. By representing the disappeared with ID pictures they had appropriated a photographic tool of state control. They furthermore visualize them via family photographs that allow for an insight into the character of the person portrayed, something that the neutral expression called for in ID pictures renders invisible. These strategies are part of a broader pattern of affected families in several Latin American countries, who actively counteract the impact of violence with similar photographic interventions in the politics of memory. In the course of socializing and interacting with the researcher, who digitized these pictures, other appropriations of pictures for political interventions took place. In one particular case one of the disappeared is commemorated by interviews with family members on the SoundCloud portal, which includes a podcast of his biography and a digitized photograph from his childhood. Hence the pictures developed a social life of their own during research and accessed the digital world as a further platform for political intervention.

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In Disputing Visual Memories in the Peruvian Andes. The Case of Huancasancos, Ayacucho María Eugenia Ulfe and Ximena Málaga Sabogal direct their attention to photographs at the suggestion of their interlocutors in Huancasancos. These include pictures of residents once taken by the local professional photographer, pictures that give insights into a period when the town was infiltrated by Sendero Luminoso and drawn into the conflicts of this terrorist group in the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. The stories these pictures tell about everyday life run parallel to integration of Huacasancos into one of the pivotal committees Sendero Luminoso used to indoctrinate youth and train them at the Los Andes local school for armed conflict in the interests of building a “new state.” The researchers collected photographs that bear witness to this event, “[t]he war continued, but in the meantime community life kept on going.” The various interests and perspectives of both scientists and residents influenced the choice of historical pictures shown in a local photographic exhibition, the fruit of concerted action with local authorities. The photographic exhibits tell stories of beauty pageants and soccer games under conditions of violent civil war, thereby foregrounding the “small narratives.” The official photographic exhibitions on the Peruvian civil war to be housed in the future in the museum Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (in Spanish LUM), on the other hand, still have no plans to devote space to the “small narratives” of these photographs and thus of life beyond victimization. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the many colleagues who conduct research on the topic of photography in and from Latin America as referred to in the articles in this volume. Our exchange with some of the authors is based on workshops such as “The Visual Cultural Heritage of the Andes und Amazonia,” which took place at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin in November 2014. The financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin was instrumental to making publication of the present volume possible. The volume itself is the outcome of Gisela Cánepa Koch’s stay as a Georg Forster research fellow of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies in 2014 and a reciprocal visit by Ingrid Kummels to the master’s program of Visual Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in the same year. Special thanks go to Barbara Belejack for her pa-

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tience and expertise in revising the authors’ contributions. We gratefully acknowledge the superb quality of the language editing by Barbara Belejack and Sunniva Greve (who worked on the introduction). We thank AnneKristin Kordaß, Ximena Aragón, Luis González Toussaint and Oliver Tewes for their dedication in completing the volume and their valuable copy-editing and layout skills. Berlin/Lima, January 2016

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Bibliography Adolf, Marian (2011): “Clarifying Mediatization: Sorting through a Current Debate.” In: Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 3/2, pp. 153-175. Appadurai, Arjun/Breckenridge, Carol (1995): “Public Modernity in India.” In: Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1995): Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Berger, John (1990): Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series, London: Penguin Books. Bell, Joshua A./Christen, Kimberly/Turin, Mark (2013): “After the Return.” In: Museum Anthropology Review 7/1-2, pp. 1-21. Brown, Michael F. (2009): “Exhibiting Indigenous Heritage in the Age of Cultural Property.” In: James Cuno (ed.), Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Alison K./Peers, Laura with members of the Kaina Nation (2006): Pictures Bring us Memories. Sinaaksiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaahwa: Photographs and Memories of the Kainai nation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cánepa Koch, Gisela (2011): Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú, Lima: PUCP. Cánepa Koch, Gisela (2013): “Imágenes del mundo, imágenes en el mundo: del archivo a los repertorios visuales.” In: POLIANTEA 16. (http://journal.poligran.edu.co/index.php/poliantea/issue/archive) Cánepa Koch, Gisela/ Ulfe, María Eugenia (2014): “Performatividades contemporáneas y el imperativo de la participación en las tecnologías digitales.” In: Revista Anthropologica 32/33, pp. 67-82. (http://revistas .pucp.edu.pe/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/11326/11835) Edwards, Elizabeth (2001): Raw Histories. Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, Oxford: Berg. Fontcuberta, Joan (2015): The Post-Photographic Condition. Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Berlin: Kerber Verlag.

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Freund, Alexander/Thomson, Alistair (2011): “Introduction: Oral History and Photography.” In: Alexander Freund/Alistair Thomson (eds.), Oral History and Photography, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-27. Garde-Hansen, Joanne (2011): Media and Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil/Ferguson, James (1997): “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology.” In: Akhil Gupta/James Ferguson (eds.), Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Ground of a Field Science, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-46. Hepp, Andreas (2010): “Mediatisierung und Kulturwandel: Kulturelle Kontextfelder und die Prägkräfte der Medien.” In: Maren Hartmann/Andreas Hepp (eds.), Die Mediatisierung der Alltagswelt, Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, pp. 65-84. Humboldt Lab Dahlem (ed.) (2015): Prinzip Labor. Museumsexperimente im Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin: Nicolai Verlag. Kraus, Michael (2015): “Exploring the Archive. An Introduction.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Berlin: Ethnologisches Museum, pp. 9-47. Kummels, Ingrid (2012): “Espacios mediáticos: cultura y representación en México –Introducción.” In: Ingrid Kummels (ed.), Espacios mediáticos: cultura y representación en México, Berlin: Edition Tranvía, pp. 9-39. Kummels, Ingrid (2015): “Negotiating Land Tenure in Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk People’s Videomaking between Mexico and the USA.” In: Working Paper for the EASA Media Anthropology Network´s eSeminar (http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars). Kummels, Ingrid (n.d.): “Patron Saint’s Fiesta Videos: Mediatization and Transnationalization between the Sierra Mixe and California.” In: Freya Schiwy/Byrt Wammack (eds.), Adjusting the Lens, Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, in print. Livingstone, Sonia (2010): “Interactive, Engaging but Unequal. Critical Conclusions from Internet Studies.” In: James Curran (ed.), Media and Society, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 122-142. McKenzie, Jon (2001): Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge.

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Murray, Susan (2008): “Digital Images, Photo Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.” In: Journal of Visual Culture 7/2, pp. 147-163. Poole, Deborah (1997): Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Poole, Deborah/Rojas Pérez, Isaías (2011): “Fotografía y memoria en el Perú de la posguerra.” In: Gisela Cánepa Koch (ed.), Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú, Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, pp. 263-303. Price, Sally (2007): Paris Primitive. Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Postill, John (2010): “Introduction: Theorising Media and Practice.” In: Birgit Bräuchler/John Postill (eds.), Theorising Media and Practice, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1-32. Rosaldo, Renato (1993): Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press. Schmidt, Thomas E. (2015): „Wem gehören die Masken?“ In: Die Zeit, May 21, 2015, p. 43. Strassler, Karen (2010): Refracted Visions. Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, Durham: Duke University Press. Van Dijck, José (2007): Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Of Photography and Men Encounters with Historical Portrait and Type Photographs1 M ICHAEL K RAUS

The historical photography collection of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin includes a picture of a young, serious-looking, about eleven-year-old Guató boy with a melancholy gaze standing in front of a hut. He is barefoot and wearing only a pair of trousers that he wrapped around his waist in the manner of a loincloth, held by a non-Indian belt. In his left hand he carries a bow and an arrow (Figure 1). The photograph was taken by the ethnologist Max Schmidt in 1901. Meki, so the boy’s name, accompanied the explorer for a time. Schmidt describes him as a happy, outgoing boy who knew how to distract him when he himself grew melancholy during his travels (Schmidt 1905: 157f.). For two years, from 2011 to 2013, I worked at the Museum in Berlin in the project “Erschließung, Digitalisierung und wissenschaftliche Recherche zu historischen Fotografien aus Lateinamerika.”2 Besides their digitization,

1 2

Translated from the German by Andreas Hemming. The use of the male gender form includes implicitly the female gender form unless indicated otherwise. “Development, digitization and scientific research on historical photographs from Latin America” (DFG INST 142/2-1). My thanks go out to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for financing the project and Manuela Fischer as well as all my other colleagues at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin for their cooperation. The goal of the project was, among other things, to make the Museum’s photographic collection accessible via the online databank of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (www.smb-digital.de). The volume “Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the 1 The Guató Meki. Photographer: Max Schmidt. 1901 © Ethnologisches Museum – SMB (VIII E 1412).

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my work included the reorganization of the photographic collection from Latin America, its analysis and its documentation in the museum’s database. The photograph of Meki carries the inventory number VIII E 1412. It measures 15.9 x 10.3 cm and is glued to a cardboard backing that in turn measures 18.9 x 13.8 cm. I noted all this information in the database, together with a reference to the publication of the picture in Schmidt’s travelogue (1905: Plate VIII, 144-145). Beyond that, I paid no further attention to the photograph – at least initially. Max Schmidt later returned twice more to the Guató. When researching other images I came across an article on one of his later voyages that he published 27 years after taking the photograph of Meki. There he mentioned, almost by the way, that Meki had apparently drunk himself to death (Schmidt 1928: 122). This throwaway comment touched me. I retrieved the older photograph from the archive and examined it again, with a new perspective, so to speak. What had happened in this boy’s life since Schmidt’s first visit? Why did this child in the picture feel the need to turn to alcohol? Was the unusual situation of being photographed somehow responsible for Meki’s melancholy gaze? Or was that gaze more telling than the ethnographer’s description? In Schmidt’s travelogue, to which I returned as well, he mentions the use of alcohol when he first arrives among the Guató. Timotheus, Meki’s father and Schmidt's host in the village of Figueira, is said to have been a great fan of brandy. He was evidently accustomed to receive it as a gift from strangers. Schmidt tried to avoid meeting these expectations as best he could and hid a bottle he had with him. But he could not ignore his host’s entreaties altogether, who himself had gifted him with palm wine after all. He had to watch as his hosts got increasingly drunk. And although he did not take advantage of the fact, he did note with a degree of perturbation how easily the Guató could be taken of advantage of under these conditions. In his travelogue he writes: “Now would have been the most favorable moment for a ‘shrewd researcher and collector’ to ‘buy up’ everything of interest from the people for pennies. When I re-

Ethnologisches Museum Berlin” (Fischer/Kraus 2015) was a further product of the research.

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fused to contribute freely to their pleasant feeling of intoxication, they were willing to make the greatest sacrifices for only a small glass of brandy. Timotheus, whom I had given four Milréis for several ethnographic pieces, proposed, eventually, after all previous requests had been in vain, to give up all his valuables for just one more sip of brandy.” (Schmidt 1905: 141f.)

This narrative does not explain the fate of the young Guató. What happened to him in the following years remains speculation. For me, however, this story provided occasion to look anew for information on the individuals depicted in the photographs of the collection. The goal of this essay is to address the numerous gaps that exist in the data when it comes to identifying the persons being photographed and to identify patterns that emerge in the documentation of such encounters. In the second part I want to present an exhibition project for the Humboldt Lab Dahlem that was developed based on the issues raised in this context. Looking for the Individual Encounters in the archive such as the one I just described increasingly raised questions during the viewing of the collection of historical photographs, among them large numbers of portraits and type photographs. What do we really know about the people looking out at us from these images? In the vast majority of cases alone the ethnicity of the photographed person, the place the photograph was taken and the name of the photographer are noted. The mere fact that in the above described case the subject’s name is known makes it stand out. To what extent were researchers and photographers interested in the fate of the individuals they were studying? To what extent were the people being photographed in fact perceived only as typological examples, mere representatives of a collective, prototypical of a culture? One end on the scale of interest and forms of representation was formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in an interview with Didier Eribon (a statement that Lévi-Strauss himself admitted might sound cynical): “I do not concern myself with people, but with beliefs, with customs and institutions” (Lévi-Strauss/Eribon 1996: 224). It is not my intention to criticize this stance. Of course, it is an important part of scientific work to look for structures and generalizable features. But it is remarkable how rare it is that in-

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2 ‘Tsirakuá’ Woman. Photographer: Erland Nordenskiöld. 1909 © Ethnologisches Museum – SMB (VIII E 3679).

dividuals find themselves the focus of a science that sees personal relationships and personal encounters as the basis for gaining knowledge. María Susana Cipolletti and Fernando Payaguaje (2008: 11f.) have pointed out how rare biographical (and autobiographical) texts and studies are in anthropology, and especially in anthropology focused on South America. Beside their stated intention to document ‘physical’ or ‘ethnic’ types (cf. Hempel 2007), the lack of more detailed information on the individuals being photographed, especially in the early days of anthropological photography, will in many cases certainly have to do with the comparatively short amount of time researchers spent among the people they photographed. In this older literature, reports about repeated encounters between scholars and the people they studied – encounters that would surely have provided some descriptions of at least some historical depth – are rare. An example of such a reunion is the tragic fate of a ‘Tsirakuá’ woman (Figure 2) mentioned by Swedish explorer Erland Nordenskiöld in one of his popular descriptions of his experiences in Gran Chaco. Together with another woman and six children, the ‘Tsirakuá’ woman had been captured by the

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3 The Bakairi Antonio. Photographer: Max Schmidt. 1927 © Ethnologisches Museum – SMB (VIII E 4861).

‘Yanaygua’ after an attack on their village.3 In captivity, she gave birth to another son. Some time later Nordenskiöld met the woman again, living with a priest in the Bolivian town of Charagua. The ‘Yanaygua’ had sold her and her son for liquor, sugar and syrup; the priest in turn handed the ‘Tsirakuá’ boy over to someone else. Carl Moberg, Nordenskiöld’s Swedish travel companion, was the last to report on the fate of this woman. He had met her on the street in the village. She was dressed in rags, weeping and full of despair in search of her child. When she did not find it, she disappeared back into the forest (Nordenskiöld 1912: 306ff.). Another case that can be traced over a period of four decades is that of the Bakairi Antonio, who in the period from 1884 to 1901 was either hired 3

‘Yanaigua’ was a collective term for Indians living in the forest coined by the Guaraní that found common use also among the Whites. Nordenskiöld writes that ‘Yanaigua’ were “friends” of the Tapiete (Nordenskiöld 1912: 304). Several Zamuco-speaking groups living in the Gran Chaco, who had been enemies of the Tapiete, were called ‘Tsirakuá’ above all the Ayoréode. My thanks to Jürgen Riester and Isabelle Combès for pointing this out.

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to guide himself or found guides for several German research expeditions and used the influence and goods he thus acquired – including glass beads, but also oxen and a gun – to establish for a time his own little violent regime on the Rio Paranatinga. Max Schmidt met Antonio, who was first mentioned and even photographed during the expeditions of Karl von den Steinen (1886: 211, 129; 1892: frontispiece; 1894: 16-17, Plate II) and who he had himself come to know in 1901, again in 1927 (Figure 3). Four decades after Antonio’s first encounter with a German research traveler, Schmidt again wrote a few brief lines about his life and took two more photographs of him (cf. Schmidt 1947: Plates II and III; Kraus 2004: 362-371; 2014a: 42-47). Heterogeneous Relationships The question of finding information on individuals that were photographed during these expeditions is closely linked to the question of the origin context of these images. The historical portrait and type photographs that are neither quick snapshots nor photographs of larger groups in which individuals disappear in the masses document, simply in the manner of their creation, an interpersonal relationship. The facial expression, stance and staging of such photographs witness – consciously or unconsciously – the traces of these intercultural encounters. What were these relationships like? To what extent were they marked by empathy and mutual respect, to what degree influenced by power and duress? “Power – however diffuse it might be –” wrote Georges Balandier (1972 [1967]: 37), “implies a dissymmetry in social relations.” Eric Wolf (1990) distinguished various levels upon which power took effect. For these present considerations, besides the interpersonal level – is a photograph the result of the free will of both the photographer and the photographed or did one side force the other to the photograph – the tactical or organizational level is important. To what extent were the conditions of the encounter at all such that the photographed individual had any choice in the matter? Moreover, the aspect of the attribution of meaning that Wolf discusses must also be considered. How did the protagonists look upon one another and how did the photographer describe the image? How do these existing descriptions – and later interpretations – influence our gaze and our perception? And is this perception ‘frozen,’ that is, mainly determined by

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the message of the associated text, by how the image is presented or by other constructed forms of prior knowledge? The old travelogues provide relatively detailed information on the nature of the respective encounters as well as the reactions to the use of the camera. The presentations of ethnographic data are often preceded by detailed descriptions of the course of the expedition and provide a good deal of information on the context in which the data was collected. These early ethnologists were well aware of the epistemological importance of these lengthy introductory descriptions, which was rediscovered in the theoretical and methodological debates of the 1970s and 1980s (cf. Geertz 1973; Marcus/Cushman 1982; Clifford/Marcus 1986). Fritz Krause, for example, stresses in his description of his 1908 expedition to Brazil where he worked primarily among the Karajá, the specific value of these lengthy travel narratives. They were important, “because the data emerging out of the expedition can only be properly assessed if the nature of their collection is known, that is, the conditions under which the study was carried out” (Krause 1911: III). If we focus our reading of these accounts on the scenes in which the process of photography is described, a remarkably heterogeneous picture emerges. One aspect that has already been widely pointed out is the fear that cameras often triggered. In her famous essay “In Plato’s Cave,” Susan Sontag (1977: 7) wrote: “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.” This statement is true not only for non-Europeans or among people unused to the technology of photography. Thus we find, for example, in a report by Rudolf Virchow on the “General Assembly of the German Anthropological Society” that the Congress was memorable not least because “more participants than ever before were equipped with photographic apparatuses and the other members were subject at every turn to their attacks” (Virchow 1891: 746, italics MK). In the field, where the functioning of a camera was all the more a mystery, these “attacks” were often perceived as being a real threat. Thus we read, for example, in a report by Paul Ehrenreich, who accompanied Karl von den Steinen on his second expedition to the Brazilian Xingu region, that: “The taking of photographs was not overly difficult, except that the people were so afraid and often trembled so violently that their natural facial expressions were lost” (Ehrenreich 1890: 97). Ehrenreich also reported that some Indians trembled with fear when they were being measured. In

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one case the fear was so great that one girl he wanted to examine resorted to diving into the river to escape. Others followed and the research team aborted their studies for the day (Ehrenreich 1892: 39; see also von den Steinen 1894: 129). Diving into the river to thus end such an agonizing encounter was not always possible. The colonial context in which the indigenous populations of Amazonia found themselves even after the independence of the South American nation-states was no doubt an important factor for moving the people to hold still for a photographer. Hierarchical power structures came in handy for the research travelers, for example, when government officials or local authorities such as rubber traders enabled the physical measurement or the photography of the indigenous population (cf. Hempel 2015: 211f.; Koch-Grünberg 2004: 72, 76, 84-86; Kraus 2004: 189-197). In the account of his expedition to Peru in 1888 that he undertook together with Charles Kroehle to take photographs that he could later sell, Georg Hübner describes a situation in which a photograph of a ‘Campa’ (Asháninka) family emerged: “While preparing to photograph them with their house, they watched attentively – until we screwed in the objective. When they saw it, they got frightened, apparently because they thought that we would be pointing some form of gun at them, and they stood up and ran away, leaving us there alone” (Hübner 1893: 60). While these ‘Campa’ still had the chance to run, when the Indians were in the presence or sometimes even the prisoners of rubber collectors, this was not the case. The photographs taken by Hübner and Kroehle reveal the complex interdependencies associated with the medium of photography. The two photographers profited on the one hand from the colonial context in which they found themselves – the enslavement and relative defenselessness of the Indians they encountered – in their endeavor to take photographs that they could later sell for a profit. But these photographs in turn were used to document and condemn this brutal context (cf. Hardenburg 1913; Kraus 2013: 15). But it would be a misrepresentation of the historical data to describe these power relations as being unilateral in favor of the research travelers. Both Wilhelm Kissenberth and Theodor Koch-Grünberg describe how they at times were simply forbidden to take photographs in an Indian village (Kissenberth: Diary XII, 85 (EM); Koch-Grünberg 1967 [1909/10]: I, 350). Furthermore, many cases can also be found – among the likes of Ernst Ule, Wilhelm Kissenberth, Felix Speiser and later Claude Lévi-Strauss – in

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which the local Indians demanded that they be photographed and that they were often disappointed when the anthropologist did not do so (Ule 1913: 284; Kissenberth: Diary V, 16 (EM); Speiser 1926: 229f., 262; Lévi-Strauss 1989 [1955]: 167). Sometimes opinions and interests were divided along lines other than between scholar and the peoples being studied. Kissenberth reports that during his stay among the Canela (Ramkokamekra), the men had no objection to being photographed while some women were uneasy about the proposition. The emerging conflict was not between Canela and the outside visitor but between the interests of the men on the one hand, and those of the women on the other. Despite their reluctance, Kissenberth did take a photograph of some women in a kitchen hut. It was made possible by the village chief, who instructed his wife in no uncertain terms that she let herself be photographed (Kissenberth 1912: 49).4 Elsewhere the self-determination of the women seems to have been more pronounced. The Italian artist and ethnographer Guido Boggiani, who lived in Paraguay for many years (and was killed there by some Indians in 1901/02 for reasons that were never quite cleared up), was very much fascinated by the rich body painting tradition of the Kadiweú women. But he was not always permitted to photograph them. One richly decorated woman (see Figure 5), who reminded Boggiani of a work of the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, succumbed to his appeals to let herself be photographed only after long hesitation (Frič/Fričová 1997: 33). The amount of negotiation that went into each concrete encounter and how little sweeping generalizations on how travelers behaved are worth, can be seen in the great variety of situations that emerged during one and the same expedition. Theodor Koch-Grünberg wrote on his stay among the Makuxi during his 1911-1913 expedition “Vom Roroima zum Orinoco”: “Then the day’s work begins. The Indians are photographed individually and in groups. No one is afraid of the mysterious apparatus. They nearly

4

For a more in-depth description of the expeditions, behavior and intentions of the mentioned German research travellers see Kraus 2004. For a detailed analysis of their photographs and photographic praxis see Bossert/Villar 2013, 2015 (on Max Schmidt); Hempel 2009 (on Theodor Koch-Grünberg); Hempel 2014a, 2015, Kraus 2013 (on Paul Ehrenreich); König 2002, Kraus 2013, Schoepf 2005, Valentin 2012, 2015, Kohl 2014 (on Georg Hübner and Charles Kroehle); Kraus 2014b (on Ernst Ule); Kraus 2015 (on Wilhelm Kissenberth).

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demand to be photographed because as payment the men receive tobacco and fishhooks, the women and children beads and colorful ribbons” (KochGrünberg 1917: 37). Some time later, however, the situation was very much different. On his encounter with the Schirianá (Yanomami) during the same expedition he writes: “I erected the large photographic apparatus to record the community individually and in groups. Evidently, already my preparations made an eerie impression on the people. To reassure them I first let Schmidt and then José stand before the camera. As I duck under the black hood, a look of horror appears on their faces. A young Schirianá with particularly characteristic features that I wanted to place before the camera pales, trembling violently and wants to run away. Mönekaí [one of KochGrünberg's indigenous guides, MK] tries in vain to explain the harmless procedure with a photograph of his brother Maipalalí. No one understands him” (ibid: 203). Interesting in this context are also the different reactions on the part of the Indians when they looked through the camera lens and when they later looked at the photographs that often needed, for technical reasons, to be developed right away. Paul Ehrenreich, for example, writes that “it is noteworthy that the image in the viewfinder is always recognized immediately, something that uneducated Europeans often are not able to do at first” (Ehrenreich 1890: 97). Koch-Grünberg made similar observations. He wrote that upon emerging from the darkroom tent in the village of Cururú-cuara in 1903: “Each developed plate that I brought out was duly admired and laughed about; most often the negative image was identified immediately” (Koch-Grünberg 1967 [1909/10]: I, 81; cf. Koch-Grünberg 1917: 248f.). Several Taurepang that he visited in 1911 identified people on negatives immediately, which led him to note that they had “an extraordinary talent for identifying pictorial representations foreign to many of our own socalled educated citizens” (Koch-Grünberg 1917: 104). But as different as the behavior of the traveling scholars was, the reactions of the Indians were also different. In addition to the newly developed images, Koch-Grünberg at times showed his various hosts and companions photographs from Germany that he had with him in his baggage or photographs taken among other ethnic groups. Some Yanomami who he met on the way apparently did not know what to make of what they saw (ibid: 202). A broad spectrum of social relations and, in turn, descriptions can thus be identified both in terms of personal relationships and reactions. While

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evidence of the reduction of the photographed individual to a mere object can be found in the literature, it would be too simple to conclude that all early anthropologists and photographers in the South American lowlands shared this stance. The encounters were complex and in the Indian villages especially, the act of photography was generally accompanied by much negotiation. In their published travelogues – intended for a larger public and written and illustrated appropriately – many of these scholars also tried to develop a sincere interest among their readers for the people they visited, their cultures and ways of life and combat existing prejudices in their own society. For example, Erland Nordenskiöld (1912: 1) began one of his books saying: “I have tried, as best I could, to live the life of the Indians, to understand them. I fished with them, danced with them, sang and drank with them. I tried to forget that I came to study these people and not to merely live with them and enjoy myself. I considered these Indians fellow men. Between the many dry facts I want to show a people that are worthy of a reader’s sympathy.” Elsewhere he writes that “one would be mistaken, were one to believe that the conversations with these men were just an interesting form of study. I felt comfortable among these fine, tactful and – yes, why not – educated people. It was often quite refreshing after having whiled among the often ignoble, superficial whites” (ibid: 156). Theodor Koch-Grünberg stressed in a letter to Alberto Vojtěch Frič that he was writing his books with the goal, among other things, to reach a wider audience using nontechnical language and “in doing so, if possible, correct the ludicrous preconceptions that the masses have about ‘primitives’” (Koch-Grünberg to Frič, May 2nd, 1916, Sta Lu). Touching Photography – or: Can an Exhibition be an Essay? The all too often futile search for biographical information on the people shown in these historical photographs as well as the very different descriptions of how people reacted during their contact with the photographer led to the idea to broach these issues in an exhibition. This idea was benefited by the fact that at more or less the same time that I was working on this project in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, the Humboldt Lab Dahlem (HLD) was opened. Financed by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes in anticipa-

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4 The “Touching Photography” exhibit. Room one. Photographer: Jens Ziehe. 2013 © Humboldt Lab Dahlem/Ethnologisches Museum – SMB. tion of the opening of the Humboldt-Forum, the HLD had the mandate to develop experimental new exhibition formats that might influence the Humboldt-Forum’s exhibition concept. The exhibition could be realized in this context.5 One of the initial ideas for the exhibit was that the visitors should be

5

The Humboldt-Forum will be a center for art, culture, science and learning. It will include the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen Berlin as well as a library and the exhibition lab of the Humboldt-Universität. It will be housed in the soon-to-be reconstructed Berlin Palace and is expected to open in 2019. For a documentation of the individual HLD projects see http://www.humboldt-forum.de/humboldt-lab-dahlem/ (last accessed 26.07.2015); see also Humboldt Lab Dahlem 2015; the following description of the exhibit is a reworked version of a previously published text (Kraus 2014c). For an analysis of the work of the HLD cf. Scholz 2015. My thanks to the various teams involved in realizing the exhibit, above all Agnes Wegner and Franziska Hartmann from the HLD and Jürgen Willinghöfer and Detlef Weitz from chezweitz.

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able to see the people in the historical photographs ‘eye-to-eye,’ that is, life-size. The individuals in the pictures – and not their status as object or the aura of the historical original – and various relationships – between the photographer and the photographed, between images and their use, between visitors to museums and persons being portrayed or represented – were to take center stage. I also wanted two other aspects to be included in the exhibit: that the heterogeneity and complexity of the concrete historical encounters be shown; and that the visitors to the exhibit be permitted to experience the final step in the scholarly process, that is, the analysis of the historical encounter and how it should be understood. Concrete information on the encounters in Amazonia at the turn of the 20th century should be included, but it should – despite the implicit nature of an exhibit as tracing a given path dictated by the exhibition designers – not be a fixed narrative. The visitors to the exhibition were to be given the opportunity (and possibly the burden) of coming to their own conclusions. The concept for the realization of these goals was developed together with the scenographic designers of chezweitz. The people at chezweitz came up with the idea of ‘living images,’ that is, the digital animation of selected photographs.6 They also proposed to recreate an ‘archive’ through the use of overhead projectors and foils that would make it possible to show a relatively large number of the photographs in the actual archive, but still let the visitors actively influence which images were projected on the wall and in turn how they search for information and impressions. In the space between these two elements, the stories behind selected images were told. Upon entering the exhibit, a visitor was met by three long canvas panels hung from the ceiling upon which life-size and in an alternating sequence a total of 21 photographs were projected (Figure 4). After a few seconds the images faded out, accompanied by an indicated camera shutter. The only other design element in this room was an audio component: a faint breathing in the background. This was very discrete, but helped to avoid any absolute silences while at the same time underscoring the idea of animating the images. Anyone looking at the photographs, or better, the pe-

6

chezweitz has uploaded some of these animations onto the Internet. See https://vimeo.com/116235174 (last accessed 04.10.2015). More photographs of the exhibit can be found under http://www.chezweitz.de/de/home/humboldt-lab (last accessed 04.10.2015).

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5 The “Touching Photography” exhibit. One of the tablets in room two. Photographer: Sebastian Bolesch. 2013 © Humboldt Lab Dahlem/Ethnologisches Museum – SMB.

ople they showed, would quickly realize that they were moving. In most cases, this movement was very subtle, however, in meeting with the experimental character of the Humboldt Lab Dahlem and its mandate we intended to play with forms and push the limits. A young Kayapó man, for example, could be seen rolling his shoulders, arms and upper body in one fluid motion, a Bauré winked and a Piro with a drawn bow slowly turned to face the visitor. We refrained deliberately from using any text at this point. It was only in the second room that we informed the visitor via a largeformat wall text about the exhibit’s subject. Various encounter scenarios and image histories were also described here. On tablet computers laid out in the room, an introductory story and six more narrative threads could be perused. Selected photographs were accompanied by an audio narrative based on and citing the information that was available on them, such as biographical fragments and the context of the encounter (Figure 5). The spoken texts included citations out of the relevant travelogues and incorporated unpublished letters and diaries. The listening experience helped the visitor concentrate on the image while taking up the information about it instead of having to shift between a written text and an image.

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6 The “Touching Photography” exhibit. Room three. Photographer: Jens Ziehe. 2013 © Humboldt Lab Dahlem/Ethnologisches Museum – SMB.

In an attempt to avoid the centering of these narratives on the traveling scholars or on the ethnicity of the individuals being photographed, characteristic aspects of the specific encounter were identified, providing for the headings “fear,” “empathy,” “body,” “art,” “ambivalence,” and “change.” The stories behind these terms showed how different and complex the encounters could be and how these were intertwined with personal attitudes, the ideologies of the time and the prevailing asymmetric political constellation. These narratives had no simple common denominator. The frightened Asháninka, who were browbeaten into letting themselves be photographed, had little in common with the self-assured Kayapó, who were vehement in their refusal (demonstrated on the tablets by means of an empty space where a photograph should have been). The cold, physical anthropological documentary style of type photography practiced by Paul Ehrenreich was shown in opposition to the loving description of an Indian storyteller by Erland Nordenskiöld. The design of the room was marked by four further quotations on the wall that again emphasized the heterogeneity and the individuality of concrete encounters. We pointed to the subjective character of the exhibition – of every exhibition – by means of the use of an essay-

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istic narrative style. The main text on the wall as well as the introductory text were both written in the first person, and I included, beside the historical data, some of my own personal feelings when working with these photographs. In the third room stood three tables, each with an overhead projector (Figure 6). Beside them were a total of 156 numbered projector foils, whose design was inspired by the aesthetic of archive cards. The respective photograph on the top left quarter was complemented on the bottom left by “Personal information.” On the right were listed the categories “Ethnic group,” “Name,” “Location,” “Date of photography,” “Photographer,” “Measurements,” “Ident. no.,” and “Link” (Figure 7). One hundred forty-seven projector foils showed members of various South American indigenous groups, seven were pictures of photographers and two were images of groups of expedition participants. The information in the field marked “Link” was there to help visitors find pictures that were in some way associated with one another and to view these side by side. For example, of some people we had several images – from various perspectives or, less often, taken at various times or by different photographers. The people in some of the pictures were related to one another or were participants in the same contextual narrative. Some pictures were of course taken by the same photographer. By juxtaposing the linked projector foils, text blocks could be combined to reveal overarching narratives. In the field “Personal information,” individual information about the person depicted was recorded in meeting with the original idea of the exhibition. All the photographs in rooms one and two were also included on these projector foils. In addition to the accumulating recognition factor, the search for correlations, the feeling of working in an archive and the viewing of new images, the projector foils demonstrated the message that until then had been expressed only in the introductory wall text, namely the disparity between the very large number of photographs and the very small amount of information that existed on the individuals shown in the photographs. Although far from a representative sample, it may be of interest that of the 147 photographs of members of various indigenous groups, in 140 cases an ethnic attribution was documented, but a proper name in only 52 cases. Personal information – limited at best – was

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available in only 50 cases.7 In most cases the field “Personal information” thus remained blank. Fragmentation and reduction, standardization and the pursuit of comparability of scientific data and documentation processes were addressed in this room, as were different visual tropes and photographic formats and the different efforts the photographers made to record, beside such general information as ethnic identification, individual information as well.

7 The “Touching Photography” exhibit. One of the overhead foils in room three. © Humboldt Lab Dahlem, chezweitz, Ethnologisches Museum – SMB.

7

The actual percentage of photographs that were well documented in terms of personal data is, in fact, much lower. In selecting photographs to be used in the exhibit, the choice fell necessarily on those that were better documented.

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One reading that the dramaturgy of the exhibit allowed was the retracing of the course of an actual encounter: a first meeting was followed by personal engagement and negotiations to end in the organizing and summarizing of the impressions gained during the first two events. When one meets a stranger for the first time as in room one, one initially knows nothing about them. The first impression is cursory, it is visual. What we associate with this individual is, most of all, the result of our own feelings and thought processes, spontaneous associations, ideas and projections that are still not only derived out of the immediate encounter, but have much more to do with the baggage that we carry with us. In the second room – reminiscent of Pratt’s (1991) “contact zone” – the impressions become more dense and the visitors gain concrete information about past encounters. It was where stories of contact situations were told in the context of contemporary political constellations. The photographs emerged, as mentioned above, as the product of a brief meeting or as the result of a prolonged social relationship. They were accompanied at times by laughter and personal sympathy and in other cases by fear and feelings of helplessness. The suggested archival situation in the third room confronted visitors to the exhibit with processes of ordering and classification. This ‘archive’ was, however, not necessarily the end of the exhibition; it could also be seen as a turning point. Those who did not want to continue into the adjoining Museum Europäischer Kulturen (MEK) needed to wind their way back through the first two rooms of the “Touching Photography” exhibit to the other exhibition halls of the Ethnologisches Museum. The same was true for those visitors who came directly from the MEK – the door at the end of the exhibit had necessarily to remain passable, both for organizational reasons and because it was an escape route – seeing the exhibit ‘in reverse’ from a mass of archived documents to a multimedial attempt to bring these documents to life in an exhibit based on the (re)construction of only a small part of the vast collection. The first room functioned above all on a visual level. The second room combined visual impressions and auditory information. In the third room the image and text information was complemented by an active search for and ordering of information.

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Results and Reactions On the whole, the response to our experiment was very positive. But of course, for the purpose of this essay it is more interesting to look at the critical voices. Two aspects were at the core of most criticism: power and nakedness. It was sometimes the case that visitors felt that the people depicted in the photographs were being compromised by means of the form of presentation. Both the animation of the images as well as the – relative – nakedness of some of the people being shown were of concern to visitors and gave occasion for criticism. I want, therefore, to conclude this essay with a reflection on this encounter – that is, between the chosen form of presentation of historical photographs and the critical visitor comments – and present some thoughts on them.8 Interestingly, often enough, negative comments did not address the exhibition in its entirety. They were most often a rejection of the choice of representation in the first room. Our attempts to contextualize the photographs in the second and third rooms – which found a good deal of praise – were ignored by the critics. The narratives presented in the second room made it clear that among other things, the exhibited photographs were the product in part of a colonial context. One of our goals was to inform visitors who had not previously thought about how these photographs came to be about this fact. In contrast, however, the critics often did not see (or they did not wish to see) the fact that some of the photographs were not a result of one-sided power relations but the product of mutual agreement. Two aspects are in my view of particular interest here: On the one hand the critics ignored the fact that the aspect they criticized was already addressed explicitly in the exhibition, even if it was described as only one factor in the production of a part of the photographs being exhibited (and thus reflecting the

8

“Touching Photography” was not a ‘big’ and much less an ‘exhaustive’ exhibit. It was an experiment on how photography as a specific medium – a specific museum object – might be exhibited; the HLD has been experimenting in this way for four years (see note 5). Impressions on how this experiment was received were gathered via personal comments and via Live-Speakers who were in the exhibit from time to time. Further, comments were collected from blogs, newspapers, a Deutschlandradio reportage (cf. e.g. Halder 2013; König 2013; Wahjudi 2013, Wulff 2013; Peraldi 2015: 17) and an evaluation workshop initiated by the HLD to which experts were invited to comment on the exhibit.

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facts more accurately). Second, it seems that they often understood the first room – which purposely left room for interpretation – as a provocation. The comments imply a critique of the nature of the constructed encounter as open to interpretation; instead, the critics demanded an unambiguous stance – in my view a quite questionable position. From this perspective, these historical photographs can be read in one and one way alone: they are evidence of asymmetrical power relations. That we did not echo this interpretation as the sole interpretation of the photographs resulted in much indignation among some visitors. The digital animation of the photographs found a good deal of praise, although it was also criticized as well. The goal of this animation was to generate a moment of irritation and wonder among the visitors and in turn give cause to examine the images more closely. We hoped that the interest thus awakened could be met in the next room with information about the diverse behaviors and settings mentioned above. The digital manipulation of the photographs varied. Taking the mandate of the HLD at its word, different forms and degrees of animation were experimented with, from simple movements of the body or the shifting of the background to a change in facial expression, the latter being most expressive in the picture of the Bakairi Antonio (Figure 3), whose face shifted between a strong distortion and its original form. At least in the latter case of Antonio, the criticism that we received was understandable. The digital manipulation of a human face can strike an unpleasant chord and we concluded in our final evaluation of the project that we would not again attempt this specific form of animation. That said, even this conclusion was again questioned when we were granted, by pure coincidence, an indigenous perspective on this form of presentation. Without our prior knowledge, a direct descendant of Antonio’s and an accompanying Bakairi visited our exhibition while on other business in Berlin. They were – so Andrea Scholz, a HLD staff member – pleasantly surprised by the presentation of their ancestor and saw no cause for distress in this particular form of facial animation. This raises the question of who in the end has the right to decide on the appropriateness of any given presentation. It is my interest as an anthropologist to understand as much as possible the ‘native’s point of view’ and ensure that it is heard – which requires continued effort, not least due to the violent suppression of this perspective in the past. But this does not mean the necessary abandonment of all of one’s own

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positions. The goal must be, in my view, to take different points of view as comprehensively as possible into consideration and then take a founded and well thought-out position (cf. Straub 1999). In the case of the present example, despite the acceptance of the indigenous visitors, I would not repeat the facial animation of a photograph as we did for the Bakairi Antonio because I can sympathize with the criticism coming from my own social context. That said, it should also be noted that those individuals who criticized the representation of the indigenous in the form of animated photographs – something this described episode points to as well – should acknowledge the criticism as their own position – generally an academically educated European perspective – and not confuse it with the presumed criticism of a representation from an indigenous point of view. A similarly complex constellation emerges in the analysis of perceived ‘nakedness.’ I say ‘perceived’ because nakedness is a culturally constructed form of perception that is difficult to agree upon. Among many ethnic groups of the Amazon region, a man is not perceived as being naked when he is wearing a hip cord. In some cases, the foreskin of the penis is tied together with the hip cord. Since this type of clothing only hides the glans from view, the penis as such remaining visible, from the European perspective men dressed such are seen to be naked. Karl von den Steinen reported in his travelogue that the Bakairi were in no way concerned about their – for him – nakedness. What they did find irritating, instead, was when someone watched while they ate – something that elsewhere is rarely a point of contention (von den Steinen 1894: 63-68, 173, 190-199; cf. Kraus 2004: 440-450). Adolf Ellegard Jensen brought the problem to a point more than half a century ago, when he wrote that with a view to different notions of nudity, sexuality and corporeality or bodily functions, “the ethnologist is often in the embarrassing situation of either ignoring cultural mores or breaking a taboo in his own society” (Jensen 1992 [1951]: 254). Thus, which form of presentation is most appropriate in an exhibition? One argument is that the exhibition of photographs of ‘naked’ indigenes reproduces a colonial form of representation (possibly because it recalls associations about ‘primitive living conditions’). A counterargument is that it was precisely in the colonial era that indigenous people were forced to accept European clothing standards and that the people in the photographs were dressed as they chose to dress and often posed quite proudly for the

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8 Canela Man. Photographer: Wilhelm Kissenberth. October 12, 1908 © Ethnologisches Museum – SMB (VIII E 2952).

camera (Figure 8). Is the showing of these images, consequently, the repetition of a colonial act? Or is the rejection of images showing ‘naked’ indigenes not in fact a continuation of the colonialist attempt to force upon them our clothing standards and morality?9 The problem of different cultural perspectives – which are by no means homogeneous even within one and the same culture and can, in addition, change over time – was already an issue at the time the photographs shown in the exhibit were taken, and the photographers were already aware of it. Wilhelm Kissenberth, for example, reflected in his diary on the ‘nakedness’ of the Canela (Ramkokamekra) he photographed (Figure 8) and about how it would be received back home:

9

A different phenomenon is the intentional commercialization of photographs of nude indigenes for erotic purposes (cf. Wiener 1990: 136-144; Onken 2015: 164ff.); for an example of how this behavior was already criticized by anthropologists addressed in the exhibit at the beginning of the 20th century, cf. Kraus 2004: 446f.

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“Oh ye old men of the royal Bavarian Centrum [Deutsche Zentrumspartei = conservative Catholic party of the German Wilhelminian and interwar periods, MK], ye Catholic and Protestant bigots of all states and free cities of my beloved fatherland, what you would have seen! No fig trees to be found and even then: the people would not know what to do with its leaves. Would you have rejoiced as I did at the truly beautiful bodies of this strong – except for their thin legs – well-formed race or would they have been no more than animals, soulless beings to you? Completely naked were – to be truthful – only the men and children, the women wore, at least as far as I could see, a loincloth.” (Kissenberth: Diary II, 47f. [EM])10

Karl von den Steinen was, despite his attempts to explain his position, apparently much criticized for his photographs of ‘naked’ Indians in the age of Empire. But he remained true to his convictions and his chosen form of representation. In the abridged edition of his work “Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens,” published in 1897, he addressed this criticism in a new foreword: “To my surprise I was criticized from several quarters about the accompanying photographs of naked Indians. Some comments were laced with holy indignation; others were expressed with a more friendly delicacy. Apparently there are those among us that are so unreasonable that they are ashamed and others who are little bit ashamed that they are so unreasonable. To the former I would submit that experience shows that such attacks are more often than not a form of advertising. The latter I would ask whether it is not rather through the eye of the beholder that these photographs acquire their indecency. Thousands of people are now living in the illustrated state, all their ancestors – and not only theirs – have lived thus and it never came to them to be ashamed of their nakedness” (von den Steinen 1897: VIII). Looking at photographs as well as their presentation in a museum are processes of perception, and we are sometimes more and sometimes less aware of the factors that influence our perception. Not only the creation of such images, but also their exhibition and interpretation are negotiation processes into which flow existing perspectives, power relations, interests and moral convictions. “The image freezes an endless number of possibili-

10 This citation and others of Paul Ehrenreich, Georg Hübner and Erland Nordenskiöld mentioned in this essay were used in the exhibit in the audio commentary and illustrated with relevant photographs (Figure 8 among others).

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ties; words determine a single certainty,” wrote Roland Barthes at one point (Barthes 1983: 13; cited by Pinney 1992: 87). In addition to the narration of individual biographies or the reference to the lack of such information in the documentation and the contextualization of their production process, one of the goals of the exhibit was to show the complexity as well as the variety of factors that affect both the production and the later use of these photographs. The ‘frozen possibilities’ of image interpretation were to be highlighted, thawed out so to speak. Interestingly enough, it was often precisely this goal – the questioning of the rigidity of a single certainty – that earned the most criticism.11 But just as the persons in the photographs cannot be described adequately as ‘primitive,’ so can the situation in which they were photographed not by generalized as ‘colonial appropriation.’ In a review of the exhibit, Paul Hempel wrote expressly in favor of an opening of our gaze at these photographs. He found the tendency to see these great numbers of photographs in our archives “as inherited burdens from a distant and at times inglorious past” and to thus either put them aside completely or to pigeonhole them anew, styling and condemning them to a role of “icons of a colonialchauvinistic worldview” to be not only reductionist but in fact a “capitulation to the doubtless difficult material.” Hempel cites “the methodological doubt” that even many of the protagonists behind the camera had, and sees in the confrontation “with the various contexts of origin of the portraits, with touching biographical details, as well as with moments of disturbance and confusion when delving into the image material” a chance for the ethnographic museum to go on the offensive and develop a profile “as an inquiring rather than as a knowing institution” (Hempel 2014b). Processes of knowledge creation based on often hasty processes of categorization and definition thus come into focus. Reflecting upon these processes might help prevent ideas about other people from becoming frozen all too solidly as

11 Pinney (2007: 39) and Goede Montalván (2015: 172) address the conflict between the intentions of exhibit designers and visitor expectations. Pinney was interested above all in sensitizing visitors for the complexities of the colonial encounter, stressing that “colonial photography configures the world as picture in Heidegger’s sense. Central here are knowability in advance and substitutability” (2007: 22). He cites various forms of re-enactment, “which through a kind of re-telling or re-performance attempt to construct a different narrative with different effects” (ibid: 33).

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one-sided convictions – no matter the context, continent, or time period in which we find them.

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Bibliography Balandier, Georges (1972 [1967]): Political Anthropology, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Bossert, Federico/Villar, Diego (2013): Hijos de la selva. La fotografía etnográfica de Max Schmidt – Sons of the Forest. The Ethnographic Photography of Max Schmidt, Santa Monica: Perceval Press. Bossert, Federico/Villar, Diego (2015): “Max Schmidt in Mato Grosso.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography form Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, pp. 280-298. Cipolletti, María Susana/Payaguaje, Fernando (2008): La Fascinación del Mal. Historia de vida de un shamán secoya de la Amazonía ecuatoriana, Quito: Abya-Yala. Clifford, James/George Marcus (eds.) (1986): Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ehrenreich, Paul (1890): “Mittheilungen über die zweite Xingu-Expedition in Brasilien.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 22, pp. 81-98. Ehrenreich, Paul (1892): “Südamerikanische Stromfahrten.” In: Globus 62, pp. 1-4, 33-40, 70-74, 100-106, 133-140, 181-186, 214-221, 259-264, 326-331. Fischer, Manuela/Kraus, Michael (eds.) (2015): Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography form Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau. Frič, Pavel/Fričová, Yvonna (1997): Guido Boggiani. Fotograf. Fotografo/Fotógrafo. Photographer, Praha: Nakladatelství Titanic. Geertz, Clifford (1973): The Interpretation of Culture. Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books. Goede Montalván, Peggy (2015): “Museen der ‘Weltkulturen’ oder Museen ‘zwischen den Welten’?” In: Michael Kraus/Karoline Noack (eds.), Quo vadis, Völkerkundemuseum. Aktuelle Debatten zu ethnologischen Sammlungen in Museen und Universitäten, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 169-183. Halder, Lucia (2013): “Wenn Bilder plötzlich lächeln. Die Ausstellung ‘Fotografien berühren’ in Berlin,” July 19, 2015 (https://www.visualhistory.de/2013/12/12/wenn-bilder-ploetzlich-laecheln/).

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Hardenburg, W.E. (1913): The Putumayo. The Devil’s Paradise. Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed upon the Indians therein (edited and with an introduction by C. Reginald Enock), London: Fisher Unwin. Hempel, Paul (2007): “Facetten der Fremdheit. Kultur und Körper im Spiegel der Typenphotographie.” In: Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer/Bettina Dietz/Frank Heidemann/Paul Hempel (eds.), Bilder des Fremden. Mediale Inszenierungen von Alterität im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin/Münster: LIT, pp. 177-205. Hempel, Paul (2009): “Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Visual Anthropology in Early Twentieth-Century German Anthropology.” In: Christopher Morton/Elizabeth Edwards (eds.), Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame, Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 193-219. Hempel, Paul (2014a): “Anthropologisch-ethnologische Fotografien aus dem Nachlass Paul Ehrenreich.” In: Gregor Wolff (ed.), Forscher und Unternehmer mit Kamera. Geschichten von Bildern und Fotografen aus der Fotothek des Ibero-Amerikanischen Instituts, Berlin: IberoAmerikanisches Institut, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, pp. 66-75. Hempel, Paul (2014b): “The Ethnological-Anthropological Portrait,” July 29, 2015 (http://www.humboldt-forum.de/en/humboldt-lab-dahlem /documentation/probebuehne-3/touching-photography/positions/ #c1181). Hempel, Paul (2015): “Paul Ehrenreich – the photographer in the shadows during the second Xingu expedition 1887-88.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln/Weimar/Wien, Böhlau, pp. 209-243. Hübner, Georg (1893): “Meine Reise von Lima nach Iquitos.” In: Deutsche Rundschau für Geographie und Statistik XV, pp. 9-19, 59-66, 122-126. Humboldt Lab Dahlem (ed.) (2015): Prinzip Labor – Museumsexperimente im Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin: Nicolai. Jensen, Adolf Ellegard (1992 [1951]): Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Kissenberth, Wilhelm (1912): “Bei den Canella-Indianern in ZentralMaranhão (Brasilien).” In: Baessler-Archiv 2, pp. 45-54.

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Koch-Grünberg, Theodor (1917): Vom Roroima zum Orinoco. Ergebnisse einer Reise in Nordbrasilien und Venezuela in den Jahren 1911-1913. Erster Band. Schilderung der Reise, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Koch-Grünberg, Theodor (1967 [1909/1910]): Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern. Reisen in Nordwest-Brasilien 1903/1905. Mit Marginalien in englischer Sprache und einer Einführung von Dr. Otto Zerries, Volume I, II, München/Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. Koch-Grünberg, Theodor (2004): Die Xingu-Expedition (1898-1900). Ein Forschungstagebuch (edited by Michael Kraus), Köln/Weimar: Böhlau. König, Eva (2002): “Charles Kroehle und Georg Huebner. Zwei Deutsche im Urwald Perus (1888–1891).” In: Eva König (ed.), Indianer 1858– 1929. Photographische Reisen von Alaska bis Feuerland, Hamburg: Edition Braus/Museum für Völkerkunde, pp. 60-64. König, Jürgen (2013): “Wenn der alte Indianer wieder lächelt. Humboldt Lab liefert Ideen für das ‘Zentrum der Weltkulturen’ im Berliner Stadtschloss,” July 19, 2015 (http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/wennder-alte-indianer-wieder-laechelt.1013.de.html?dram:article_id=2654 36). Kohl, Frank S. (2014): “Land und Leute in Ost-Peru 1888-1891, dokumentiert von Kroehle & Hübner.” In: Gregor Wolff (ed.), Forscher und Unternehmer mit Kamera. Geschichten von Bildern und Fotografen aus der Fotothek des Ibero-Amerikanischen Instituts, Berlin: IberoAmerikanisches Institut, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, pp. 76-85. Kraus, Michael (2004): Bildungsbürger im Urwald. Die deutsche ethnologische Amazonienforschung (1884-1929), Marburg: Curupira. Kraus, Michael (2013): “Ambivalenzen der Bildproduktion. Historische Porträt- und Typenfotografien aus dem südamerikanischen Tiefland.” In: Rundbrief Fotografie 20/2, pp. 10-16. Kraus, Michael (2014a): “Perspectivas múltiples. El intercambio de objetos entre etnólogos e indígenas en las tierras bajas de América del Sur.” In: Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, September 20, 2014 (http://nuevo mundo.revues.org/67209). Kraus, Michael (2014b): “Von Pflanzen und Menschen. Ein Botaniker dokumentiert das Amazonasgebiet.” In: Gregor Wolff (ed.), Forscher und Unternehmer mit Kamera. Geschichten von Bildern und Fotografen aus der Fotothek des Ibero-Amerikanischen Instituts, Berlin: IberoAmerikanisches Institut, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, pp. 106-115.

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Kraus, Michael (2014c): “Touching Photography/Project description. New narrative Strategies for Historical Photographs,” July 19, 2015 (http://www.humboldt-forum.de/en/humboldt-lab-dahlem/document ation/probebuehne-3/touching-photography/project-description/). Kraus, Michael (2015): “‘More news will follow’ – Wilhelm Kissenberth’s ethnographic photographs from Northeast and Central Brazil.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography form Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, pp. 245-279. Krause, Fritz (1911): In den Wildnissen Brasiliens. Bericht und Ergebnisse der Leipziger Araguaya-Expedition 1908, Leipzig: Voigtländer. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1989 [1955]): Traurige Tropen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lévi-Strauss, Claude/Eribon, Didier (1996): Das Nahe und das Ferne. Eine Autobiographie in Gesprächen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch. Marcus, George E./Dick Cushman (1982): “Ethnographies as Texts.” In: Annual Review of Anthropology 11, pp. 25-69. Nordenskiöld, Erland (1912): Indianerleben. El Gran Chaco (Südamerika), Leipzig: Albert Bonnier. Onken, Hinnerk (2015): “Postcards from Latin America.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography form Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, pp. 151-174. Peraldi, Audrey (2015): “Die Reise des Johan Adrian Jacobsen zu den Haida erzählt vom zukünftigen Humboldt-Forum Berlin.” In: Kunst & Kontext 9, pp. 13-17. Pinney, Christopher (1992): “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography.” In: Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography (1860-1920), New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 74-95. Pinney, Christopher (2007): “The phenomenology of colonial photography.” In: Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer/Bettina Dietz/Frank Heidemann/Paul Hempel (eds.), Bilder des Fremden. Mediale Inszenierungen von Alterität im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin/Münster: LIT, pp. 19-39. Pratt, Mary Louise (1991): “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In: Profession 91, pp. 33-40.

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Schmidt, Max (1905): Indianerstudien in Zentralbrasilien. Erlebnisse und ethnologische Ergebnisse einer Reise in den Jahren 1900 bis 1901, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Schmidt, Max (1928): “Ergebnisse meiner zweijährigen Forschungsreise in Matto Grosso. September 1926 bis August 1928.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 60, pp. 85-124. Schmidt, Max. 1947. “Los Bakairí.” In: Revista do Museu Paulista (Nova Serie) 1, pp. 11-58, fig. 1-56. Schoepf, Daniel (2005): George Huebner 1862 – 1935. Um Fotógrafo em Manaus, São Paulo: Metalivros. Scholz, Andrea (2015): “Das Humboldt Lab Dahlem – Experimentelle Freiräume auf dem Weg zum Humboldt-Forum.” In: Michael Kraus/Karoline Noack (eds.), Quo vadis, Völkerkundemuseum. Aktuelle Debatten zu ethnologischen Sammlungen in Museen und Universitäten, Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 277-296. Sontag, Susan (1977): “In Plato’s Cave.” In: Susan Sontag, On Photography, London et al: Penguin Books, pp. 3-26. Speiser, Felix (1926): Im Düster des brasilianischen Urwalds, Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder. Steinen, Karl von den (1886): Durch Central-Brasilien. Expedition zur Erforschung des Schingú im Jahre 1884, Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus. Steinen, Karl von den (1892): Die Bakaïrí-Sprache. Wörterverzeichnis, Sätze, Sagen, Grammatik. Mit Beiträgen zu einer Lautlehre der karaïbischen Grundsprache, Leipzig: Koehler’s Antiquarium. Steinen, Karl von den (1894): Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und Ergebnisse der Zweiten Schingú-Expedition 1887-1888, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Steinen, Karl von den (1897): Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und Ergebnisse der Zweiten Schingú-Expedition 1887-1888. Zweite Auflage als Volksausgabe, Berlin: Reimer. Straub, Jürgen (1999): Verstehen, Kritik, Anerkennung. Das Eigene und das Fremde in der Erkenntnisbildung interpretativer Wissenschaften, Göttingen: Wallstein. Ule, Ernst (1913): “Unter den Indianern am Rio Branco in Nordbrasilien.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 45, pp. 278-298. Valentin, Andreas (2012): A fotografia amazônica de George Huebner, Rio de Janeiro: Nau Editora.

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Valentin, Andreas (2015): “The Kroehle-Hübner photographic collection.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, pp. 193-207. Virchow, Rudolf (1891): “Die diesjährige Generalversammlung der deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft und der Stand der archäologischen Forschung in West- und Ostpreussen.” In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 23, pp. 746-767. Wahjudi, Claudia (2013): “Im Auge des Jaguars,” July 19, 2015 (http://www.art-magazin.de/szene/67605/humboldt_lab_bilanz). Wiener, Michael (1990): Ikonographie des Wilden. Menschenbilder in Ethnographie und Photographie zwischen 1850 und 1918, München: Trickster. Wolf, Eric R. (1990): “Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions.” In: American Anthropologist, New Series, 92/3, pp. 586-596. Wulff, Matthias (2013): “Stolpersteine für das Stadtschloss: Was die Dahlemer Museen planen,” July 19, 2015 (http://www.morgenpost.de/ printarchiv/kultur/article120974077/Stolpersteine-fuer-das-Stadtschloss -Was-die-Dahlemer-Museen-planen.html). Archival material Ethnologisches Museum Berlin – SMB (EM) – Tagebücher Wilhelm Kissenberth Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg (Sta Lu) – EL 232, Büschel 333 Online Sources “Fotografien berühren,” October 4, 2015. http://www.chezweitz.de/de /home/humboldt-lab. “Fotografien berühren,” October 4, 2015. https://vimeo.com/116235174. “Humboldt Lab Dahlem,” July 26, 2015. http://www.humboldt-forum .de/humboldt-lab-dahlem/.

Unfixed Images Circulation and New Cultural Uses of Heinrich Brüning’s Photographic Collection1 G ISELA C ÁNEPA K OCH

The photographic collection of the German researcher Heinrich Brüning (1848-1928), who conducted lifelong archaeological and ethnographic research and documentation in the northern coast of Peru, is scattered; parts are held by the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg and in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. His photographs form part of a more comprehensive legacy that includes archaeological artifacts, historical documents, field notes, personal correspondence, and wax cylinders on which he recorded traditional music. All these materials, gathered in the course of half a century, are nowadays considered the first and most important documental

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This study has been made possible thanks to the Georg Forster Research Fellowship I was granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in 20142015. The grant allowed me to carry out research in Germany and, therefore, I was able to visit the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg; the Ethnologisches Museum and its Phonogramm-Archive in Berlin and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. I want to respectively thank Bernd Schmelz; Manuela Fischer and Ricarda Kopal; and Barbara Göbel and Gregor Wolff for their kind support and professional advice. I am especially grateful to Barbara Potthast and Hinnerk Onken, who enthusiastically guided me in my initial foray into the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg. I also had the opportunity to discuss preliminary versions of this article with colleagues in Germany in the context of workshops and lectures. 1 The diversity of Internet pages using and referring to Brüning’s photographs. Photographer: Sara Lucía Guerrero. January, 2016.

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source for the study of the history and the social life of the Muchik people,2 while Brüning himself is now celebrated as a cultural hero for having accomplished the major task of saving the archaeological and ethnographic legacy of the Muchik for the present generations. When I was at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin in 2014, reviewing photo albums belonging to the legacies of important German researchers who conducted archaeological and ethnological investigation in Latin America between the 1890s and 1940s, such as Max Uhle and Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, I came across photographs taken by Brüning, as well as by renowned Peruvian professional photographers such as Martín Chambi and Max T. Vargas.3 In some cases these photos were reproduced as the motifs of postcards or as prints that appeared in books or magazines. These albums, which were used to gather and systematize data, had been assembled with visual materials that had been produced according to motives and criteria other than those of science. This can be attributed to the fact that in this period comparative approaches still governed ethnological research (Stockings 2002). In contrast to what was beginning to establish itself as the ethnographic method, with its special emphasis on the ethnographer’s first-hand records, the organization of these albums admitted data from different sources, as long as it found a place in the classification system and

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The Moche or Muchik culture is a regional culture that developed during the Early Intermediate period in the valley of the same name, in the northern Peruvian coast. According to Schaedel (1988), Brüning performed his studies under the belief that there was continuity between the archaeological remains that he had documented in his investigations and the indigenous population of the region. This fact had its counterpart in Brüning’s passion for documenting ethnographically those he believed to be the successors of the Moche culture. Martín Chambi (1891-1973) was one of the most prolific Peruvian photographers of national and international renown, and a foundational figure of the Cuzco School of Photography. Although portrait photos were one of his strengths, special attention has been given to the photographic documentation that he realized of men and landscapes in Andean southern Peru. Chambi studied with the Arequipa photographer Max T. Vargas (1873-1959), in whose studio he worked as an apprentice (Huayhuaca 1993). Vargas’s studio was one of the most prominent among the Arequipa bourgeoisie for its portrait photos, a genre in which he was highly recognized. At the same time, at the international level his aesthetics had great influence on modern fashion photographers of the era (Garay/Villacorta 2012; Balda/Latorre 2014).

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complied with the pretension of totality. Thus, in these albums photographs or postcards from Chambi and Vargas,4 which were of artistic content and commercial value, had been re-signified in terms of the scientific regime in which the album recontextualized them. On the other hand, the presence of Brüning’s photographs could be explained by the social use of photography as an object of exchange mediating social relations (Poole 1997). Brüning fostered relationships with many researchers and scientific institutions throughout his life, exchanging viewpoints and research findings that included methodological reflections and field data, as well as photographic material. While he produced most of his photographs in the context of his field investigations, others were taken to record series of archaeological items to inventory his archaeological collection, which he offered to various German and American museums.5 Brüning’s photographs have not only been separated and archived in different institutions, but several have been widely dispersed and are now found in the albums of various researchers. Copies appear in printed form, either in older publications or in those that followed Richard Schaedel’s pioneering 1988 publication on Brüning’s photographic collection. Such dispersion is certainly due to photographic technology itself, which allows for copying and analog representations, making replicability and interchangeability one of the most important features of photography. However, this scattering is also linked to the materiality of the photograph, which makes it an object of valuations and various social uses. Mobility should not only be understood in temporal and spatial terms – moving between locations and time frames – but also as involving displacement between different regimes belonging to science, art, and the market.

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The postcards of Vargas with scenes of the social context of the architecture and landscape of Andean southern Peru and Bolivia were widely acquired by Americanist researchers like Max Uhle, Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, and Eduard Seeler (Onken 2014); they were used in their investigations because of the high documentary value. The Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin stores photographic material from Max T. Vargas and from Martín Chambi (Garay/Villacorta 2012; Buchholz 2015). According to Schaedel (1988), a review of Brüning’s photographs of archaeological objects indicates that he possessed around 800 objects at the end of the 19th century.

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As Michael Kraus (2015: 9) has argued, “each location leaves traces of the image it conserves.” Within this framework, I started tracing Brüning’s photographs in view of discovering their existence beyond the museum, the albums, and print publications. I found them on the Internet, where they circulate and are appropriated as part of a wider public sphere (Figure 1). Over the years Brüning’s photographs have made a transition from the analog to the digital, acquiring existence in the virtual world, as well as being restored into the local context from which they originally came. The mobility of Brüning’s photographs and their resistance to be fixed in particular places and to particular regimes, challenge the notion of the photographic collection as a delimited, specific materiality localized and confined within the boundaries of the institutions that house them. They also challenge the definition of the collection as a unit with innate and predetermined content and value. In that sense I start from the idea of Brüning’s photographic collection as a landscape of lived realities; that is, as a permeable and fluid materiality, which has been reworked in the framework of social and technological processes, as well as in the frame of diverse historical and biographical circumstances that make his photographic legacy susceptible to multiple meanings. At present Brüning’s photographic collection is primarily valued in terms of its ethnographic content, as is claimed in various publications about his work, as well as in current public debates on identity. Brüning’s legacy has been pivotal to the ethnological construction of the notion of “the Muchik” people. Raúl Asensio identifies the year 1987 as a key moment for the renaissance of Muchik identity and its role in the “reconfiguration of the discourses on collective identity and the beginning of an era of change” (Asensio 2012: 35). This era includes the discovery of the Lord of Sipán6 tombs and the publication of an article by Richard Schaedel (1987) in which he argues for the historical and cultural continuity between the pre-Hispanic cultures and the current population of the region.

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At the time it was one of the most important archaeological discoveries on the national and international archaeological scene. It did not only resonate in the scientific arena. The funeral attires of the Lord of Sipán were also exhibited in several museums around the world, attracting widespread public attention to the wealth and aesthetics of its ornaments and symbols wrought in gold.

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The period that began at this moment has been characterized by the implementation of neoliberal reforms by the Fujimori regime (1992) and the processes of decentralization initiated in 1989, as well as by elections of new regional governments in 2002. The context favored the surge of movements of identity revival and the development of initiatives for the management of cultural repertoires and patrimonial goods, all of which operated in multiple ways for the creation of a sense of regional uniqueness, for the promotion of the region as a tourist destination, and for the consolidation of an elite that legitimized itself as the custodian of the Muchik identity. It is in this context that Brüning’s photographs and Brüning himself, as a public figure, acquired new meanings and cultural and political usages, while being incorporated into what Finneran (2012) calls a “meta-narrative of patrimony.” A short review of his biography and of the paths his collection has taken will reveal the kind of interventions, visibilities and invisibilities, placings and shifts that underlie its construction as an ethnographic collection, as well as the photographic material’s resistance to being fixed as ethnographic. In addition, it will allow me to discuss these photographs as part of a public arena where Muchik identity is disputed and shaped. Brüning as a Collector and Self-Taught Ethnographer: The Multiple Uses of Photography and the Heterogeneous Formation of his Photographic Collection Hans Heinrich Brüning was born on August 20, 1848, in Hoffeld, Schleswig-Holstein, and died on June 2, 1928, in a hospital in Kiel. As pointed out by those who have written about his biography and trajectory as researcher (Schaedel 1988; Haberland 1990; Hampe 2009; Chávez 2006; Schmelz/Aristizábal 2009), Brüning studied at the Technical University of Hannover and served in the Prussian Navy (1870), after which he was employed by the shipping company Hapag-Lloyd. In 1875 he came to Peru to serve as an engineer on the haciendas of the northern coast dedicated to the planting and refining of sugar cane. He also commercialized machinery and served as administrator of several haciendas such as Pátamo, Laredo, and Pomalca. He resided in several cities of northern Peru until 1925. During those 50 years he made a single visit to Germany (1897-1898) to attend his parents’ golden jubilee. Though he had no training in the emerging disciplines of archaeology and ethnology, in contrast to other German research-

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ers who arrived in Peru at that time to do extensive fieldwork, he studied and documented the Muchik society and culture of northern Peru with true passion. By 1880 Brüning already had begun his activities as a collector of archaeological objects (Aristizábal/Schmelz 2009). He worked in a region particularly rich in archaeological sites that were subject to widespread looting (huaqueo, derived from huaca referring to revered precolonial monuments and from saqueo, looting) by locals and foreigners. These pieces became part of private collections and circulated in the thriving world market for antiquities. Exploring archaeological sites, located within the property of the landowning class, was an amateur and recreational practice that the local elite cultivated with enthusiasm as a form of social distinction (Gänger 2014). According to Chávez (2006), Brüning accompanied these landowners, who relied on their laborers to accomplish the hard work of excavation, on their explorations. Brüning was also well acquainted with the market for antiquities, regularly buying pieces to expand his collection. As shown by the letters and photographs of his personal correspondence with researchers and directors of several museums, he also participated in the market early on, offering his archaeological collection for sale,7 first to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg, and later to other museums in Germany, USA, and finally Peru. His expectations were to acquire funds that would enable him to continue his research, which by 1895 (Schaedel 1988) had more clearly shifted from archaeological and historical to ethnographic interests. He then planned to retire and return to Germany in order to fully dedicate himself to systematizing all his field data and to publishing his research findings. Although he was an autodidact Brüning argued that he had collected pieces on a scientific basis, seeking to gather series of objects that could be analyzed in a comparative way. Brüning also made efforts to proceed systematically. His education as an engineer allowed for a certain level of rigor in his research proceedings. For example, he measured pre-Hispanic con-

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By 1987, when he made his only visit to Germany, he had already established relationships with officials from the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg; he gave them 35 archaeological artifacts during his visit to encourage them to buy his archaeological collection (Chávez 2006).

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structions, made drawings of these, and kept up-to-date on technological and scientific progress regarding photographic documentation (Chávez 2006). Not only did he stay informed about and acquire the latest equipment, but he also aimed for technical sophistication (Bartels 2015) and explored different uses of photography for archaeological and ethnographic research. His main concern was to identify the origins of the Muchik people through their material remains; therefore, he documented their archaeological and historical traces. He was also aware of the fact that many of these material traces, as well as those cultural practices that had still survived, were in danger of disappearing. Chávez (2006) provides several examples of archaeological remains documented by Brüning through annotations, drawings, and photographs, which soon afterwards disappeared completely. In this way his legacy became a valuable source for reconstruction and historical memory (Prümers 2015). It is possible to identify an early period in which Brüning mainly used photography to register the site and context of excavation and to inventory archaeological artifacts. Photographic documentation responded to a double logic – on the one hand, that of data collection; on the other hand, that of historical documentation and preservation. Given the difficult financial conditions in which archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork were carried out at the time, which restricted the freedom and creativity of researchers (Kraus 2014), it can be argued that although limited, Brüning’s use of his own resources to conduct research gave him relative freedom to determine his own agenda and allowed him to move between archaeological, historical, and ethnological interests, as well as to live during long periods with the people he studied. Adolf Bandelier, whom he accompanied on his expeditions in Peru in 1895, had an influence in getting him interested in ethnographic topics. Later on, when Brüning had returned from his visit to Germany, he acquired meteorological measuring instruments, as well as photographic and sound recording equipment, which was crucial to the tasks of ethnographic documentation. From then on he devoted the use of photography to documenting aspects of daily life, work and economy, rituals and festive traditions, and human types, which can be identified as a second period in regard to his photographic interests and production. Under the guidance of Erick von Hornbostel, director of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Brüning also made annotations

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and sound recordings of the extinct Muchik language and the traditional music of the region, spending long periods of time in the town of Eten in 1906 and 1909 (Aristizábal/Schmelz 2009). The understanding with which Brüning conducted research involved an awareness of the scientific, economic, and social value of his collections, both on a personal level as well as for the local and international society. On the one hand, he used them to fulfill his intellectual curiosity; on the other hand, he used them as a means of gaining prestige and recognition as a scientist.8 Brüning used photographs for purposes beyond their representational function. Recognizing their status as objects of exchange, he was also able to use them to enhance his reputation and build a network of contacts. But he also went after their economic value. Brüning never actually sold his photographic collection in the strict sense of the word. While photographs had played an important role in anthropology since its inception and museums considered it important to include them in their holdings, acquisition and conservation policies were ambiguous, so the formation of photographic collections was largely subject to a variety of contingencies (Kraus 2015). Brüning’s photographs that are now guarded in museums in Hamburg and Berlin were not free from this situation. Brüning negotiated the delivery of his glass plates in exchange for two copies of each. These copies were easier to handle and better suited for the purposes of systematizing their content as well as for their eventual use in publication than glass plates.9 What can be judged from his correspondence is that he did not develop the glass plates himself, but commissioned photography studios to do the work, which implied additional costs. Thus, he delivered an initial stack to the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg when he made his trip to Germany in 1897 (Aristizábal/Schmelz 2009). However, according to the account of Prümers (2015), when he finally returned to

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Brüning was listed as a member of the Colegio de Ingenieros, the Instituto Histórico del Perú, and the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, and in 1902 he joined the team of the expedition along the Marañon river basin, led by Manuel Antonio Mesones and financed by the Peruvian State. Although he did not have a professional title, all these affiliations lent scientific credibility to his research and collections. Some of Brüning’s photos illustrated local publications and the journal Anthropophyteia.

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Germany and was negotiating with the museum for the sale of the archaeological collection he had brought along, he seemed to have had difficulty reaching an agreement regarding the delivery of 200 glass plates that he was still keeping. It was under these circumstances that he offered and later delivered the 200 glass plates to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (BGAEU).10 While still in Peru, Brüning had tried unsuccessfully to sell his archaeological collection to the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. Nevertheless, for this purpose he sent photographs that recorded the archaeological artifacts that formed part of his collection. Today those pictures, together with about 200 glass plates, are held by the museum. When Brüning received the first set of copies in 1927, he had an opportunity to review, correct, and complete the information contained in the list that he had delivered with the glass plates to Berlin. This systematization, which he performed near the end of his life, turned out to be crucial since only he held this information in his memory. It was only the next year when Brüning died that the museum contacted his nephew who was in charge of his collections, expressing interest in acquiring the photographs that he had kept in his possession. Nevertheless, the nephew had already delivered them, along with other materials, to the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg. Thus, the photographic collection that is housed in the museum of Berlin was never acquired as a collection per se. Instead it is the result of a series of contingencies that can be traced back to Brüning’s as well as the museum’s agendas; meanwhile, the nature and acquisition of the photographic collection housed in the Museum für Völkerkunde responded to another set of circumstances. The latter includes the glass plates, copies, and four photo albums that Brüning conserved until his death. These items were delivered together with a collection of books, historical documents, field notes, newspapers clippings, and correspondence. These materials add value to the photographic collection to the extent that they allow for an informed and contextualized reading of the photographs. Finally, it should be said that Brüning’s photographic collection itself is heterogeneous in format, content, and provenance. In addition to the large quantity of archaeological and ethnographic photographs, it includes photos

10 An important part of the former photographic collection of BGAEU is owned today by the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (Kraus 2015).

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with personal content such as family photos, pictures of social get-togethers in which Brüning participated, as well as small-format portraits that he may have taken himself or purchased as a gift from his acquaintances; there are also other sets of photographs that Brüning did not take, but probably acquired from photography studios in order to enlarge his collection.11 Brüning first tried to sell his archaeological collection in the mid-1980s, with hopes of using the proceeds to establish a fund that would finance his research. But due to difficulties at work and with his state of health, he came into economic need, and had to rush his efforts to place the archaeological collection on the market. This situation also was influenced by more rigorous Peruvian law on heritage protection, whereupon selling and shipping archaeological and historical collections abroad became more difficult. So, by the 1910s the scientific, heritage, and economic values allocated to the collection came into contradiction. In a letter dated April 6, 1916, to his friend, the landowner José Ignacio Chopitea, Brüning writes: “[…] during a period of more than thirty years I have collected data in this regard, as well as objects made by the ancient inhabitants of Peru, so that I could use them, when the time was right, as the basis of my research. When I thought the time had come I suffered an economic setback and now the collection only serves as a disturbance and obliges me to sell it.” (Chávez 2006: 111, note 25, my translation)

Finally, thanks to contacts that Brüning established with members of the local and the national intellectual and political elites, he managed to sell most of his archaeological collection (around 5000 objects) to the Peruvian government in 1921 (Hampe 2009; Aristizábal/Schmelz 2009). Nevertheless, only four years later Brüning returned to Germany where he still had to struggle with a precarious economic situation and poor health. His attempts to sell another part of the archaeological and photographic collections became very problematic. The difficult economic situation of museums, aggravated by the post-World War I years, encumbered the negotiations. Towards the end of his life he agreed to hand over his archaeological collection to the museum in Hamburg, where authorities advised him to do so; in their view this step would allow them to raise the funds necessary to pur-

11 Prümers (2015: 388) reports that Brüning acquired glass plates belonging to Adolph Bandelier from a photographer in Trujillo.

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chase the collection more easily. The negotiations went on for months and then years, while the price was declining. Finally the sale took place after his death. Contrary to what Brüning had planned, he was unable to either systematize the data he had collected over 50 years, or publish his findings. The freedom to organize his own research agenda, which initially had characterized Brüning’s work, at the end of his life was completely ruined. In other words, Brüning’s scientific project and the integrity of his collections were victims of his precarious economic situation, his poor health, and the unrewarding market for antiquities and ethnographic objects. The Enhancement of the Photographic Collection: Shaping its Ethnographic Content In Peru, but particularly in the northern department of Lambayeque, Brüning is a well-known figure. A documentary12 produced for national TV celebrates his life and work, a school is named after him, and the first museum of archaeology of Lambayeque, founded to house the archaeological collection he sold to the Peruvian government shortly before his definitive return to Germany, bears his name. The Museo Nacional Arqueológico Brüning had its first headquarters in Brüning’s private home and President Leguía appointed him as its first director. In 2007 the Federación de Pescadores y Agricultores Muchik “Enrique Brüning” was founded with the goal of demanding social and economic rights. Additionally, Brüning is broadly recognized as a cultural hero, revered for having saved a significant part of the archaeological and anthropologi-

12 This documentary with the title Brüning (n/d; 50 minutes; Producciones Alcaravan Television) is one of the ten chapters of a series produced for public TV called Hombre de Bronce, produced by Alejandro Guerrero. The series narrates the life and work of ten prominent men of Peruvian science and literature, including Augusto Webebauer, Daniel Alcides, Julio C. Tello, Ricardo Palma, and José María Arguedas. Another documentary that should be mentioned is Schliemanns Erben: Goldpyramiden im Inka-Reich, by Gisela Graichen and Michael Tauchert, produced by Peter Prestel for the German TV channel ZDF in 2008 (it was first broadcast on February 17, 2008, as part of the Terra X series, sequence 23). This film was made with the collaboration of Bernd Schmelz, Wissenschaftlicher Leiter (Scientific Director) and an expert on Brüning’s work.

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cal heritage of the Muchik people for future generations. He is called the wise man; “the man forever in love with the Moche” (“el eterno enamorado de los moche”), while his close work with the local population, his interest in everyday life, and his assumption that the people he was studying were heirs of the ancient Muchik is referred to as “thinking like Brüning” (“pensamiento Brüning”).13 The intellectual spokesmen of the current Muchik neoindigenist movement recognize Brüning’s legacy as foundational of Muchik awareness and political agenda (Alva Mendo 2004; Asensio 2012). In 1988, U.S. anthropologist Richard Schaedel (1920-2005), published La etnografía Muchik en las fotografías de H. Brüning 1886-1925 in Peru, the most comprehensive work to date on Brüning’s photographic collection. The book is the result of several years of research at the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg, for which Schaedel obtained several research grants from the German government. His book had a positive reception, since it responded to the concerns expressed by local intellectuals, such as anthropologist Victor Antonio Rodríguez Suy Suy (1918-2008), a disciple of Schaedel, regarding the fate of Brüning’s collection after he had returned to Germany. Asensio (2012) considers Schaedel and Rodríguez Suy Suy as the founders of the anthropological vein of the Muchik neoindigenist movement, which he distinguishes from the archaeological current that also informs the discourses on identity revitalization.14 This vein groups a sector of the literate elite, among whom we find anthropologists who identify as Muchik such as Rodríguez Suy Suy, Jorge Sachún, or those considered followers of Apapek (“the Creator” in Muchika language), as Schaedel was called (Maeda 2009), which includes teachers, middle-class professionals from the region, artisans, farmers, and fishermen (Asensio 2012). The revival of Muchik identity was initially articulated as a cultural project and academic activism by Schaedel and Rodríguez Suy Suy, who acted as the “bridge between Schaedel and the intellectual and social world of the northern coast” (Asensio 2012: 47). It consisted of reclaiming the rights of the Muchik people, as the legitimate caretakers, to ensure access to 13 See http://www.rumbosdelperu.com/de-sipan-a-br-ning-por-un-deslumbrante-cir cuito-de-tesoros-V846.html 14 For more information on Schaedel’s academic and political trajectory in Peru, his theories on the historical continuity of the Muchik people, his close links with academia and part of the intellectual elite of northern Peru, and his activism, see Maeda (2009) and Asensio (2012).

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and the administration of their archaeological and anthropological legacies. The same year that Rodríguez Suy Suy founded the Centro de Investigaciones y Promoción del Pueblo Muchik in the town of Moche, Schaedel published his book on Brüning’s photographs (Asensio 2012). In this context, his publication, and in particular the ample selection of photographs it includes, can be understood as an act of reparation in the sense that – according to the movement’s logic – Brüning’s legacy belongs to the Muchik people, who should have the right to full access.15 The book includes the reproduction of a significant number of photographs from the collection archived in Hamburg, which totals around 2100 images. As I will later discuss, Schaedel constructs an anthropological argument with regard to the ethnographic content of Brüning’s photographic collection, in order to support his theory about the historical continuities of the Muchik people, which is the main scientific argument that sustains the discourse and ideology of the movement. This anthropological current of Muchik revival discourses soon developed into political initiatives and demands. In 1995 the Confederación de los Pueblos Muchik (Confederation of the Muchik People) was created. Its manifest was written by Schaedel and Rodríguez Suy Suy (Maeda 2009), who argued that there continued to be a “Muchik people” and that this group had the right to defend and control their cultural and natural resources, with the goal of economic sustainability (Asensio 2012). The idea of a self-managed economy implied the recovery of ancestral technologies and products such as braiding straw hats, spinning and weaving of cotton threads, and the cultivation of native cotton.

15 In order for Schaedel to be able to prepare the publication of his book in Peru, he needed to have the copies of the photographic material that he had revised during his prolonged stays at the Hamburg museum, which were financed by the German Service of Academic Exchange (DAAD in German). How and under what terms access to this material was carried out is a matter on which greater clarity is needed. To mark the occasion of the opening of the Museo Nacional Brüning in 2006, after its restoration with the support of the German government and its embassy in Peru, an exhibition that included a selection of his photographic material housed in the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg and the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin was organized with the support of the Norddeutsche Affinerie AG. The respective photo catalog was published by the Goethe-Institut of Lima (Pamphlet “Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848-1928),” for presentation at the museum’s re-inauguration ceremony).

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A year after the appearance of Schaedel’s book, the museum in Hamburg published the German-Spanish bilingual collection Fotodokumente aus Nordperu. Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848-1928), edited by Corinna Raddatz. In addition to a series of articles that discuss his biography and the importance of his legacy the book includes a compilation of his photographs, which are thematically organized, and slightly different from the selection in Schaedel’s book. In order to edit Fotodokumente the photographic collection was organized and conservation measures were implemented (Raddatz 1990). The interest of Hamburg’s Museum für Völkerkunde in enhancing Brüning’s photographic collection forms part of a more comprehensive initiative to focus research on the museum’s major photographic collections. According to König (2002), the museum’s full comprehension of the value and purpose of the photographic material has been inconsistent. It was not until the 1980s that photographic collections were rediscovered as part of the historical patrimony of the nation. In 1999, with the financial support of the ZEIT foundation, the museum was able to begin the digitization of its American collection. Brüning’s collection and that of Frederick Weygold, which had been previously published and exhibited, were the first to undergo digitization. This initiative also included the organization of the exhibition Indianer 1858-1928 and the publication of the respective catalog, in which there are two articles dedicated to Brüning’s photography that emphasize its ethnographic content. The Ethnologisches Museum Berlin also carried out a project to restore and digitize Brüning’s photographs as part of a larger initiative to add value to its collections of historical photography of Latin America. This initiative was encouraged by the German state foundation Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which allowed the museum to research the collection, create the exhibition Touching Photography (Fotografien Berühren), and disseminate its findings, which are included in the volume Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America, edited by Manuela Fischer and Michael Kraus in 2015. The publication comprises three articles on the photography of Brüning; one examines the process of restoring his glass plates (Bartels 2015), and the other two discuss the contents and value of his photography for archaeology (Riviale 2015; Prümers 2015). Since the publication of Schaedel´s book several other publications on his photographic collection, field notes, notations on the Muchik language,

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and music recordings have appeared. Together they have all been fundamental in shedding light on Brüning’s collections and in consolidating his status as a serious researcher and cultural hero. Furthermore, they have played a role in revealing the actual location of the collections and making their contents accessible to researchers and the public in general in northern Peru. Yet they also reveal that the trajectory of Brüning’s legacy has led to the partial dispersion of his collections, which are now distributed in Peruvian and German institutions. Brüning’s photographic collection is mainly valued for its ethnographic content. This assessment derives from the argument Schaedel makes in his book, declaring Brüning to be an ethnohistorian and his photographic collection ethnographic. In presenting the biography of Brüning, Richard Schaedel writes: “We have said that, for its time, Brüning was extraordinary for his objectivity regarding the indigenous people and for valuing their traditional culture. It is even more extraordinary because he was able to perceive in the Indian peasantry of the northern coast the repository of pre-Hispanic culture, even after nearly four centuries of acculturation. And this explains their interest in getting into the notarial archives, especially in that of José Rivadeneira to search for data that referred to the colonial past of this people, and thereby draw the continuous history of the Muchik since preHispanic time. He was without doubt, not just the first ethnohistorian of Peru, but of Latin America.” (Schaedel 1988: 12, my translation)

Schaedel’s most compelling argument regarding the ethnographic character of Brüning’s photographic collection is based on the systematization and analysis he makes of the photographic corpus he selected to discuss in his book. The text is divided into a number of chapters that group the photographs around the themes of classic ethnographic monographs: economy, society, religious life, technology, and types. According to Schaedel, the fact that he was able to find and select photographs for each of these topics, speaks to the ethnographic character of the collection. The final section of the book contains a list of codes and legends that Brüning had assigned and carefully noted for each photo. To the same degree that this information substantiates a systematic procedure that allows the contextualization of the photographs, it also helps to reinforce the thesis about its ethnographic nature.

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Brüning certainly had a clear interest in documenting aspects of social reality and was thus covering various aspects that were of interest to him and that corresponded to the holistic goal that classic ethnography professed at that time. However, following the argument that archives are disciplinary devices that define their own truth and allow for making visible some things and invisible others (Foucault 1972; Mbembe 2002), I want to argue that the kind of intervention that Schaedel conducted with Brüning’s photographic collection involves the delimitation and homogenization of his photographic production. This intervention implies both the fixing and regulating of photography within the regime of science, specifically of ethnography, and the disciplining of the gaze with which the images are to be interpreted. Through selection and classification Schaedel builds a corpus that serves to illustrate his argument, while it invisibilizes those items of the collection that inventory lists record but do not find a place in the order he proposes. In this regard it should be noted that among Brüning’s photographic materials housed in the museum in Hamburg are four of his original photo albums. One of them contains a significant number of small-format, portrait photos and several group photos depicting people and families belonging to the middle and upper classes of Lambayeque society. One can only speculate whether these photographs were obtained by exchange in the logic of the cartes de visite (Poole 1997) or if they were taken by Brüning himself. In any case, these materials indicate that for Brüning photography was not only a technology for ethnographic recording, but also occupied a place in his social life and affections and that he was familiar with photographic languages, aesthetics, and regimes other than the scientific. In other words, not only had his photographic collection been constructed as purely ethnographic, but also his photographic imagination. The classificatory approach proposed by Schaedel in his book, which can be found in the albums of researchers such as Max Uhle and Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, was not applied by Brüning when assembling his albums, or in the listings that he put together. We are not certain about the reasons that led him to act in this way. Perhaps it was the kind of systematization that he planned to do, but which was interrupted by his death. But one could also argue instead that he was distancing himself from comparative approaches and following the ethnographic method by emphasizing de-

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tailed description of procedures, events, and social relations as well as cultural content. It is interesting to note that the albums include series of photographs that document the sequence preparation of chicha or different moments in the celebration of a given fiesta. Among the photos that Schaedel classifies as “types,” are several that follow the pattern of physiognomic photography of the era, but most of them, especially images of women or groups of women, follow the same portrait aesthetics that characterize the portraits and family photos that Brüning kept in his album. These photographs suggest that Brüning did not only have a racial or scientistic appreciation of the subjects he portrayed, but also an aesthetic one, going beyond the ethnographic imagination of human types, and developing an eye committed to discovering the subjective, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of his subject of study. In other words, the photographic gaze of Brüning, which, as I have discussed, suggests a complex relationship with photography and the understanding of ethnography as a subjective and moral task, has been mediated by Schaedel’s gaze, which privileged an ethnographic perspective in an objectifying and exoticizing vein. If one takes into account that Schaedel acted in the framework of a committed anthropology, exercising a political and cultural activism, we may identify a paradox. On the one hand, the scientist’s approach to Brüning’s photographic collection objectifies the photographed subjects in terms of cultural and social categories; on the other hand, there is the political will to vindicate the rural populations of the Peruvian northern coast, whom Schaedel considers descendants of the ancient Muchik as cultural and political agents. It is a paradox that has been identified as belonging to indigenista ideologies conceived and formulated by elites (Méndez 1995; De la Cadena 2000). Brüning’s photographic eye, as an “unlikely hero of ethnic mochica claims” (Asensio 2012: 45) and as an auto-didact, probably gave him a greater margin of freedom and creativity when it came to taking photographs, greater than that enjoyed by Schaedel when it came to interpreting them.

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2 Screenshot from the Internet portal of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin showing a Brüning photograph and context information. (http://www.smbdigital.de)

The Photo Collection on the Internet: Appropriation, Recontextualization, and the Digital Archive as Network Both the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg and the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin have carried out projects to digitize their photographic collections, including the Hans Heinrich Brüning collection. This has been done mainly for conservation purposes. Although the Hamburg museum included the publication of Fotodokumente aus Nordperu as part of its initiative to disseminate the content of Brüning’s collection, it is the museum of Berlin which supports digitization projects as part of an agenda that seeks to ensure the accessibility of its collections. Besides publishing some of Brüning’s photos in the book Exploring the Archive, they have also put online the catalog of his photos archived at the museum (as well as those of other collections), so that users can access the photographic material, research it on the Internet, and make working copies (Figure 2). Access is available by following links on the museum’s website. Complementary information is displayed for each photo, which allows for contextualization (see

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http://www.smb-digital.de). This kind of initiative is part of a broader policy of making the museum and its archives accessible, which corresponds to collaborative and participative endeavors that aim for post-colonial approaches (Mussell 2014).16 In contrast, the museum in Hamburg, according to what I could gather from conversations with museum authorities, continues to apply a much more conservative policy regarding the dissemination of material on the Internet. Although photographs have been digitized, they are accessible only through a personal visit to the museum, where researchers can consult a numerical list containing a caption and view of the photo, but cannot obtain a digitized copy. Dissemination of the photographic material is limited to published editions. Identifying the circulation of Brüning’s photographs on the Internet, where they are circulated by a lay audience, provides insight into some of the paradoxes of museum accessibility policies. Most images circulating on the Internet do not stem from the Berlin museum’s website, which was created with the explicit purpose of making the documents available to the public. Instead they have been scanned from books published by the U.S. anthropologist Richard Schaedel, such as his La etnografía muchik en las fotografías de H. Brüning 1886-1925, and the museum of Hamburg, that is, from Fotodokumente aus Nordperu von Hans Heinrich Brüning, edited by Corinna Raddatz. Printed texts and images from these scanned publications have been partially or entirely reproduced in nonprofessional formats by Internet users, who post them on the web.17 Ironically, the photographs from

16 Forming part of this line of research are projects such as: “Digital object mobility. Recent technologies and transatlantic exchange of knowledge” coordinated by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Berlin. The project aims at “analyz[ing] how spaces and formats of international cooperation are impacted by the digital shift.” See http://www.iai.spk-berlin.de/no_cache/en/third-party-funded-pro jects/ongoing-projects.html?tx_wfdrittmittelprojekte_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=76. This project forms part of the base project “Mobile Objects” within “Bild Wissen Gestaltung. Ein interdisziplinäres Labor” (“Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory”) Cluster of Excellence at HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin 2012-2017, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. See https://www.interdisciplinary-laboratory.hu-berlin.de/de/MobileObjekte. 17 In order to prepare the publication in Peru of La etnografía Muchik, Brüning must have had copies of the photos. I have no precise information about these

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the Hamburg museum are the ones that have been widely disseminated – contrary to the policies of the museum. It might be said that in this context, and regardless of the technological possibilities each medium entails, the book containing the printed photos has proved to have higher mobility than the digitized photos on the museum’s website. Access to the Brüning photographs enabled by Internet users does not follow a progressive sequence model in which a museum and its digitization projects assume the role of and operate as mediators between the “original” – the photographic object located in the museum, whether a negative or a copy – and the digitized version. Instead, transfers take place from the published copy to its digital version, and in this process the Internet user assumes the leading role. The form in which Brüning’s photographs are appropriated reveals the motives that propel network actors and their way of performing on the Internet, scanning printed images and allowing for more effective and efficient uses. Most network actors are not expert researchers. They do not use the Internet as a resource for scientific data; nor do they always require the photo’s context information. Instead they favor the possibility offered by digital technology and the performative nature of the Internet in creating the photographic context for a given image anew. They have no need of high-quality copies, as their logic is that of the prosumer (Toffler 1997). Furthermore, as participants of what Joan Fontcuberta (2015) defines as the post-photographic condition, Internet actors are not subject to the tyranny of the original. In other words, they value the image as part of a repertoire that can be iterated on the network, engaging photography in terms of the performative imperatives of the Internet, submitting to the call of the “click”: to search, download, copy, share, rank, comment and intervene. The “click” refers to the fact that they are “permanently performing tasks and advancing in a complicated map of itineraries” (Cánepa/Ulfe 2014: 77). Regarding the website of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, it can be noted that access to Brüning’s photos is not as straightforward as it is when resorting to Google by using the search terms “Brüning,” “Brüning photographs,” or “Brüning photographic collection.” Google first brings Internet searchers to images

materials and their fate. Some of his photos are otherwise kept and partially exhibited in the Brüning museum. These copies might also be the source of some of the scans.

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that originated in print publications. These images appear individually or as albums on websites dedicated to regional news or cultural issues, as well as blogs or Facebook pages administered by members of Lambayeque’s local elite, such as intellectuals, journalists, and communicators. In contrast, access to the museum website requires a more specialized search, following the access routes available on the page itself, which is less consumerfriendly and less efficient. The circulation of Brüning’s photographs on the Internet responds to two types of presence: First, as an object of accounts that inform about its social use and presence offline, but communicate this information through virtual channels; second, as a presence iterated on platforms such as blogs and Facebook, operating as part of a repertoire that allows for intervention online. Regarding the first type of presence, I want to note that it works within the public arena where the discourse on Muchik identity is being discussed. Within this arena the photographs succeed in reproducing the argument that present-day society has its historical and cultural origin in the heritage of the Muchik people, which is registered and materialized in Brüning’s photographs. Here the image operates as an index. In this case, the heritage attributes and ethnographic contents that have been granted to the photographic collection are invoked in order to convey legitimacy to Muchik identity. The collection serves as a source of scientific and historical evidence and evidence of cultural authenticity for contemporary society in the region. Here I want to refer to three examples that I consider illustrative of the way Brüning’s photographs have been appropriated, transforming them into an essential part of present-day society and culture in the region: (i) the current inclusion of a photo of the Danza de los Diablicos, which Brüning registered at the Feast of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in Jayanca in 1904, as evidence for the historical and cultural roots of the dance, in the file prepared for the nomination of the dance as Cultural Heritage of the Nation;18 (ii) the appearance of the same photograph of the Diablicos dance next to the photo of a contemporary dance troupe in a newspaper article

18 The nomination of the Diablicos dance as part of the nation’s cultural heritage went into effect on May 29, 2013. The photos I refer to appeared on the web page of RPP Noticias on May 31, 2014 (http://rpp.pe/peru/actualidad/lambay eque-la-poblacion-de-tucume-la-virgen-y-los-diablicos-noticia-599951).

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that highlights cultural organizations that perform the dance in an effort to revitalize it as part of regional identity politics; and (iii) the use of 20 photographs of women taken by Brüning in Lambayeque in 1894 to reconstruct the face of the pre-Columbian priestess of Chornancap (La Sacerdotisa de Chornancap).19 In addition, Brüning’s photographs portraying people at work or doing daily activities are used, for example, in school projects that seek to foster the region’s historical memory. One project consisted in mounting an exhibition using parts of the photographs in staging scenes of everyday life. In this case, the images allow the creation of an event in which visitors become part of the scene that they share with the persons represented in largescale reproductions. Thus, so far one can argue for a complex appropriation and redefinition of Brüning’s photographs that implies understanding and using them as evidence, historical sources, and cultural heritage in order to construct arguments about memory, authenticity, and regional identity. But they can also be understood as a performative device to create events and intervene in history, so that actors (who understand images in such a way) participate in what Appadurai and Breckenridge (1995: 4-5) define as “public culture,” a “zone of cultural debate,” that “articulate[s] the space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state – where different social groups (classes, ethnic groups, genders) constitute their identities by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life.” Furthermore, Brüning’s photographs perform within such a public culture, online and offline, as well as transiting between both spheres.

19 Her skeletal remains were found in 2011 in a royal tomb, and are 1200 years old. The reconstruction of her face was part of a collaborative project between the Brüning museum in Lambayeque and Utah Valley University. See Peru 21 Noticias, December 12, 2012. See http://peru21.pe/opinion/lograron-reconstruirrostro-sacerdotisa-2107527.

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3 Facebook page Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo with one of Brüning’s photographs and a greeting posted on the occasion of Mother’s Day. (www.facebook.com)

Regarding the presence of Brüning’s photographs as a visual repertoire used for intervention via Internet platforms, one can find them being cited on blogs, YouTube, and Facebook pages. For purposes of the discussion presented here, I will mention two Facebook pages: Ancient Photos of Chiclayo. Public Group (Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo. Grupo Público), and Images of Lambayeque. Website of Society/Culture (Imágenes de Lambayeque. Sitio web de sociedad/cultura). The administrators of these websites and the members of the Facebook group belong to the provincial middle class; among them are professionals, local intellectuals, journalists, and

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public officers, including a group of migrants living in other cities of Peru or in other countries. All are very much engaged in the debates on Muchik identity, so these Internet platforms allow them to develop initiatives and have a say in these debates. A review of the content that appears on these platforms, whether in the texts and photographs posted by those in charge of the sites or by those who make comments, allows us to identify aspects of interest with respect to Muchik identity. For example, on a rhetorical level, Brüning’s photographic materials allow for before / after comparisons. In one case, a black-andwhite photograph taken by Brüning at the turn of the century, which shows a building that is representative of the architecture of the era, is placed next to a color photo of the same building today, now completely deteriorated. Thus, the first image operates as the index of the past and a better time, while being compared to the present and demanding that action be taken. Such rhetoric appeals to nostalgia in order to make a political argument about the fate of the city’s architectural heritage. The fact that Brüning’s photos work as an index of a lost past and of nostalgia is especially relevant if one considers that many of the members of both Facebook pages that I have mentioned are migrants who reside abroad or in other Peruvian cities. In that regard, these photos operate as an index of both a past time and spatial distance. This fact becomes relevant when one considers the use of Brüning’s photos in making an argument about tradition and Muchik identity, particularly that of Muchik women. Figure 3 shows the Mother’s Day greeting posted on the Facebook group Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo, as well as comments from some of the members. The greetings, which are intended for all women in the group and in the region who are mothers, refer to the forces of tradition and the telluric power of the landscape as the foundation of their identity. The argument contained in this commentary is illustrated with a photograph of a rural landscape taken by Brüning that shows a group of women in traditional dress, sitting on the floor, accompanied by their children, and weaving straw hats. This scene represents what is considered a typical activity of everyday life for Muchik women. In other words, Muchik identity and its foundational forces are materialized in women’s bodies and activities, as well as in their surroundings. Since Schaedel’s argument about Muchik continuity is very much disseminated, it can be said that the photograph further implies the idea of continui-

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ty between the women depicted by Brüning at the beginning of the 20th century and contemporary female members of the Facebook group, as well as society in northern Peru. The art and craft of traditional weaving of straw hats work as an index of such continuity, which spokesmen of the Muchik revival movement also conceive of as central to the development of a selfmanaged Muchik economy. Nevertheless, at the same time that continuity is acknowledged, comments from female members of the Facebook group refer to the fact that spatial and temporal distance is reestablished. For example, they recall that their grandmothers used to weave straw hats and that this tradition had been lost by people living in the cities. So, the women depicted in the photos stand for Muchik identity, but at the same time they are objectified as a distant “other” in time and space. It is interesting to observe that women instead of men promptly establish this distance between themselves and the women depicted in the photo, since they consider themselves to be part of an urban, middle-class, literate, and professional community. Distancing from and objectification of the women portrayed in the photos and the Muchik identity they represent also occurs as they become captured in the materiality of the photographic object – even though these photos circulate as digitized artifacts. Members of Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo see themselves as legitimate and authentic representatives of Muchik tradition taking responsibility for the management of the historical photos of the region that they have gathered in their digital archive. In other words, Muchik identity – that is, the one that the group identifies with, represents, and guards – is embodied in the photographic archive. At the same time, this version of Muchik identity is separated from real contemporary indigenous women who live and work in the rural and impoverished areas of this part of northern Peru and who, eventually, could be identified or might recognize themselves as descendants of the women depicted in the photos. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that men who belong to the Facebook group do not select photographs that portray Muchik men to represent themselves or celebrate their Muchik identity. Thus, a distinction is established between middle-class urban men as subjects that represent Muchik identity and women (of the past and the present), who are the objects of representation. A further distinction is instituted, that comprehends class and geographical location, between middle-class urban men and women, and impoverished, rural men and women (of the past and the present).

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The tasks of constructing, safeguarding, and publishing the contents of the photographic archive which materializes that Muchik identity, define the contours of Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo. This profile is further performed in a certain style that comprehends the kind of visual material and commentaries that are considered appropriate for posting on Facebook and that count on a proper interpretation of them. This style includes using historical photographs and having the sensibility and the capacity to recognize and appreciate them for their historical, social, and aesthetic value. Although it is not required to have expert knowledge of these photos, differences are established between those who are connoisseurs and those who are not. In other words, through discursive practices entailed in the work of interpreting historical photographs (Postill 2010), a “visual divide” (Kummels 2015) becomes operative in the shaping of public culture of Muchik identity. Even though the group is open to all who concerned with Muchik identity, some participants have been banned, for example, after they posted offtopic photographs of current events, social gatherings, or tourism promotion. On the other hand commentary about the photographs includes notes with information about the image or about the people or events that are documented in the photographs. Celebratory and nostalgic comments are abundant and welcome. Briefly, the profile and style of the Facebook page determine the contours of the public sphere and define the repertories and style adopted for making a legitimate and constructive intervention, a process that shapes the community of legitimate participants, which considers itself literate and refined. The discourse on Muchik identity on the Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo Facebook community is that of a regional elite and differs from the discourse promoted by Schaedel, Rodríguez Suy Suy, and other intellectuals who are engaged with the political agendas of workers, rural, and marginalized groups. It is celebratory, romantic, and exoticizing. As Marisol de la Cadena (2000) has noted with respect to ethnic configurations in Cuzco, this type of representation allows a regional elite to distinguish itself from others within the nation state; at the same time, it allows the regional elite to consider itself separate from rural communities, farmers, craftsmen, and fishermen. Although it draws on Brüning’s photographic repertoire, which at a first glance would connect it to the anthropological arguments developed by Schaedel, these digital representations and performances result in being

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more instrumental to what Asensio (2012: 4) defines as Muchik “archaeological identity.” Within this identity “the appeal to Mochica culture constitutes a narrative about the origin of the regional identity that perfectly fits the political and economic project of the new regional elite: a political project based on principles of regional autonomy, order and commitment to international commerce as the source of economic wealth for the region” (Asensio 2012: 42-43). Re-contextualized in current public discourses on Muchik identity, Brüning’s photos are being used to serve a nostalgic, romantic, and gendered representation that entails forms of ethnic, class, and gender differentiation and exclusion. Another aspect I wish to touch upon deals with the online performativity of Brüning’s photographs, regarding the way they circulate, are contextualized, and shape a digital archive. To that end I have identified Diego Portilla Miranda’s blog, TextosotxeT, as the site where scanned images and text from the book published by the museum in Hamburg were first made freely available on the Internet (Figure 1). In February 2012, a file was uploaded, followed by four more, until the entire book – including articles and photographs – were finally added to the blog’s archive. The scanned texts and links to materials that make up the blog’s complete archive (which Portilla manages rigorously, including the respective bibliographical references), come from the social sciences, communications, philosophy, and the history of the region. In the context of this blog, the digital version of Fotodokumente becomes part of a more comprehensive constellation of academic texts, selected according to the particular interests of the blogger. In this case, it is part of an effort of to make a text that is considered relevant for the historical memory and identity of Lambayeque accessible to the public, placing a special value on its ethnographic content. Thus, the texts and the photographs have been displaced into the digital and virtual regime, thereby altering their condition as museum objects, but remaining within the ethnographic regime. However, the scanned version of Fotodokumente is part of a personal library that is made available to the public. Although it is a GermanSpanish, bilingual edition, access to the book is limited when it comes to the Peruvian public, particularly in regions of the country where library resources are inadequate. For these readers, the Internet constitutes an important source of access to material that is not physically within their reach, making access to the digitized catalog a way of staying informed. As an

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online actor, Pimentel is not only a consumer of books; he also acts as a sort of virtual librarian or archivist, that is, as an intermediary between the museum, its experts and custodians, and users of the Internet, challenging the sovereignty that the former exercise upon the objects, collections, and knowledge linked to them. This mediation, however, does not occur with the materials housed in the museum, but between the museum’s printed catalog and the digital version hosted on Pimentel’s blog. In other words, one can argue, as I will discuss shortly, that in the virtual world of the Internet, it is the scanned photographs and the various archives that are created with them that constitute “the original” from the perspective of the Internet user. The digital version of Fotodokumente that Pimentel shares in his blog on February 12, 2013, later appears in the Facebook page Imágenes de Lambayeque. It is hosted there on September 5, 2013, as an album called La etnografía Muchik en la fotografía de Heinrich Brüning 1886-1925. It should be pointed out that the title of this album, which contains material from the book published by the Hamburg museum, is the same as the title of Schaedel’s book. Yet the administrator of Imágenes de Lambayeque has knowledge of both publications, and both are available on his Facebook platform; so this apparent confusion is informative of two things: First, it seems to suggest that no distinction is to be made between the two texts, in the sense that Brüning’s collection is conceptualized as a landscape with horizons that project beyond the boundedness of the particular materialities that either the collection sheltered in Hamburg or the published catalogs impose. Second, by stating so clearly the title of Schaedel’s book, viewers are encouraged to accept its arguments as the lens through which Brüning’s photos should be read. As Van Dijck has argued (2010: 6), the circulation of photographic material on Internet platforms such as Flickr and Facebook responds to the imperatives of sharing, so that connectivity and networking become main features of a “new regime for shaping views.” Therefore, it is possible to assert that the collecting and sharing of Brüning’s photographs, the creation of albums, and the reference made to different sources, do not only create the collection anew, but also exert a normalizing force on the interpretative frame to read them. On the Facebook page Imágenes de Lambayeque, the album that contains the Hamburg museum’s publication is preceded by a text written by the website administrator, Diego Portilla Miranda, summarizing Brüning’s

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4 Facebook page Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo; one of the albums named Hans Heinrich Brüning includes an article copied from the blog of the historian Teodoro Hampe and the complete scanned version of the book Fotodokumente aus Nordperu. (https://www.facebook.com)

biography. The blog TextosotexT is cited as the source of the photographs collected on this page, and a link is provided. Later, on July 27, 2014, the same material appears in the album Hans Heinrich Brüning belonging to the Facebook group Antiguas Fotos de Chiclayo (Figure 4). Here there is no reference to the source from which the digitized material has been taken. While a member of the group may have directly scanned it from the book, one could also suppose that it was taken from Pimentel’s blog, or even from Imágenes de Lambayeque, since, as I have been able to verify, these Facebook groups share images with each other. For example, the note accompanying a photograph posted April, 13, 2013, on Imágenes de Lambayeque refers to the page Antiguas fotos de Chiclayo as its source. This also shows

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how the group’s archive has become a source and referent for other Internet users, such as members of the Imágenes de Lambayeque group. On the other hand, although Antiguas fotos de Chiclayo is named as the source of this photograph, it could not have been taken from the album that contains the digital version of Fotodokumente, because that complete archive was not uploaded until after the post on Imágenes de Lambayeque was made. What I have been able to confirm is that this photograph already existed in the photo gallery of Antigua Fotos de Chiclayo. There it was posted two months before, on February 21, 2013, with the title Balsilla en la costa de Pimentel (Figure 1). In sum, prior to the existence of the complete digital version of the book published by the Hamburg museum, collections of Brüning’s photographic material already existed in the digital world,20 and had even been assembled in small albums following thematic criteria with titles such as: “Brüning and the Muchik People,” “Brüning and the World of the Sea” or “Brüning and Wildlife.” The complete image archives of the two Facebook pages that I am analyzing are therefore made up of individual photographs that can be found in the photo gallery, as well as in the albums. Both were sources from which photographic material has been selected to create additional new albums or add new posts. Thus, one could argue that the photographic corpus published in the books Fotodokumente and La etnografía Muchik have been separated into parts. However, picking up on the discussion about the democratizing role of digital technologies on mobility of and access to museum collections, one could also argue that what is really taking place is a multiplication of archives; in a second step a network of archives is constituted, which intensifies the mobility of the images and they become increasingly accessible and visible to new audiences. As is well known these networks find their own boundaries and frontiers in the communities that are articulated through them. Although the museum in Berlin has placed its digital collection of Brüning’s photographs online, these do not circulate in the archival networks that configure themselves around the blog and the Facebook communities that currently con-

20 One likely source for this may have been partial scans of Fotodokumente as well as Etnografía Muchik, which, as I indicated earlier, are also referred to by users of these pages and even shared in pdf format.

 

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gregate around Lambayeque public culture. Despite the efforts of the museum to provide greater accessibility of its collections, they have remained restricted to specialized academic circles. The alternative archival initiatives that I am analyzing actually function as a parallel network to that of the museums. In this regard, it should be pointed out that in these alternative archives each online iteration of Brüning’s photographs leads further away from the original – that is, from the existence of the photographs as objects in the collections of the museums of Hamburg and Berlin; at the same time new referents of authenticity are created. A good example of this is the animated version of a photographic selection made from available materials and titled Hans Heinrich Brüning. Album fotográfico, which is found on YouTube. This video itself constitutes original material.21 As Walter Benjamin (1969) has stated, the technologies of mechanical reproduction empty the represented objects, as well as the object of representation itself (the original print of a photograph), of its aura of originality as it operates in a representational regime. What the present exploration shows us is that on the Internet the authenticity of a photograph is reinstated in each of its iterations. Therefore, the digitization of Brüning’s photographic collection (including that of the printed catalogs) and its respective displacement into the virtual world also implies their mobility between the representational and performative regimes (Cánepa/Ulfe 2014). In this performative regime, the agency of online users – which this medium both demands and constitutes – is central. On the Facebook pages that I have been exploring, photographic material is gathered, selected, grouped and separated, posted and shared online, as well as commented on by posting observations, sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy. To carry out these tasks Internet users refer to the printed material, especially to material found on the Facebook pages themselves. As a whole, the materials that have been gathered form a larger archive that includes albums with historical photographs of diverse origins (professional photographers, family collections, magazines, and newspapers); they also contain texts that include newspaper 21 This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgmIQ2M6WdM; accessed January 5, 2016) was made by Milton Cárdenas Neyra and shared on April 27, 2013, the same year that the digital version of Fotodokumente disseminated. Milton Cárdenas Neyra, who is also a member of the group Imágenes de Lambayeque, has shared other YouTube videos that deal with ecology, music, and sport in Lambayeque.

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clippings, posters, and official documents. In general, no contextual information is provided for these images; however, if additional information is offered when a photo is posted, users of the site can then expand upon or correct that information. These comments can be the direct expression of the actors’ voices or quotes from other voices. In contrast to what Roland Barthes (1992) argues for print media, there is no one single inscription here that fixes the content of the photograph. Neither is there, as in the case of the digitized photographs of the collection of the Berlin museum, a file that informs us in an authoritative way about the photograph. On the contrary, when an image on Facebook is commented on (for it can also remain unnoticed online), it is the object of multiple disputed interventions and interpretations. While the comments remain set in written form, the platform operates rather like a forum of ephemeral statements similar to oral communication. To summarize, one can argue that the appropriations and consequent recontextualizations of Brüning’s photographic legacy made possible through its entry onto the Internet increase the accessibility of this material; therefore, new audiences, new voices, and new experts appear beyond those of the museum. Moreover, this even applies to museums that are revising their policies and opening their collections up to the virtual world. One can also observe a greater creativity when handling historical photographs; which translate into new, emerging agendas and novel uses of material initially confined to the spaces and imperatives of the scientific regime. These new spaces also signify that the photographic material returns to the place from which it had been removed in the course of production and circulation. This occurs in a transformed historical context; the material returns as new agents that intervene in the configuration of contemporary social processes. In this process the ethnographic photo regains mobility by moving between different regimes such as those of science, aesthetics, identity politics, and performativity, while also regaining its complexity as a cultural object. In this respect a tension between the modern archive and the digital archive may be noted. As I have already argued, although the photographic archive has been displaced outside the scientific regime, Internet users do not stop taking its ethnographic content into account. On the contrary, this dimension is reinforced through various comments made about the images, whether to highlight the scientific importance of Brüning’s work or show

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interest in identifying the theme, place, or date of the image. This type of concern can be observed among learned users or those who are precisely linked to the academic world in the region, but it also emerges when arguments are required to legitimize the photographic material; scientific discourse still serves to confer authority upon images. However, everything that has been pointed to as positive attributes of the digital archives, in the sense that they favor a more democratic access and meaningful social and political uses of historical images, has to be attenuated: The analyzed virtual archives of the blogs and Facebook platforms do not facilitate the search and the systematization of the material according to scientific standards of rigor and productivity. On the other hand, access to Brüning’s photos in a way that reproduces and systematizes them according to scientific standards is restricted by the disposition of the museum to show, publish, and share aspects of its collection with a broader audience. It can abstain from digital dissemination altogether, as in the case of the museum in Hamburg, or design the scope of its platform to mainly appeal to specialized audiences, as in the case of the museum in Berlin. In terms of possible appropriations and recontextualizations of Brüning’s photographic legacy, this certainly entails limitations. Final Remarks Many of Brüning’s photographs are already more than 100 years old and have traveled a long way. On his return to Germany, Brüning took them along with him and surely never imagined that decades later they would return to the region of Lambayeque, where their journey had originated. Photographs, along with other cultural objects, have a life of their own and undergo change. During their many journeys and their digital transformation, Brüning’s photographs have even been converted into something new – original objects with their own contextual referents – while losing their connection to the old. Brüning took photographs in an effort to document the traces of continuity between ancient Muchik society and that of the contemporary inhabitants of the region. And it was in this same spirit that the U.S. anthropologist Richard Schaedel brought those photos back to Peru, this time in printed version. The publication of Brüning’s photographs has played a central role in the emergence of an ethno-political movement of Muchik identity.

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In this regard Brüning’s photographs have played a double role. On the one hand, they have been used to construct a visual argument about cultural continuity between the Muchik past and present. On the other hand, they have been freed from the regime of the museum and the analogical archive, and appropriated as a repertory through which the various groups that make up society in the region of Lambayeque are able to perform Muchik identity and give it particular meanings of their own, meanings that differ according to ethnicity, class and gender – and sometimes converge or conflict with each other. In conclusion, and drawing on Haskins’s (2007: 408) discussion on the September 11 Digital Archive, the processes of offline and online appropriations and recontextualizations of Brüning’s photographic collection, entail a tension between creating “bridges between demographically and politically diverse audiences” and promoting “balkanization.”

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Haskins, Ekaterina (2007): “Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age. In: Rhetoric Society Quarlerly. ProQuest Research Library. Fall 37/4, pp. 401-422. Huayhuaca, José Carlos (1993): Martín Chambi, Fotógrafo. Lima: Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación, Centro de Investigación en Comunicación Social de la Universidad de Lima, CICOSUL. König, Eva (2002): “Einleitung.” In: Eva König (ed.), Indianer 1858-1928. Photographische Reisen von Alaska bis Feuerland. Katalog zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung vom 28.4.2002-15.6.2003. Herausgegeben vom Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg, Berlin: Edition Braus. Kraus, Michael (2015): “Exploring the Archive. An Introduction.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln: Böhlau, pp. 9-47. Kummels, Ingrid (2015): “Negotiating Land Tenure in Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk People’s Videomaking between Mexico and the USA.” In: Working Paper for the EASA Media Anthropology Network’s eSeminar (http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars). Maeda, José (2009): “Richard Paul Schaedel y los Muchik.” (http://terraeantiqvae.com/forum/topics/richard-schaedel-y-losmuchik#.VpmS9PnhDIU). Mbembe, Achille (2002): “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In: Carolyn Hamilton/Verne Harris/Jane Taylor/Michele Pickover/Graeme Reid/Razia Saleh (eds.), Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 19-26. Méndez, Cecilia (1995): Incas sí, indios no: apuntes para el estudio del nacionalismo criollo en el Perú, Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Mussell, James (2014): “Digital Forum. The Postcolonial Archive.” In: Journal of Victorian Culture, 19/3, pp. 383-384. Onken, Hinnerk (2014): “Visiones y visualizaciones: la nación en tarjetas postales sudamericanas de finales del siglo XIX y comienzos del siglo XX.” In: Iberoamericana, XIV/5, pp. 47-69. Poole, Deborah (1997): Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Postill, John (2010): “Introduction: Theorising Media and Practice.” In: Birgit Bräuchler/John Postill (eds.), Theorising Media and Practice, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1-32.

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Prümers, Heiko (2015): “Hans Heinrich Brüning and Archaeology.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln: Böhlau, pp. 387-410. Raddatz, Corinna (1990): “Prefacio y agradecimiento.” In: Corinna Raddatz (ed.), Fotodokumente aus Nordperu von Hans Heinrich Brüning (18481928), Hamburg: Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg. Riviale, Pascal (2015): “Archeological Collections in Peru and their International Influence during the Nineteenth Century.” In: Manuela Fischer/Michael Kraus (eds.), Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, Köln: Böhlau, pp. 89-108. Schaedel, Richard P. (1987): “Dos mil años de continuidad cultural de los Muchik en la costa del Perú.” In: Iberoamerikanisches Archiv, NF Jg. 13/1, pp. 117-123. Schaedel, Richard P. (1988): La etnografía Muchik en las fotografías de H. Brüning 1886-1925, Lima: COFIDE. Stocking, George (2002): “Delimitando la antropología: reflexiones históricas acerca de las fronteras de una disciplina sin fronteras.” In: Revista de Antropología Social 11, pp. 11-38. Toffler, Alvin (1997): La tercera ola, Barcelona: Plaza & Janés. Van Dijck, José (2010): “Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity: Sharing Views, Experiences, Memories.” In: Memory Studies XX/X, pp 1-15. Figure Sources 1 2

Photographer: Sara Lucía Guerrero. January, 2016 Screenshot from http://www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus?service =direct/1/ResultLightboxView/result.t1.collection_lightbox.$TspTitleI magelink.link&sp=10&sp=Scollection&sp=SfieldValue&sp=0&sp=0& sp=3&sp=Slightbox_3x4&sp=0&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=F&sp=T&sp=7 3 Screenshot from https://www.facebook.com/groups/chiclayoold/search/ ?query=%20mam%C3%A1s%20seguidoras 4 Screenshot from https://www.facebook.com/groups/chiclayoold/photos /?filter=albums

Recognizing Past and Present through Photography Temporality and Culture in Konrad Theodor Preuss’s Images A URA L ISETTE R EYES

The reflections on photography presented in this essay revolve around two issues. The first refers to Konrad Theodor Preuss’s (1869-1938) photographic practices during archaeological and ethnographic expeditions carried out in Colombia between 1913 and 1915. Those expeditions were based on his interest in “the comparative history of religion as the problem of a supreme being among primitive peoples” (Kutscher 1976: 27f., my translation). The second issue relates to a practical exercise I carried out with photographic prints during a research trip to Colombia between December 2014 and February 2015 as part of my doctoral dissertation. During that visit, I used Preuss’s photographs as a means to evoke narratives (photo-elicitation) during interviews and meetings with people from indigenous organizations, museums, and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), to mention a few. My dissertation project focuses on the analysis of the musealization process of the data and artifacts gathered by Preuss during his expeditions, which eventually would consolidate a body of knowledge in the emerging disciplines of the anthropology of the Americas (Altamerikanistik) and modern anthropology in Germany during the 20th century. This essay, in particular, aims at understanding Preuss’s use of modern tools, such as photography, within the process of description, which became the centerpieces

1 Dancer with sun mask. Photographer: Konrad Theodor Preuss, 1914. Collection of the Världskulturmuseerna, Gothenburg.

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of anthropological scientific knowledge. In these processes, the image, along with narratives and observations collected during field research, turned into a strategy to legitimate the researcher’s ethnographic authority (Clifford 1988). Thus, for early 20th-century archaeologists and ethnologists the image assumed an illustrative role, contributing to the legitimization of the discourse that the researcher had to construct. In the case of Preuss’s expeditions in Colombia, photography allowed him to show where he had been and had excavated; it provided visual proof of the contexts in which his research was carried out and included both natural and social landscapes. In this essay I will discuss how those natural and social landscapes are presented by Preuss and how he used photography as a recording tool to approach the realities in which he was interested. Furthermore, today’s multiple appropriation of discourse on heritage and its instrumentalization has created controversy and fostered reflection that shows the important relationships between the indigenous communities in Colombia and the material and non-material expressions and cultural objects that they are attempting to claim as their legitimate property.1 The recent interest of Colombian scholars and indigenous organizations in Preuss’s collections (from the Kogi masks to the San Agustín monolithic stone statues) motivated me to visit Colombia to understand how the Kogi indigenous people of today perceive objects kept at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. I showed them photographs taken by Preuss a century ago to elicit answers, in which the relationship between materiality and the Kogi’s own knowledge system became apparent, a relationship intertwined with processes of identity legitimization. Thus, through conversations about the material features photographed by Preuss, the people interviewed expressed their close relationships to those realities. Through objects, buildings, landscapes, or costumes, among other broad categories, they reflected on the traditions and customs that are still very much alive, as well as those that have transformed over time, drawing attention to how these traditions and customs belong to Kogi indigenous identity.

1

To delve into the issues regarding heritage, heritage policies, and differential social agents see Chaves/Montenegro/Zambrano (2014).

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Notes on the Photographic Material in Preuss’s Publications on his Expeditions in Colombia In August 1913, Konrad Theodor Preuss asked the government for permission to undertake archaeological and ethnographic research in the “region of Caquetá and the departments of Huila, Nariño, Cauca, Valle, Tolima, and Antioquia” (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Legación Alemana 1911-1914: Folio 16). He then began his expedition in September. This expedition pursued two objectives: on one hand, there was growing academic interest in that area of the American continent, as was mentioned in a letter to the minister of clerical and educational affairs, Dr. von Trott zu Solz: “It’s a good time to travel in Colombia, because our biggest rivals, the Americans, are so hated there at the moment that they can’t even think about undertaking anything. This is because of Panama’s forced surrender to the United States. In Ecuador, for example, Professor Marshall H. Saville at Columbia University in New York has been expending considerable resources for years on excavations. His obvious overexploitation means that nothing will be left over for the territories’ future generations. He also plans to extend his activities later to Colombia, specifically to the very area that I am looking at.” (SMB-PK, EM. Acta E 1867/12)

On the other hand, Preuss drew attention to the use of “scientific methods” to gather objects that would become part of museums at a time – the late 19th and early 20th centuries – when buying and exchanging them was a very common practice of collectionism. He intended to carry out excavations in San Agustín because he considered himself a pioneer collector of those objects, which were to become part of museum collections to advance the praxis of scientific archaeology. Arranging all the details and steps of the expedition was a task entirely assumed by the researcher–subject, who intentionally chose the locations, the collectable resources (material and non-material), and the collection method. He also devoted a lot of time to writing texts to systematize and analyze findings, as seen in the following passage: “At this moment, starting an archaeological investigation of Colombia would hold great promise, for the collections of the museums there are all second- or third-hand, and even often originate from the activities of treasure seekers exclusively looking

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for gold implements. The importance of finally using scientific methods in those Andean areas that earlier were inhabited by fairly highly respected tribes is selfevident. Among these peoples, we are the most familiar, archaeologically, with the Tschibtscha or Muyska on the plateau of Bogotá and Quimbaya in the Valley of Cauca. At the same time, very little has been reported anywhere from the conquest period.” (ibid)

This is why he sought to establish a link between the museum collections and the exercise of a scientific practice in the field. However, attempts to apply a scientific method to archaeological excavation were confronted with a series of difficulties. One has to take into account that the researcher had to deal with the inherent difficulties of this type of exercise. As time went on, extreme weather conditions, restrictions on excavation, poor transportation between the various sites, and the limited ability to move around at will led Preuss to miss all the deadlines he had set, whereupon he shortened the period of time he spent in each location: San Agustín and the surrounding area, the tributaries of the rivers Orteguaza and Caquetá, and the north slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta at the end of his expedition. Although he finished his research in 1915, the outbreak of World War I forced Preuss to remain in Colombia. This scenario gave him the opportunity to conduct further research, but by then the budget for the expedition had already run out. His limited income was just enough to pay the rent in a small town called La Esperanza. There he had the opportunity to catalog all the material he had gathered and time to prepare his publications. By the end of 1919, when the war was over, he had returned to Germany. In all his publications, Preuss used images of the places he visited, taken on site during his expeditions.2 Although working conditions were not always the most appropriate, according to his expectations, he collected a considerable amount of photographs. To take them, he had to travel long distances using several means of transportation: by riverboat, on foot through the jungle, or on the back of a mule. After long journeys, he gathered his collections and sent them to intermediate towns; from there they were dispatched to Germany.

2

Monographs regarding his research in Colombia that are particularly important with respect to this matter are Preuss (1921; 1923; 1926; 1929).

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It is hard to determine the exact number of photographs he took during those years. The existing file material is kept at the Ethnologisches Museum and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, both in Berlin. Part of his collection is thought to have been lost during World War II. However, some copies of his photographic collection are found at the Världskulturmuseerna (Gothenburg) as part of the materials that museums regularly exchanged with each other during the first decades of the 20th century. These exchanges occurred when Preuss was director of the American Section of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, along with the 1920 sale of part of the collection to the Göteborg Museum, where Erland Nordenskiöld worked as director of the Ethnography Section (Palacio 2015). His research with the Kágaba (Kogi) was published in two volumes under the name of Forschungsreise zu den Kágaba, Beobachtungen, Textaufnahmen und sprachliche Studien bei einem Indianerstamme in Kolumbien, Südamerika (1926).3 The first volume is divided into three sections: impressions of the trip and results of research, texts and translations, and a grammar summary. The second volume presents a comparative lexicon of the Kogi and German languages. It contains about 35 photographs that show the villages he visited, ritual garments, informants, families, and other members of the community. A similar structure is seen in Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, Textaufnahmen und Beobachtungen bei einem Indianerstamm in Kolumbien, Südamerika (1921)4, published in two volumes. In the introduction he wrote about his journey. Then, he made several notes on feasts and religiosity in the community, including myths and their translations, as well as a description of their language grammar. This time, only six photographs were published. In these one can see a maguaré (a traditional wooden drum), dancers and singers, and a ritual dance that he witnessed. The best collection of Preuss’s published photographs is found in Kunst: Ausgrabungen im Quellgebiet des Magdalena in Kolumbien und ihre Ausstrahlungen in Amerika (1929).5 There he published 87 plates; each 3 4 5

In English: Expedition to the Kágaba, Observations, Textual Notations, and Linguistic Analysis on an Indigenous Tribe in Colombia, South America. In English: Religion and Mythology of the Uitoto, Textual Notations, and Observations on an Indigenous Tribe in Colombia, South America. In English: Art: Excavations at the Headwaters of the Magdalena in Colombia and its Impact in the Americas.

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plate contained up to six photographs in which one can find photographs of the excavations, the statues on site. In the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin, there are photographs of objects from other museums, drawings, as well as photographs from other publications. As with his prior publications, he provides the details of the expedition and then talks about the locations he excavated, concluding with interpretations and comparisons of the stone sculptures he excavated to those in other American cultures. The objective of this final reflection was to establish possible relationships among the various societies that created monolithic statues and to identify stylistic features, types of ceramics, manufacturing sites, mutual influences, and trading routes. As Viviana Palacio (2015: 45) mentions, Preuss maintained Humboldt’s tradition of “[…] anecdotal narration, which includes details of the trip, routes, hardships, and feelings, along with description of social customs and landscapes observed – and scientific insights according to background and interests.” The first question about those materials is how Preuss managed to take the photographs, since he struggled with geography and negotiations with the people who appeared in the photos. When he went to San Agustín for the first time, he had to finish before the rainy season started. He was always under time pressure because of the heavy rains, which would compromise the selection of excavation sites and the objects that could be removed, photographed, registered, and collected. This is his testimony on these matters: “For a researcher, it was an overwhelming and auspicious sight. For me, the most obvious thing to do, of course, was to first of all gain an impression of the significant prehistoric sites referenced by Codazzi and his successors. The idea of performing detailed work right then and there, however, could not be contemplated because of the rain-soaked and frequently swampy terrain. For this purpose, at the main sites – specifically in Meseta Forest and the jungle – it was necessary to flatten the ground, let it bake in the sun during the dry season, and carefully scorch it. Given how the huge statues were just lying around, half-sunken in the difficult terrain, and rarely standing upright, it was hard not to despair, despite the joy of the discovery, at the prospect of recording them in every detail, casting a mold of them, and identifying any possible linkage to the modest temple-like stone settings, or especially the basic gestures of the giants. Lacking a pulley system, the idea of putting them upright with my inadequate tools seemed utterly impossible. […] The rain, however,

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only hindered our work for a few hours; it was more difficult to take advantage of the interruptions to take photographs and to get accustomed to the different exposure durations. Finally, I became impatient in the face of the tasks awaiting me, which had to be completed before the start of the rainy season in April.” (Preuss 1929: 8,12)

The rainfall in the Alto Magdalena River area had been a key element in archaeological research in the zone. Since Preuss had arrived in Colombia during the dry season, he decided to explore that area first. The mountainous geography, along with the size and weight of the statues to be excavated, led him to use photography as a practical means to gather data on his “discoveries,” together with plaster casting. However, he insisted that photography was a better strategy because: “Accuracy, of course, is a prerequisite for the critical work that is carried on by other researchers. Having a reliable pictorial representation of the pieces, as well of as many excavation phases as possible, is the only way to inspire a sense of obligation in the researcher, who works alone under difficult circumstances. This is especially important given that he is usually forced to destroy the conditions he finds, for purposes of conducting his own research; therefore, later inspection of the site by those who might succeed him is not always possible.” (Preuss 1929: 6*)

Extracting a statue and registering it through drawings – at one time standard practice in archaeology – was not enough. With photography, the archaeologist could capture in images all the different sides and angles of the piece he had found. Thus, Preuss thought that photography improved the distortion present in other recording techniques. With plaster casts the copies ended up different sizes from the originals, depending on the care taken when casting, while drawings and diagrams were always dependent on the artist’s talent. Photography was able to correct all these imperfections and turned out to be a more realistic means of reproduction. As a result, these images show and precisely describe what was excavated. However, this representation of “reality” was still an artificial construct, since it depended on the act of taking photographs and the interests of whoever prepared the shoot, requiring the statues to be arranged in a certain position once they were removed, raised, and cleaned.

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While Preuss visited the Alto Magdalena region, he concentrated on materiality: statues, ceramics, and lithics. All were excavated according to a particular archaeological technique; photography was used to record testimony of the field work on site. This was of great importance because those photographs were destined for the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin, where they served as testimony as to how the excavation was conducted and what objects were found, especially statues. Lithics and ceramics were registered with drawings. Preuss’s archeological research constitutes a turning point for interests in the field that were predominant during the 19th century, when archaeology sought monumentality without a clear context of the piece; only the monument was considered to have value. Frequently the origin contexts of collections sent to museums were unclear. In this respect, what Preuss did was to give importance to the interest in knowing the origin context of the objects, either from an archaeological or ethnographic perspective. While he was in San Agustín – the most important location of the expedition – he not only identified and described statues, but also located them geographically, explaining that having some remain on site would help to understand the lifestyle of the people who had built them. In addition, Preuss collected Uitoto mythological stories, found in songs and tales, to better comprehend the mythic features of the monolithic statues. When the first exhibition on his expedition opened in the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin, he called attention to the relationship between photography and plaster casting: “Science requires nothing less than a side-by-side display of the plaster casts and the correspondingly large originals left behind on site using the photographs I took there. This shows the relationship between the more clear-cut castings made at home and the photographs of the original taken while in the field.” (Preuss 1929:5*)

These images proved that the statues were too big to be transported to the museum in Berlin. They also legitimized the real and physical presence of the archaeologist in the field, eliminating any speculation. The researcher acquired an active role, in which fate and randomness were eliminated as far as possible, and, instead, a systematic process of registrationexcavation-collection began.

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So now, we saw the use of photography in archaeology, but how was it used to carry out ethnographic expeditions? Well, once the rainy season began in San Agustín, he decided to stop the excavations and went ahead to the Orteguaza River in search of the communities of the Uitoto people who might be able to provide a mythological explanation of what he had found in the San Agustín statuary. Due to the presence of colonizers, missionaries, and rubber tappers he was able to contact the indigenous communities living along the riverside without much difficulty. From this trip, he could only gather six photographs, which are included in the first volume of Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto. Preuss met indigenous people who had been displaced from their traditional territories in a contact zone (Pratt 1992). In the new villages founded by missionaries and colonizers, one could appreciate that different world views and identities were intermingling. The camera, an object of the white man, was one of several artifacts that were re-signified and adopted within the indigenous world. From Preuss’s perspective two worlds were living here together at the same time and space, interweaving in everyday customs and practices. His intentions of recording “indigenous purity” through photography did not match what the locals – who belonged to that hybrid world – wanted to be registered. “For them, as with many other Indians, respect for the external culture of the whites was at odds with their pride in their own worth, based on their traditions, that is, on their religious beliefs in the broadest sense. […] One day, Alejandro appeared in stockings without shoes and with an umbrella in his hand. In this manner, he paraded all morning around the hall in front of his people. He only wanted to have his picture taken alongside his wife and his little daughter, who also looked incredibly European, and, in each case, they were supposed to take an umbrella into their hand, even the little two-year-old.” (Preuss 1921: 12)

Cameras, just like umbrellas and dresses, belonged to the once foreign objects that had been adopted. When Preuss wanted to photograph people impromptu, they refused. Instead, they acted out roles in front of the camera. Preuss’s romantic view of indigenous people conflicted with the Western practices they had already acquired, and he insisted on finding features of his preconceived indigenous world:

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2 Small child using a baby walker, Orteguaza River, Colombia. Photographer: Konrad Theodor Preuss, 1914. Collection of the Världskulturmuseerna, Gothenburg.

Rosendo, on the other hand, remained an Indian through and through. He was the first to let himself be photographed in full Native American attire […] Some dances were finally carried out on the evening of April 27. However, the actual feast day was the following evening, where the men appeared in the morning wearing only a loincloth and were painted with lines all over the body, so that I was no longer able to recognize my friends (Fig. 3). In this procession, the dark figures looked a good deal more impressive. Men grouped in pairs with long flutes (Fig. 4) and panpipes danced continuously in the hall, which shook the whole building. Taking photographs was not an option. Also, no one was moved to come to my platform. However, I could make up for this to some extent at night, when I fetched them individually and took their pictures with flash photography.” (ibid: 12-14; emphasis added)

The unpublished images show men, women, and children wearing clothing brought by the missionaries (Figure 2). Those images did not satisfy Preuss’s expectations: “It is thus not possible to distinguish between socalled wild and civilized Indians, unless one takes the former to be hostile and the latter to be those who have not simply embraced some European products, but rather swapped their manners and customs with those that

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3 Women cutting grass, Palomino, Colombia. Photographer: Konrad Theodor Preuss, 1914. Collection of the Världskulturmuseerna, Gothenburg.

have been imported. The latter naturally offer little in the way of ethnological study” (ibid: 25). Something similar happened with his publication on the Kágaba people, where several photographs of daily life were straight out of a 20th-century anthropology canon that sought to portray a stereotypical version of indigenous identity. This canon was used to select specific photographs for publication (Naranjo 2006). An example of this is Figure 3, an unpublished image that shows women harvesting the grass used as a cover for rooftops in the vicinity of Palomino. In contrast, photographs of men, women, and children that showed foreign customs were neither included in the publications nor considered a worthwhile topic for scientific research. Instead, what he published were photographs of villages and sacred sites on the north slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, among them: San Francisco, San Miguel, Pueblo Viejo, Takina, Nabuvakai, Palomino, Noavaka, Nabuvakai, and Santa Rosa.6 He paid close attention to photo-

6

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graphically recording sites and ritual objects like temples, masks, canes, and garments for ceremonial dances. With difficulty, he photographed passers-by, including mamos (religious authorities, also called mamas), local authorities and their wives, widows and children. He usually included the name and origin of the person in the photograph, but not the names of women and children because: “I never saw women from a distance of closer than twenty paces. They immediately ran away” (Preuss 1926: 15). Getting around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta was not easy for Preuss, because access permits granted by local authorities were required. In the Alto Magdalena region, rain was his main obstacle, but language barriers and mistrust of foreigners limited him when he worked with the Kogi: “These circumstances were not advantageous with regard to my plans, as it was feared that I would ruin prices with my barter goods and diminish the receptivity of the Indians. In general, the whole population both here and in Dibulla did not make as good an impression as the hard-working, enterprising, and trustworthy people in San Agustín. Just getting up here was something remarkable to the people in Dibulla, and later no one wanted to accompany me to Palomino, where, of all the residents, only two had previously been here. Even a decent payment could not shake them from their comfort or their fear.” (ibid: 11-12, emphasis added)

Traditionally, mamos and local authorities controlled travel permissions given to foreigners, when they were consulted. Preuss was not very successful in this respect: “Thus, twelve days after my arrival I had given up any hope of accomplishing anything. I only wanted to visit the temple (cansamaria) of Takina and Makotama before leaving for Palomino. […] They even deliberately tried to speed up my departure by informing me that a festival would be celebrated in Palomino in six days” (ibid: 15). That is why his chances of taking pictures of people were limited when he visited villages and sites: “The state of affairs had not changed since then. Arregocé cheerfully appeared every day with food, but neither he nor the few Indians who arrived from time to time were willing to let themselves be photographed regardless of any remuneration. That

each time he showed photographs of a given place, the local people would claim it was actually someplace else.

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said, I tried to convince them that I only wanted to see how tall they were. My assaults on them with the camera to get at least some snapshots will probably appear strange enough to them in hindsight.” (ibid: 14-15, emphasis added)

The images depict more than social and geographic landscapes. Moreover, they depict more than mere negotiation meetings. Since permission was not granted to photograph everything, the images also represent the agency of the different people he interacted with, rather than what he was interested in. He took 80 photographs in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. 23 were of geographic or dwelling spaces (villages, temples, and bridges), 20 of people photographed individually (most of them posed, with just one taken naturally), 16 more show groups of people (nine of daily activities and seven of body measurement and comparison), and finally 20 were of objects (traditional sugar cane mills, masks, clothing). In her recent work, Viviana Palacio (2015) talks about the artificiality of the images of Preuss’s expedition to the northern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. In these images, one can see that people changed their clothing to create a portrait of the ideal indigenous community that Preuss had in his mind. The location of the photographs was not always clear, especially temple photographs, thus creating fictional characters who appear to match his discourse. Preuss’s narrative trope in publications legitimized his authority as a scholar, because it proved the researcher’s physical presence at the sites, showing that “he was there” in the areas of contact. Photography, Permission and Negotiation on the Northern Slope of the Sierra Today Around 2013, Colombia began to experience increasing interest in Preuss’s work and collections. This recent interest has partly been fostered by the country’s management of cultural heritage, which is governed by a series of cultural laws requiring that the cultural appropriation of objects and expressions must come from the same communities that produce them (Ministerio de Cultura 2010). Thus, heritage is strongly connected to cultural identity and is used for different goals. As a result, the Preuss collection in the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin has become controversial in two ways. In 2013, the ICANH (Colombian Institute for Anthropology and History) commemorated the centenary of archaeological research in San Agustín,

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naming Preuss as the first archaeologist to carry out scientific research in the area.7 This sparked a debate on the national importance of the archaeological park in San Agustín e Isnos, its renovation, and the planned exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Colombia (National Museum of Colombia), including the transfer of several statues from the park to the museum in Bogotá, a journey of nearly 525 km. At the time, there were discussions about the place of the community in heritage management and the loss of heritage through smuggling and collections in foreign museums, such as the one Preuss took to the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. “Repatriation” and “return” were words that emerged, right next to “extraction” and “looting.” This debate shed light on the importance of heritage not only as a topic that concerns museums, but also as a national issue. Soon magazines, newspapers, television news programs, as well as scholars – most of whom were anthropologists with different points of view – were talking about an exhibition that many saw as a threat to the integrity of the very pieces that were to be moved. Everyone had something to say: the ICANH (in its role as protector of Colombia’s heritage), Fabián Sanabria (director of the ICANH at that time), the museum organizing committee, San Agustín’s citizens and politicians, the Yanacona people, who inhabit the reservation (resguardo) located in the ar-

7

The ICANH celebrated the centennial of the beginning of the excavations in San Agustín, which corresponds to the research conducted by Preuss. The institute published a guide to the site, which stated, in part: “Reprint of the work of Theodor Preuss. Itinerant photographic exhibition Pioneros de la arqueología en San Agustín [Pioneers of archaeology in San Agustín]. Infrastructure investments in the Luis Duque Gómez museum of San Agustín and El Alto de Los Ídolos was needed. This was an international competition to transform San Agustín and Isnos into a world class archaeological field. Luis Duque Gómez Scholarship from the Archaeological Research Foundation (FIAN in Spanish) of the Banco de la República to perform scientific research at archaeological fields in Colombia. Scientific and cultural activities with universities, the mayor of Huila, the municipality of San Agustín, and several representatives of the diplomatic corps. Documentary with the workers of San Agustín and Isnos about the history of archaeological fields. Workshops with artisans, experts in tuff-crafting and training of guides of the archeological field of San Agustín, Major exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Colombia: ‘San Agustín, piedra viva hoy’ [San Agustín, living stone of the present].” (ICANH 2012)

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4 Two sun masks. Photographer: Konrad Theodor Preuss, 1914. Collection of the Världskulturmuseerna, Gothenburg.

chaeological park, scholars, researchers, and anthropologists (Rodríguez 2014). Another controversy developed when the Indigenous Council Governor José de Los Santos Sauna and the mamo8 Pedro Novita visited the storage rooms of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, where two Kogi masks collected by Preuss are kept (see Figure 4). This visit was reported on by various media and again the subject of “repatriation”9 of the masks was brought up.

8

9

In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta there are several authorities: on one hand, governors are elected and represent each of the indigenous communities (Kogi, Arhuaco or Iku, Kankuamo and Wiwa), and on the other hand, traditional authorities called mamos or mamas who are considered “the sole authority […] who decide on policies, strategies, actions and relationships of indigenous peoples” (Santos Sauna 2011: 6). See: Die Welt (2013) and Salazar (2014).

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The Kogi community knew of the existence of these masks through Juan Mayr,10 current Ambassador of Colombia in Germany, who has been in contact with the community since September 1976, when he worked with the team that found Ciudad Perdida (Lost City) in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Mayr said about the visit: “They were very kind to me at the beginning, allowing me access to the ceremonies. Years later, it became something more direct, more of a direct experience, being part of the rituals, and obviously at some point that was when I said that some of their masks were here. […] That’s how it happened. I was already ambassador, and when talking to them, they told me they wanted to come to Berlin if I could invite them. I said yes, of course, come to Berlin, come and express your opinion. Then, we asked for permission so they could go see the masks, which aren’t taken out of their display cabinets. […] It was there that mamo Pedro Juan established a dialog with the masks, it was very interesting.” (Interview with Juan Mayr. November 27, 2014)

A series of public declarations were made about the return of these masks to the Kogi community after the interview. Regarding this experience and the role of the masks in the Kogi world view, the Indigenous Council Governor José de los Santos Sauna said: “First, he took us to one of the masks, two of the masks they have there in Berlin, this one is from here, from the region of Palomino, from Alto Palomino. So here we’re talking about two things: recovering sacred sites, or sacred space, all those trees, sacred stones, some with figures, some without, everything. Second, we talked about recovering the sacred object, the tumas11 is in that sacred object, the gold, the mask, the stone, the wooden sticks, all the cultural elements, and then we found out that sacred object was in Berlin. We went to look, and yes, it was there. […] Sacred objects have a mission, a purpose, connectivity […] to connect spirit and matter, the spiritual world and the earth, with the air, with everything, with the heavens.

10 It must be clarified that the interview with Juan Mayr was held on the occasion of his long experience in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and his long term relationship with the Kogi community. Nevertheless, the opinions expressed in this article should not be understood as the official position of the Embassy of Colombia in Germany. 11 The tumas are rocks of different colors, used as offerings, pagamentos, and as necklace beads.

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They’ve taken lots of sacred objects. That’s why we’ve lost that dream, the strength of the Tayrona.12 […] That’s why the communities are losing their culture, their language, their identity, their villages, their own systems, their education, their health. We’re worried about that. Then, the mamo, we, Juan Mayr, who is very well known, that’s why we traveled, first to talk about how we see the planet […] Then we know that the mask is there. For us, the Indigenous, this is a loss of knowledge, a loss of culture, a loss of connection, a loss of purpose, because we are not using it. It’s just a thing and it’s in a jail back there. Eventually, […] we also want to recover the sacred object that’s there in the world because we want to connect with the Mother again, with all sacred objects. That’s why we traveled there, and also to show that we exist.” (Indigenous Council Governor José de los Santos Sauna. January 22, 2015)

We can see in this interview with the Indigenous Council Governor Santos Sauna that Kogi have a world view centered on sacred objects, in which the object is a means of communication with the non-material world, with other beings and spaces. It is worth mentioning that there has been no formal or official request to repatriate those objects in the Preuss collection at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin.13 There is still an open debate on the cultural importance of the objects to the indigenous organization, as seen in the case of the masks and in the testimony of the Indigenous Council Governor. Since this is a very complex and multifaceted topic, we will stop here and simply say that while I was in Colombia many people mentioned it, directly or indirectly. In the next section, I will discuss how I used Preuss’s photographic collection as a means to evoke a response in the meetings I had arranged with various people (indigenous organizations, cultural institutions, and people

12 “The word ‘Tairona’ is not a tribal name, nonetheless during the 16th century it was used to name a rather small indigenous group residing by the north river side of La Sierra Nevada […] the actual term is used to name the archaeological culture described by J. Alden Mason and G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, circa Pueblito. The same word is used to refer to the culture of the people from the region of Santa Marta, described by the chronicles of the 16th century.” (ReichelDolmatoff 1997: 252) 13 In a meeting with Fabián Sanabria, former director of the ICANH, held on January 16th of 2015, it was stated that no formal requests were made with respect to this particular issue.

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from indigenous communities) between December 2014 and February 2015. Before presenting the reflections that arose from my use of photoelicitation, I will describe the origin of the photographs in question. In 1920, a copy of the material gathered by Preuss in Colombia entered the Världskulturmuseerna in Gothenburg. This collection contains about 26 photographs of his excavations in San Agustín, 32 of his expedition to the rivers Orteguaza and Caquetá, and 80 of his expedition to the northern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.14 Much of his notations and, in particular, his photographs were lost during World War II; only the photographic collection in Gothenburg remained. This material is highly valuable with respect to his research in Colombia. Other historic photographs that portray the Kogi world are those of Gustaf Bolinder and Friede Schecker, which have been studied by Fischer and Oyuela (2011). Although the photo collection was digitized and is now freely available on the website, during my visit to Colombia I discovered that no one knew about it, including scholars, representatives of cultural institutions, and indigenous organizations.15 It is important to mention that not all the photographs taken by Preuss are found there; this is clear when one compares the published materials and the database. For example, there are no pictures of 14 The account may vary as some photos were classified with the same reference code and contain up to two shots. This is the case of several photographs of people, where a back and front shot were taken, but were registered under the same code. 15 Among those interviewed were: Margarita Reyes Suárez (director of the Anthropological and Archaeological Heritage Group of the ICANH, director of the museum), Martha Patricia Ramírez Nieto (researcher with the Anthropological and Archaeological Heritage Group of the ICANH), Clara Isabel Botero (former director of the Museo del Oro), Santiago Giraldo (director of Colombian Heritage Program), Enrique Campos (professor and director of the Museo Etnográfico de la Universidad del Magdalena), Fabio López (professor and director of the archaeological collection of the Archaeological Laboratory of the University of Magdalena), Tatyana Torres (manager of Tayronaka). From the organization of Indigenous Gonawindúa Tayrona: Cabildo Gobernador José de los Santos Sauna, Cayetano Torres (director of heritage issues), Julio Barragán (consultant), a n d Juana Londoño (former director of Prosierra and current consultant). Informal conversations were held with others, including: Nicolás Cuadros (tourist guide in Santa Marta), Edith (Nicolás’s wife), Gabriel Nolavita Garavito (Kogi, currently initiated as mamo), and mamo Rumaldo.

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the Goajira communities in the collection. However, three photographs appear in his publication on the expedition to the northern slope of the Sierra. In his book Forschungsreise zu den Kágaba, one can find 50 per cent of the material kept at the Världskulturmuseerna (Gothenburg), which stems from this expedition. Some of the lack of awareness of this collection is related to limited access to translations or new editions of Preuss’s research. It was not until 1994, that a Spanish version was published in Colombia, making his work more widely disseminated in that country. As a result, the first reaction to my request for responses to the photographs was curiosity. They had never seen them and they knew nothing about Preuss’s publications on the Kágaba. Those who knew the area recognized some of the villages, but only those who had a close relationship to the Kogi or were Kogi themselves recognized some of the sacred objects and sites. Later my interlocutors reflected on customs and traditions that are still practiced, such as building techniques. They also mentioned changes that have occurred over time. Today, several communities live together in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and have autonomous control over their reservation lands.16 The situation is not ideal, since there are different interests at play, where colonizers, farmers, and revolutionary groups are present, resulting in conflict, primarily over land ownership. This is why the expansion of the reservation is a subject of constant debate, given the borders of sacred sites, such as the so-called Black Line (Duque 2012). Multiple conflicts between the Kogi and their “younger brothers”17 have reduced access to the sites Preuss visited in 1914 and 1915; only indigenous people are allowed in now. War, violence, and intervention have created tension in the region (CIT 2011). Oc16 The “reservation” (“resguardo”) has a long history in the territorial administration of the country; it dates from the colonial era, when the Spanish monarchy recognized territories for indigenous communities. During the 20th century, indigenous people struggled to define their ancestral territories using the reservations as reference points. It is worth mentioning that reservations are owned by the whole community and operate within their own jurisdiction with their own administration. In the case of the SNSM, the Arhuaco territory consists of two reservations: Resguardo Arhuaco de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Resguardo Bunsichama. The Kankuamo possess the Resguardo Kankuamo and the Resguardo Kogi-Malayo-Arhuaco, which is shared by several communities. 17 In the Kogi world view, the term “younger brothers” is used to refer to those who are not part of the communities living in la Sierra.

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cupation of their lands and restrictions to their interaction with other communities throughout history have given Kogi a sense of mistrust of foreigners and newcomers. In this context, one of the first reflections, when working with photographic materials such as his, questioned why Preuss was given access to the places he visited and how he negotiated with local authorities back then to obtain some sort of permission to freely move about. In this regard, the Kogi community has thought about the social relationships they have with other communities, their interaction with the national society, and the role of spaces for social organization (Torres 2011). During my visit, I talked about this with several members of the community, such as Gabriel Nolavita Garavito, a Kogi man around 25 years old. He is an apprentice mamo and lives in the village of Seywiaka in the Palomino (Dibulla) basin. His father is the mamo Shintana Nolavita. Seywiaka is a new village, built in 2010 to re-settle Kogi families displaced by armed conflict in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; it is located in the exact river basin that Preuss visited a century ago. Gabriel provided most of the reflections described here. He began with an overview of the photographs, recognizing some of the villages he has also visited, housing construction techniques, items of clothing, and various aspects of daily life, such as food and rituals. Then he looked for similarities and differences between life back then and today. He established a diachronic reading, which recognized changes along time, and a synchronic reading, which understood that those photographs showed a particular moment of the past. He then insisted on the importance of their indigenous organization in governing how to interact with outsiders: “Since they didn’t speak Spanish at that time, there was no council or anything. These people didn’t know what money was, so they paid with animals, like mules. Limes, machetes, and modern clothes were all hard to find. Everyone carried his belongings along; you received and passed it around. Maybe they had money someone had given them, so they accepted it. […] Now they don’t allow it. If you go up there, a lot of people come around, ‘no, get back, get back’ they say.” (Interview with Gabriel Nolavita Garavito. February 2, 2015)

Negotiating access permission was brokered by relationships based on oneto-one relationships of exchange. Valuable and scarce objects, such as

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clothing, mules, machetes, were the currency that granted access and permission to remain and freely move about locations, since only locals knew the roads and paths. When various people I spoke to in the Sierra saw the photographs, I heard comments such as “you can’t go up there” or “it’s on the other basin.” This showed that access to certain areas is not public; it is controlled by permissions given by communities or local authorities in every village. Thus, the photographs are testimonies of agreements and disagreements. A discourse of wide differences is still heard, which is why even today it is forbidden to take certain photographs, because they might disclose a private space. Photography is a means of communicating knowledge which, according to community rules, is not in the public domain. Regarding Preuss’s landscapes and panoramic views of the village and his permission to photograph them, Gabriel commented: “No, he’s taking a lot of pictures of the páramo, you can see it here, and then people want to go up here, so they say yes. They say, now they say to me, you wouldn’t feel good if you showed those photos to other people. That’s what the mamos say, so they don’t do that now. I don’t know why they did it before.” (Interview with Gabriel Nolavita Garavito. February 2, 2015)

The expression “snow-capped,” seen in the description of Figure 5, is an example of photographs that indirectly make public a sacred space, in this case the páramos mentioned by Gabriel. The second reflection was about the historic perception of the documents. The past is not seen as an unchanged continuum. Instead, change is recognized and acknowledged, especially change in daily routines and rituals. If Preuss obtained the names of the men he photographed, it means he had the opportunity to talk to them or get close to them. This made it possible to detect lineages and families. In a meeting with the Indigenous Council Governor,18 family links were found between the people in the photographs and present day mamos:

18 Currently, the Kogi council governor is José de los Santos Sauna. Among those who attended the meeting were: advisers of the organization, members of the Kogi community, and the council itself. The conversation focused on heritage issues, and the photographic material was used to provoke discussion of the re-

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5 The village of Palomino with snow-capped mountains in the background. Photographer: Konrad Theodor Preuss, 1914. Collection of the Världskulturmuseerna, Gothenburg. “These are my mother’s grandparents and great-grandfather, they are Nolavita. That one could be the father of José María’s great-grandfather, because here he is: In the book, it says mama José Miguel, José Miguel Garavito, mama Trinidad Noivita; there’s also Lavata, Silvestre Lavata. They’re four people. Mama come from that family, mama José María Garavito; they’re the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.” (Indigenous Council Governor José de los Santos Sauna, January 22, 2015)

This last comment is an insight into how the social structure identified by Preuss is still present. Lineages are identified by each mamo’s last name, which is why he mentions the various family members. Even today, the apprentices of mamos often are their own sons, chosen when they are young

search led by Preuss on the north slope of the Sierra in the early 20th century; therefore, the photos were used as a strategy for rapport building, but they were not the focus of the conversation.

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6 Mamos and local chiefs of Palomino. Photographer: Konrad Theodor Preuss, 1914. Collection of the Världskulturmuseerna, Gothenburg.

boys (although it is possible to be chosen without being a descendant of the mamo). In this case, the images brought up a topic that was broader than the image itself. The discussion was a complex reflection that tried to make sense of an object or a space according to cultural values. When we talked about masks and garments used in ceremonial dances, Gabriel said: “They have it, the mamos have it. But not all of them. Just one mamo has it. I mean, my papa has things that are very, very old something that’s ancient, ancient. It’s not wooden, it isn’t […] it’s like the way they used to make them a long time ago, like stone. He still has it, it’s like this big one [points to the picture]. But he told me he’s going to give it to me, big things like this, and like that one used to do trabajos for everyone. It’s not from today, it’s ancient. Then, this mask, right now he keeps it in a place no one can get to. When they’re going to do a ceremonial dance, when it’s going to rain, when it’s not raining, when there are droughts, then they take the mask, they wear it, and dance. My father says it’s seven days and seven nights.” (Interview with Gabriel Nolavita Garavito. February 2, 2015)

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Regarding this mask that Gabriel talked about, it is worth noting that research carried out by Fischer and Caycedo (2006) proved the age of these types of objects through C14 tests. The “Mama Uákai” mask from Noavaka dates back to the 1470 and the “Mama Nuikukui Uákai” or “Malkutse” from Noavaka goes further back to 1440. These findings corroborate Gabriel’s testimony that generation after generation apprentices inherit objects from mamos. That explains why he says they look “ancient” and “like stone.” Preuss calls this a “sun mask” from Noavaka. It has a vertical crack. As a result, two things are clear from the conversation: first, are aspects related to the object’s materiality and its relationship to certain rituals. Gabriel says: “No, almost identical, they look alike, but they have different marks. The mark is up here [points to the photograph] […] Yes, yes, this is different. Yes, this has a crack, and this one here doesn’t. This one, it looks like it was cracked here, and then they sewed it.” (ibid) The second aspect has to do with the reason the mask was cracked, since so much care is taken to preserve this object: “Well, he, when they are about to dance, he puts on the mask, they put on the mask. The person who is participating goes to where they are doing the dance. He can’t go before the seven days have passed. Yes, if you arrive, I mean, for example, I go up there to see where they’re doing it. They have many things. If you get up there, where they are, then sometimes you either looked for a girlfriend, or looked for, that’s something you can’t do before, you have to confess before getting here. But if you get there, if you’ve done that, then they start to dance and you stay; they make you stay for seven days here. But when they’re dancing, sometimes this falls down, and then right there they send him to find out, to tell what’s happening. Then, you talk about everything and say I did this, and this, and that’s why this happened.” (ibid, emphasis added)

Materiality then has a symbolic content explained through cultural logic. In this sense, action is provoked by breaking the rules. Here, the dancer did not follow the preparation for the ritual, thus, the logical sequence is broken. Since some of the photographs are about dancing scenes, Gabriel stated:

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“Yes, of course, when they’re going to dance, everyone has to look in that direction. It’s not that you can’t hide over there, no. It’s just that, at that moment I had a camera, but they told me I couldn’t take it. I did, but in the house they went through everything in my backpack. They told me to leave it there, I couldn’t move it from there.” (ibid, emphasis added)

Nowadays, not only is attendance controlled, but recording this dancing ritual in the Palomino basin is also forbidden. This rule applies to both locals and foreigners. Other people I talked to about this topic did not say much regarding the masks and the garments. They were more talkative when they saw photographs of villages, sugar cane mills, or bridges. This is a clear sign of respect for the rules about rituals and that the right to speak about them depends on one’s status. These ritual dances are so sacred that external objects are totally rejected: “That day we went to build the mamo house. We went up there, and I got there and I had to take off my boots, my socks. I mean, I had to take them off before arriving […] we take off our caps and our shoes.” (ibid) The third and final reflection is about the relationship space-object. Preuss focused on Kogi myths and stories, so he tried to find material examples of those stories by taking photographs of the bohíos (traditional huts), masks, canes, and more. Only those taking part in the ritual could get close to them. Gabriel affirms: “It’s not in every village; in one village it’s just there to meet up. But where they’re going to perform the dance is different from the village; that’s near the lake, near the páramo, close to the cave, and then they climb up there.” (ibid, emphasis added) Those ritual spaces are usually close to sacred areas, such as natural springs, páramos, lakes, caves, etc. Getting there requires hours of walking, as well as a local guide and permission to travel there. Of his travels to Takina, Preuss (1926: 15) wrote: “Finally Pedro Alberto was present on departure in December and together with my faithful companion Telesforo we reached Takina within two hours by foot (Fig. 5).” The relationship with those sacred places and sacred objects is still very important for Kogi people because: “It is almost impossible to return those objects to their original sites. Every object had its own sacred site. When they are moved, they get corrupted and become a source of sickness. Looting has weakened our land, our ancient control over illness-

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es, natural disasters, the social structure, and the effect of armed conflict.” (CIT 2011: 103)

Hence, “[…] they use the mask in a place that is still there, that still exists, and that is still in use. Those are the sacred sites. Not even the indigenous council can go there. No boots, no army is allowed, nothing” (Interview with Gabriel Nolavita Garavito, February 2015). These practices maintain harmony between materiality and immateriality, and thereby become a strategy to keep order: “Because these objects have a purpose, they have a mission, they have connectivity. If they’re not here – they’ve taken away lots of sacred objects – that’s why we have lost that, that dream, that strength that the Tayrona used to build things. They could lift a two-ton stone, four tons. It was spiritually easy” (Indigenous Council Governor José de los Santos Sauna, January 2015). When one of the two is affected, order is destabilized. Materiality has a role to play. That is why sacred objects are located in places that are also sacred: “[T]he mask – at the moment, he [his father, the mamo] keeps it in a place where it can’t be reached, no one can walk there, he keeps it. When a ceremonial dance de trabajo, is about to be held, when it’s going to rain, when it doesn’t rain, when there are droughts, then they get the mask, they put it on, and they have to dance.” (Interview with Gabriel Nolavita Garavito, February 2015)

Since masks are kept in strategic places, not all of them are taken out at the same time. When Preuss (1926: 29) photographed them he mentioned: “Even if there were not as many as Alfonso had promised, because Alfonso’s brother Javier had hidden them, the photographs were all the more valuable to me because just two masks had appeared at the festival in Palomino – the only ones, besides a third, owned by Miguel, the priest.” Final Thoughts Being so close to the context in which the pictures were taken allowed me to understand certain situations that occur during field work; a photograph is not a given product, nor a preconceived one. In the case of Preuss, photography assumes the role of legitimating a research process in which there

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is constant negotiation. What is photographed is not what the photographer wants to record, but what he is allowed or able to photograph. Although Preuss started out with clear goals as to specific spaces, activities, and objects that he wanted to see and record, he faced both physical, geographic limits with respect to location access, as well as cultural limits to his access to people and communities. It was all very unpredictable; he never knew if he would be able to photograph everything he wanted or just a fraction of it. The further he went into places he did not know in terms of rules and behavior patterns, the harder it was to have the freedom to record those experiences through photography. Taking photographs gave Preuss the opportunity to record pieces that he was not able to transfer to the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin, for example, a large part of the San Agustín statuary. In this case, the image gave the original object a place in the imaginary built through the collections at the museum. The image established the fact of its existence; even if the original object could not be integrated in the store rooms, as testimonies of a non-present object they proved their integration into the space of the museum field. This indicates that the photographs fulfilled their original objective of proving the physical presence of the researcher in the field, portraying him as the main conductor of registration-excavation-collection processes. It should be mentioned that the only publication translated to Spanish in 1931 shortly after its publication in Germany was Preuss’s book Kunst with his best collection of photographs of the San Agustín statuary. It is notable, that the number of takes would change, depending on the specific expedition. The most numerous came from Preuss’s excavations in San Agustín and the surrounding area; there he was entirely free to photograph according to his interest when negotiating with the local farmers and landowners. In contrast, in the tributaries of the Orteguaza River and the northern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the number of photographs decreased, along with the number of permissions granted in negotiations with indigenous communities. So he was not as free as before. What is represented in these photographs is the conflict between the interests of the researcher and the community, a constant clash of world views. This is the case of Alejandro’s wish for a portrait with his umbrella in the Uitoto community. Twentieth-century canons filtered which photographs were publishable, according to a stereotype or an expectation of what was really

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“Indigenous” and what was not. Therefore, many motifs showing the daily routine of the communities were ignored. Thus, having access to both the published and unpublished photographs opens up different interpretative paths. Publication is limited by a set of specific options that restrict which images are in fact reproduced. This applies in particular to photographs published a century ago, such as those of Preuss. In that case, argumentative logic was the one that privileged some photographs and discourses as suitable for publication. The complete photographic collection contains many more untold stories, silenced because they did not help prove the scientist’s point of view. Children wearing clothes brought by missionaries in the Orteguaza River, men simply having their meals, and people gathering supplies for daily use are examples of situations that were not “Indigenous” enough for Preuss. The communities in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are organized to claim lands, respect their authorities, and freely practice their religious beliefs. In addition, mamos and local authorities have always had a great importance in the local life throughout the reservation and the various river basins where Kogi people live. It is necessary to describe the context in which Preuss’s photographs were taken a century ago in terms of how he moved from one village to the other. Only in this way, can we know how reliable the material is and to what extent it can open a window that provides meaningful insight into social and cultural matters today. Some of the readings incited by the photo-elicitation were related to a synchronic dimension of the past, i.e., Kogi interlocutors acknowledged that history was presented in the photograph and wondered how permissions were given and how Preuss interacted with indigenous people during his expeditions. Other readings focused on changes in the region and in the community. In these readings, the photographs provide a benchmark for the continuing process of change, indicating a diachronic perception of what was represented and photographed. The photographs mentioned throughout this essay were a means to remember old stories told by the mamos, at the same time that personal experiences were recalled and discussed. The object, the photograph, and the situation portrayed in it were also topics for discussion, even when some of the scenes were not part of public knowledge within the Kogi community. They are situated within a hierarchy of knowledge management. There is a high probability that many community members had never seen anything

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like the masks photographed by Preuss; this also applies to sacred sites where few are allowed to go. Preuss’s interest in spaces, objects, and stories about spirituality was connected to a basic and constant reflection found in the Kogi world view regarding the way in which certain objects are interpreted and how they are given a place in cultural life, as occurs with the masks. Thus, they acquire agency becoming a communication channel in contexts where mediation is necessary. This essay presented several reflections that indicate how photography can be used as a strategy to engage in conversation and as a mnemonic resource, based on the fact that Preuss’s expedition had clear objectives centered on heritage. Nevertheless, the depth of the reflections depends greatly on how they are evoked, made problematic, questioned, and discussed. When the people I talked to located Preuss in their territory and understood what he did on the northern slope of the Sierra in the distant past, they explained to me how the process of interacting with foreigners has changed over time. For them, this is due to the strengthening of indigenous organization, as well as tense relationships with regard to land property and cultural heritage between diverse stakeholders.

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Bibliography Chaves, Margarita/Montenegro, Mauricio/Zambrano, Marta (2014): El valor del patrimonio: Mercado, políticas culturales y agenciamientos sociales: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología (ICANH). CIT, Corporación Indígena Tairona (2011): Propuestas para el programa de garantías de los derechos fundamentales de los pueblos indígenas de Colombia, Valledupar: CIT. Clifford, James (1988): The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Duque, Juan Pablo (2012): Territorios indígenas y estado: a propósito de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Vicerrectoría Académica. Fischer, Manuela/Oyuela-Caycedo, Augusto (2011): “Der zeitlose Rahmen. Fotografien aus der Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Kolumbien.” In: Irene Ziehe/Ulrich Hägele (eds.), Visuelle Medien und Forschung; über den wissenschaftlich-methodischen Umgang mit Fotografie und Film, Münster: Waxmann, pp. 129-139. Fuhr, Eckhard (2013): “Berlins Stadtschloss hat ein Beutekunstproblem.” In: Die Welt, December 16, 2013 (http://www.welt.de/122994919). ICANH, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (2012): “San Agustín, piedra viva hoy,” Hoja de Ruta, Décalogo de actividades académicas, culturales y de inversión para celebrar el Centenario de San Agustín. September 25, 2012 (http://www.icanh.gov.co/?idcategoria =7252). Kutscher, Gerdt (1976): “Berlin como centro de estudios americanistas, ensayo bio-bibliográfico.” In: Indiana, Beiheft 7. Ministerio de Cultura (2010): Compendio de políticas culturales, Colombia: Ministerio de Cultura. Naranjo, Juan (2006): Fotografía, antropología y colonialismo (1845-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili. Oyuela-Caycedo, Augusto/Fischer, Manuela (2006): “Ritual Paraphernalia and the Foundation of Religious Temples: The Case of the Tairona-Kágaba/Kogi, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia.” In: Baessler-Archiv 54, pp. 145-162.

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Palacio, Viviana (2015): La imagen del indígena de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, el archivo de K. Th. Preuss, Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquía. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1921): Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, Textaufnahmen und Beobachtungen bei einem Indianerstamm in Kolumbien, Südamerika, Band 1: Einführung und Texte, erste Hälfte. Göttingen und Leipzig: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, J.C. Hinrichs. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1923): Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, Textaufnahmen und Beobachtungen bei einem Indianerstamm in Kolumbien, Südamerika, Band 2: Texte, zweite Hälfte und Wörterbuch. Göttingen und Leipzig: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, J.C. Hinrichs. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1926): Forschungsreise zu den Kágaba. Beobachtungen, Textaufnahmen und sprachliche Studien bei einem Indianerstamme in Kolumbien, Südamerika, St. Gabriel-Mölding bei Wien: Administration des Anthropos. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1929): Kunst: Ausgrabungen im Quellgebiet des Magdalena in Kolumbien und ihre Ausstrahlungen in Amerika, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1931): Arte monumental prehistórico: excavaciones hechas en el Alto Magdalena y San Agustín (Colombia); comparación arqueológica con las manifestaciones artísticas de las demás civilizaciones americanas, Bogotá: Escuelas Salesianas de Tipografía. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1993): Visita a los indígenas Kágaba de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, observaciones, recopilación de textos y estudios lingüísticos. Parte I y II, Santafé de Bogotá: Colcultura: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología. Preuss, Konrad Theodor (1994): Religión y mitología de los Uitotos, Primera y Segunda Parte, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992): Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo (1997): Arqueología de Colombia: un texto introductorio, Colombia: Presidencia de la República. Rodríguez, Marcela (2014): “‘San Agustín, piedra viva hoy’ a ‘El silencio de los ídolos.’” In: Baukara 5, pp. 73-85. Salazar, Patricia (2014): “¿Colombia podrá rescatar patrimonio de museo alemán?” In: El Tiempo, March 26, 2014 (http://eltiempo.com/mundo/ europa/patrimonio-colombiano-en-museo-aleman/13738597).

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Santos Sauna, Jose de los (2011): “OGT: un bastión para los pueblos indígenas de la Sierra.” In: Zhigoneshi 11. Torres, Cayetano (2011): “Ciclos y rumbos de la organización indígena en la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.” In: Zhigoneshi 11, pp. 19-23. Archival material Ethnologisches Museum Berlin SPK (SMB-PK, EM) Acta E 1867/12. Gesuch des Kustos am Königl. Museum für Völkerkunde Professor Dr. Preuss um Gewährung von Mitteln zu einer Forschungsreise nach Columbien. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Legación Alemana 1911-1914, Colombia, Archivo General de la Nación: Folio 16. Interviews Interview with Juan Mayr, November 27, 2014. Berlin, Germany. Interview with Gabriel Nolavita Garavito, February 2, 2015. Palomino, Colombia. Interview with the Indigenous Council Governor José de los Santos Sauna. January 22, 2015. Santa Marta, Colombia. Interview with Fabián Sanabria, Martha Patricia Ramírez, and Nicolás Jiménez. January 16, 2015. ICANH, Bogotá, Colombia.

Appropriating an Image A Study of the Reception of Ethnographic Photography Among the Zapotec Indigenous People of Mexico M ARIANA DA C OSTA A. P ETRONI

Starting with a reflection on the reception of the images, in this article I examine the manner in which the Zapotec inhabitants of Yalálag, a community of the Mexican Sierra Norte, currently perceive and reinterpret pictures that were taken during the late 1930s and early 1940s by the anthropologist and indigenist Julio de la Fuente.1 The key issues that I investigated in Yalálag concern the extent to which contemporary indigenous people identify themselves or not with these external images of them, and the changes and continuities they perceive in their reality in comparison with what they observe in the pictures. This article presents conclusions developed in the study “The Image of the Indian in Julio de la Fuente’s work” (“La imagen del indio en la obra de Julio de la Fuente”; Petroni 2008), in which I sought to understand the representation of the Indian in Mexican anthropology and in the indigenista movement in which photography took a secondary role almost exclusively dedicated to the documentation of activities carried out by government institutions along with the indigenous peoples of this country. The photos of Julio de la Fuente stand out mainly due to their ethnographic character, which is due to the representation of a scientific view based on a neutral,

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This article is a revised version of my contribution to Aisthesis no. 46: 125-150 in December 2009 on “La recepción de la imagen. Una reflexión antropológica sobre la representación del indio en México.” 1 Seeing the ancestors. Photographer: Ernenek Mejía, 2007

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objective, and rational personification of the object of study. Taking these assumptions as a starting point, I explored the representation of indigenous peoples in the photographs by Mexican anthropologist and indigenist Julio de la Fuente. De la Fuente conducted his anthropological research among the Zapotec2 of Yalálag (de la Fuente 1949), an indigenous community located in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca state in southern Mexico, during the years 1938 to 1941. The work of de la Fuente was influenced by the Culturalist School – which is based on the idea that culture determines the individual’s behavior, their way of thinking, and the way they perceive their environment – and it aimed to determine cultural characteristics of the indigenous and mestizo peoples of the region, as well as the factors causing cultural changes between these two groups – namely, the factors that led indigenous peoples to abandon their customs and to adopt the costumes of the mestizo people in a process understood as acculturation. During his field research, Julio de la Fuente took 211 photographs, which were analyzed in my research both from the process of constructing the meaning of these images, as well as from those persons who contextualize their production. However, in this article I highlight the analysis of the reception of these images and the attempt to understand how the inhabitants of Yalálag receive these photographs, whether they identify with them or not, and the changes and continuities they perceive in their reality beginning with what they observe in the pictures. Photography as a Fragment To understand the reception of the photographs by Julio de la Fuente among the Zapotec indigenous peoples of Yalálag, I begin by considering that one of the central features of the photograph, according to Susan Sontag (2005 [1977]), is the process by which their original uses are changed and replaced by others, since photography is a mere fragment and its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. Considering this, it is 2

The Zapotec indigenous peoples are located in the central valleys of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, in the Sierra Norte region, south to the Tehuantepec Isthmus. The Zapotec peoples to whom I refer in this work inhabit almost 30 municipalities that differ with regard to their community and group identity, economic specializations such as in the production of handicrafts, the variation of language spoken, and in dress.

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understood that a photograph is transformed according to the context from which it is observed. Therefore, the reception of the images taken by Julio de la Fuente must be understood taking into account the circumstances in which they are observed. Cultural differences, perceived in a specific context, mark the forms of image appropriation, for they characterize the place from which the viewer signifies what is captured in them. It is necessary to seize upon such particularities, when we seek to understand the reception of the photographs. This perception is located in the distinction between what might be designated as the “photographer’s photo,” which builds upon a significant staging of the photograph’s subject, and the “viewer’s photo,” which includes the dimension of connecting to the image subjectively, in which every viewer will enclose him- or herself and appropriate elements of the photograph, which for the viewer constitute small and loose fragments of reality (Rodríguez Gutiérrez 1995). To understand the “viewer’s photo” as observed by the inhabitants of Yalálag, I sought to understand how certain sectors of the community perceived Julio de la Fuente’s photographs. Examining the reception of the photographs is an attempt to understand how Yalálag’s residents envision themselves and their history. Therefore, I conducted several informal and in-depth interviews (Figure 1) based on the resident’s viewing of an album of 95 photographs, which I had selected based on two main criteria: the quality of the images – aesthetic qualities – and the subjects I deemed to be most characteristic of Julio de la Fuente’s work. It is important to emphasize the role of a photo album as a means that facilitated access to the community and to spaces that I would not have been able to enter without these photographs. This album opened doors faster, and allowed me to address issues and personal stories more easily, as many interviewees felt comfortable talking about themselves through the images. Before presenting the album, several interviewees did not want to talk about their lives or have an interview with me; the pictures were what triggered the memories. Thus, I conducted 19 interviews with different people of the community, which offered me both a general and a particular view of the photos. Besides the interviews, I complemented the collected information through participant observation, seeking access to the daily life of the community in order to perceive the emotion surrounding the reception of the photographs and their interpretations. The interviews focused on four aspects: 1) whether the person observing the picture identified him/herself with it or not; 2)

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the changes this person perceived in his or her reality when comparing it to what was depicted in the image; 3) what elements drew their attention the most; and 4) free association with regard to the photograph. The first question sought to find out to what extent the defining characteristics of Yalaltecs as depicted by Julio de la Fuente matched or not the ways in which these people perceive themselves today. Thus, this question puts into play the difference between the indigenist perspective depicted in the work of Julio de la Fuente and the viewer’s own self-perception. The second question – whether the person observing the photograph noticed any changes in their reality in comparison to what was depicted in the image – sought to explore the signs of cultural transformation presented visually by Julio de la Fuente and to find out whether the inhabitants of Yalálag were assessing transformation or not. The third question arises from the contributions of Roland Barthes, who seeks to understand which particular interests are directed at certain photographs. The punctum, according to Barthes (1997), is an element that comes out of the image like an arrow and “pierces” the spectator. Based on that concept, I tried to identify which details in de la Fuente’s photographs draw the gaze of the inhabitants of Yalálag. This served as a way of emphasizing the gaze of the Spectator, that is, of those who observe the photographic images, as opposed to the gaze of the Operator, which in this case is Julio de la Fuente, who operated the camera. The fourth question seeks to understand the lines of thought developed from the images and the connection between the photographs and Yalaltec social memory. I sought to identify which themes were the ones people scrutinized most when observing the photographs, in order to understand what memories arise from the images taken by Julio de la Fuente. Yalálag The Zapotec indigenous community of Villa Hidalgo Yalálag is located in the Sierra Norte of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, 120 km from its capital Oaxaca de Juárez. Yalálag has approximately 2000 inhabitants, and is particularly noteworthy because of its former economic importance in the Sierra Norte region. Some inhabitants engage in farming and produce corn and sugarcane for their own consumption. However, commercial activities and the production of leather sandals (huaraches), which are sold in weekly

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markets hosted by nearby towns, prevail. Like many towns of the Sierra Norte region, Yalálag is characterized by its high rate of migration. Most of its inhabitants, especially the young ones, migrate to Oaxaca, Mexico City or Los Angeles in the United States in search of a better livelihood. The local government is based on traditional customs, and is elected once a year by a Community Assembly that meets to choose all members of the city council. These members are elected from local citizens, who must then fulfill their office for a year without receiving payment or other form of economic help from the community. Yalaltec women no longer wear their traditional garments, such as the huipil, in everyday life; very few still preserve their traditional dress. However, as people themselves assure, they do preserve the Zapotec language without much influence from Spanish. Yalálag is also known for internal conflicts related to political control of city hall. The community is divided between those who support party politics, many of them members of the PRI (Partido de la Revolución Institucional), and members of the Grupo Comunitario (Communitarian Group) that meets at the Uken Ke Uken A. C. Cultural Center. This organization, whose name means “to make possible the impossible,” is mainly comprised of people who oppose partisan politics. The division between these two groups can also be seen on the issue of whether to include traditions and customs in community administration. The Yalaltec social context is characterized by a division between supporters of “modernity” on the one hand and those who support “tradition” on the other. According to each point of view these two antagonistic stances can either lead to the development or the disappearance of the community. Identity, Transformation, Punctum, and My Past There is a constant tension between the process of creation and interpretation of the image, which acquires new tones when its reception is analyzed. Through the relationship between the eye of the photographer and that of the viewer, the interpretation of reception seeks to understand the social mechanisms that deconstruct and reconstruct the information transmitted by different by the gaze of different viewer.

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Julio de la Fuente (1905-1970) was an important Mexican anthropologist and indigenist who worked at the National Indigenous Institute (INI)3 in Mexico, and during the 1950s worked as director of the Coordinating Indigenist Center4 of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the state of Chiapas. Among his main anthropological contributions are his writings on interethnic relations (1989b [1965]), indigenous education (1989a [1964]; 2003 [1946]), and applied anthropology. Although his work as photographer is yet to be fully recognized, over two thousand of his pictures can be found in the Fototeca Nacho López collection.5 These images are of great informational value on the indigenist work he carried out in indigenous communities in Mexico during the years between 1930 and 1950. The pictures taken during the ethnographic research he conducted in Yalálag stand out, since he used photography “to detail data,” (as he writes) and later to illustrate his book, Yalálag. Una villa zapoteca serrana (1949), in which he published his research. His photographs refer to a documentary style, but highlight a modernist perspective, with a greater degree of movement captured by the images and their inclusion of social issues such as poverty and alcoholism. Among the photographs taken in the northern Sierra Zapoteca, 45% are family portraits

3

4

5

The INI was founded in 1948 and had as its main objective promotion of the development and integration of the Mexican indigenous peoples into the national economy, as well as into the social and political life of the nation. During the 1940s and 1950s in Mexico, the main indigenist institutions of the country were developed. Their practices and policies were based on the promotion of the development of the indigenous communities through education and participation in economic life. Their objective was to place these communities on an equal footing with respect to mestizo communities. These actions resulted in the socalled “planned acculturation,” understood as the substitution of values and the ideological transformation towards a specific cultural state. As part of the INI’s indigenist policies, the Coordinating Centers were created with the objective of promoting cultural development and the integration of the Mexican indigenous communities. The Fototeca Nacho López of the National Commission for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples (CDI in Spanish), which followed the INI, owns the document archive of the working programs that this Institution has created since 1948. A great amount of this material is related to indigenist policies the Commission has carried out, which nowadays are an important part of indigenous and indigenist Mexican history. This archive holds more than 30.000 photographs that can be accessed through: http://fototeca.cdi.gob.mx/

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that correspond to the photographer’s perception of cultural change. As expressed in his text on Yalálag, the author’s main interest is to contribute to the knowledge of socio-cultural changes that were then transforming the indigenous groups into an urban population. Therefore, he sought to understand how the Zapotec culture reacted to the prolonged contact with “more technologically advanced cultures.” Almost all of his photographs were taken from a frontal position and their composition and angles are not innovative. They emerge through an anthropological approach that does not seek aesthetic compositions or illustrative documents, but instead a relationship with the studied subjects. This approach is noticeable in the images made in the Sierra Norte, where Julio de la Fuente stayed for long periods, which allowed him a better “negotiation” of the image. Thus, in many photographs the subjects are posing, which indicates a close relationship between the anthropologistphotographer and the community residents. The images span from taxonomic photography, in accordance to the model used by several photographers and scientists in previous decades of recording indigenous groups; photography of archaeological ruins and pre-Hispanic objects based on the style of museum catalogues; and photographs of “typical popular characters,” a genre so characteristic of the photographic models of the 19th century. Photographs of “types” that de la Fuente catalogued reveal his attempts to understand indigenous reality and create an index of cultural change for the inhabitants of Yalálag. This applies to photographs with a frontal take of the assembled family members, couples or single individuals, either in a 100 % frontal position or with a three-quarter turn, showing the typical dress of the group or community, or the transformation of such clothing (Figure 2 and 3). They display male and female attire; the background is not neutral, often including aspects that characterize life in the region, such as houses or markets. The photographed subjects pose stiffly, conscious of being in front of a camera; the physical characteristics are secondary to clothing. This demonstrates a vision focusing more on “culture” than “race,” something denoting a greater influence of anthropology’s Culturalist School in de la Fuente’s visual perception of reality. Through his images, the author expresses his theoretical and methodological conception of the indigenous person, which he mainly developed in his early texts. Therein he defines the Indian through cultural characteristics

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2 Woman outside a house. Photographer: Julio de la Fuente, 1940. D.R. © Julio de la Fuente, Fototeca Nacho López, Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas.

such as clothing, language, and traditions. Through his photographs, as well as his written work, he emphasizes the importance of indigenism as a means of integrating indigenous peoples into Mexican national society. Viewing photography as a mirror of reality, contemporary Yalaltecs sought to find in de la Fuente’s photographs memories and signs of a past that once existed. By looking for relatives, acquaintances, places, and traces of change, the interviewees recognized the photos as images from their community’s past and history. This association of the image with social memory enables one to comprehend that the viewers are actually identifying themselves with the photographs.

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3 Men. Photographer: Julio de la Fuente, 1940. D.R. © Julio de la Fuente, Fototeca Nacho López, Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas.

While observing the photo album, spectators’ first reaction consisted of looking for acquaintances or relatives among the persons depicted in the photograph. The vast majority did not recognize anyone, and always expressed some disappointment both among themselves as well as to the researcher, as many interviewees – especially the elderly – feared that not recognizing anyone would prevent them from participating in the study. Among the dozens of characters that appear in the photographs three men were recognized. Among them, I would like to highlight Prisciliano Diego, featured in photographs of him selling sandals at the Yalálag market, which

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4 Yalálag’s market. Photographer: Mariana Petroni, 2007.

is still held every Tuesday morning in the city center. This gentleman was recognized by his relatives, who also identified his father, Juan Diego, who is distinguished as “el Principal” – the elder communitarian representative – of Yalálag in Julio de la Fuente’s book. For many interviewees, recognizing the portrait of a family member meant a greater connection to the album and their memories, although these were not the images that particularly activated the memory of the spectators, but instead those in which they recognized a place, an event or a typical feature of the community. These latter images inspired them to tell stories about the city’s past as well as their own past, especially about the customs of years past. Among these customs the use of traditional attire which consisted of a piece of white cloth (manta) with embroidery, a skirt, and a headdress made out of coiled, black goat wool (rodete) stood out (Figure 4). To understand perception of traditional dress (Figure 5), the current political situation of Yalálag must be mentioned, that is, the division between two local rival groups over control of city hall. On the one hand are the people linked to the PRI party and the regional caciques who have held great economic and political influence since the post-revolutionary period

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5 Woman showing her hairstyle. Photographer: Julio de la Fuente, 1940. D.R. © Julio de la Fuente, Fototeca Nacho López, Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas.

and were in charge of bringing progress, modernity, and the State’s ideology to the most remote regions of the country (Aquino 2002). The task of fostering community progress often entailed the abandonment of customs, beliefs, and the Zapotec language. The community members’ relationship to this party meant that its official candidates could build upon local support and that the electoral participation of Yalaltecs was in favor of the PRI. On the other hand is the Grupo Comunitario, formed by men and women from the community’s intellectual elite, who had the opportunity to attend university to study for a professional career. Since the 1960s, this group has led the opposition against PRI, based on the idea of the municipality’s democratization through public elections in which all citizens par-

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ticipate; they furthermore believe that any political authority with democratic aspirations should work without remuneration, consult with the community on all important matters, and have a work plan approved by the population (Aquino 2002). However, this movement did not restrict itself to combatting local cacicazgo: it also sought to build an alternative model of government and society, based on the idea of the appreciation of their local identity and the transformation and revitalization of representations which up to the moment have been associated negatively with their identity. The collective actions of the Grupo Comunitario arose from the conviction that only the revalorization of their culture would allow them to improve their living conditions and positively redefine their relations with the rest of Mexican society. For the sociologist Alejandra Aquino (2002), the positive affirmation of ethnic identity among Yalaltecs can be explained by the birth of a community movement at the local and regional level, which strengthens the bonds of solidarity and sparks initial reflections on their own culture. This movement developed in a national and international context, in which collective representations of the Indian were being redefined. This allowed the Yalaltecs to find a positive image of themselves in the other’s gaze, from which they could begin to recognize and re-create their own identity in different terms. As a result of this movement initiatives arose that directly tackle the issue of recovering traditions that the participants themselves considered as distinctive of their identity. An outcome of this approach was the emergence of the Uken Ke Uken A.C. Cultural Center, an institution where the Yalaltecs, especially the intellectual elite, have defined language, traditional agriculture, artistic expressions, and the ways of communitarian organization as the constituent elements of their identity. From these premises, the photographs of traditional Yalaltec huipil dress that I showed to members of this group, were considered as reaffirming local tradition and as a positive appraisal of their indigenous character. The interviewees directly involved in the organization of the Grupo Comunitario and the activities they carry out at their research workshop appreciated the past in its relation to the present, assessing the reality they perceived in the images as more beautiful and more authentic, as a time when women wore “the genuine dress of the Yalaltec woman” and “work prevailed.” During the interviews, this appreciation of the past and of tradition by exalting the use of traditional attire was always complemented with state-

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ments about the importance and value of the Zapotec language for the community and the consequences of its growing blending with Spanish. Among the Yalaltecs, one of the main features used when ascribing identity is language. Currently, almost everyone in the community speaks Zapotec as their mother language and actually uses it in the different domains of everyday life. However, as I was able to observe, young people and children are losing their speaking skills; although many are able to understand the language, they cannot speak it. Furthermore, many are not interested in learning it; they assert that they prefer to learn English, since “it is the language spoken in the north (United States),” where they intend to migrate after finishing secondary school. Faced with this perspective, the Grupo Comunitario has shown a special interest in recovering the Zapotec language as an important identity element for their community. The affirmation of their language, through activities promoted by its Cultural Center, led the population to understand that their language has the same value as Spanish. When associating tradition-dress-language a further element was mentioned during interviews, which is also being recovered as a component of Yalaltec identity: the esteem of traditional agriculture, the importance of being peasants (campesinos) “as an essential condition to exercise their right to free self-determination” (Aquino 2002), and the value of corn as the sacred grain responsible of granting life. For this reason the lack of photos of agricultural activities – which in earlier times not only referred to the production of corn but also included harvesting beans, chili, sugar cane, and pumpkins – caught the attention of some interviewees. Although the cultivation of corn is recognized by Yalálag inhabitants as an important activity of community life, many families have abandoned it, mainly due to the high costs involved. Maize cultivation requires an extensive investment of manpower and a large investment of time, which is why many families in the region prefer to migrate to urban centers in Mexico or abroad and engage in other economic activities. Among the photos taken by Julio de la Fuente during his stays in Yalálag there is not a single image portraying an agricultural activity. Since the main interest of the author was to understand cultural change, perhaps this led him to disregard some “traditional indigenous” activities that were not affected by change, but instead were characterized by permanence, such as agriculture. I would also like to stress that most of the photographs were taken at the center of town, which is why pictures of women and children who were in town performing

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household chores predominate, whereas men, who would go to the fields to look after their crops, were rarely portrayed. It is important to mention that the organizers and participants of the Grupo Comunitario were not the only ones to notice the lack of photos of agricultural activities: this also applied to other inhabitants of Yalálag, who were not part of that organization, and also asked about pictures of harvesting of the agricultural plots and the planting. These people, however, in contrast to those participating in Grupo Comunitario, did not see traditional dress as a statement of their culture, but only as another element they had already ceased to use and which had been replaced. According to some interviewees, this was due to the price of white fabric, according to others, especially women, due to manta cloth’s tendency to become soiled and the trouble it took to wash it. The reasons mentioned varied, revealing different perceptions of the presence or absence of traditional huipil dress in the pictures. This group consisted mainly of Yalaltecs who sell produce from their plots at the community market Tuesday morning. In contrast to the Grupo Comunitario, which identified women dressed in “mestizo” clothing as inhabitants of other communities, they defined these same women as persons with money who did not work in the fields and therefore had more contact with Oaxaca, the state capital, and with non-indigenous habits. Many interviewees who had never worn traditional clothing during their childhood or whose mothers did not wear the huipil belong to families whose main economic activity is the sale of coffee or meat or the production of leather sandals (huaraches). The foregoing observations allow us to state that the Yalaltecs identify with the photographs by Julio de la Fuente. While observing the photographs, spectators looked for elements that define what it means to be Yalaltec according to their point of view, and tried to identify relatives and persons known to them, specific places in the community, and the market. The traditional huipil dress, portrayed by Julio de la Fuente as an element subjected to cultural transformation, was undoubtedly the most prominent element distinguished by the spectators who commented on it in different ways. Its perception varied according to class relations in the community. Thus, for the local intellectual elite, women dressed in their traditional Yalaltec attire were seen as an affirmation of the value and beauty of the indigenous. This group found in the “other,” that is, in the gaze of the anthropologist, a confirmation of a positive self-image. This perception is

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connected to membership in an identity politics movement that bases itself to some extent on a number of traits that define the Indian in Mexico from the perspective of the State’s indigenism. This is not a mere coincidence or the actual influence of indigenism, since interestingly these characteristics are claimed by the Yalaltec movement as part of a self-determination movement which, paradoxically, fights both for difference as well as for equality. It seeks to obtain specific cultural rights, while also demanding civil rights and reaffirming their intention of being part of the nation. Taking a different view, people who did not belong to the movement for indigenous self-determination would see traditional dress as yet another element of their reality that had been lost as a result of the changes that had come with the construction of roads connecting the village to the state capital, with increasing migration to the state capital and to Mexico City, the decline in the local market’s relevance, and as part of other changes that did not imply, according to their point of view, the loss of their indigenous identity, but the transformation of their reality. Research conducted by Julio de la Fuente in the Sierra Zapoteca was based on the theoretical contributions developed by U.S. anthropologist Robert Redfield (1974) and sought to identify characteristics of indigenous communities along a continuum, whose extremes are on the one hand urban society, and on the other, rural folk society. For this reason, his photographs sought to illustrate characteristic features of changes according to this bipolar model. Based on my research, I can state that the central goal of de la Fuente was to propose actions that allowed the integration of indigenous communities into national society by means of “evolution to a higher stage of development.” This was considered possible if the indigenous adopted elements of a “more advanced culture” or urban societies. De la Fuente intended to formulate policies for the transformation of the indigenous reality, such as policies for “castellanización” (the adoption of Spanish language for all means and purposes), and for economic improvement of communities, since he believed in the benefits of “modernity” as a means to end the marginalization of indigenous communities. Images that sought to portray the change of Yalaltec clothing were part of this concern, since de la Fuente considered the abandonment of traditional dress as part of the transformations occurring in indigenous societies due to their “contact” with mestizo groups in the national population. They

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would lead individuals “to abandon being Indians” and to integrate into national culture. Only one of the interviewees commented directly on the changes in dress shown in the photographs of Julio de la Fuente, and said: “It is impressive, the lady dresses her daughter with non-indigenous clothes, and here she is wearing the traditional huipil dress.” He also remarked that already many women no longer donned traditional dress and that children wore shoes. He stated: “[...] as soon as new fashions arrived here in the community, people transformed in their consciousness, [they start believing that] what comes from the outside is better than ours, and now there are only few women left in our village who still wear the traditional huipil dress.” (Plutarco Aquino Zacarías, June 2007)

This statement, made by a member of the Grupo Comunitario, agrees in a certain way with de la Fuente’s goals. When considering the loss of certain elements of their culture as the loss of their identity, they assess the decline in the use of traditional huipil dress as a symptom of the disappearance and consequent erosion of local culture. It was only in this case that perception of cultural change was clearly associated solely with what was featured in the image. In other cases assessments of this transformation were derived from comparing what was portrayed in the pictures with the present. Among the Sierra Norte Zapotecs, the garment is one of the distinguishing elements of the community and one through which mainly women are identified. Thus, the interviewees often drew attention to the fact that women in the photographs belonged to a certain community due to the clothes they were wearing and identified places and communities by means of the women portrayed. Therefore, from the local point of view, transformation in traditional attire can be interpreted as the loss of one of its distinguishing characteristics and features of community belonging. Taking this perspective into consideration the element used by de la Fuente to characterize folk or indigenous culture can be conceived as having meaning for regional differentiation of the inhabitants and as a marker of inter-community relations in the Sierra Norte. Therefore, clothing emerged as an element to which the Yalaltecs referred when identifying with the images and also as an element from which many interviewees departed when commenting on changes in the community, each from his or her particular point of view. The change in

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6 Woman holding a baby. Photographer: Julio de la Fuente, 1940. D.R. © Julio de la Fuente, Fototeca Nacho López, Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas.

attire did not only imply the loss of another cultural feature that distinguishes this population from national society, but also the loss of one of their symbols of community belonging. In addition to the loss of traditional dress, the interviewees also highlighted the difference between the market portrayed by Julio de la Fuente and the market currently organized in Yalálag’s town center (Figure 6). De la Fuente (1949) describes the market (la plaza) in his work as the means through which people used to buy and sell almost everything that was produced in agriculture and regional industry; it constituted the main mechanism for commercial distribution and acquisition of money. His images

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7 Church. Photographer: Mariana Petroni, 2007.

portray the many people who formerly convened at la plaza and marketed products, as well as the diverse origin of sellers and buyers who attended Yalálag. In the 1940s, the Yalálag market (Figure 7) ranked second in importance in relation to the Villa Alta market in the Sierra Norte region. It was held on Tuesdays and was characterized by its function as a major corn storage for the surrounding indigenous population; here coffee produced in nearby regions was also concentrated and then transported to Oaxaca. Many Yalaltec families prospered in this period through the commerce of coffee from the Sierra Norte to the state capital. Nowadays, the market is attended by vendors from the community who sell fruits and vegetables, other merchants who bring plastic products from Oaxaca, and residents of nearby communities that sell specific items produced in their village. The earliest buyers arrive at 7 a.m. and by 10 a.m. the vendors are already packing their products to leave again. This transformation not only caught my attention, but also captured the interest of the people who saw the photos. Young people who did not experience the golden age of the market in Yalálag knew the history of its former importance, but had never seen pictures of its diversity of goods and people before. They showed no surprise, but interest in getting to know the differ-

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8 Bread seller. Photographer: Julio de la Fuente, 1940. D.R. © Julio de la Fuente, Fototeca Nacho López, Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas.

ences between the past and the present. Among the older persons arose a feeling of nostalgia. For many of them the market was a symbol of the importance and prosperity that once characterized the community. Until the 1960s, the road that came from Tlacolula in the Valley of Oaxaca reached the Sierra Norte only as far as Yalálag. Therefore, all products leaving and entering this region necessarily had to go through the town, which became one of the most important commercial centers in the region and was the source of prosperity for many Yalaltecs engaged in buying or producing items typical of the Sierra Norte and selling them in the city of Oaxaca. With the extension of the road to the city of Villa Alta, the town

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lost its importance, which led to the impoverishment of the population, the decline of the local market, and increasing migration. Based on photographs of the market, many interviewees described the changes in the community in recent years. One had to do with the replacement of materials produced in the region, such as ceramics, with plastic products and utensils, which young people especially criticized in view of the increased environmental pollution they entail. These “negative” images were always associated with the decline of the Yalaltec market and the poverty in the community and the region in general. This perception of change and of the transformations that occurred in the community with the extension of the road, and their association with the emergence of negative aspects, shows that from the perspective of the indigenous people of Yalálag the changes advocated by Julio de la Fuente as necessary for the integration of the community to the nation did not promote real integration, but instead led to the persistence of the marginality in which they lived, as well as to a gradual loss of traditional practices such as cultivation of land. Therefore, the dichotomy between tradition and modernity is characterized by both young people and adults as a conflict. It entails simultaneously the access to certain technologies and the improvement of the population’s quality of life, as well as the loss of important cultural elements and their consequences for the economic life of the community. Whether or not they form part of the local indigenous elite that defends the tradition of the community, all Yalaltecs understand both processes as contradictory: on the one hand integration supposedly allows them to overcome their state of “backwardness,” though at the cost of abandoning their traditions; on the other hand if they choose to “remain indigenous,” this allegedly entails staying isolated from the national society and the technological advances coming from it. Roland Barthes (1997) defines the punctum as an element that stands out in the photograph, and pierces the observer while drawing his or her attention. Thus, a gaze, a face, a tree, someone’s dress, produces some kind of feeling that leaves its mark on him or her, it pierces the observer. For the interviewees in Yalálag, it was virtually impossible to take notice of every element that drew their attention in each photo of the album. The remarkable elements got lost between viewing one picture and the next one, and acquired different degrees of importance among so many images. In contrast to Barthes’s proposal, it was the set of images – i.e., the album as a whole –

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that provoked a certain feeling among the interviewees. Among the elderly, nostalgia marked each image, the memories of how things were before arose during the interviews. In contrast, among youth, impressions ranged from interest in the past of their community to utter contempt. With regard to this observation, I now focus on a photograph that caught the attention of most observers due to the presence of a clay vessel in it, marketed by the Mixes, an ethnic group economically subordinate to the Zapotec and living near Yalálag. This object caused surprise, especially among women. Many women pointed towards it, and made comments on its use. These pots were used by the Yalaltecs for water storage and for the production of beverages and traditional meals. Such pots full of water can still be found in the yards of some Yalálag houses. They are used to wash dishes or other household appliances, but, as has already been mentioned, such regional products are no longer sold in the local market. Nowadays, with tap water, there is no longer any need to store water; food is cooked in metal pots and the traditional beverage is no longer prepared. As an uncommon element in Yalaltec daily life, the Mixe earthen vessel emerged among the photos as a memory element, referring not only to the object itself, but also to the activities that were related to it, from trade to beverage production. Starting with the evaluation of the images as a whole, the Yalaltec perspective has shown that a photo album has a different meaning and a different importance when compared to an isolated picture. In addition to noticing the elements that give meaning to each of the photographs, it was observed that the images unfolded into stories, memories, and opinions that were part of Yalálag community life, suggesting a different perspective on the role of photography in social research. The photographs were perceived by the Yalaltecs as “an inconvertible proof that a given thing happened,” (Sontag 2005: 3) and as being part of the existence of that past, they were valued as documents that tell the story of their past. All who viewed the album, opined that these documents should be shown to the whole community, and many indicated the importance of children having access to these photos in order to be able to “appreciate what they have left us,” “so that the young people may reflect how it used to be,” and “for them to get to know the differences.” As a means of preservation of an extinct past, de la Fuente’s photographs have emerged as historical documents in the current Yalaltec con-

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text, marked by the dichotomy between tradition and modernity they were interpreted as historical documents that allow for a reassessment of local history. As Sontag (2005) stated, the fascination exerted by the photographs is not only a reminder of what no longer exists, but is also an invitation to sentimentality. “Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time” (Sontag 2005: 55). For this reason, in addition to the defense or recovery of local traditions, Julio de la Fuente’s photographs are perceived as a fragment of Yalaltec history that must be retrieved and known by all. Beyond the anthropological discourse and indigenist ideology of Julio de la Fuente, reminiscence, the local memories, and the appreciation of a unique history are molded from Yalaltec’s contemporary gaze. Final Considerations Most photographs taken by Julio de la Fuente, which focus on showing the physical features and clothing elements, hairstyle, environment, etc., of the Yalaltecs as well as the inhabitants of other Mexican regions, functioned as a tool for the realization of his ethnographic work. Based on photography’s documentary role, they served as an instrument that gave witness to the existence of the subjects of knowledge, converting them into objects of study. As objects of study, the indigenes were observed with regard to their cultural and racial characteristics, and catalogued in accordance to the visual signs of differentiation. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) uses the term “visualism” for a practice that assumes that being able to visualize a society and represent it graphically is the same thing as understanding it. Thus, the main objective of representing cultural difference through the images was self-explanation. The photographic records of de la Fuente are presented as this attempt of cataloguing cultural difference, as an attempt to understand it. In de la Fuente’s photography, dress and accessories are imbued with a defining character. His basis for understanding the indigenous character was the definition of the group’s typical features. One of the visually enhanced features was the traditional dress that clearly marked a distinction from the mestizos. The elements of indigenous dress are seen as signs of the preservation of traditions. The search of this characterization sparks de la Fuente to take

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dozens of pictures that typify both the traditional and the modern. Change is perceived through family photographs in which the author identifies the transformed persons, mainly children who, unlike their parents, no longer wear traditional clothes. Clothing and adornments serve for marking the subjects’ proximity or distance to urbanity and thereby, their greater or lesser potential for cultural change. Therefore, the photographs by Julio de la Fuente fulfill the function of transcending the changes, the disappearance, and the death of a culture. Barthes (1997) argues that photography is an affirmation of death, in the sense of a duplicate of reality represented on a piece of paper as evidence itself of the what-had-once-been of death. The image, therefore, arises as a guarantee of eternity, since as a duplicate of a referent it is a way to transcend its disappearance. Thus, de la Fuente’s photographs emerge as a “monument of remembrance” in view of the imminent transformation of the Indian. As such, his images store memories of that change itself, of the transformations that someday would disappear along with the Indian. The study of the reception of Julio de la Fuente’s photographs paved the way for several possible paths of analysis and knowledge of both his work and the past and present of Yalaltec reality. The original uses of the photographs Julio de la Fuente took to illustrate his anthropological work and to document cultural change were replaced by the use of photography as social memory. The images transformed into a chest of memories that paved a way to understand cultural transformation from the local perspective. This in turn made it possible to comprehend, how from their own perspective, changes imposed by indigenist policies have integrated these communities into national society.

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Bibliography Aquino, Alejandra (2002): Acción colectiva, autonomía y conflicto: la reinvención de la identidad entre los zapotecas de la Sierra Juárez, México: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora. Barthes, Roland (1997): La cámara lúcida. Notas sobre la fotografía, Barcelona: Paidós. De la Fuente, Julio (1949): Yalálag. Una villa zapoteca serrana, México: Museo Nacional de Antropología, INAH, SEP. De la Fuente, Julio (1989a [1964]): Educación, antropología y desarrollo de la comunidad, México: INI, CONACULTA. De la Fuente, Julio (1989b [1965]): Relaciones Interétnicas, México: INI, CONACULTA. De la Fuente, Julio (2003 [1946]): “La escuela rural indígena como institución importante en el cambio cultural del indio.” In: Samuel Cano Enríquez, Julio de la Fuente: Documentos y Correspondencias 1936-1962, México: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (CD). Fabian, Johannes (1983): Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Petroni, Mariana da Costa A. (2008): La imagen del indio en la obra de Julio de la Fuente. Un estudio sobre la antropología y la fotografía mexicana, México: CIESAS. Petroni, Mariana da Costa A. (2009): “La recepción de la imagen. Una reflexión antropológica sobre la representación del indio en México.” In: Aisthesis 46, pp. 125-150. Redfield, Robert (1973): Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rodriguez Gutiérrez, Marisol (1995): “Testimonio y poder de la imagen.” In: Ángel Aguirre Baztán (ed.), Etnografía: metodología cualitativa en la investigación cultural, México: Alfaomega. pp. 237-247. Sontag, Susan (2005 [1977]): On Photography, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Online Resources Fototeca Nacho López, July 2015 (http://fototeca.cdi.gob.mx/)

Unexpected Memories Returning Photographs and Films from the 1980s to an Asháninka Nomatsiguenga Community of the Peruvian Selva Central I NGRID K UMMELS

With the advent of cell phone photography and the practice of sending pictures across great distances to different viewing communities, photographs now are taken for granted in almost every part of the world. When Manfred Schäfer and I studied Völkerkunde (a discipline nowadays called cultural and social anthropology) at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in the 1970s and 1980s, this was not yet the case. Instead there was a profound disparity between (analog) photography as a common practice in our own society and the limited access that people had to the medium at our research sites in marginalized regions of Latin America such as the Peruvian Selva Central. The fact that high-quality photo technology was much more expensive, its handling was less user-friendly than it is today and, furthermore, that hegemonic cultural values discriminating “others” such as indigenous peoples’ affinity to it were inscribed in photography’s social practices contributed to what I term a “visual divide.”1

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I use the term “visual divide” in line with the more familiar term “digital divide” in order to capture in a similar manner, the uneven access to audiovisual media technology as a result of educational disparities, geography, social class, ethnicity, cultural factors, and gender. In addition, “visual divide” refers to the comprehensive structures of inequality that people who are categorized as indigenous face in this field: inequality is not merely inscribed in representations, but 1 Selection of photos taken by Manfred Schäfer between 1978 and 1989. Photographer: Manfred Schäfer.

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This particular chasm was also true of Matereni, a village inhabited by Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga on a tributary of the Río Ene in the Peruvian Selva Central. In the following, I will recount the history of the approximately 2000 photos (mostly color slides) that Manfred Schäfer took as the only photographer in this community in the years between 1978 and 1989, and of their various attributed meanings and uses made of them over the course of time and in different locations. Manfred Schäfer (b. 1949) was a professional photographer and filmmaker who graduated with an engineering degree in photography and cinematography. He subsequently studied anthropology from 1976, obtaining his doctorate in 1987 (Schäfer 1988). From the late 1970s, he was intensely involved as a political activist in the struggle against the Ene 40 dam project of the Peruvian government, which threatened to flood the land of many Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga communities, including Matereni, and thus destroy their habitat. He also joined in the resistance of the Awajún (Aguaruna) against Werner Herzog’s shooting of the movie Fitzcarraldo, which many of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous people opposed, forming a broad coalition. They rejected the film company’s encroaching procedure of incorporating Awajún and Asháninka people as extras in this film that celebrates a rubber baron of the 19th century (Greene 2009: 183-189; Schäfer 1982b). Manfred and I had worked closely together ever since we became a couple in 1982.2 At the end of 1989 we spent two months in Matereni to shoot our first joint project for the German TV station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Im grünen Himmel (In Green Heaven), a portrait of their sustainable economic activities such as agriculture and hunting and gathering in the rainforest. Shortly afterwards, this area was invaded by the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla. The people living in the Selva Central were severely affected by the ensuing

2

also in the materiality and the social practices of audiovisual media such as in media training and the organization of work. The actors bridge this divide through their own creativity and by combining photography with local traditions of media use (see Kummels 2015; Kummels n.d.). Manfred Schäfer and I collaborated on the book, which contains interviews with Asháninka film extras who had been recruited by the Herzog film company through methods comparable to those of the rubber boom era such as debt peonage (Schäfer 1982b). We co-produced two photographic exhibitions, one super 8 film between 1982 and 1983, and ten 16 mm films for German television in the years between 1981 and 2003.

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civil war until 1997, but even in the years that followed they were victims of recurrent episodes of violence, expulsions, deportations, and the disappearance and killing of residents. Today this region is probably the last remaining pocket in the country where remaining partisans of Sendero Luminoso still engage in drug trafficking.3 In Peru, the severe conflicts and ravages of that period are associated to this day more with the highlands region of Ayacucho than with the lowland area of the Selva Central, which was in fact no less affected. Manfred Schäfer died in 2003. It was not until 2014 – 25 years after our last visit and on the occasion of an invitation to Lima’s Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) – that I decided to return to Matereni.4 In preparation for the trip, I digitized 600 color slides and two movies that we had filmed there to be able to hand them over to the community.5 Since 1989, I had lost direct contact with the people from the village and had been able to obtain very little information about this part of the country, which had been overwhelmed by the civil war. Due to the lack of communication, I decided on my own initiative to return the photos and the films that Manfred Schäfer and I had recorded there. I was not only inspired by my own private motives and the belief that the photos – which had been largely forgotten in my own personal archive over the years – primarily belonged to the subjects represented in the images. As a media anthropologist I also sought to answer several questions that are central to my work. For decades, photo and film documentation has been an important part of the methodological toolbox of anthropological re-

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It was not until 2015 that Asháninka men, women, and children enslaved by Sendero Luminoso in the border area between the departments of Ayacucho, Junín, and Huancavelica were liberated by the Peruvian military forces after being detained for 25 to 30 years. There are no exact figures for the total of Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga victims during the civil war. Between 10.000 and 15.000 probably suffered displacement and up to 6.000 were killed during armed battles. In view of their teaching and research focus on the Amazon region, representatives of the university expressed an interest in these anthropological photos and films as part of my invitation to the PUCP. This also motivated me to first contact the subjects of the images. I handed over digitized photos, movies, and a video projector to the village’s presidente. Due to time constraints, I selected 600 photographs before my trip, primarily portraits, so that they could be digitized on time.

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search. Today, the visual documents once amassed by these scholars for research purposes are often the only source or one of the rare sources of this kind, which depict the subjects and their everyday life over the long periods of time before photography and film achieved the more generalized access it enjoys today. In the course of my field research on local media history and media uses in an Ayuujk village in Oaxaca, Mexico, which I initiated in 2012, I discovered that the inhabitants currently appropriate and adapt these kinds of historical visual documents created by external photographers to suit their own needs.6 They actively look for historical images and reinterpret them by integrating them into their own private photo albums and Facebook pages or even organize local photo exhibitions. Among other things, they reinterpret photographs once taken by anthropologists during the first half of the 20th century who were keen on portraying Ayuujk persons as “representatives of the ethnic group” for their family albums. The persons portrayed are now reinterpreted as deceased relatives, friends, and village members from the perspective of the community’s own history. I conceptualize this creative capacity of actors from the margins to appropriate new means of communication on the basis of their cultural and social needs in terms of them opening new “media spaces” (Kummels 2012). In recent years, a number of studies have examined similar cases of pictures that anthropologists once took within the context of their field research and similar reclamations and reinterpretations on behalf of the source communities under the term of “visual repatriation.” Such projects, which concern “a realigning of relationships between museums and the communities drawing on their collections” (Brown/Peers 2006: 101), focus on photos that have been archived in anthropological museums since the second half of the 19th century.7 It is important to note that these photos were not exclusively taken in the framework of a pseudo-scientific and neocolonizing anthropological perspective, as in the case of anthropometric

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My research sought to retrieve the diversity, intensity, and historical depth displayed in the culturally specific uses of photography, radio, video, and television in an Ayuujk community in Oaxaca, Mexico, and one of its satellite communities in Los Angeles, USA. Inhabitants of the Mexican village began to appropriate photography as early as in the 1960s despite their limited access to audiovisual technology. Parts of this research have been published in Kummels (2015) and Kummels n.d. The expression visual repatriation was coined by Ann Fienup-Riordan (1998).

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photography. Still, in the course of cataloging and archiving at the museum the photos’ subject matter was often classified according to a formula of clear-cut categories of cultural regions and ethnic groups (Kraus, this volume). This classification scheme negated the actual varied circumstances in which photographs’ representations were negotiated and imbued with a transcultural quality. Today, above all museums and museum anthropologists engage in returning photos to the source communities, as a rule handing them over in digitized versions rather than in the original. The studies on visual repatriation stress both the range of former researchers’ approaches toward photography and the impressive work that the descendants of the photographed subjects invest in redefining and translating the images to integrate them into their own version of history. Manfred Schäfer’s photos exemplify the broad scope of visual methods that were actually applied in the context of ethnographic research. In the case of each anthropologist, there were different motivations to take pictures, and the relationships of trust, the interactions with the research subjects, as well as the further objectives pursued when publishing the photographs, varied. From the time Manfred started to work as a professional photographer (his work was published in professional journals such as Photo Revue), he developed his own aesthetic style. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was a popular strategy of modern photography to convey dynamism and modernity by visualizing movement in a scene. The expression of motion blur was often implemented by panning the camera when pursuing a particular subject. Serial images of people in motion were taken using a motorized trigger. Manfred applied such stylistic devices too, though what was novel was his use of them to convey the dynamism and modernity of his indigenous subjects.8 What is more, he portrayed people in their everyday clothes, and did not suppress “traces of civilization” like T-shirts with a Lucky Strike logo nor index Western garments’ adoption as a “loss of culture.”9 In this manner, he counteracted cliché images of “the Indians”

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Manfred Schäfer combined ethnographic research and photography in several contexts from 1976 onward and conducted research among the Rarámuri and Lacandón in Mexico, as well as the Awajún, Shipibo, Asháninka, Ashéninka, and Nomatsiguenga in the Peruvian Amazon region (with regard to the Ashéninka see Schäfer 1988, 1991). Manfred’s portrait of an Awajún activist in such a T-shirt was widely diffused in connection with the Amazonian peoples’ opposition to Werner Herzog’s film

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(prevalent, for example, in the promotion of tourism in Germany and in U.S. magazines such as National Geographic), which in many cases portrayed indigenous people as exotic and averse to change. Manfred’s visual approach contributed to setting a new trend that meant a decisive departure from photography’s primary use since the 19th century as a medium for producing and spreading the notion of race as a visual discourse of rigid, hierarchical categories to be distinguished by physical appearance, culture, and stage of development (Poole 1997: 22-23). Manfred, by contrast, fundamentally understood photography as a tool for a collaborative or action anthropology approach.10 The process of taking pictures and constructing their messages were part of anthropology’s political activism and pursued with the intention of effectively conveying the cultural strengths and the concerns of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous people. The process of photography was conceived as ideally requiring a continuous dialogue between researchers and research subjects on the same level. As a researcher and professional photographer, Manfred engaged in conversations with Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga to define desired messages and motifs suitable for giving their political statements visual expression.11

project Fitzcarraldo. Interestingly, Herzog himself indirectly comments on these photographs, see Stern 51/1979, Herzog’s letter to the editor. 10 The Munich Trickster magazine dedicated its January issue in 1980 to the approach of action anthropology. Historically, its origins have been attributed to U.S. cultural anthropologist Sol Tax, but the Trickster authors helped reconceptualize this approach in view of contemporary ideas like those presented by Karl H. Schlesier during his guest professorship at the University of Munster. Action anthropology critically reflected on the colonial and neo-colonial entanglements of anthropology (especially anthropologists’ involvement in the U.S. government’s Project Camelot). Its practitioners instead advocated collaborating with and committing oneself as a scientist to supporting the former “research objects” and “natives.” 11 A collaborative approach toward photography in indigenous communities is described in Schäfer/Kummels (1988), the catalog of the exhibition Somos Rarámuri. The latter was based on the exhibition Somos Asháninca from 1982. Both exhibitions were part of an effort to introduce photographic technology and knowledge to the research subjects and to convey messages vital to their interests.

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The Background Stories of the Photographic Collection In the course of participating in the photographic process, both the photographer and his photo subjects inscribe their own perspectives into the resulting picture. As a consequence, such images basically allow for many different kinds of readings. What is more, further meanings can be ascribed to photos over time depending on who looks at them and through which means of publication they are disseminated or stored. The photos of the collection discussed here range from those of a private nature – taken during fieldwork that lasted over one and a half years, they were tokens of friendship recorded for the “personal photo album” – to those that served as a means of visual politics in the context of action anthropology. Some of the photos were displayed in an exhibition in Lima with a broad impact (Somos Asháninca; see below) and others published in German magazines such as Stern, Spiegel, and Natur, where they were viewed by a wide audience. The circumstances of the production, diffusion, and consumption of the items of this one collection are already quite varied. In my opinion, photos can be productively analyzed as sites or “busy intersections” where a number of distinct cultural and social processes intersect. As interconnected attributions of meaning to societal phenomena, they give rise to new meanings (Rosaldo 1993). At the site of the photos examined here, social relations, the image’s message, and common interests were negotiated against the backdrop of anthropologists and their research subjects’ transnational entanglements in the 1980s. For this reason, it is necessary to first take a brief look at the history of the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga, especially with regard to the village of Matereni, as well as the history of German and Peruvian anthropology three decades ago. I will begin with the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga whose history of the settlement in the rainforest areas of the Selva Central extends back to the pre-colonial period. From the early 17th century, they fought against the colonization of the Spaniards and resisted the proselytizing efforts of the Franciscans (Brown/Fernández 1993). Many of their communities reorganized in social composition and size in a flexible way to meet such challenges. The combination of agriculture and hunting and gathering in remote areas further enabled them to preserve their autonomous way of life. In the 1990s, however, they increasingly began to grant concessions to large private companies for the exploitation of natural resources such as

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timber and petroleum (Krämer de Huerta 2015). In the 1980s, their traditional economy of subsistence, which was well adapted to the rainforest ecosystem, was under threat during the presidency of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-1985). Alleging that the country’s rainforest areas were still largely untapped (Richard Chase Smith accurately characterized this claim as the “myth of Amazonia as an empty space”), the government enforced their settlement and the exploitation of their resources such as hydropower as a way of solving the nation’s economic problems. The affected communities resisted through local organizations, first forming a national indigenous movement of the rainforest in 1980 under the umbrella of the Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP) (Greene 2009: 174). Despite some lingering disagreements about the appropriate course of action, the communities were also supported by the Peruvian anthropologists organized in the Centro de Antropología y Aplicación Amazónico Práctica (CAAAP) and the Centro de Investigación y Promoción Amazónica (CIPA). The rainforest indigenous communities mainly pursued the goal of securing their communal land rights as comunidades nativas. They called on the land reform that had been instituted during the period of leftist military rule of Peruvian president Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975). In the course of their struggle to have their sustainable use of the rainforest recognized and their opposition to the national policy of Amazonia’s colonization, the communities built alliances and broadened their network. Matereni’s unique history played an important role in the development of this movement. The Asháninka, who immigrated to this area, founded the village in 1964 together with the original inhabitants, the Nomatsiguenga. The Asháninka previously had worked in the coffee plantations of settlers (colonos) from the Andean highlands under the terms of the prevailing debt peonage system. Cesario Chiricente, an Asháninka, effectively turned the tables in his quest to become independent, introducing coffee growing to the area with the support of like-minded individuals. Cesario’s strategy of withdrawing to a region that is still unaffected by colonization and is removed from state power and the main traffic routes has been repeatedly used by Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga throughout their history for either preserving or regaining their independence.

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Manfred Schäfer visited Matereni for the first time in 1978 while working as a professional photographer12 and became increasingly politically active on behalf of Peru’s ethnic minorities. The Peruvian government viewed them as an obstacle to national unity and the country’s development and strove to “integrate” them. “Reform projects” aimed at these ethnic minorities in the areas of education, colonization, agriculture, and hydroelectricity effectively constituted a hidden policy of ethnocide. Recognizing that there were similar oppressive situations throughout the world, students in Germany, including those of the Munich Institut für Völkerkunde, expressed their solidarity with the “tribal societies” (“Stammesgesellschaften” was the usual designation of indigenous peoples at that time).13 Few state governments had committed themselves to national models of multiculturalism. Manfred collaborated with a group of anthropology students who had founded Trickster magazine in 1978 and supported the resistance against the systematic marginalization and expulsion of ethnic minorities from their habitats as a result of major dam projects.14 The German government was also involved in the plans to construct the Ene 40 dam; the Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) had surveyed possible sites for hydropower plants with the help of the German consulting company Lahmeyer International (Schäfer 1983). In this context, Manfred looked for a community that was located within the 100.000 km2 of the potential flood zone for the purpose of document-

12 As a professional photographer he worked on commissions, inter alia, from the German state Agency for Technical Cooperation (in German GTZ) as well as private firms. 13 See interview with Werner Petermann, a founding member of the Trickster magazine, in Haller (2009). He describes how students’ initiatives were a major moving force complementing and counteracting the teaching of conservative anthropological schools of thought (such as diffusionism) imparted at the Munich Institut für Völkerkunde. 14 Manfred criticized the misrepresentation of Asháninka as “Campa Indians” in an exhibition at the Munich Museum für Völkerkunde (Schäfer/Bauer 1979). He also designed the first book of the Trickster publishing house (Schäfer 1982). This book deals with the inhumane treatment that several hundred Asháninka extras experienced during the filming of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The film company in charge was headed by Walter Saxer. The book collects the testimonies of the Asháninka who were affected by being recruited through debt peonage. For more on action anthropology, see footnote 10.

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ing their traditional subsistence strategies and quality of life, which the state’s policy threatened with extinction. This was how he discovered the village on a tributary of the Río Ene, which had 120 inhabitants and could only be reached either using the small Cessna aircraft that transported the coffee out of the village to the regional markets or via an arduous journey of more than two days on foot. Thanks to a letter of recommendation from Alberto Quinchoker, the influential teniente gobernador of the Asháninka of the department Junín, he was accepted into the community, an unusual gesture toward a “gringo” in those days. Manfred subsequently worked hard to develop a strong relationship with the community. For instance, he took part for more than a year in all of the men’s daily work, which earned him the respectful nickname “Saviri” (machete). His participation further served as a way to document the economic activities of the Asháninka and the Nomatsiguenga and their alimentary produce. They asserted “we’re doing well,” while Peruvian law, in contrast, alleged that the comunidades nativas still needed to be introduced to a “dignified life”; it used this argument to justify the promotion of agriculture in the rainforest region.15 Manfred noted that although verifying that Matereni led a “good life” according to the “criteria of ‘Western’ science” was a problematic approach, he made use of it nonetheless as a way to initiate “a debate in our culture,” which was yet not willing to respect the criteria of indigenous cultures. In this regard, he also criticized “the arrogance and ignorance of the Peruvian legislator” (Schäfer 1982a: II-III). In his master’s thesis, he measured and recorded in minute detail the nutritional value of the products that Matereni’s inhabitants obtained from their fields (chacras) and the intact rainforest.16 He also published photos of a “good life”17 and explained: 15 See the “Ley de Comunidades Nativas y de Desarrollo Agrario de la Selva y de Ceja de Selva” from 1978, article 1. 16 To this end, he remarked in his master’s thesis (1982a: IV): “I will therefore describe the land area on which the people of Matereni live, what technique they use to produce which product, in what quantity, and inquire to what degree they are able to sustain themselves sufficiently with nourishment. With these findings, I intend to ground scientifically the community’s assessment ‘we’re doing well’ and compare their subsistence strategies with the national economy.” 17 Many of his photos depicting Asháninka’s and Nomatsiguenga’s economic activities were published in the Peruvian journals mentioned below. The term “good life” was not used in a political sense in the 1980s, even though concepts concerning a desirable lifestyle had already been expressed. Ideas concerning

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“Though the subject matter does not require it, I’ve incorporated narratives and photos into the depiction so that the reader will not lose sight of the people, the people of Matereni, between the tables and statistics.” (Schäfer 1982: VI)

Manfred freely shared photos like these with Peruvian organizations that supported the native rainforest communities, in particular with Voz Indígena, the newsletter of the Asociación de Desarrollo de la Selva Interétnica Peruana (AIDESEP) founded in 1980; Amazonía Peruana, the magazine of the Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica (CAAAP); and Tarea. Revista de Educación Cultura. He also used the photos for his own work such as the 1982 article “Yo no soy Campa. ¡Soy Ashánincá!” (“I’m not Campa. I’m Asháninka!”), which advocated using the Amazonian peoples’ autodenominations, since they were an expression of self-determined political stances. “Campa” was the common name used at that time by non-Asháninka Spanish speakers, for whom it was a derogatory word meaning “wild,” “primitive,” and “uncivilized.” Despite the term’s problematic usage, anthropologists at the time – in compliance with the discipline’s convention of adopting exonyms carelessly – integrated and perpetuated the exonym “Campa” without giving it further thought in their writings. Yet, “Schäfer’s (1982c) article […] had such an impact that it stopped the academic and official use of the term in favor of Asháninka” (Sarmiento Barletti 2011: 4).18 An example of the impact of Manfred’s photos and their context is found in the cover image of the 1980 Lima Kurier and his article “Asháninca: Imagen y realidad.” A man from Matereni, at the peak of his concentra-

the “good life” and the self-determined development of the Asháninka (kametsa asaike) were formulated in the 21st century by the organization Central Asháninka del Río Ene (CARE). See CARE (2011). 18 See also Santos/Barclay (2005: XX) and Gow (2013: 54). In Stefano Varese’s (1973) classic monograph La sal de los cerros, it was still common to use the term “Campas” instead of Ashéninka (the self-designation of the inhabitants of the Gran Pajonal region). Scholars currently argue in favor of retaining “Campa” as an umbrella term for the Arawak-speaking Amazonian lowland groups since, on the one hand, they share many cultural and linguistic features and, on the other hand, they have repeatedly changed in their social composition and political alliances. Relying exclusively on their self-designations is considered problematic for anthropological research. See Santos/Barclay (2005).

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2 The cover photo of the Lima Kurier in September 1980 and the village chief (teniente gobernador) Cesario Chiricente practicing archery. Photographer: Manfred Schäfer.

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tion, shoots an arrow, while his companion cheerfully and confidently looks in direction of its target (Figure 2). The picture conveys strength, forward motion, and a fighting spirit. At the same time, it both plays on the romantic image of the Indian of German society, while subtly contradicting it. Manfred took the photo in May 1980. He liked to comment on the fact that the archery practice had actually been organized as part of the improvised celebration of Mother’s Day, that is, a public holiday the villagers chose to adopt. The picture is part of a series showing all the men of the community practicing archery with a bull’s-eye target, including Manfred himself. He told me how surprised he was at first when he learned that national holidays were celebrated in Matereni “without […] the original occasion being of importance” (Schäfer 1982a: 23-24). This photo series, to which Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga men also contributed as occasional photographers, conveys the pleasure in this Mother’s Day celebration. At the same time, Manfred took advantage of the event to make perfectly timed close-ups of numerous archers. Many of his photo series reveal a similar situational approach: On the one hand, they document processes in detail, for example, the construction of a house from the natural resources of the rainforest; on the other hand, close-ups and portraits emphasize motifs like concentration, accuracy, cooperation, a bountiful hunt, catch, or harvest, the good life and similar values of a satisfying self-determined life.19 Manfred used black-and-white photography as an aesthetic device when recording events which he considered particularly momentous. This includes a journey that he undertook in October 1980 together with the two village authorities, Cesario Chiricente and Pablo Mahuanca, to Lima. There, the community and the neighboring villages of Chichireni and Anapati claimed a joint land title as comunidad nativa “Tres Unidos de Matereni” at the Ministry of Agriculture. Similar to all the native inhabitants of the Selva Central, Matereni’s quest for the land title was critical for securing natural resources on their territory, particularly precious woods such as mahogany. Since the three villages initiated the process of obtaining a land title in September 1979, according to the standard schedule it should have been awarded in early 1980. Instead this process was systematically obstructed by private logging companies interested in exploiting the area for

19 See his photos, for example, in Trickster magazine no. 8, pp. 45-55, December 1981.

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3 Cesario delivers a speech at the Ministry of Agriculture in Lima. Photographer: Manfred Schäfer.

their own profit.20 As a result, Manfred became involved as an advocate of the community and initiated a trip to Lima with a group of men from Matereni in October 1980. They were received by the Minister for Agriculture, who was in charge of the awarding of titles (Figure 3). Their demands were supported by leftist politician Hugo Blanco Galdos who had been a presidential candidate in 1980 and was present at this reunion. In connection with these endeavors, Manfred designed a photo exhibition in collaboration with the villagers entitled Somos Asháninca (We are Asháninca) that was shown from August 27 to September 30, 1981, in Lima’s Biblioteca Nacional. For this occasion, the same group of men returned to Lima. The exhibition was intended to convince the public there of the Asháninka’s and

20 “The company FASA (Forestal Apurimac SA), in which a former Minister of Economy and Finance and a senior official of the Forest Department of the Agriculture Ministry participate, seeks to obtain permission to deforest an area where Matereni is also located. It was FASA’s intervention which prevented the land title from being awarded to the inhabitants of Matereni” (Schäfer 1982a: 33).

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Nomatsiguenga’s quality of life and the sustainability of their subsistence strategies, which were well adapted to the tropical rainforest.21 Unexpected Memories: The First Day of My Visit In August 2014, I traveled to Matereni with 600 pictures in my luggage like those described above. For the first time, I did not go by Cessna, but rather uncomfortably on the back of a pickup and over a bumpy dirt road that is primarily used to exploit the area’s timber. Instead of the less than 30 houses I witnessed during my last visit, picturesquely covered with capashi palm leaves, I now looked upon a veritable sea of 150 newly constructed square houses made of sawn planks and shiny, corrugated roofing. My attention was drawn in particular to the impressive agencia, a large one-story building that was worthy of a provincial capital’s government seat. In the conversations that followed, I learned about how the people of Matereni had accomplished this rapid development largely on their own and by investing their own money. After years of conflict and with the help of the Peruvian military, they had managed to expel the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla from their territory. Since 1998, they have exploited and marketed the wood of their comunidad nativa, which was finally officially recognized in the 1990s. They have repeatedly extended contracts with a logging company from Oxapampa, which guarantees them a regular income. Since then, the road was built, drinking water was routed to the village and – above all – education was expanded locally. The town now boasts schooling opportunities that range from the primary school to a technical college. Eight settlements (anexos) from the surrounding area have since joined the community. In the process, it has transformed into a regional center, which in the core settlement alone accommodates five times as many inhabitants as it did 25 years ago. The population is predominantly young. Life expectancy is not very high, while at the same time throngs of children and youth from around the area gather here to attend one of the schools. 21 The photography exhibition received broad coverage in the capital press, including El Comercio. It was interpreted in different ways with regard to President Belaúnde’s politics of colonizing and economically developing the rainforest region. El Comercio, for example, contradicted the exhibition’s message by writing a headline that claimed that the Amazonian natives welcomed the colonization of their region.

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After the driver assured me that this was actually Matereni and I got out, I fortunately discovered something that was familiar to me about the unfamiliar surroundings: a group of women in an informal get-together drinking masato (manioc beer). Sitting among them was the wife of the former village chief Cesario, María, who recognized me. On this Sunday, I soon went from house to house to meet old friends and acquaintances, but also got to know a large number of young adults, adolescents, and children. During each encounter, I had to deliver the sad news that Manfred had died. Since they had not received an official notice, they continued to believe that he was alive despite his long absence. On this first day of my visit, our conversations revolved around Manfred. Even young people who had never met him personally had formed a vivid impression of him. Elvis, a man in his late twenties, had been the former presidente of the community, despite his youth. He represents one of two village factions, a dual organization I had already witnessed 25 years ago. Representatives of these two factions have always shared the highest political offices or regularly alternated in their responsibilities. Elvis asserted that the community owed Manfred its land title and therefore its current prosperity, for the land title enabled them to sell timber as one of its natural resources. Numerous people offered a similar assessment. As the young ex-presidente explained to me, Manfred’s role as one of the founding figures of the village was regularly commemorated at public speeches at village festivals and national holidays. He had obviously been adopted as part of the community because of his good deeds and despite being a foreigner he was not actually regarded as an outsider. On this first day of my visit, memories were therefore evoked in conversations and by drinking masato at informal get-togethers. Orality is still by far the predominant means of communication in Matereni; thus, memories are shared by way of conversation. Orality is especially powerful not only because it communicates information, but because it can also act as a rhetorical means, a catalyst for action, and a call of warning. In their narrations the residents always incorporate gestures, performances, and singing. For instance, even though she had not seen him for 25 years, to my surprise Julia, a close friend of mine, would spontaneously imitate Manfred’s dance style when telling a story about him. I experienced her enactment as an impressive way of making him most vividly present, one much superior to a photo in my view.

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Much of what people told me on that first day aimed to summarize the community’s development over the past 25 years. The villagers expressed their pride to me at what had been achieved and they repeatedly stressed how they had built up everything through their own efforts. During the civil war, even people living far away had sought refuge in Matereni, considering it a relatively safe haven. Nevertheless, the community had suffered great setbacks. In the course of several assaults (including one in which Augusto, the former pastor and secretario had been killed), the entire village had been looted. At the time of the fighting, Víctor, the son of the old village chief Cesario (and the protagonist of our films) and Pablo, who was Cesario’s rival, gradually assumed leadership roles. In 1988, Víctor initiated the process of timber exploitation as the new village authority. The revenues made it possible to finance the schools, potable water, and especially the houses (including the agencia building) for Matereni and its anexos. For the village’s residents this success story was tinged with a sense of bitterness about how little support they had received from the Peruvian government. They now complained that the politicians were alleging that the community’s hard-won achievements were supposedly due to the state’s own investment. Despite having embraced this change, the people would also comment on their former diet in a highly nostalgic mood: “We hardly are able to catch any game anymore,” many of my interlocutors remarked regretfully. Women recalled the abundant yields of the hunting and gathering parties that I had accompanied. Hunting and relishing the meat of tapirs, deer, wild boar, samani (coelogenus paca), monkey, and pheasant had become a thing of the past. I was overwhelmed with unexpected memories on the first day of my ten-day visit. Through the many encounters and stories, I was able to experience the community’s enduring friendship with Manfred, and with me as well. The deep sorrow over Manfred’s death showed me how close many had felt to him. I was also surprised by the stories that attributed to him a central role in the village’s founding, for Manfred had never claimed such a weighty role for himself. While the oral sources converge into a convincing, straightforward narrative, his written and visual sources in contrast appear to be much more fragmented. When trying to assess his actions with regard to advocacy for communal land ownership on the basis of a comuni-

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dad nativa the written and visual sources require more extensive interpretation.22 Reconciling Memories: The Following Days of My Visit It was not until the second day of my visit that I actually unpacked my visual material. The medium of photography still does not have an institutionalized place in Matereni and until now (in August 2014) has not been appropriated as a recording technology or as a medium of remembrance. I realized this over the next few days when asking friends and acquaintances if they kept photos. Some of them proudly showed me their recently issued ID and voter cards as their only pictures. Similar ID photos are used for graduation certificates. Manfred had donated photo prints to many villagers in the 1980s – also as a basis for discussing their use – but as I was not able to find any of them, I assume they were not deemed worthy of preservation. This may hold true since objects instead of two-dimensional images remain at the center of the inhabitants’ visual culture, which includes men’s and women’s traditional garment, kithaarentze (cushma); adorned baby slings, tsompirontsi; shoulder bags, tsarato; and bows with a variety of arrows, depending on the game to be hunted. Although these traditional objects are being supplemented or replaced by imported goods, the latter nonetheless are often fashioned in a way that preserves the old forms and functions. Two-dimensional images are rare, but some anthropomorphic and zoomorphic drawings or paintings are displayed in institutions that encourage the production of pictures, like the schools and the (Adventist) church. In contrast, modern audio-visual mass media are still scarce. Electricity is supplied by a generator requiring fuel and is limited to two to three hours in the evening. In 2009, the current village chief, Simón, acquired a solarpowered television, which, in a populist touch, he installed in front of his house along with long benches for all the villagers to enjoy at their leisure. It is the only device of its kind, yet this, too, will soon change. During my 22 Despite the land titling of many communities, the menace of land expropriation has not been banned. Regional politicians and private companies in the Junín department continue to undermine the communal property form of the comunidades nativas. They try to convince the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga of the alleged advantages of a centro poblado, i.e., the individual parceling of land, which facilitates its commercialization.

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stay, the first lines of the public electricity network had been laid, and the connection to the cellular network was also imminent. The first young adults had obtained mobile phones, although they were still used exclusively for listening to music. Given that Matereni has no tradition of using photography as a medium of leisure or memory, my effort toward restitution confronted the residents with new issues, such as the question of how to interpret the images of the historical photographs and what uses to give them. I had brought along 10 x 15 cm prints of the 600 photos, mainly portraits of the former village inhabitants. Working together with Santiago, an old friend and the village pastor, I spread them out on two large tables in the assembly building.23 People immediately started to flock to the location and over the next hours there was an excited coming and going of about sixty people (Figures 4 and 5). When viewing the photos, people wanted foremost to identify Cesario, the village chief who died in 2003, Mahuanca, the Nomatsiguenga village founder, Shenkari, the legendary shaman (sheripiari), who had lived to be over 100 years old, and Manfred. Many of the boys commented to me: “I want to see my grandfather’s face,” and remarked with satisfaction that they could now see, for instance, what their grandfather Cesario had looked like. Their foremost interest was therefore directed towards deceased persons considered to have been important. I had not anticipated this and was not able to satisfy the demand for photos of these particular persons. The people present at the photo viewing that day had only a secondary interest in recognizing and seeing themselves in the images, a possibility which I had mainly suggested to them. Personal images from childhood are still not part of constructing subjectivity in Matereni.24 The task of recognizing oneself in a 25-year-old photo is a challenge in general, but even more so if the medium is still relatively new to the region. Rarely have I

23 Originally, I intended to project the digitized photographs with the laptop and projector that I had brought along with me. However, the tactile quality of the photographs I had hastily printed out while in Satipo, proved to be much better adapted to the visual and material culture of Matereni. The prints made it possible for the residents to freely select, view, and comment on the photos at their own pace. 24 Mirrors were already widely used in the village in the late 1970s for the purpose of applying face paint. Mirrors primarily fulfilled these utilitarian purposes rather than being used for visualizing oneself as in drawing self-portraits.

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4 Víctor and Julia viewing pictures from the 1980s for the first time. Photographer: Ingrid Kummels.

seen more stunned expressions than those of the adults whom Santiago and I tried to convince were the children in the photos. Accepting photos as part of one’s own family history and deliberately using them in its construction requires socialization with photographs as a particular “way of seeing” (Berger 1990) and familiarity with forms of genealogical interpretation like family photo albums. For me and members of the urban societies I grew up in (Brazil, USA, France, and Germany), photographs have long been a fundamental dimension of subjectivity. In everyday life I seldom question their capacity of reproducing reality and their information value. People in societies like these have been socialized with photography, which means that they have been intensively instructed in the art of reading pictures. My parents first taught me to read photographs of myself (or my previous self) by narrating their anecdotes and versions of history as allegedly inscribed in such photos. Otherwise, I would not be able to identify with and make sense of “my” photos as a baby. In the course of a similar learning process on the second day, participants began to recognize others and themselves in the photos. Moreover, they took pleasure in looking at the large stack of photos and passing them

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5 Santiago and his photograph from 1982-1983. Photographer: Ingrid Kummels.

on, one by one, as part of the game of discovering others and themselves. At the same time, despite eliciting joy, pleasure, and astonishment, the photos were generally not treated as objects to be cherished and kept. I gave them away to the persons portrayed in them, but only few individuals developed a special relationship to “their” photo. For some who had known Manfred during their childhood, “their” photo reflected their relationship with the photographer. Isabel spontaneously pasted a picture of herself with a group of children on the front wall of her house, alongside the drawings of biblical motifs depicting the past that already adorned it (Figure 6). These examples show how photos are read from different points of view in day-to-day social life. The messages associated with the pictures are not restricted in a unidirectional fashion to the persons and objects represented in them. Others were recalled the humble origins and the adverse circumstances under which their village had first developed, especially when inspecting the clothing once worn by the people in the photos: hand-woven cotton cushmas dyed with plants and barks in a reddish-brownish color, which the youth, in particular, consider to have gone out of style. Women now have a general preference for cushmas of light industrial cloth of dif-

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6 Isabel pasting her childhood photo on the front wall of her house. Photographer and collage: Ingrid Kummels.

ferent bright colors, the globally popular pink being a favorite. But the “poverty” of former garments was also interpreted as conveying their determination and mobility back then and regarded a benchmark against which today’s modernization appears as even more laudable. Still other images were commented on because of the message they conveyed through certain aesthetic choices. Even contemporary observers who are too young to have had a personal recollection, would make remarks such as: “That was a good idea of the teacher.” The reference here was to a photo of a game initiated by the teacher in which school children built and played with miniature airplanes. Once displayed, the photos and the films I had brought figured prominently in the conversations I had with the villagers. This was particularly true, for instance, with Simón, the village’s current presidente, whom I met two days later, after he had returned from a regional meeting of the Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga in Pucallpa. Much like Elvis, Simón represents at 33 years of age a new generation, which now wields political power and decides on the new benchmarks for a good (and modern) life in Matereni. I had known Simón well as an eight-year-old in the late 1980s and personally witnessed how his father Cesario had raised and trained him to become his successor as the head of the village.25 Yet due to the civil war, he and Elvis 25 This is especially apparent in the final scene of our documentary In Green Heaven. Cesario delivers a speech in front of the camera in which he warns that

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7 Simón as a child accompanying Manfred during the shooting of In Green Heaven in 1989 and today. Photographer: Ingrid Kummels.

belong to the generation of children who were forced to grow up outside of the community: For their protection, their parents sent them to secondary schools in the larger towns of Mazamari and Satipo during the second half of the 1990s. There they lived with and worked for non-Asháninka, in exchange for room and board. As representatives of Matereni’s two main factions, Simón and Elvis are political rivals. When I met Simón for the first time there was a bit of tension in the air, because I had made the acquaintance of his rival first and we were essentially strangers to each other. The photos, however, helped me to substantiate my memories of him as a child. Just as my parents had done earlier, I caught myself convincing Simón of the anecdotes that I recollected with regard to “his” childhood photos (Figure 7). I told him about how he used to follow the two of us everywhere, and the images, which showed him enjoying himself in our company during our film work, seemed to support this. I also specifically gave to Simón the pictures of his father on the journey to the Ministry of Agriculture in Lima. He was especially intrigued by these black-and-white photos, an aesthetic that was deliberately chosen at that time to convey historical proof of the village’s quest for official recognition. Simón immediately commented on how this photo and others of the former village could be enlarged and used for political purposes, such as one of a Cessna airplane at the local airstrip.

their land could become scarce again one day because of population growth. In this scene, he specifically placed beside him his eight-year-old son Simón, wearing a shoulder bag (tsarato) as a sign of his Asháninka identity.

