Discursive Formation,Ethnographic Encounter,Photographic Evidence: The Centenary of Durkheim's Basic Forms of Religious Life and the Anthropological Study of Australian Aboriginal Religion in His Time

Historical research on the work of Émile Durkheim has often been confined to textual analysis aiming to reconstruct his research in the context of anthropological discourses at the turn of the 20th century. As radical changes in the visual culture of the late 19th century shaped the formation of anthropology as an academic discipline, the ambition of this article is to elaborate the ways Durkheim's use of ethnographic data and visual material formed the foundation of the theoretical and methodological design of his approach to religion. By tracing features in his Basic Forms that emphasize visual material and prioritize religious practice, I submit that the photographic evidence given in Spencer and Gillen's account of Aboriginal religion allowed Durkheim to theorize religion primarily through ritual. Photography, as a visual means of representation, enhanced the study of religion by focusing on ritual without necessarily demanding consideration of its mythical narratives and cosmological accounts. Based on a thorough analysis of his Basic Forms, this article argues that Durkheim used the photographs of the Aborigines of Central Australia systematically and that this use of photographs consequently guided his ethnographic depiction and his selection of theoretical concepts and methodological procedures.     

Photography as a research tool

This paper attempts to delineate a research design and method for using the photograph as a research tool. An analysis of the photograph's research suitability will consider its ability to structure “articulated visual statements” of the community and to generate “explanatory models” for analysis and interpretation. A significant aspect of the study is the material it offers for a discussion on an important methodological dimension for acquiring knowledge through visual research data. The question is not whether to use photographs as research tools, but how to fit the photograph into the research design and process.     

More to it than meets the eye: Photo‐Eli citation amongst the Batak of Sumatra

Photo‐elicitation was utilized by the author in the Batak area of North Sumatra, Indonesia, to obtain information on Batak textiles stored in European museums. This article examines the kinds of interaction which occurred between the anthropologist, owner of the photographs, and the viewers of the photographs, from whom responses were being elicited. The data collected demonstrate that, regardless of the edge on reality that photographic documents appear to hold, the kind of information they elicit is subject to the same interpretive pitfalls as information collected in the field in other ways. While hardly a new insight, it holds important implications for salvage projects, such as the documentation of material culture, in which photo‐elicitation is frequently made to serve.     

What works in the field? A comparison of different interviewing methods in ethnobotany with special reference to the use of photographs

Ethnobotanists use a variety of interview techniques to collect ethnobotanical data. Drawing upon the results from a quantitative ethnobotanical study in five Yuracaré and Trinitario communities in the Bolivian Amazon, the pros and cons of the following methods are evaluated: (1) interviews in situ during transects, walk-in-the-woods, and homegarden sampling; and (2) interviews ex situ with fresh plant material, voucher specimens, or plant photographs as reference tools. Although the systematic use of plant photographs for ethnobotanical interviews is poorly documented in literature, the results show that indigenoùs participants in our study recognize significantly more plant species from photographs than from voucher specimens. It is argued that, especially in remote and isolated study sites, photographs might be advantageous over voucher specimens.     

Visual preference in a human-reared agile gibbon (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Hylobates agilis</Emphasis>)

Visual preference was evaluated in a male agile gibbon. The subject was raised by humans immediately after birth, but lived with his biological family from one year of age. Visual preference was assessed using a free-choice task in which five or six photographs of different primate species, including humans, were presented on a touch-sensitive screen. The subject touched one of them. Food rewards were delivered irrespective of the subject’s responses. We prepared two types of stimulus sets. With set 1, the subject touched photographs of humans more frequently than those of other species, recalling previous findings in human-reared chimpanzees. With set 2, photographs of nine species of gibbons were presented. Chimpanzees touched photographs of white-handed gibbons more than those of other gibbon species. The gibbon subject initially touched photographs of agile gibbons more than white-handed gibbons, but after one and two years his choice patterns resembled the chimpanzees’. The results suggest that, as in chimpanzees, visual preferences of agile gibbons are not genetically programmed but develop through social experience during infancy.     

On the materials of mats: thinking through design in a Melanesian society

This article examines the selective use of plant materials in design in Melanesia. It explores – through an analysis of pandanus leaf mats in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea – how makers select fibres on the basis of their capacity to express social relations to varying temporalities before their natural decay. J.J. Gibson's theory of affordance and Donald Norman's concept of mapping are critically applied for this purpose. This approach emphasizes how social and temporal relations are condensed into objects, and refocuses anthropological attention towards materials and their affordances in the production of material culture.     

Piercing transfigurations: Representations of suffering in Cyprus

This paper explores representations of suffering in Cyprus, a divided island. It examines differences between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in their official publicity/propaganda photographic material in representing the issue of missing persons in Cyprus. It attempts to show that the differences are relatable not just to their different persuasive strategies, but also to different approaches to photography, to experience and memory. For the Greek Cypriots, the sacrifice of the person has to be represented as an absent body, the quintessential example being Christ. By contrast, for the Turkish Cypriots it is the presence of a (dead) body, the body of the dead hero/fighter, that signifies a sacrifice and transforms him into a shehit (martyr). Such differences can be related to differences between the two groups in the political fabulation of the past and its appeal to “memory” and “experience”. The Turkish Cypriots because of their pressing political problems, especially between 1963–70 when they tended to view their survival as being at stake, use photographs in a relatively “realist” matter‐of‐fact way although their aim is highly emotionally charged. Greek Cypriots use photographs as representations of what is in effect an iconic predicament: representation as participating in some fundamental way in that which it represents. After examining the predicament of depicting suffering through photography, the paper suggests that to respond effectively to suffering we may have to approach it not through the seductive realism of the photograph but through its means of representing the symbolic and the imaginary.     

Telling a Tale: Margaret Mead's Photographic Portraits of Fa'amotu,a Samoan Tāupou

In 1925 Margaret Mead spent 10 days in High Chief Ufuti's household in the village of Vaitogi, Tutuila, before sailing to Ta'u where she conducted most of her research on Samoan adolescence. In Vaitogi, Mead took many photographs of Fa'amotu, Ufuti's t # upou daughter, several of which appeared in Coming of Age in Samoa . This article examines a number of intertwined issues of visual representation which may have prompted Mead to use a disproportionate number of pictures of Fa'amotu in early editions of her book. Mead's approach to photographic representation and issues such as collaboration, performance, typicality, marketability, anonymity, and acknowledgement are examined through her photographs and writings.     

Picturing Culture: The Photography of Muttappan teyyam between 1920 and Today

Three different appropriations of a 1928 photograph from South India allow insights into German anthropology in the 1920s, contemporary German museum practices, and present-day ritual forms in northern Kerala. Juxtaposing these readings as what Edwards named evidential strategies, power of representation, and re-experiencing demonstrates the possibilities and limits of visual representation. The article contributes to a Picturing Culture debate that considers entrenched visual economies of archived photographs, and opts for an understanding of different aspects of cultural knowledge transported through photographs.     

Use of exclusion by a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) during speech perception and auditory-visual matching-to-sample

An adult female chimpanzee showed responding through use of exclusion in an auditory to visual matching-to-sample procedure. The chimpanzee had previously learned to associate specific visuographic symbols called lexigrams with real world referents and the spoken English words and photographs for those referents. On some trials, an unknown spoken English word was presented as the sample, and the match choices could consist of photographs or lexigrams that already were associated with known English words as well as unknown lexigrams or photos of objects without associated lexigrams. The chimpanzee reliably avoided choosing known comparisons for these unknown samples, instead relying on exclusion to choose comparisons that were of unknown lexigrams or photographs of items without associated lexigram symbols.     

‘Real Relationships’: Sociable Interaction,Material Culture and Imprisonment in a Secure Psychiatric Unit

Research into the character of social relationships in psychiatric inpatient facilities has focused on face-to-face interaction between individuals and within groups in the communal areas of wards. Using theories developed in material culture and media studies, this article argues that patients’ relationships to goods, namely, photographs, cards and gifts from family or friends, televisions and radios, are important mediators and constituents of sociability. In an ethnographic study of a medium-secure psychiatric unit, I show how these goods are put to use in private space in ways that reflect and mitigate the constraints of incarceration and stigmatization. The data were derived from 3 months of participant observation on a male and a female ward at a unit in the south of England, including a series of anthropological interviews with 19 patients. This article highlights two important findings. First, potentially isolating activities are perceived by patients as sociable, in that watching television and looking at photographs in their room helps to counter feelings of loneliness and isolation. Second, potentially sociable activities, exchanging goods or watching the communal television, are often practiced in such a way as to maintain distance between patients in acknowledgment of the constrained and volatile nature of these relationships. This suggests that patients aspire to retain a sense of the artificiality of their situation, preferring to confine their notion of ‘real’ relationships to those that exist outside the institution.     

From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact

In culture contact archaeology, studies of social identities generally focus on the colonized–colonizer dichotomy as the fundamental axis of identification. This emphasis can, however, mask social diversity within colonial or indigenous populations, and it also fails to account for the ways that the division between colonizer and colonized is constructed through the practices of colonization. Through the archaeology of material culture, foodways, and architecture, I examine changing ethnic, racial, and gendered identities among colonists at El Presidio de San Francisco, a Spanish-colonial military settlement. Archaeological data suggest that military settlers were engaged in a double material strategy to consolidate a shared colonial identity, one that minimized differences among colonists and simultaneously heightened distinctions between colonists and local indigenous peoples.     

Airborne sperm of Conocephalum conicum (Conocephalaceae)

We have obtained the first momentary photographs of sperms just as they are discharged from the antheridium of a liverwort, Conocephalum conicum, and have succeeded in monitoring the airborne sperms of bryophytes under field conditions. Airborne sperm of liverworts seems to be an effective strategy for raising the efficiency of fertilization between male and female plants separated in a drought environment. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Using aerial photography to investigate evidence of feeding by bowhead whales

Aerial photographs were analyzed to investigate the feeding habits of the Bering‐Chukchi‐Beaufort (BCB) population of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), particularly epibenthic feeding near Barrow, Alaska. Evidence of epibenthic feeding was based on mud visible on the dorsal surface of whales, resulting from feeding near the seafloor. Other cues used to assess feeding were an open mouth or the presence of feces in photographs. Over 3,600 photographs were analyzed including photos from surveys in spring and late summer and in both the western and eastern Beaufort Sea. Of all the photographs analyzed, 64% were scored as definitively muddy. In spring, ratios ranged from a low of 27% in 2003 to a high of 76% in 2004. When all May sample sets off Barrow were combined (1985, 1986, 2003, 2004), there was a significant difference (t‐test, P < 0.004) between the proportion of muddy juveniles to the proportion of muddy adults, with muddy adults being more common. The Barrow area was a commonly used feeding ground during migrations in both the spring (61% of the sample were feeding; 55% epibenthically) and autumn (99% of the sample; 97% epibenthically). Bowheads both migrate and feed through areas where petroleum extraction is underway and anticipated; hence, exposure to oil after a spill is of considerable concern to Native communities and management agencies.     

Standardizing the Protocol for Hemispherical Photographs: Accuracy Assessment of Binarization Algorithms

Hemispherical photography is a well-established method to optically assess ecological parameters related to plant canopies; e.g. ground-level light regimes and the distribution of foliage within the crown space. Interpreting hemispherical photographs involves classifying pixels as either sky or vegetation. A wide range of automatic thresholding or binarization algorithms exists to classify the photographs. The variety in methodology hampers ability to compare results across studies. To identify an optimal threshold selection method, this study assessed the accuracy of seven binarization methods implemented in software currently available for the processing of hemispherical photographs. Therefore, binarizations obtained by the algorithms were compared to reference data generated through a manual binarization of a stratified random selection of pixels. This approach was adopted from the accuracy assessment of map classifications known from remote sensing studies. Percentage correct () and kappa-statistics () were calculated. The accuracy of the algorithms was assessed for photographs taken with automatic exposure settings (auto-exposure) and photographs taken with settings which avoid overexposure (histogram-exposure). In addition, gap fraction values derived from hemispherical photographs were compared with estimates derived from the manually classified reference pixels. All tested algorithms were shown to be sensitive to overexposure. Three of the algorithms showed an accuracy which was high enough to be recommended for the processing of histogram-exposed hemispherical photographs: “Minimum” ( 98.8%; 0.952), “Edge Detection” ( 98.1%; 0.950), and “Minimum Histogram” ( 98.1%; 0.947). The Minimum algorithm overestimated gap fraction least of all (11%). The overestimation by the algorithms Edge Detection (63%) and Minimum Histogram (67%) were considerably larger. For the remaining four evaluated algorithms (IsoData, Maximum Entropy, MinError, and Otsu) an incompatibility with photographs containing overexposed pixels was detected. When applied to histogram-exposed photographs, these algorithms overestimated the gap fraction by at least 180%.     

Imagining the Real: The Photographic Image and Imagination in Knowledge Production

The exploratory discussion in this article starts from the fact that it is the realism of photographic representations which enables them, in an indexical sense, to point back to a reality beyond themselves as images. In the same vein, it is as a metonymic space-time fragment that the photograph can indicate a continuation of reality beyond its own framing of the visible. Or, putting it differently, rather than constituting transparent representations, presence in photographs is evoked through absence of the real. What is not problematized in photographic theory and visual anthropology is that photographs thus depend on imagination for their interpretative connection to reality. My argument sees photographic practice as interference, which pushes the medium past the implicit positivist premise for visual knowledge production in anthropology. Furthermore, when understanding the ability to imagine as movements in reason, the separation between imagination and reason, presumed necessary for the scientific production of knowledge, is also challenged. Concerned with rethinking photography in visual anthropology, imagination’s role in knowledge production will be explored through my photographic art project, Houses/Homes.     

Characterization of a soluble factor that specifically suppresses the in vitro generation of cells cytotoxic for syngeneic tumor cells in mice.

A tumor-specific soluble factor found in extracts of thymocytes from mice bearing small P815 tumors has been demonstrated. This factor is capable of significantly suppressing the in vitro generation of syngeneic cells cytotoxic for P815 targets if it is added to culture vessels within the first 30 hr of culture. The suppressive factor eluted from Sephadex G-100 after hemoglobin and was estimated to have a m.w. in the range of 40 to 60,000. Preparative isoelectric focusing of thymic extracts established that the suppressive material has an isoelectric point in the range of pH 4.6 to 4.9. The suppressive activity of extracts could be removed by passage of the material through immunoadsorbent columns prepared from membrane proteins of P815 cells but not by analogous columns prepared by using L1210 membrane proteins. The suppressive material was not removed by its passage through immunoadsorbent columns containing anti-mouse immunoglobulin.     

Using geotagged photographs and GIS analysis to estimate visitor flows in natural areas

Protected area management requires detailed information about visitors’ travel patterns. Unfortunately, methods commonly applied to obtain this information (e.g. monitoring, simulation) are expensive and time consuming. As a result, for many protected areas worldwide there are no reliable data upon which management actions (e.g. trail maintenance, introduction of use limits) can be based. Today georeferenced material shared on the Internet (e.g. geotagged photographs, GPS tracks) provides a new valuable source of information about people's movements, though its low density (e.g. few geotagged photographs per unit area) in natural areas has discouraged applications in such contexts so far. We propose a new approach that uses geotagged photographs to identify popular locations, and a gravity model to estimate the volume of visitor flows from access points (e.g. parking lots, bus stops) to those locations. The model, which assumes volumes to be proportional to the popularity of access points and destinations, and inversely proportional to the travel time for going from one to the other, is set up in a GIS environment and calibrated by means of actual visitor counts over a set of locations in the study area.Results of a first application to the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage Site (Italy) are encouraging as the model provided good estimates and a consistent map of visitor flows. The method enables park managers to roughly estimate visitor flows over large trail networks with only limited field work required. Future applications may include the analysis of off-trail movements to predict the intensity of trampling.     

The Photograph and the Malanggan: Rethinking images on Malakula,Vanuatu

From the recent efflorescence of anthropological engagements with photography we are by now aware that photography is an embodied practice and that photographs are complex materialisations of the subjective and experiential as well as the objective and evidential. Despite discussions of ‘visual repatriation’ (e.g. Brown and Peers 2006 ), and of local responses to colonial photography and other kinds of archival images in the Pacific, little has been discussed regarding the status of photographs as particularly ‘Pacific’ artefacts—objects that make sense in indigenous terms as well as being understood in terms of the connections to other places that their production and circulation might signify. Following Wright’s exhortation to recognise ‘the provincial nature of Eurocentric notions of photography and … suggesting that a certain corporeality and materiality constitute elements of its identity’ (2004: 74) , I discuss the resonance of historical photographs in Vanuatu, building an analogy with Malanggan—funerary carvings from Northern New Ireland. I do not mean to suggest that photographs are complex ritual artefacts, but rather follow the ways in which Malanggan have been used as anthropological conceits, in order to discuss the representational efficacy and materiality of Melanesian images in facilitating the crystallisation of memory and history ( Küchler 1988 ), the enchantment of technology ( Gell 1998, 1999 ), and the consolidation of certain kinds of property relations ( Strathern 2005b ). As my title suggests, I draw on Strathern’s combination of Malanggan and Patents to rethink the potential utility of Malanggan as a ‘way to think’ about the meanings of photographs in Pacific communities.