The first time I saw the photographs of Tsháiek y Nróik, I was reviewing an article about visuality and coloniality in the Argentinian Chaco. While these pictures were used just to compare colonial and contemporary photographic approaches to indigeneity, they produced me a very negative impact and I kept them in my memory. They bluntly encapsulate various elements of indigenous peoples’ representation that I find distressing. In this visual essay, after briefly accounting for the history behind these pictures, I address the origins of racism before discussing the development of two particularly damaging colonial tropes: the authentic native and the naked Indian. To develop the narrative I employ digital and physical collage. |
Tsháiek y Nróik (2020)
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The self-invention of the ‘white’ in the Middle Ages
Figure. 2 Close ups with entire paintings. The Invention of the ‘white’. From left to right: Our Lady of Vladimir, Constantinople; Virgin and Child enthroned (Maste of Bigallo); Santa Maria in Trastevere (Cavallini Pietro); Agnolocoronation of the Virgen (Gaddi); Virgin and Child (Angelico Fra); Mary with Child (Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen).
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As Janet Nelson and Peter Linehan have stated “[i]dentities, medieval and modern, are constructs of selves and others at the same time.” [1] The racialization of the ‘other’ body came also with the invention of the Christian body as a “white” figure. According to the art historian Madeline Caviness, Europeans started to represent themselves visually as pure white during the late Middle Ages.[2] Byzantine and early twelfth-century artists depicted faces and bodies with heavy layers of pigment that contrasted strongly with their garments. Even in North Europe, painters “usually built a face up from a bluish or greenish modelling wash, through varied tones of brown and pink,” and pure white was reserved only for the eyes.[3] This tradition, which lasted for several centuries, finally changed by the late thirteenth century. This shift is spotted by contrasting two south Italian medical manuscripts with just a century of difference.
As author notes, the 12th century image shows “rich flesh tints giving ruddy complexions, and variously black or brown hair”, whereas the 13th century exposes “pure white bodies and gold or red hair”[1]. Tiny noses and mouths, pale brown hair, and a radical simplification of a facial expression were also introduced as new representational codes. Consequently, the “enemy”, “the other”, was classified with the rest of colours. In fact, coloured devils started to be used in order to categorize the bad, the ugly, the sinful. These anticipated the colour designation colonizers later imprinted to the rest of the world. Asians, Indians, Africans and Indigenous peoples still carry the burden of such racist chromophobia. When photographed, the indigenous body is impregnate by the racist historical constructions I have just described. [1] Madeline Caviness, Ibid., 17 [1] Peter Linehan, and Nelson Janet L., Eds. The medieval world. Vol. 10. Psychology Press, 2003. p. 13 [2] Madeline Caviness. "From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1, no. 1 (2008): 1-33. [3] Ibid., 13 |
Modern Racism
Canonical racial theory claims that racism is a modern concept that has appeared in the last few centuries. Scholars that support this position[1] claim that all signs of differentiation and otherness before the 17th and 18th century were almost entirely cultural: “a compound of language, law, power and lineage or inheritance”.[2] Distrust, social distance and violence between people are considered a feature that have been always present in human history, which they explain using the notion of ethnocentrism, rather than racism. For these scholars, racism emerged out of three main changes in human history: the trafficking and slavery of Africans, the expansion of European colonialism in America, Africa and Asia, and, over all, the development of social Darwinism. [3]
The age of the enlightenment brought the development of modern physiognomy and with it the elaboration of theories of racial difference. Under the idea of phenotypic variation of the body as a signifier of race, an apparatus of segregation was created. Darwin’s assumptions that all races evolve differently as a result of genetic combinations and other factors, helped to reinforce this apparatus. This all was instrumental for imperialist expansion as it legitimised oppression. Colonized people were therefore depicted as objects of anthropological and ethnographic studies. The precarious living conditions of most colonized people were justified as resulting from their own lower stage of human evolution. Social Darwinism was a bit abstract at that time and so it needed more concrete and visual imagery. These were produced in two different scenarios: photographs of colonized people and their ‘live displays’ at so-called ‘The Great Exhibitions’. Two main visual tropes were developed: the authentic native and the naked Indian. [1] See for example: David Theo Goldberg “the racial state, Uday Singh Mehta, “Liberalism And Empire” Thomas Holt “On race in the global economy.” [2] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "On Saracen enjoyment: Some fantasies of race in late medieval France and England." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 115 [3] Charles Hirschman, "The origins and demise of the concept of race." Population and development review 30, no. 3 (2004): 388 |