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He wanted to frame these photos, along with one of longtime teniente gobernador Cesario, to adorn the agencia. When I interviewed Simón a few days later with the camcorder, he immediately corroborated his oral history version of Matereni’s foundation by interpreting the photos and the film In the Green Heaven as substantiating this version: “First, all of the comunidades nativas were formed and my father convened the people of Matereni. According to the story he told me, he himself came from Mazamari. That’s where he lived the previous years and he later came here to be able to found a small village. It first only had ten community members. Some would live there, others [lived] farther away. When he arrived, they started to come together and organize as a small village. In the film, one notices that this is actually what happened, right?”

Simón devised another political use for the photos when he invited me on a trip the next day that turned out to be a kind of election campaign to the neighboring villages of Alto Chichireni and Tinkabeni. As presidente, part of his responsibilities consists in visiting the anexos on regular basis, which he does by driving his own Toyota Jeep on what might be one of the world’s toughest dirt roads. Simón asked me to bring along pictures of the neighboring villages that were left over from the selection process, as well as my camcorder. He wanted me to film the trip over the dirt road. It was filled with deep muddy furrows, and we had to cross several rivers without bridges. Simón specifically made stops for recording purposes. He identified positively with the scenes he wanted me to capture, attributing to them an authenticity with regard to the current lifestyle of this rainforest region. He related these scenes both to a realistic documentary style of filming and to the genre of the action film. Simón would playfully refer to our super 8 films as action films, as “Acción Matereni.” The action film coincides thematically with the militarization of the area: In Chichireni, 40 military personnel monitor the area, which is now called VRAEM (Valle del Río Apurímac, Ene y Mantaro). During the presidency of Ollanta Humala, this vast region was identified as the country’s last stronghold of terrorism and drug trafficking (narcoterrorismo). I had anticipated from the outset that the photos I had brought with me would be used in relation to this difficult situation. When we briefly stopped at this first of VRAEM’s many military bases, Simón, who of course knew all the soldiers well, referred to some of them jokingly as “my

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cousin” and “my brother-in-law.” This was an effective way of relieving pressure in such situations. He had told me earlier that I should pretend to be a teacher working in Matereni. Continuing on our way, we made a stop in the village of Alto Chichireni, where, as a conventional greeting, we were served large gourds with manioc beer to share with others in conversation. Simón immediately signaled to me to show my photos. When Eugenio, a teacher, looked through them, he discovered two group portraits of Alto Somabeni. After scrutinizing these pictures for a long time, Eugenio said: “You might think that they were still alive.” It was a touching moment. He told me that two of the three men in the picture were his uncles. They had followed the Sendero terrorists to the villages, which they had occupied with great enthusiasm because they were promised the moon, that is, “that they would get a lot of things, that they would be millionaires.” That was the last time he saw his uncles, for they never turned up again, and it is assumed that they are no longer alive. “I have identified my family,” Eugenio finally told me with a voice and a smile that conveyed a certain satisfaction. Simón further remarked that he would now be able to use the photo to claim compensation. In this case, the slides that Manfred once arranged and classified under the heading of “people” had transformed into evidence for entering into negotiations with the state and for demanding reparations. Outlook What is the future of these historic photos? I realized from the beginning of my brief journey that the hard disk with the digital copies that I would leave behind with Simón in his capacity as presidente of the community could be little more than an initial intervention with regard to their “visual repatriation.” By the time I departed ten days later, clearer – but also conflicting – ideas had emerged. Various groups in the community had formulated their own claims in accordance with the tensions of the local political structure. Simón asked me if, for my next visit, I could enlarge certain photos and frame them so that they might be hung at the agencia. Even the teachers of the various schools, who are key political actors, had their own requests. The teacher of the primary school, a son of Carlos and a good friend of Manfred, told me to bring a laptop and a projector as a donation for the school during my next visit. I promised that I would return with these ob-

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jects in exactly two years. Hence, I began my journey home with the feeling that my obligation to the community had been extended by these new demands. After a long period of neglect and forgetting, the historical photographs from the 1980s have assumed a new potency at the nexus Peru and Germany – or, even more specifically, in relation to the Asháninka, Nomatsiguenga, and “their” anthropologists and new friends. When Matereni was finally connected to the cellular network in November 2015, the first message I received in Berlin from the village was: “Hi Ingrid, this is a greeting from your friend Simón Chiricente [...] I want you to send me last year’s photographs and videos.”

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Bibliography Berger, John (1990): Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series, London: Penguin Books. Brown, Alison K./Peers, Laura with members of the Kaina Nation (2006): Pictures Bring us Messages. Sinaaksiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaahwa: Photographs and Histories of the Kainai Nation, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brown, Michael F./Fernández, Eduardo (1993): War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon, Berkeley: University of California Press. Central Asháninka del Río Ene (CARE) (2011): Kametsa Asaike. El vivir bien de los Asháninkas del Río Ene. Agenda Política de la CARE, Lima. Fienup-Riorda, Ann (1998): “Yup’ik Elders in Museums: Fieldwork Turned on Its Head.” In: Arctic Anthropology 35/2, pp. 49-58. Gow, Peter (2013): “Autodenominations: An Ethnographer’s Account from Peruvian Amazonia.” In: Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 11/1, pp. 52-64. Greene, Shane (2009): Customizing Indigeneity. Paths to a Visionary Politics in Peru, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Haller, Dieter (2009): Interviews with German Anthropologists. Interview Werner Petermann, January 24, 2009 (http://germananthropology.de). Krämer de Huerta, Anka (2015): “Widerstand mit Tradition. Die Asháninka in Bergregenwald Perus.” In: Christian Feest/Christine Kron (eds.), Regenwald, Rosenheim: Lokschuppen, pp. 272-277. Kummels, Ingrid (2012): “Espacios mediáticos: cultura y representación en México –Introducción.” In: Ingrid Kummels (ed.), Espacios mediáticos: cultura y representación en México, Berlin: Edition Tranvía, pp. 9-39. Kummels, Ingrid (2015): “Negotiating Land Tenure in Transborder Media Spaces: Ayuujk People’s Videomaking between Mexico and the USA.” In: Working Paper for the EASA Media Anthropology Network's eSeminar (http://www.media-anthropology.net/index.php/e-seminars). Kummels, Ingrid (n.d.): “Patron Saint’s Fiesta Videos: Mediatization and Transnationalization between the Sierra Mixe and California.” In: Freya Schiwy/Byrt Wammack (eds.), Adjusting the Lens, Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, in print.

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Poole, Deborah (1997): Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosaldo, Renato (1993): Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press. Santos, Fernando/Barclay, Frederica (2007): “Introducción.” In: Fernando Santos/ Frederica Barclay (eds.), Guía Etnográfica de la Alta Amazonía. Vol. 5, Lima: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, pp. xv-xli. Sarmiento Barletti, Juan Pablo (2011): “Kametsa Asaiki. The Pursuit of the ‘Good Life’ in an Asháninka Village (Peruvian Amazonia).” PhD thesis, University of St. Andrews. Schäfer, Manfred (1980): “Asháninca: Imagen y Realidad.” In: Lima Kurier 17, pp. 1-3. Schäfer, Manfred (1982a): Indianisches Wirtschaften in einem Asháninca/Nomatsiguenga-Dorf der peruanischen Montaña. Unpublished master’s thesis, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Schäfer, Manfred (1982b): Weil wir in Wirklichkeit vergessen sind, München: Trickster. Schäfer, Manfred (1982c): “Yo no soy Campa. ¡Soy Asháninca!” In: Amazonía Indígena 4, pp. 30-31. Schäfer, Manfred (1983): “Fortschritt ins Elend.” In: Natur 1, pp. 60-67, 103. Schäfer, Manfred (1988): Ayompari, Amigos und die Peitsche. Die Verflechtung der ökonomischen Beziehungen der Ashéninga in der Gesellschaft des Gran Pajonal/Ostperu, Weilbach: Self-published. Schäfer, Manfred (1991): “Ayompari – ‘él que me da las cosas.’ El intercambio entre los Asháninca y los Ashéninga de la selva central peruana en una perspectiva histórica.” In: Peter Jorna et al. (ed.), Etnohistoria del Amazonas, Quito: Abya-Yala, pp. 45-62. Schäfer, Manfred/Bauer, Matthias (1979): “Zur Schau gestellt.” In: Trickster 3, pp. 29-31. Schäfer, Manfred/Kummels, Ingrid (eds.) (1988): Wir sind Rarámuri. Eine Dokumentation von und über Rarámuri (Nordmexiko). Katalog zur Ausstellung “Wir sind Rarámuri,” Weilbach: Self-published. Varese, Stefano (1973): La sal de los cerros. Una aproximación al mundo Campa, Lima: Ediciones Retablo de Papel.

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Films Schäfer, Manfred/Kummels, Ingrid (1982-1983): Indianisches Wirtschaften. (Indigenous Economy), super 8 films, ca. 180 minutes. Schäfer, Manfred/Kummels, Ingrid/Asháninca of the Río Ene (1989): Im Grünen Himmel. (In Green Heaven), WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), 16 mm, 60 minutes.

Gazing at the Face of Absence Signification and Re-signification of Family Photographs of Disappeared University Students in Peru M ERCEDES F IGUEROA

Between the years 2010 and 2012, I developed a research project in Lima, Peru, within the Visual Anthropology Master’s Program at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP),1 which took as a starting point the quality of the family photo album as a medium for storytelling. I consequently proposed conceptualizing the album as a space used by actors in social life to represent the personal stories of university students who were disappeared and murdered by state terrorism during the early 1990s.2

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The master’s thesis was titled: “That is How He/She left. The Family Photo Album as a Space to Represent and to Acknowledge Victims of Violence in Peru.” At the beginning of the 1980s, the terrorist groups Sendero Luminoso (SL, Shining Path) and Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) declared war on the Peruvian State, whose response at the hands of its armed forces unleashed an armed conflict that resulted in unprecedented violence. In its account of this confrontation, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) estimated approximately 69.280 victims died or disappeared over a period of 20 years (1980-2000). The vast majority of these victims were Quechua-speaking peasants, who were almost invisible to official national interests. This internal violence is considered not only the longest conflict in Peruvian history, with the greatest economic impact and cost to human lives, but also a manifestation of the indifference at the center of Peruvian power toward the poorest and most remote populations in the country; it is also evidence of the racism and exclusion deeply rooted in Peruvian society. 1 Students’ ID photos used in the public sphere. Photographers: Mercedes Figueroa and Miguel Gutiérrez.

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The proposal allowed me to discuss three main issues: i) how the notion of victim is currently applied in Peru, especially the one put forth by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR in Spanish) in its final report in 2003;3 ii) the discourses that are generated around this category as well as the images (visualities) and imaginaries related to it; and iii) the political agendas of memory and acknowledgment developed by the relatives of victims of state violence. During fieldwork, I also observed the different dimensions of representation that family photographs acquire when they circulate in the public sphere. Such dimensions relate to the circuits these pictures have traveled and may continue to travel in the wake of the disappearance of these young people; they also relate to images generated during my research. As will be shown later, the uses and meanings attributed to these images exceeded their original scope, just as the original intentions of serving as a family register were reconfigured – including by my own research proposal – after the violence. This article addresses this particular aspect of the social use of photography. First, I will present the guidelines and overall results of my research, as a basis to discuss the appropriations and re-significations of the photographs and second, map the circuits that I identified. Finally, I will review the role of the family photo as an artifact of memory and examine the representations at play when these images are used to construct discourses on the past and on victimization in Peru.4 The Family Photo Album as a Research Site and Research Strategy A family photo album functions as a household archive (Silva 1998) that is used to preserve personal images and those of close relatives. As every other archive, it is more than a simple repository, organized and preserved under certain techniques or methodologies. It also involves a complex set of representation decisions and practices. In addition, as a medium for story-

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The CVR final report was presented in 2003 and can be consulted in its entirety at the following link: http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ingles/pagina01.php. All photographs in this article are used with the express permission of the students’ families.

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telling, the family photo album becomes a testimony of the life journey of the people it represents. The children we see in the photographs of figure 2 are Enrique Ortiz Perea (circle, upper left corner), Ernesto Castillo Páez (circle, top right corner), Armando Amaro Cóndor (circle, lower left corner), Melissa Alfaro Méndez (lower right corner), Kenneth Anzualdo Castro (circle, top center) and Dora Oyague Fierro (bottom center). All were university students at the beginning of the 1990s. All, with the exception of Melissa, disappeared between 1990 and 1993 in operations carried out by paramilitary troops during the first government of Alberto Fujimori. In 1991, Melissa was killed instantly when a letter-bomb addressed to someone else exploded in her hands at the newspaper where she was working. This device was also prepared and placed by paramilitary forces.5 At the time of their death or disappearance,6 these students were between 21 and 25 years old. They were born in several provincial cities, with the exceptions of Ernesto Castillo and Dora Oyague, who were born in Lima. They were victims of state terrorism and suffered kidnapping, torture, murder, and disappearance.7 As of this date, the bodies of four of them (more than half of the group) still have not been found. As often happens with our own photos or with those of our friends and loved ones, the images of these young people can evoke feelings that recall 5

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According to the Pro Human Rights Association (APRODEH), “the explosive was composed of 200 grams of ambo gelatina, a material for military use. […] In 1993, the self-styled “León Dormido” military group issued a communique that ended up in the hands of Sí magazine. The document named Officer Victor Penas Sandoval as one of the alleged perpetrators, considering senior military officials to be responsible as well. The source based his testimony on his own participation, on the use of exclusive military explosives (during the time in which the events occurred, March-October 1991), as well as on the implementation of complex technology.” In: http://www.aprodeh.org.pe/casos2007/lima/ casoalfaro.html. It is important to reiterate that the research sought to problematize the category of “victim,” not the final outcome of these young people, or the way in which they were killed. It is equally important to think about the family memories and life stories of victims of terrorist groups, and ask ourselves what representations are being constructed about them. Furthermore, these are not the only memories and experiences of the conflict. They co-exist with those of soldiers, police, civilians, and even terrorists. Therefore, it is also relevant to create initiatives that further explore all these memories.

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our own past and family, prompting us to recognize and get to know them. Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Kenneth, and Dora were siblings, children or friends – just like we are, just like people we know.8 The disappearance of these young people meant the end of their life story and an irreparable break in their family history, generating an enormous void. The ethnographic exploration of the album as both research site and methodology showed me, on the one hand, how family members build visual and discursive narratives about the life story of each of these young people, giving a particular order according to what is considered most representative or characteristic.9 On the other hand, exploring the album also draws us into the emotions and intentions behind these family narratives, which, over time, seem to have found new meaning for the void generated by the disappearance. In this regard, in most of these six stories, the last photo of the young student tends to build a bridge between past and present; articulating family history, commitment, and dedication to justice projects. In addition, thinking about the album as a space to tell these personal stories leads to a more intimate and humane view of the victim of the conflict, prompting us to reflect on the nature of the category of “victim” in Peru. In this regard, despite the efforts made by the CVR to “convince Peruvian society that a future is possible only via a consensual view of the past, this problem [of memory] in Peru has continued to be anchored in a logic of war” (Poole/Rojas Pérez 2012: 263).

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The work with these six families and the stories presented here evolved during the course of the research. Seeking to test my proposal, I discovered that not all of the family members I initially expected to interview were residing in Lima (which, logistically, would have ensured the continuity of my work). Nevertheless, I came into contact with the Coordination against Impunity (Coordinadora contra la Impunidad- CCI), an organizational initiative founded by the families of victims. Almost every family member interviewed for this article is part of the CCI. Here we have six stories that represent only a specific group of victims of the conflict and that share certain characteristics: young people, students, residents of urban areas, victims of state terrorism, among others. The intention of this work was not to make the others invisible nor to generalize the analysis, but to test an idea and invite reflection based on specific cases.

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2 Family photos of missing students. Collage: Mercedes Figueroa.

Among other things, this involves presenting the victim as an anonymous and remote “other,” whose situation is contextualized in war and violence, without emphasis on cultural, political, and social contexts.10 Finally, being considered a “victim” is closely related to the likelihood of obtaining reparation from the State, which requires family members to demonstrate and prove the innocence of their loved ones, resulting in various discourse and action strategies. At the same time, the category is subject to criminalization by broad sectors of society that defend the antisubversive policies of the Fujimori government. Therefore, it is in the dynamic between these two fronts that debate the truth about Peru’s recent past, in which the present proposal is framed. While my thesis proposal sought to problematize the notion of victim built around the conflict, at times it proved to be necessary to make use of the same notion, to allude to

10 In the same way, parallel to the homogeneous image of “victim,” an image of “senderista” or “terrorist” as the main “victimizer,” is constructed, generating a stigmatized image with certain inherent characteristics and ignoring cultural and family contexts.

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its more public, political meaning or to more precisely compare and highlight the individual behind the category. The Photo Album: Methodological Possibilities The research began by thinking about the album as a space or visual story, smaller than the family photographic archive. Therefore, relatives of the students were invited to undertake a process of selecting the photographs, so that they would become the rapporteurs of their own memories, demonstrating their relationship with the chosen images and what the images represented for them.11 The families with whom I have tested this proposal are mainly the mothers and sisters of Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Kenneth, and Dora. I also had the opportunity to speak with a brother of Melissa, with Ernesto’s father, a first cousin and an aunt of Dora Oyague.12 It should be noted that the amount of photographic record was decisive, since it provided the framework for how the family would handle the selection process. The more photographs there were, the more options to choose from. Photo selections were made during or after the interviews and conversations with family members; often more questions or anecdotes emerged while they were reviewing the images. The research project itself generated all the work situations, which raised not only methodological but also ethical challenges. One of them was my own approach toward these families, in my position of researcher, using the very same category of “victim.” However, during the course of the investigation, rediscovering Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Dora, and Kenneth in their humanity was also transforming my own assessment. My approach to the intimate story that family members shared with me al-

11 The idea of selecting photographs and creating albums, which I propose as a way of narrating the life stories of people who have disappeared, emerged from my reading of two works: Álbum de familia: la imagen de nosotros mismos (Family Album. The Image of Ourselves) by Armando Silva (1998), and the Uruguayan project “Family Album,” which is discussed in the paper “Fotografía y desaparecidos” (“Photography and the Missing”) by Magdalena Broquetas (2006). 12 I noticed this greater presence of women during my fieldwork, which always presented one of the more challenging elements of analysis.

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lowed me to see these young people as the son, daughter, brother or sister they once were – and who are now missed. But this sort of encounter or re-encounter also took place with their sisters and mothers, who not only shared their photo archives to tell me the stories of their loved ones, but also let me know much about their own personal stories and how these were changing – and transforming into a commitment to fight – as a result of the disappearance of their loved ones. In this sense, the research also enabled a space in which family members could review their own history and see themselves as individuals, i.e., as Gisela, Gabriela, and Milagros Ortiz; Magna Perea; Carmen Páez; Cromwell Castillo; Raida Cóndor; Carmen Amaro; Norma Méndez; Carmen Oyague; Carolina Huamán; and Félix and Marly Anzualdo. This rediscovery is precisely what the proposal contemplates: start with everyday life to break through the anonymity and the distance between us and those we identify as “victims,” and then acknowledge, through the album, the history that exists beyond public discourse and political agendas. Once interviews were conducted, each selection was digitized, thus generating other kinds of images that were later “returned” to family members for their approval and for their own digital archives. Digitization not only allowed me to have a systematization of all the family images selected, but the option to review and work “outside” the original materials – editing and using the images in different ways without manipulating the physical photographs – which were more than 40 years old and of immense emotional value. As we have seen, it is in the generation and “return” of this digital material that an exchange circuit between the families and me began, which also created the possibility that these images might travel along other routes beyond the research itself. Meanwhile, digitized photographs were reprinted, both in a photobook that grouped the stories of Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Dora, and Kenneth for further consultation, and in six individual booklets – one for each story, one for each family – as a sign of gratitude and acknowledgment. Disputed Memories It is also important to consider the context in which I conducted the research, as well as the passage of time (between 22 and 25 years) and the

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family’s own reflective process – their grief, healing, and decisions – as elements that could affect their way of remembering and relating to the photographs and what they represent. Therefore, we must not lose sight of the social and political conditions during and after the conflict, under which the relatives of the victims developed both visual and discursive strategies for action and representation in the public sphere. Such strategies also respond to their political agendas for reparations and the search for justice. After the political violence, the so-called “battles for memory,” i.e., conflicts over the truth about the past, reveal the fissures in Peruvian society, and outline the political and discursive framework in which all direct and indirect actors operate. Similarly, these battles are a crucial factor in building democracy and reconstructing individual and collective identities, both for those who lived through the violence and for the generations that follow and whose knowledge of what happened is indirect. Acknowledging memory as an object of dispute, leads us to pay attention to the active role the protagonists play in these battles as producers of meaning. Memory, then, is the product of deliberate processes of selecting and ordering facts. Such processes are carried out with the aim of creating a coherent story according to specific interests, values, and ways of understanding the policies that the State should implement to overcome the damage caused by the conflict (Barrantes 2006). In such a way, the so-called “salvation memory” was constructed, representing the peace brought by Alberto Fujimori and his adviser Vladimiro Montesinos to a nation where “the incarnation of evil was not only Sendero Luminoso and MRTA, but all those who disagree with the official version about what happened in those years” (Degregori 2004: 76). According to this discourse, Fujimori, backed by the armed forces, was solely responsible for the strategic defeat of subversion.13 This discourse resulted in efforts

13 In opposition to this “salvation memory,” other “memories for reconciliation” have arisen. Their principal spokesmen are human rights organizations and the journalism of opposition, along with several professional guilds, progressive sectors of the political spectrum, the Church, and victims’ organizations. These memories, moreover, recognize and denounce the responsibilities of the armed forces and the governments of Fernando Belaúnde, Alan García, and Alberto Fujimori in the systematic and widespread violation of human rights during the conflict.

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to isolate victims from active participation in the debate about memory, and established an image of the Left almost synonymous with terrorism. Moreover, as has been pointed out, to be eligible for State reparations and earn public approval, relatives have been “obliged” to prove the innocence of their loved ones during the conflict. And they themselves risk being branded as terrorists – unless they can prove their own innocence. This is why relatives of the young students not only demand that the Peruvian State identify and punish those responsible for the disappearances of Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Dora, and Kenneth, but that it also clarify that neither the young people nor they themselves had any link to subversive agents. Such clarification – in the judicial record – would be a vindication for each of the students, as well as for their families.14 Images that Denounce, Memories that Travel The role of photography in memories of war and political violence is not only to document the historical record, but also to denounce the methods of repression used by dictatorial regimes, including enforced disappearance. The photographs eventually become representative symbols of the terror exercised by the State, due to the fact that visual texts promote a response based more on emotion than rationality. For Magdalena Broquetas (2006), the use of photographs displaying the faces of the victims has been established as one of the reporting tools used by social movements opposed to dictatorships in South America. “This use of close-up photography in the banners was not something new for human rights movements in the region. On the contrary, it was a resource used early by the Argentine “mothers,” who, in the 1980s, had opted not to include names under the photographs as a way to universalize the protest: every face symbolized all of the missing” (Broquetas 2006). To achieve this goal, they made use of ID photos or life-sized silhouettes extracted from everyday photographs; the disappeared then began appearing in different environments. These images, without personal information, were integrated into the corpus of elements and protest practices that char-

14 Some families, with the help of organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, have managed to bring cases against the Peruvian state for crimes against humanity.

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acterized the movements. In Peru, various sized photographs of the faces of the disappeared are also used as a form of denunciation. However, in contrast to the practice developed in Argentina, the name of the missing family member and the date of disappearance are usually included.15 In such contexts, photographs acquire a symbolic character as the antithesis of absence, while also serving as documents that provide information about the appearance of the missing person. In this regard, the inherent quality of the image to touch those who look at it should also be considered, as it is this quality that gives photography a different potential when compared to other tools of protest. Also, during this dynamic family memories that are basically private enter the public sphere. They acquire a political meaning when the narratives are represented in memory circuits, when they are confronted with other perspectives on the recent past, and when they seek public acknowledgment of their relatives as “victims” or subjects of reparation. I use the term “memory circuit” to refer to areas of action that the same families have created over the years as sites to remember and vindicate their loved ones, based on their version and experience of violence. Such circuits are strengthened with the participation of other actors such as human rights organizations, academic groups, collectives of artists and photographers, among others, which generates diverse opinion and action in the public sphere. The circuits are mostly comprised of a series of regularly held events. Among those that stand out are pilgrimages to cemeteries and memorials; protests, sit-ins, and vigils in public spaces or marches to key institutions such as the Palace of Justice and the Congress of the Republic; and talks in academic spaces, such as universities or other institutions.

15 The dictatorial processes in Peru and Argentina had very different origins and trajectories; moreover, the characteristics of the victims were also different. If we take into account the widespread indifference of Peruvian society and the stigma generated around the main actors in the conflict, naming victims and indicating the date of their disappearance is of utmost importance for their acknowledgment.

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3 Pilgrimages in El Ángel Cemetery. In memory of Cantuta’s missing students and professor, 2010 (left). Commemorating Melissa Alfaro, 20 years after her death, 2011 (right). Photographer: Mercedes Figueroa.

Memories of the conflict are also constructed and strengthened through large-scale activities, such as demonstrations against the presidential candidacy of the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, and those against the promulgation of a law that would criminalize protests. It is not only about the visibility that these performances offer, but also that the topics of memory and human rights have themselves become an arena for political debate and stigmatization. Compared to earlier years, these kinds of events have become more widespread. In part, this is due to the use of virtual platforms on the internet, primarily by human rights organizations, which marks a drastic change in the dissemination of information on cases of disappearance and related events. On the other hand, there are also more institutional memory circuits now. The most important, due to the impact on Peruvian society at the time of its presentation, is the exhibition Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar (Yuyanapaq: To Remember). Designed as the graphic arts counterpart of the CVR’s Final Report, it gives an account of the years of violence (19802000) that Peru lived through, with a selection of more than 200 photo-

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graphs that are primarily journalistic.16 This exhibition contrasts with initiatives such as that of the National Association of Relatives of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP, in Spanish),17 on the violence experienced in the region of Ayacucho. Its exhibition room makes use of various historical records, both photographic as well as from material culture, in order to name the disappeared. Displaying the belongings of the missing person allows audiences to “know” and even experience their absence in another way. This example shows the importance of contextualizing experiences, according to the regional scope of the conflict, in addition to considering the ways that these populations remember and transmit memory. The Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (LUM, in Spanish) museum project was inaugurated on December 17, 2015. The museum project is an initiative of the Peruvian government to create a space for meeting, commemoration, and debate about the years of violence. Its stated objective is “to acknowledge and dignify the victims of that period through reflection and exchange, contributing to the construction of a citizenship that makes the past an instrument to act on, in the present, and ensure that what happened will not be repeated.”18 Replica and Circulation: The Photograph as an Artifact of Memory We have not lost contact, and, in fact, have met on several occasions. Nevertheless, almost three years after finishing my fieldwork, visiting the relatives of Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Dora, and Kenneth who participated in the investigation involved a process of revising and updating,

16 Such staging requires further analysis that takes into consideration the institutionalism of the CVR and its official discourse about the past. In this regard, see Poole/Rojas Pérez (2012). About the exhibition, consult: http://www.cverdad. org.pe/apublicas/p-fotografico/e_yuyanapacha.php. 17 See: http://anfasep.org.pe/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=34:whois-anfasep. 18 See: http://lugardelamemoria.org/.

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both as a researcher and on a personal level.19 During those three years, changes happened in everyone’s life. Some of the family members are now in delicate health, while others have further advanced in their professional fields; others have married, traveled, and learned different things. For my part, shortly after graduating from the master’s program, I turned 30, and moved out by my own. Afterwards my mother presented me with an album of my own history, about what she understood and represented as my life until then. Later, I started adding new records to the blank pages. My mother’s gift not only reaffirmed my fascination with this kind of record, because of its visual and material quality, but validated once again its enormous capacity for storytelling and appealing to emotions that invite us to remember. Therefore, I considered it important to share this new archive with the families who had shared theirs with me and to review some ideas. In addition, after several of the digitized photos emerged on various memory circuits, I considered it relevant to inquire about the paths and destinations of these images. The uses that family members have made of the photos that I scanned are very specific. First, they are now part of their personal archives, documents that have been and can be shared, as they choose. Mapping the circuits these digital photos have taken exceeds the scope of this article – besides, family members do not have a precise memory of these exchanges. Nevertheless, I consider it worth mentioning to show how versatile the images have proven to be. Digitizing was not a widespread practice among family members, so the work I did was valued because the images would be preserved in time. Later I began digitizing other images that are now part of their personal archives. Creating a replica of the photographic image is the main objective of digitization, since it guarantees the appearance of the image when it is used in different spaces and media. Besides, exchanging other objects belonging to the student, which are now of unique nature, presents a risk of loss. Digitization also allowed for the creation of high resolution images for better quality reproduction. These scans corresponded mainly to outside requests, such as the one from the LUM, for exhibition

19 Visits were made to resume contact, inform them about this publication, and request their approval to use the photographs, as well as to review and update content.

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purposes. This meant that family images would enter more institutional circuits as part of a “legitimized” discourse on the past. An interesting initiative using replicated images appears on the SoundCloud portal, where user PirataRadio has included a podcast on the life of Kenneth Anzualdo, as well as the conditions and repercussions of his disappearance. The audio, entitled “A Shout Breaks the Silence,” includes his sister Marly’s narration, making this a collaborative project. The audio was planned to commemorate Kenneth’s 47th birthday on June 13, 2015, the day the audio was made available. Distribution on social networks was designed to call attention to the 23 years that have passed since his disappearance.20 SoundCloud also allows a picture to accompany the audio; therefore, Marly chose and facilitated one of the scans I made. This image shows Kenneth in a school event when he was six years old, carrying the national flag in his home town of Chiquian, capital of the province of Bolognesi, in the department of Ancash – although this information was not included with the photo on the website. This photograph was chosen because it represents Kenneth’s childhood, his outgoing personality, and the love he felt for Chiquian, where he returned every year to celebrate local festivities. Other initiatives, however, required that the family photograph be used as an object. Such was the case of the exhibition Cantuta in our memory: 20 years in the history of Peru, presented in September 2012. As part of a wider project of museum curatorship commemorating representative cases of violence in our country that occurred in 1992, the exhibition included personal items, including family photographs, belonging to nine students and a professor who were disappeared – to humanize them in the eyes of visitors and foster memory in all generations.21 Nowadays, while there are many ways to work with these images – as the families themselves recognize – what I have seen again and again is that the photographs that most often travel the memory circuits mentioned above are the ID photos; over time they have become a record of family

20 The audio can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/pirataradio/un-grito-rompeel-silencio. 21 Statements by Karen Bernedo, the curator of the exhibition, can be found at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewovmeze9yw. On family photos, see minute 2:57.

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4 Screenshot of the audio shared by PirataRadio.

history and a concentration of various representations of the victim, both inside and outside the privacy the home. Photograph as Symbol, Photograph as Identity “I basically want people to know my daughter, so that they can see what she’s like, the way she was, so they remember her that way. That’s what I hope for when I carry her photo: she’s my daughter, this is her smile, this is her personality, remember her. […] It’s also a way to identify yourself: I’m her mother. Here are the two of us. She’s not gone, she’s with us.” (Norma Méndez, June 2015)

An ID photo is not like any other image, as it is used for identification purposes in the national document of identity (DNI for its acronym in Spanish); we could say that it is an image of a socially legitimized, institutional recognition. Writing about the Argentine dictatorships, Eva Camelli and Florencia Luchetti (2009) point out: “It is the gaze of the State at the human face. It is the registration of individuality in a community, the most fixed and crystallized delimitation of personal identity. It is, paradoxically, the image that became hegemonic in the representation of those who opposed that gaze of the State and challenged its dominant power. With these images, the demand to “give them back alive” [aparición con vida] was socially settled.” (Camelli/Luchetti 2009)

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In the cases of Enrique, Armando, Melissa, Dora, and Kenneth, the use of their ID photos does not symbolize political militancy, but the events of their disappearance and death; it also represents the activism of the families and their defense of human rights. Ernesto’s parents, on the other hand, use one of his last photos, and although it does not have the ID photo format, it serves the same representative function. It is important to remember that there is no one way of looking at the past. Instead, multiple memories occur when the past is activated in the present and whenever it is recalled in the future, thereby creating multiple individual and collective identities (Jelin 2012). Furthermore, the memories constructed from the past will depend on the present circumstances of the person doing the remembering (Durán 2006). The use of the ID photo was one of the first resources employed by family members to demand that police search for loved ones who had disappeared. In these circumstances, family photos are rather “informal,” and do not always facilitate proper facial identification. In addition, the ID photo is likely to be one of the last photographs ever taken of these young people, the closest to the facts of their disappearance. The photographs of Enrique, Armando, and Dora were facilitated by the university where they were studying; the photos had been taken for their university identification card just two months before they disappeared. Kenneth’s case was similar; his photograph had been taken for the same purpose and his copy was at home. As to Melissa, her photo is the one taken for her identification card at the newspaper where she worked; after her death, the image was provided to relatives. Finally, the image of Ernesto was taken by his father and found in a roll of 36 shots; the roll was developed after he disappeared.22 As mentioned above, the presence of the photograph marks the absence of the student, and does so in several ways. First, it provides the observer with a clear idea of what the missing student looked like. It also suggests a young life interrupted, and appeals to the personal history of the observer.23

22 This also indicates how the practice of photography and its use in our daily lives has changed over time. 23 In this regard, I should point out that one of the photos chosen by Ernesto Castillo’s parents, although not an ID photo – or perhaps precisely for this reason – made me remember my older brother, because of the color of his skin and hair, and because of the close relationship that he (evidently) had with his younger sister.

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On the other hand, these photographs offer the “illusion” of the students’ presence, that they are the ones who are demanding their rights. By taking the pictures with them, fathers, mothers, and siblings feel accompanied in their struggle. This presence is materialized in an enlarged and laminated copy of the ID photo, indicating the student’s name and date of disappearance. The card is then used as a pin or necklace, which makes it easy to transport (Figure 1). In this respect, the photograph also acts as a sort of investment that the family chooses to carry; on one hand, it acts as a visual strategy of protest that is part of their political agenda for memory: “The photo is always going to create memories, and for us that’s very important. […] At some point, there will always be someone looking at it” (Norma Méndez, June 2015). On the other hand, carrying these photos is an act of acknowledgment for family members, as well as for the general public; as a result, the image becomes a sort of document of identity for the person who carries it. In this way the photographs represent the students and what happened to them; they also represent the families and their commitment. Third, a sort of appropriation (or prolongation) of the life of the missing student occurs through the body and the person of their relatives, who assume responsibility for being their voice on the memory circuit. As Cromwell Castillo explains: “I’m going to be Ernesto now. Carrying him here [he points to his chest], I imagine that Ernesto is walking with me” (June 2015). It is a constant effort, not just as part of carrying out an agenda, but something that will always be part of the lives of these family members. As we can imagine, carrying the photo of their loved one is not a simple act. Even Cromwell Castillo had qualms about carrying it for many years, because it implied a humiliating act of victimization, due to the indifference of Peruvian authorities and society. Marly Anzualdo confirms this feeling: “Victim sounds like defeat” (June 2015). Carolina Huamán carried a photo for many years, and points out how hard that is to do: “We’re not there because we want to be there. I’d rather not be carrying it again, not for lack of love but because it’s a process that just will not close” (June 2015). Currently, Carolina carries the photo of her cousin Dora only on occasions where deemed necessary.24

24 The Cantuta case went through a judicial process that resulted in the sentencing of Alberto Fujimori to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity. After-

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A fourth dimension corresponds to understanding the ID photo as part of daily activities. It can easily be transported and generates the “illusion” of company; therefore, students’ family members always carry a laminated photo as part of their personal objects of daily use. Small in size, the photo is usually carried in the wallet, always ready for display in the public sphere. Meanwhile, the “illusion” of the presence of the person who is absent is also extended or transferred to the domestic space. Original ID photos, without lamination, are also part of everyday life. With respect to the experience described by Carolina Huamán, these photos do not indicate the date the student disappeared, and thus invite family members to remember their life and not their death. Nevertheless, they still serve the same “illusion”: “She’s my guide; I’m going with her. Although she’s no longer with us, by carrying her picture in my wallet, I look at it and think about her” (Carmen Oyague, June 2015).25 Other family members retain the original ID photo in albums, which implies a return to the home, where the image is added to the life history of the missing youth. Besides being preserved in photo albums or carried as personal items, photos of Enrique, Ernesto, Armando, Melissa, Dora, and Kenneth are also present in other areas of the house, framed on a living room table or hung as a picture on a wall. Their location makes them highly visible in the domestic space, which is turned into a memorial space. Mihály Hoppál calls these areas domestic “altars”:

wards, the Oyague family decided to stop carrying the photo as an act of denunciation and the search for justice. This leads us to reflect on the process of forgiveness and reconciliation. 25 Carrying ID photos of our loved ones in our wallets is a socially recognized habit or daily practice, although it is a choice mainly based on personal motivations and feelings such as love and nostalgia. In other words, the loss of a loved one does not necessarily imply carrying a picture in a wallet. However, in situations like those described here, this practice becomes essential, acquiring meanings and values that are part of agendas that go beyond the private sphere, just as occurs – as already pointed out –with family photographs. Therefore, the original ID photo not only creates the illusion of company, it also becomes a vehicle of family and political memory.

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5 Domestic altars in the homes of Enrique Ortiz (left) and Armando Amaro (right). Photographer: Mercedes Figueroa. “[…] where photographs of ancestors, grandparents, parents, husbands or wives who are deceased have been placed, and which can even be accompanied by crosses, candles, and other votive objects, setting up a sort of altar of family history, serving as a daily memorial of the one who is absent for those who are living.” (Hoppál 1989: 94, quoted in Ortiz 2005)

These domestic spaces of remembrance also grant a symbolic presence to family members who have disappeared, making them part of everyday life in the home and the family. They also provide information about the missing person to anyone who may visit. Therefore, similar to what we find in the more public context of denunciation, photographs symbolize the antithesis of absence in the private context. As we can see, there is an attempt to somehow erase the inexorable gap in time, connect the present with the past, and push for an impossible encounter (Durán 2006). The words of Raida Cóndor, Armando’s mother, exemplify in a moving, but powerful way, this personal quest: “When we go on tour, he’s the first one that goes in the bag. […] He goes everywhere with us” (June, 2015). Finally, while the motivations and meanings embodied by ID photos on designated memory circuits are clear, they are probably not the best representative of the missing student. Perhaps for denunciation and the pursuit of justice, but not for the story of a life. We see a clear example of this with Marly Azualdo’s selection of a photograph of her brother Kenneth as a child to accompany the audio “A Shout Breaks the Silence.” In the same

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vein, relatives of Enrique, Dora, Armando, and Melissa point to photos in which family members are present or those that represent important aspects of the young student’s life history. Cromwell Castillo, on the other hand, chose one of the last photos of his son Ernesto. In this photo – unlike the one most often used on memory circuits – he appears with a wide smile. By Way of Conclusion Throughout this essay, we have seen how certain types of images, in specific contexts, acquire new values that are different from those of their usual space of circulation or different from the purpose for which they were generated. First, my own presence as a researcher is a form of appropriation of family photos, using them as the starting point to problematize the category of victim, while also exploring their potential to diversify the forms in which memories about violence are expressed. In this appropriation, the family album presents itself as a methodology and a research site where I could identify some of the spaces – mainly of a public nature – in which these photographs circulate outside the home. These are analyzed in greater depth in the present article. The insertion of these photographs into the memory circuits that have been created over the years responds to different dynamics and dimensions of representation, in which past and present overlap (Durán 2006). In turn, the discourses constructed in these circuits were socially and politically framed around disputes for the truth about the past, which led to stigmatization and categorizations such as that of “victim.” Such representation dynamics allow the presence of the disappeared youth on two planes: (i) through the photographs that family members carry with them, which show faces and dates of disappearance or death; and (ii) through the bodies of relatives who, in their commemorative performance, somehow hope to embody and give voice to those who are absent. Likewise, digitization of photographic images makes it possible to replicate them. They can be reproduced in different media, both virtual and physical, and then appear in both institutional and civil society initiatives, allowing the family to retain the original photographs and other personal items of the missing student. Not only does digitization contribute to the widespread dissemination of the symbolic face of state terror and defense of human rights, but also to the widespread dissemination of political agendas for

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memory and representations of the “victim” in this particular context of violence. Finally, a return of sorts occurs as these symbolic photographs make their way to their place of origin: the home of the young student. Family members always carry these photographs with them, and they are part of daily life. Once again, this reflects the heartbreaking interplay between presence and absence, between past and present. But it also involves bringing the practice of memory about recent past into the realm of the private, just as these same photos once left the intimate realm of the family to go out to the streets and become public.

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Bibliography Barrantes, Rafael/Peña, Jesús (2006): “Narrativas sobre el conflicto armado interno en el Perú: la memoria en el proceso político después de la CVR”. In: Félix Reategui (ed.), Transformaciones democráticas y memorias de la violencia en el Perú, Lima: Colección Documentos de Trabajo. Serie Reconciliación número 2. Instituto de Democracia y Derechos Humanos – IDEHPUCP, pp. 16-40, February 2012 (http://idehpucp.pucp.edu.pe/images/publicaciones/tranformaciones_de mocraticas_y_memorias_violencia_peru.pdf). Broquetas, Magdalena (2006): “Fotografía y desaparecidos.” Paper at the Conference “Segundas Jornadas sobre Fotografía. La fotografía y sus usos sociales,” Montevideo, Uruguay, March 2010 (http://www.montevideo.gub.uy/fotografia/actividades/jornadas/segund as/materiales/broquetas.pdf). Camelli, Eva/Luchetti, Florence (2009): “La eternidad de la mirada devuelta. Acerca de la representación de la desaparición y la construcción de memoria(s) en la posdictadura argentina.” In: Revista Afuera. Estudios de Crítica Cultural, Año IV, número 7, June 2015 (http://www.revistaafuera.com/NumAnteriores/pagina.php?seccion=Art esVisuales&page=07.ArtesVisuales.Camelli.Luchetti.htm&idautor=158 ,%20159#T1). Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (2003): Informe final (http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php). Degregori, Carlos Iván (ed.) (2003): Jamás tan cerca arremetió lo lejos. Memoria y violencia política en el Perú, Lima: IEP/SSRC. Durán, Valeria (2006): “Fotografías y desaparecidos: ausencias presentes.” In: Cuadernos de Antropología Social número 24, pp. 131–144, August 2011 (http://www.scielo.org.ar/pdf/cas/n24/n24a07.pdf). Jelin, Elizabeth (2002): Los trabajos de la memoria, Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno. Ortiz García, Carmen (2005): “Fotos de familia. Los álbumes y las fotografías domésticas como forma de arte popular.” In: Carmen Ortiz García/Cristina Sánchez Carretero/Antonio Cea Gutiérrez (eds.), Maneras de mirar. Lecturas antropológicas de la fotografía, Madrid: CSIC, pp.189-209, April 2010, (http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/7764).

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Poole, Deborah/Rojas Pérez, Isaías (2012): “Fotografía y memoria en el Perú de la posguerra.” In: Gisela Cánepa (ed.), Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú, Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, pp. 263-303. Silva, Armando (1998): Álbum de familia: la imagen de nosotros mismos, Bogotá: Grupo Norma Editorial. Taylor, Diana (2001): “El espectáculo de la memoria: trauma, performance y política.” May 2006 (http://hemi.nyu.edu/archive/text/hijos2.html). Todorov, Tzvetan (2000): Los abusos de la memoria, Barcelona: Paidós.

Disputing Visual Memories in the Peruvian Andes The Case of Huancasancos, Ayacucho M ARÍA E UGENIA U LFE

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The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the period of violence and authoritarianism in Peru between 1980 and 2000, concluded that the social relationships between the state and society were broken, not only because of the violence, but also because of a deeply rooted, colonial heritage of discrimination, segregation, and racism. Indifference towards victims of violence was widespread throughout the country (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación 2003). Testimony, photography, and public hearings were important strategies and methodological tools for producing alternative historical narratives and making visible the victims of violence. In that vein, and while working on a research project on the issue of being a victim, we collected a large number of photographs in Huancasancos, a province and town in Ayacucho – the place most dramatically affected by violence.1 We wanted to move beyond the discourse on victim and victimhood, as well as that on violence. In their homes, we met with people who keep newspaper articles and photographs, as well as family photographs and more institutional images (for instance, communal work and the inauguration of the new school) from that period

1

Today “Huancasancos” refers to both a province and a town (capital of the province of the same name). However, the map of Peru was drawn differently in the early 1980s. The province of Huancasancos was not created until 1984, after the tragic events that took place there between 1982 and 1984. 1 Photography exhibit organized by the authors in Huancasancos. May 2014.

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of time. Based on a selection of images, in this paper we would like to highlight that what the villagers – in particular one group of people – did when they reconstructed the history of the civil war went far beyond the simplified “story of violence” that we have become so accustomed to hearing. Huancasancos, along with other villages in the Peruvian Andes, was not disconnected from the reality of the state. Institutions, public administration, and the market – almost every aspect of society – were connected to the state. The visual memory of Huancasancos is a clear example of these complicated connections and, more importantly, of a far more complicated reality than that of the war. To Imagine, To Remember Photography always implies someone’s perspective. Standing on a hilltop, we could see the town of Huancasancos. Located at the heart of the department of Ayacucho, Huancasancos is in the south-central Andes in Peru. Los Andes, an important school which was coopted by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) to spread its revolution, lies at one side of the main plaza. In the middle of the plaza is a small park that shows the four ayllus or social divisions in which basically all communal labor and local festivals are organized. Every ayllu has its own corner in the plaza. Next to the school is the new church, painted a bold shade of blue; the old church, built during the colonial era, was destroyed during the recent conflict. Next to the church are the offices of the mayor and the president of the community. We could see clear across to another hill, where the wreck of a graffiti-covered helicopter is all that remains of the military base once located there, vigilant of the small town. We stood looking – just looking and talking. This paper is about Huancasancos through the photographic lenses of its residents – pictures taken at different moments that speak about their history and their community, especially images that speak about life during wartime. This is a way to look inside Huancasancos, to see faces and places – the way they were back then. As we stood on top of the hill, the heat of the sun was so strong that even our hats and sunglasses could not protect us. The noise made it difficult to hear his voice. He stood up and began to show to us where Sendero Luminoso had entered Huancasancos – how they had climbed on top of the roofs trying to get into houses without being noticed. And how the villagers

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climbed on top of the roofs trying to escape. With his hand pointing to one side of the street underneath, he showed us where people hid from terror, and how a policeman had used a trick to stop them from the worst. Luckily the policeman was staying that night at his lover’s house on top of this same hill and was not killed with the others. Because of where he was located, he was able to blow his whistle and distract the attackers. Nilton Salcedo was the president of the Association of Victims Affected by Violence in the Province of Huancasancos (Asociación de Víctimas Afectadas por la Violencia de la Provincia de Huancasancos). He lost his parents in 1984 – both of them killed by Sendero Luminoso. He told us how other families survived, many of them having escaped just in time, while corpses accumulated in the plaza. He told us about despair, fear, and sadness with the strange tranquility of someone who had told that story many times. A story that usually stayed in Huancasancos. A story that he, as the representative of the other victims of Huancasancos, had told over and over again. Suddenly Nilton turned to us and pointed to the other side of the street where there was a photographer’s studio. This made him think of his uncle, one of the first photographers in town; for decades he had always been there with his camera at special occasions. Long before everyone had a camera in their phone, he had been an important man in the community, the one responsible for registering what people found relevant in their lives. Of course, having just been talking about the war, our first reaction was to ask about photographs from those years. We had been talking to Nilton about the events that occurred in Huancasancos in 1984. And he had never mentioned anything related to photographs from the time of the conflict in Huancasancos and the nearby villages. That day with Nilton, our conversation shifted towards the images. Initially, collecting photographs was not a part of our research. Our study focused on the condition of victimhood, the reparations program, and citizenship in post-Sendero Luminoso Peru. But after that day and that conversation, we ended up gathering images with the help of Nilton, who talked to friends and relatives and asked them to give their photographs to us. Since his uncle had been the town photographer some decades before, he had a special connection to the subject. Seeing how these images took on a new life was as important for Nilton as it was for us. Most of the images we gathered come from family albums and speak of daily life, of soccer

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teams, the election of the spring beauty queen, communal labor for the village, the construction of the new school, and the process of linderaje, the ritual walk that signals the borders of territory and reinforces communal ties. Many of the photographs we gathered are related to the school – in its fifty years of existence, Los Andes high school has educated villagers from all over the province of Huancasancos. Most photographs were taken with analog cameras and developed in local photography studios – none were professionally taken in the sense that we use the term today. We did not use the images to activate memories – we used them to return the results of our research on victimhood. We selected a small number to organize a photography exhibit on the central plaza of Huancasancos as a way to give back a little part of their own history so they could see themselves anew. Exhibiting Huancasancos Peru underwent a period of political violence and military repression between 1980 and 2000. In 2000 the transitional government of Valentín Paniagua approved the creation of a Truth Commission to investigate the years of violence. After Alejandro Toledo was elected president of Peru in democratic elections in 2001, he added the word “Reconciliation” to its name. That same year the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR in Spanish) was created, and in August 2003 the commissioners published its final report. In the narrative on the nation and its recent past, the Final Report of the CVR contains a special section dedicated to the region of Huancasancos that describes what happened there during the years of violence. The region of Huancasancos is comprised of the districts of Sancos, Sacsamarca, Lucanamarca, and Carapo. In the Final Report, the history of three districts – Sancos, Sacsamarca, and Lucanamarca – appear intertwined. Huancasancos, along with Cangallo and Vilcashuaman, was considered part of Sendero Luminoso’s Fundamental Committee Cangallo-Víctor Fajardo (Comité Zonal Fundamental Cangallo-Víctor Fajardo). The terrorist group used these communities as crucial vehicles for indoctrinating and training youth for armed conflict. Since the three districts were deemed important for their political project of a “new state,” members of Sendero Luminoso began arriving in the region in the late 1970s. By 1982, Sendero Luminoso declared the area to be “liberated,” which meant that it had assumed political control. The economy of

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Huancasancos was based on herding and pastures; due to its close proximity to the coast it was part of a burgeoning economic network, Huancasancos-Ica-Lima, which could explain part of its strategic value. Furthermore, Huancasancos was also the site of the only secondary school in the entire region, Colegio Los Andes, and high schools were used by Sendero Luminoso to spread their ideology. The region’s economic prosperity grew vis-à-vis a strong local elite, who shared in and rotated among public and communal offices. As stated in the CVR Final Report (2003) discontent grew, and in this context the ideology of Sendero Luminoso spread. By 1982 Huancasancos and the surrounding area were filled with militants, sympathizers, and the curious (curiosos). Soon after Sendero Luminoso took control of the region, the killings began. Early in 1983, Lucanamarca, Huancasancos, and Sacsamarca rebelled against Sendero Luminoso for having killed their local leaders. Sendero Luminoso responded with more death and massacres (committed in Lucanamarca on April 3, 1983; in Huancasancos on June 23, 1984; and in Sacsamarca on May 19-20, 1984). In 1984, a military base was installed in Huancasancos, followed by years of repression and more violence. Life was torturous and traumatic. Roughly those were the events. But the description of the events does not include its meaning – does not convey what those years meant for people – how life was lived under violence, how daily life continued under those circumstances. When we collected the photographs, we had no intention of organizing an exhibition. What we had in mind was something comparable to an archive – a visual archive that could help memories to flourish. The idea of the exhibit came later when we decided to speak to the mayor about the results of our research. It was a second moment in our research project. Authors have written about how photography as a technology fixes an instant and how it becomes a cultural artifact in the production and circulation of certain images about life (cf. Sontag 2003), and also how it has been used to activate memories (cf. Jelin 2012). In Peru, photography has also been one of the technologies privileged in the emergence of memory in public space and, as will be argued later, in the consolidation of certain images and cases over others (Ulfe 2013b). It was a photography exhibition, Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar (Yuyanapaq: To Remember), that was on display during the period when the CVR Final Report was delivered to the

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2 Edmundo Camana’s photograph by Óscar Medrano in Yuyanapaq. Photographer: Cynthia Milton.

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representatives of the Peruvian State in August 2003. Yuyanapaq is still on exhibit at the Museo de la Nación in Lima. It is uncertain whether it will eventually become part of the permanent collection of the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (Lugar de la Memoria, Tolerancia e Inclusion Social), the memory museum inaugurated in the city of Lima in December, 2015. Yuyanapaq is based principally on photographs taken by photojournalists who were sent to cover the war. The images clearly indicate that these photographers had not been based in the conflict zones, but that they had to move there. The exhibit was organized alongside the Final Report of the CVR, and is now perceived as the official visual memory of the period. Nancy Chapell and Mayu Mohanna, the curators, discussed the selection of images with CVR researchers, who had amassed thousands of photographs in the course of their work. Yuyanapaq has been the most visited photography exhibit ever in Peru. The intention of the exhibition was to speak to the senses. The exhibition narrative and its display activated our senses for what that visual language could say and move without words. Appealing to our emotions, the exhibit brings images of destruction, death, and pain into public culture by operating as a document – capturing the moment so that we are moved and feel empathy. Its display has been compared to a performance (Borea 2004), reintroducing the audience to the nation, its ruins, and its limits (Poole/Rojas 2012). A nation that is still centralized and urban was put on display by the photography exhibit; therefore, it was also questioned and problematized. Despite the efforts of the curators in organizing the exhibit, it remained Lima-centric. Few of the photojournalists were from the areas of devastation. Moreover, the only Quechua term used in the entire exhibit was that of the title – despite the fact that most of the Peruvians killed in the conflict were poor, rural, and indigenous (75 per cent of victims spoke an indigenous language). In addition, as an unforeseen consequence of the exhibit, some images and individual cases became iconic. Two hands cradling an ID photograph on the cover of the book of exhibition photographs; the ruins of a town hall and a man holding a poster of then-president Belaúnde upside down; the photographs of Uchuraccay taken just hours before the journalists – including the one who took the photographs – were killed; the images and voice of María Elena Moyano; the image of Edmundo Camana (or Celestino

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Ccente), a survivor of the Lucanamarca massacre; these are among the images that have circulated as referents and indexes of other histories and cases. The Camana case reveals the uses and abuses of memory (Ulfe 2013a). Camana’s photograph was taken by Caretas magazine photojournalist Oscar Medrano at the hospital in Ayacucho a few days after the tragic events in Lucanamarca (April 3, 1983). The image is that of a man who covers his head wound with a piece of white cloth. At the exhibit it was accompanied by a brief, general text: “Celestino Ccente, a peasant from Iquicha” (“Celestino Ccente, un campesino natural de Iquicha”). The terms “Iquicha” and “Iquichanos,” as Cecilia Méndez (2002) writes, were originally used in the 19th century to denote a savage Indian who opposed Independence – the common name for a peasant. Scared and lonely in the hospital, Edmundo Camana did not reveal his real name, but used a pseudonym. He was born near Huancasancos. On the day he was wounded, he was returning from tending his herd when he was confronted and attacked by Sendero Luminoso on their way to Lucanamarca. He fit the CVR profile of a victim: Quechua speaker, male, principally from Ayacucho (Figure 2). His image has been widely circulated as a symbol of all who were wounded – and in this process his image and his life have been de-historicized. Figuratively, he was killed twice: first, in the bloody events and then years later, when his case was the subject of public debate, it was used to criticize Yuyanapaq and, thus, the work of the CVR. Ill and alone, Camana was then brought to Lima in 2009, and died in the Military Hospital (Ulfe 2013b). During our stay, we met his family and relatives. His daughter no longer lives in Huancasancos, but in Ica, the provincial capital on the coast. His brother is the only member of his family who remains in their home town. Yuyanapaq, as an exhibition accompanying the results of the Truth Commission research, had an obvious and understandable bias. What the curators wanted to show through this display of pictures and sounds were the broken ties of Peruvian society – what had gone wrong and brought us to where we are today. And so the selection included images that did not display violence directly – there had been an important debate on how to avoid the so called “pornography of violence” – but, nevertheless, suggested it with every frame and shot. Photographs of particular individuals were selected to tell the story, and images of everyday life are almost absent from this account. These decisions in the selection of photographs responded to the main goal of the exhibition, but at the same time contributed to the

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construction of a particular image of the era in a way that was not always accepted by the protagonists. By concentrating on the atrocities of war and separating them from everyday life, Yuyanapaq constructed a narrative about the nation through the images that were selected and put on display (cf. Milton/Ulfe 2011; Poole/Rojas 2012). The difference between the photographs taken by Nilton’s uncle and those displayed in Yuyanapaq was that the latter primarily captured a precise moment – that of the violent event – whereas those of Huancasancos focused more on everyday experiences lived during times of violence. There are two ideas with regard to Yuyanapaq related to this issue: first, is that photojournalists always arrived after the violent act occurred, and their photographs displayed the horrors and consequences after the terrible act was perpetrated; and second, Yuyanapaq has helped to construct a visual geopolitical map of violence that anchors violent images to particular places. Thus, we are able not only to visualize the place, but also to imagine those who were victims and perpetrators. The photographs that we collected in Huancasancos described other aspects of life during wartime. One take, one gaze, and one family remembrance. These were printed images that show the flow of time, wind, sun, and dust. As such, they could be taken as “documents” or “traces of the real,” as they could “derive their truth-value from their indexical quality” (Saona 2014: 47). As such, we could consider these images as important documents that give some insight into the moment, capturing the instance of life and inscribing it in paper. But what should we do with those images? What do those images say about Huancasancos and its recent historical process? Who was portrayed in those images and who was left out? Didi-Huberman (2004: 55) says that it is important to imagine for remembrance to occur. The image works like memory; it brings to the present that which comes from the past. In doing so, the image fixes – holds – in a different language that which no longer exists. As Blanchot (1992) states, the image always comes after the object of representation – it is at a distance of and from it. As a technique, it separates the object from the subject, imparting a narrative and obliging us, the audience, to interpret it. This distance constitutes the significance and objectification of what is represented in the image. But, following Blanchot, we would like to argue that the image is not only the significance or meaning constructed to explain and comprehend it. It is also an extension of the subject/object it depicts –

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and, in that sense, an image has life of its own. For us, it was the community and its history that were bound together in those photographs – in what those images show, and in what they leave out of the picture. In the Southern Cone, several scholars have emphasized visual language and its sensorial dimension. Ludmila da Silva Catela, Mariana Giordano and Elizabeth Jelin (2010) work on the relationship that is built between the image as a memory device and the subject (the person). Their questions center on the processes of transmission and construction of memories, silences, and oblivions, and the (dis)encounters that happen when images and photography activate these processes. These authors argue that images are memory devices that activate, circulate, and promote the emergence of remembrances. How do images show the event as a social fact? Jelin (2012) has also used photography as a research technique, which often has been its place in social science research. She used photography in her 1984-1986 field research, published in the book Podría Ser Yo [It Could Be Me] in which images prompted people to speak about social conditions in their barrios (Jelin/Vila 1986). There, photography was valued as a model for objectivity and “true” representation of reality (Jelin 2012: 58). Sontag (2003: 15) would argue that photography mediates between reality and how we see, apprehend, approach, and live in that which we call “the real,” and that by selecting a moment and a glance, a sensory approach (therefore, meaningful) to the world is manifested. Photography captures a moment, but it is a moment from the standpoint of the photographer – it is his/her selection of where to focus, so it is not neutral or empty of significance. It reveals the vision and subjectivity of the one who “clicks.” “Clicking” is also a way of narrating a version of things – an image constitutes and creates a discourse, and then becomes a discourse about itself that allows memory to perform (Van Alphen 1999; Jelin 2012). Photography circulates and is used – the disappeared would no longer be disappeared without their relatives and their ID photographs as testimonies that they had existed (cf. Figueroa 2012). We had been doing fieldwork in Huancasancos for over a year – with many interruptions – and working in the region for almost three years (2011-2013) when we started gathering images. Besides relying on Nilton’s assistance, we involved the mayor’s office and the city council in collecting photos and helping us to convince people that every photograph would be given back after it was digitized. With the help of local journalists, we even

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did a radio announcement in Quechua and Spanish, encouraging people to lend us their images. We formed an archive with the images gathered. Though incomplete, it showed what Guha (1999) describes as the “bits of history,” the little histories. Those that have names and remembrances: “There is Celedonia!” said a woman looking at the photograph of the 1973 Spring Queen (Reina de Primavera) of Huancasancos. The Queen was Ninfa Martínez Parián. Celedonia stands by her side, all proud and pretty in her pink dress (Figure 3). In 1987 Ninfa Alanya (Figure 4), who is now married to Nilton, was chosen as beauty queen in Huancasancos. But instead of receiving the honors from friends and teachers, it was an army official who invested her with the title. She grew up in Huancasancos, attended the school for girls, and in 1983 transferred to Los Andes for her secondary education. She was the only woman left in her school class. All of her girlfriends had moved away from Huancasancos. None of the teachers remained. Basically, she remembers some relatives and old villagers who became teachers – like Sr. Federico González, a notable man who was involved in the creation of Los Andes but was not an educator. She recalled the story of one of her teachers who was mentally ill and sometimes turned violent with other students. She claimed that she had not received a proper education due to the wartime complications. With everything that was happening, and taking into account the school’s pivotal role in the propagation of Sendero Luminoso’s militant ideology, it does not come as a surprise that the last thing the military would want to do, once installed in Huancasancos, would be to concern itself with the quality of education provided there. Ninfa began attending the school right after José López Liceras, the math teacher at Los Andes and an active member of Sendero Luminoso, was killed in Huancasancos (February 20, 1983). By October 1982, Sendero Luminoso had claimed the neighboring villages Lucanamarca and Sacsamarca as “liberated” – which meant that these villages were already under its control. There is no clear information as to when they claimed control of Huancasancos. The CVR Final Report (2003) also mentions that by late 1982, Sendero Luminoso was already in Huancasancos. “Popular tribunals” (“juicios populares”) against cattle owners (gamonales) began to be held around the same time. Between 1982 and early 1983 there was no police or state representation in the region. And, early in 1983 these same

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3 Ninfa Martínez Parián as Spring Queen, Huancasancos 1973. Courtesy: Nilton Salcedo.

communities rebelled against Sendero Luminoso, killing their leaders. It was a communal decision to take the life of López Liceras. There is no clear information about when the army opened the military base in Huancasancos or when it left. Of course, official records exist, but for the people of Huancasancos this is a confusing time, with the armed forces of the State coming and going all the time. Policeman are mixed up with soldiers in contradictory narratives that center more on the presence of a “State-Other” than on actual functions and nomenclature. The helicopter still stands at the top of the hill as a reminder that they were there. The history of Huancasancos is filled with memories of the school, especially those regarding violence. Misael, one of the teachers who stayed in Los Andes all those years, remembers how the military would abruptly interrupt classes at any time to check on what the teachers were teaching. During the years of violence most Peruvians learned to distrust anyone connected to a university, especially those in the social sciences and humanities (because leaders of the terrorist group had come from those departments). But distrust of teachers and students was focused on war zones such as Huancasancos, zones that witnessed the rise of Sendero Luminoso among the student population at the high schools.

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4 Ninfa Alanya as Queen, Huancasancos 1987. Courtesy: Nilton Salcedo.

Meanwhile, Los Andes – with all its flaws and complexities – continued to function. Even though the military saw them as potential terrorists, the students were still young people who needed to get their minds away from what was happening around them. Their soccer matches were constantly interrupted by soldiers, but the teams kept on going. This is a part of history that the photographs do not show. Some of the boys who appear in photographs (Figure 5) of the school soccer team are no longer in Huancasancos. Some escaped to the coastal region and never came back. Some were killed by Sendero Luminoso, others by the military. Some disappeared and their families never heard from them again. But this is not what the people of Huancasancos remembered when they saw these photographs displayed in the exhibit on the main plaza. They saw a kid who was funny, another who would always get in trouble, and a third who was responsible for most of the team’s victories, since he was such a good player. The war continued, but so did life in the community. Since the beginning of the war, the school changed its location three times. Officially it was founded in 1963, but classes began in 1964. Before the creation of the school, youngsters from Huancasancos and the surrounding area would have to go to Ayacucho to study or to cities on the coast, even to Lima. The school was created to provide secondary education for men and women; it

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5 Soccer team, Huancasancos ca. 1963. Courtesy: Nilton Salcedo.

was the product of much effort and many trips back and forth to the city by the local elite. It opened on the plaza, in a small house not adapted for such purposes; the teacher Misael describes it as inadequate for teaching, studying, and even as housing. Besides, some courses lacked professors and there were not enough students to open more than one section. Nevertheless, the young Huancasanquinos already studying on the coast returned to the village to enable the school to meet the required matriculation rates. From the central plaza the school was later moved to another location – another mud-brick construction. This was the school where Ninfa studied. This was the school that bore witness to the wartime destruction. By 2000 a new school had been built. An image of the “first stone” and the techado, the Andean ceremony marking the installation of the roof, shows how important this event was for the new Huancasancos. Moreover, construction of the new school coincided with the reconstruction of the central plaza. A photograph of the architectural model of the new plaza signals new times to come. It shows a representation of el mixto, the truck-bus that still runs the route Huancasancos-Ica. Huancasancos and the surrounding towns, Lucanamarca and Sacsamarca, were never isolated, distant villages. Even during wartime, connections and trips to coastal cities and to Ayacucho were constant.

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6 Soccer team, Huancasancos September 1972. Courtesy: Nilton Salcedo.

But let’s take another look back at the 1980s. The school was the center of violence: it was there that, as stated in the CVR Final Report, students were indoctrinated in the ideology of Sendero Luminoso, and it was there that the military focused its “pacification” efforts. The rebellion of the community against Sendero Luminoso also forced the difficult question of what to do with the youngsters who repented having been involved in the party. Many of them were teenagers still in high school, sons and daughters of the reinstalled authorities who now had to decide on their future in Huancasancos. So, it does not come as a surprise that they were pardoned. The liberados (literally, “the freed ones”) were granted a fresh start after a public admission of their past errors and a firm promise to not get involved in “politics” again. Ninfa was 13 years old in 1983, and some of the liberados were her classmates and neighbors. One year after Ninfa’s election as the spring queen, on June 23-24, 1984, Sendero Luminoso launched a counteroffensive in Huancasancos and killed at least 16 people (accounts vary widely as to the number killed). State soldiers (soldados) were sure that the rebels had support within the community and that the liberados were somehow involved. The nightmare at the school continued, with the military assuming complete control and treating students as terrorists in the making. Professor

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Misael explains that teachers were under constant surveillance. Control was exercised with violence. He describes how humiliating it was to be a teacher and to have to teach with materials provided by the army. The Los Andes library was burned twice for containing books that should not be read. The soldados could take control of any class to ensure that what was being taught did not reflect on social reality or give students any “wrong ideas.” In this context, Ninfa cannot understand how the current Integral Program of Reparations works. She wonders why she cannot receive compensation for not having been properly educated.2 Maybe none of her close relatives was killed in the war, but she feels damaged all the same, damaged by the treatment that she, as a student, received in her own community. Much has been written about conducting anthropological research on violence. Theidon (2013) writes about the bond and compromise that is created between researcher and subject – the victims. As researchers we cannot assume a distant and apolitical approach; people who have suffered from violence demand more from us than our solidarity. They ask that we take their side, so that we can understand and give voice to their suffering. In order to return part of our research back to the village we decided to organize the devolution of the research results. And we did so in three parts: a short video documentary on the history of Los Andes for its 50th Anniversary, a short written text with the main conclusions of our research, and a photography exhibition on the main plaza. Out of Focus Electricity was against us. Everything was prepared: we had the mayor’s permission to organize the exhibition, we managed to print the photographs and obtain wooden stands to hold the images. We were helped by several municipal officials. The salón consistorial – the main room on the second floor of the town hall where meetings take place in Huancasancos – was packed. The mayor was already there. He introduced us and we began with the text. Discourses are always important and ritualistic in the Andes. But when we wanted to play the documentary about the school, a blackout oc-

2

The Programa Integral de Reparaciones was created in 2004, but the first disbursements were not made until 2011 (see Ulfe 2013a).

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curred. So, we had to go down to the plaza to visit the exhibition, changing the order of the program that we had prepared with such care. We had collected a considerable number of images – of more than 50 images we chose 35 to exhibit. And with those selected, we created a narrative: to create a space for the villagers to look at themselves and through the images to look back to their daily lives, their communal labor, the school soccer teams, the beauty pageant contests, basically how life had been lived. Even if it was not our primary intention, we created an archive. In our archive, as in all archives, there are certain histories that persist over others. Mbembe (2002) describes the archive and archival production as always related to the power of the State. Its materiality is related to institutions and documents, which, as a form of “cronophagy” (Mbembe 2002: 23), shed light on some issues and peoples while others are made invisible. For instance, Carlos Aguirre (2009) questions the methodology used by the CVR research team to gather testimonies among indigenous populations. Paraphrasing, the author calls attention to the following question: if almost 75 per cent of those who died during the armed conflict (69.280 persons) spoke a language other than Spanish, for what reason then, had testimonies been taken in Spanish or translated into Spanish? The CVR Final Report provides important historical information about the causes of violence – it describes how the armed conflict was part of a larger historical process that affected individuals, entire families, and ethnic communities. Even if the main actor was Sendero Luminoso, as they were the ones that had declared war against the State, other armed groups, along with the State and the Armed Forces, responded with more violence (Degregori 2015: 60-66). The CVR research is mainly based on testimony, which as Ragas (2013) has assertively pointed out, provoked a methodological and theoretical challenge to the work of Peruvian historians, who had mainly been used to consult archival documents from a distant (mainly colonial) past. The CVR documentation and testimonies formed an archive, which is kept on the second floor at the Ombudsman’s Office in downtown Lima. These testimonies could also be considered as symbolic forms of reparation, because for these Peruvians it was the first time they had exposed their lives and personal histories to state officials. But as Aguirre (2009) points out, most of the information gathered was either in Spanish or translated into Spanish, the dominant language. This is a way that “cronophagy” works: only some

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get to tell their stories, whereas others are silenced. And that is how the CVR worked in the communities. A group of researchers would arrive and announce the upcoming work of the CVR; another group would remain and register testimonies – but those giving testimony had to approach the CVR group. This meant that it was mainly those with authoritative voices (members of the local elite, leaders, official voices and representatives, school teachers, and authorities) providing testimonies. Women, peasants, those living on the outskirts of villages, or those who were not residing in the communities at the time the information was gathered, were not. Histories are constructed. As Trouillot (1995) says, there are actors, agents, and subjects who participate in unequal relations of power. Their voices are sometimes silenced and fossilized, while other voices remain vibrant. They are the ones that are heard. Then the regidor (member of the city council) came to us, and with a soft voice told us that there were people missing in the photographs. That it looked like only some of the residents of Huancasancos were represented in our selection, and that people could interpret that as an indication of biased research. But photography is a technology of power: it is expensive and not available to everybody, especially in the years before cell phones or digital cameras. Those portrayed were mainly elite members of the community. Of course, it could be seen as a problem of selection, as can anything involving photography. The photographs were taken because someone found a particular moment worthy of being recorded. In collecting photos, we asked for what was important to them, and they selected not only the images that met their definitions of “importance,” but also those that they thought we would find important. We could peel back the layers of selection one by one, as if it were an onion, and still keep on going.

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Bibliography Aguirre, Carlos (2009): “¿De quién son estas memorias? El archivo de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación del Perú.” In: Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 46, pp. 135-166, Köln: Böhlau. Blanchot, Maurice (1992): “Las dos versiones de lo imaginario.” In: Maurice Blanchot, El espacio literario, Barcelona: Paidós, pp. 243-252. Borea, Giuliana (2004): “Yuyanapaq. Activando la memoria en una puesta en escena para recordar.” In: Illapa Revista del Instituto de Investigaciones Museológicas y Artísticas 1/1, pp. 57-68. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (2003): Informe final (http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php). Da Silva Catela, Ludmila/Giordano, Mariana/Jelin, Elizabeth (eds.) (2010): Fotografía e identidad. Captura por la cámara – devolución por la memoria, Buenos Aires: Nueva Trilce. Degregori, Carlos Iván (2015): Heridas abiertas, derechos esquivos. Derechos humanos, memoria y Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. Obras escogidas IX, Lima: IEP. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2004): Imágenes pese a todo. Memoria visual del Holocausto, Barcelona: Paidós. Figueroa, Mercedes (2012): “‘Fue así como se fue’: álbum fotográfico familiar como espacio para representar y reconocer a las víctimas de la violencia en el Perú.” Master’s thesis in Visual Anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Guha, Ranajit (1999): Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Durham: Duke University Press. Jelin, Elizabeth (2012): “La fotografía en la investigación social: algunas reflexiones personales.” In: Memoria Social 16/33, pp. 54-67. Jelin, Elizabeth/Vila, Pablo (1986): Podría ser yo. Los sectores populares en imagen y palabra, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor/Cedes. Mbembe, Achille (2002): “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In: Carolyn Hamilton/Verne Harris/Jane Taylor/Michele Pickover/Graeme Reid/Razia Saleh (eds.), Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 19-26. Méndez, Cecilia (2002): El poder del nombre, o la construcción de identidades étnicas y nacionales en el Perú: Mito e historia de los iquichanos, Documento de Trabajo 115, Lima: IEP.

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Milton, Cynthia/Ulfe, María Eugenia (2011): “Promoting Peru: Tourism and Post-Conflict Memory.” In: Ksenija Bibija/Leigh Payne (eds.), Accounting for Violence. Marketing Memory in Latin America, Durham: Duke University Press. Poole, Deborah/Rojas Pérez, Isaías (2012): “Fotografía y memoria en el Perú de la posguerra.” In: Gisela Cánepa Koch (ed.), Imaginación visual y cultura en el Perú, Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, pp. 263-303. Ragas, José (2013): “Los historiadores y el Informe final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Perú, 2003-2013).” In: Revista Argumentos 7/4 (http://www.revistaargumentos.org.pe/hemos_avanzado.html). Saona, Margarita (2014): Memory Matters in Transitional Peru, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, Susan (2003): Ante el dolor de los demás, Buenos Aires: Alfaguara. Theidon, Kimberly (2013): Intimate Enemies. Violence and Reconciliation in Peru, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (1995): Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press. Ulfe, María Eugenia (2013a): ¿Y después de la violencia que queda? Víctimas, ciudadanos y reparaciones en el contexto post-CVR en el Perú, Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Ulfe, María Eugenia (2013b): “Dos veces muerto: la historia de la imagen y vida de Celestino Ccente o Edmundo Camana.” In: Revista Memoria y Sociedad 17/34, pp. 81-90. Van Alphen, Ernst (1999): “Nazism in the Family Album: Christian Boltanski’s Sans Souci.” In: Marianne Hirsch (ed.), The Familial Gaze, London: University Press of New England.

Contributors

Gisela Cánepa Koch is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and the founding Director of the Master’s Program in Visual Anthropology. She has extensively researched and published on Andean ritual and festive events as public arenas for the configuration of regional and national identities. Her current research projects on city and nation branding in Peru discuss neoliberalism as a cultural regime. In the field of visual anthropology, she has researched the history and the ethnographic imagination of visual anthropology in Peru, the configuration of memory in the context of political violence, and the uses of media in politics. Among her major publications are Imaginación Visual y Cultura en el Perú (2011); and the articles “Nation Branding: The Re-foundation of Community, Citizenship, and the State in the Context of Neoliberalism in Perú” (2013); and “Authenticity, Migration and Visual Reproduction: De-essentializing and De-localizing Identity in Andean Religious Rituals (2006). She has also produced four documentaries on rituals and religious festivities in the Andes for the Ethnographic Video Series and the CD-ROM Music and Ritual in the Peruvian Andes. Mercedes Figueroa has a master’s degree in Visual Anthropology and is a graduate in Social Sciences, specializing in Anthropology of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). She has worked in the public and private sectors, in addition to teaching and researching in the areas of urban studies, visual anthropology, memory, and cultural heritage. Currently she teaches in the master’s program in Visual Anthropology at the PUCP and works as a consultant to the Peruvian Ministry of Education. Her publica-

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tions include the article “Graffiti limeño: una forma juvenil de transitar y conocer la ciudad” (2011). Michael Kraus is Akademischer Rat at the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn. He studied ethnology, comparative religious studies, and sociology at the universities of Tübingen, Guadalajara, and Marburg. After completing his studies, he worked as a research assistant at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg and the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. He has curated exhibitions for various museums (e.g., the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin). His research focuses on the indigenous cultures of Amazonia, visual anthropology, the history of anthropology, museum studies and curatorial practices, and material culture studies. Recent publications include: Quo vadis, Völkerkundemuseum? Aktuelle Debatten zu ethnologischen Sammlungen in Museen und Universitäten (co-edited with Karoline Noack, 2015); Exploring the Archive. Historical Photography from Latin America. The Collection of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (co-edited with Manuela Fischer, 2015); and the article “Perspectivas múltiples. El intercambio de objetos entre etnólogos e indígenas en las tierras bajas de América del Sur” (2014). Ingrid Kummels is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Institute for Latin American Studies (LAI) at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and the United States, focusing on migration, transnational family relations, and community building as well as media and visual anthropology. As a filmmaker she co-authored several films with Manfred Schäfer, among them a documentary in Peru co-authored with Asháninka and Matsiguenga, In Green Heaven (1989). Among her major publications in the field of visual anthropology is Espacios mediáticos: cultura y representación en México, Berlin: Edition Tranvía, which she edited in 2012. Her publication credits include the article “Indigenous Long-distance Runners and the Globalisation of Sport: The Tarahumara (Rarámuri) in the Photography of the Sports Reporter Arthur E. Grix in the 1930s” (2015). Her research currently examines the use of photography, video, radio, and television in diversified fields of autonomous media production, circulation, and consumption between Mexico and the USA. Publication of Transborder Media

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Spaces: Ayuujk People’s Video-making between Mexico and the USA is currently in preparation. Ximena Málaga Sabogal is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at New York University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history, both from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). She has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Puno, Ayacucho and Cuzco (Peruvian Andean region). Her current research projects include “Reparing Citizenships,” an inquiry into the policies and politics of economic compensations in post-war Ayacucho, and “Global Agendas, Local Translations,” a study on the links between the global discourse on indigenous peoples and the “Consulta Previa” law in Espinar, Peru. She is working on the book Reparando ciudadanías: estrategias y sentidos de reconocimiento en Ayacucho post CVR, along with María Eugenia Ulfe. Mariana da Costa A. Petroni is currently completing her postdoctoral studies at Universidade Estadual de Campinas where, in connection with La'grima (Laboratório Antropológico de Grafia e Imagem), she researches biographies and narratives of Brazilian Indigenous leaders. She received her master’s degree at CIESAS, Mexico, where she worked on images produced by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista in Mexico. She produced and directed the documentary Voz....es. Una historia de tres lenguas (2014) and curated various photo exhibitions. She has published the following articles: “Fotografiar al Indio. Un breve estudio sobre la antropología y la fotografía mexicanas” (2009) and “Anotações sobre a Autobiografia de um líder indígena” (2013). Aura Lisette Reyes is an anthropologist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She received her master’s degree in history from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is co-director of the research group on Anthropology and History of Anthropology in Latin America (COLCIENCIAS, Colombia) and DAAD fellow with the research project “German Travelers in Colombia and Musealization of the Indigenous in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century.” Her research interests revolve around anthropological theory and the history of anthropology, with a special emphasis on the standardization of

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the discipline in the early 20th century. She has published several articles on these subjects in the journals Baukara, Antípoda, and Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades, among others. María Eugenia Ulfe is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences and Director of the master’s program in Anthropology and the master’s program in Visual Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Peru focusing primarily on material culture and representations of memory, transitional justice, violence, and politics. She has published Danzando en Ayacucho: Música y ritual del Rincón de los Muertos (2004); Mirando la Esfera Pública Peruana desde la Cultura (co-edited with Gisela Cánepa, 2006); Cajones de la memoria: la historia reciente del Perú en los retablos andinos (2011); and ¿Y después de la violencia que queda? Víctimas, ciudadanos y reparaciones en el contexto post-CVR en el Perú (2013). And, with Ximena Málaga Sabogal, she is working on a new book, Reparando ciudadanías: estrategias y sentidos de reconocimiento en Ayacucho post CVR.