The authentic native
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In the 19th century, the colonial apparatus promoted what has been term ‘ethnological shows’.[1] These spectacles were created between two anxieties: the myth of the ‘dying races’, and the ‘obsession for authenticity’. The dying races myth pretended to be a scientific explanation for the massive decline of colonized population. As people in the colonies were considered inferior and weaker than Europeans, this myth blamed the forces of evolution. It was believed that those people were physically and mentally unable to compete in the modern society. Later on, it was also argued that colonized people were declining due to an alleged self-genocide. The common explanation for the latter was that these people prefer to disappear rather than abandon their heritage and traditional ways of living. This imminent and inevitable disappearing was the central advertisement behind the ‘ethnological shows’. “Last opportunity to study the red man in his primitive glory”, it read in the promotion for the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in 1898.[2]
To dramatize it even more, the public was promised a great display of ‘authenticity’. They would get to see not just people from distant lands, but the authentic native. Elaborated costumes complemented with exotic devices were used to accentuate racial and cultural difference. These elements were obviously shown as genuine. Authenticity, as argued by James Cliford, is an invention of western institutions to assign cultural and economic values to non-western cultures.[3] It is clear by now that those performances were merely a fantasy. These actually offered mixed references from different cultures. The work of Edward Curtis is illustrative of the latter. Curtis was the most celebrated photographer of Native Americans. He persistently claimed that his work wanted to preserve the memory of natives, as these were inevitably destined to be assimilated by the ‘superior race’. His pictures often showed people covered with wigs and costumes produced by himself in order to erase all sign of modernity.[4] Curtis work has inspired generations of photographers that continue to this today with the colonial tradition of collecting, constructing and categorizing Indigenous people in order to profit with the photographs.[5] Steve McCurry, Sebastian Salgado, Eric Lafforgue, and Jimmy Nelson are some contemporary examples of this systematic reproduction of Colonial, Post-Colonial and Neo-Colonial tropes. In these photographic productions, Indigenous costumes are used as “stigma symbols”[6]. These are physical manifestations or corporeal signs that communicated the stigma of the bearer to both, the Indigenous and the observers. This visual identification not only aims to distinguish one group from the other. It also debases the personal identity of the stigmatized -the colonized- showing them as different from ordinary people. This neo-colonial narrative therefore presents idealised images that praise indigenous peoples’ cultural-distinctiveness and attach to them certain essentialist attributes. For instance, development and Indigeneity are often represented in a binary discussion: traditional/modern and uncivilized/civilized. Consequently, an indigenous person is expected to live in ‘harmony with nature’ and even to represent an alternative to capitalist modernity. An essentialized indigenous ‘way of life’ is presented as compatible and harmonic with biodiversity preservation. In parallel, indigenous people are considered unfit to interact with markets and in need of protection against economic forces. These are elements of contemporary ‘authentic’ indigeneity. I see the latter as a new form of colonialism in as much as it relegates them to subordinate spaces, distant rural territories, and impoverished livelihoods. Furthermore, the use of landscapes also reinforces the colonial tropes of Indigeneity. Landscapes can be central to the formation of social and subjective identities. A landscape can be associated with power especially when it is confined in an image be these photographs, paintings or films. These play a rhetorical role in every depiction, mainly to allegorise and to symbolize.[7] In photography, the landscape can have the power to set an atmosphere or reinforce social or political ideology. In this sense, the ‘ethnological show’ carefully constructs its landscapes. Every sign of modernisation is erased. These landscapes offer the impression of being authentically wild. The operation makes almost impossible for the public to avoid the bias. The narrative is rounded and offers no elements from which the audience can make connections with their own life. Authenticity, in this sense, objectifies the other. [1] Anne Maxwell, Colonial photography and exhibitions: representations of the native and the making of European identities. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000. [2] Brian W Dippie, The vanishing American: White attitudes and US Indian policy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982. 175 [3] James Clifford, The predicament of culture. Harvard University Press, 1988. [4] Maxwell, Anne. Colonial photography and exhibitions: representations of the native and the making of European identities. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000. 110 [5] Donald Bullock, "The Changing Roles of the Imagined Primitive in Jimmy Nelson's Photographs." PhD diss., Azusa Pacific University, 2017. [6] Goffman Erving. "Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity." New York: A Touchstone Book Published by Simon & Schuster Inc. (1963). [7] W. J. T. Mitchell, "Landscape and power. University of Chicago." (1994). |
The naked Indian
For the Christian tradition, nakedness represents a canonical narrative of a spiritual hazard. After the original sin, Adam and Eve realized their nakedness and immediately started to cover their genitalia with leaves. Other biblical references to nakedness reveal a strong connection with insanity.[1] But nakedness is different from nudeness. In western art history, nude figures are actually considered heroic. Kennet Clark’s book about the nude in classical art history differentiates the nude from the naked by stating that that nude is not a subject of art but a form of art in itself. It is considered a creation that does not try to imitate a body from nature but to perfect it.[2] Being naked, for Clark, implies shame and embarrassment. John Berger argues that the nude is a convention and a form of dress that covers the real one, the naked. He also adds that the naked reveals itself without disguise. But this revelation does not disclose its own feelings, “it is a sign of her [or his] submission to the owner’s feelings or demands.”[3]
[1] Philippa Levine, "States of undress: nakedness and the colonial imagination." Victorian studies 50, no. 2 (2008): 189-219. [2] Kenneth Clark, the Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton University Press, 2015. [3] John Berger, Ways of seeing. Penguin UK, 2008. 52 |
Figure. 10 ‘The Toba Takshik’. The news coverage presented this photography in one of the articles that explained the conflict. Tsháiek and Nróik, and other two young boys are absent in this picture and in the following one (Figure 11). One reason might be that were kept in a separate institution. But the rest 20 Takshik people are present. Unknown photographer. From: Alejandro Raúl Martinez. "Imágenes fotográficas sobre pueblos indígenas." PhD diss., Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, 2011; Dávila Da Rosa, Lena. "Los atlas antropológicos de R. Lehmann-Nitsche." http://cdsa.aacademica.org/000-081/747.pdf
In the 1860s, the Royal Institute of Anthropology in England promoted a series of lectures and other activities expecting to achieve a universal method to classify colonized people. The aim was to improve colonial management. After various considerations, the methodologies proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley and J. H. Lamprey, an anthropologist and an ethnologist respectively, were the most adopted. Naked bodies in full length, frontal and profile poses, a measure stick and a standardize mesh as background were the basic rules. These two scientists worked under the assumption that producing those pictures would be a straight forward task for colonial administrators. But the outcome was far from uniform. Most people refused to be portrayed naked. The procedures were very difficult to implement in practice. So much so that the anthropologist Everard im Thurn even suggested to use dead bodies instead.[1] Pictures that followed the Huxley-Lamprey method came mostly from penal colonies, slave-owning states, or places where people were almost completely subjugated.[2]
Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, the German who took Tsháiek and Nróik photographs, followed this method. Like colonial administrators, he also encountered resistance from Toba Takshik people. They did not want to be photographed naked. In fact, Lehmann-Nitsche described in his own writings how female adults fought back, some even aggressively, to avoid been portrayed even with clothes. If Tsháiek and Nróik appear naked in Lehmann-Nitsche’s photographs is only because they were victims of trafficking and an imbalanced power relation. They were forced to undress to satisfy a racist cliché. The latter was kept hidden from the European public and the pictures were used to reinforce the colonial fantasy of the naked Indigenous. Still today, these (Figure 1) are displayed in the official website of the British library under a very impersonal label that does not even mention their names. [1] Philippa Levine, "Naked Truths: Bodies, Knowledge, and the Erotics of Colonial Power." Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 5-25. www.jstor.org/stable/41999179. 14 [2] Anne Maxwell, Colonial photography and exhibitions: representations of the native and the making of European identities. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000. |
Some pics of the book: