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Bodies Real and Virtual: Joseph Rock and Enrico Caruso in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2011

Erik Mueggler
Erik Mueggler*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Michigan
*
[email protected]
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Extract

In 1934, during twenty-eight years of wandering west China, the American botanist Joseph Francis Charles Rock made a brief trip to England. He clipped the obituary of an old friend from the Times and pasted it in his diary. On the facing page, he pasted a photograph two decades old, and wrote this caption:

J. F. Rock (standing) with his older friend Fred Muir, Entomologist at the Haw[aii] Sugar Planter's Exp[eriment] Sta[tion], Honolulu. Photographed in our home in Liloa Rise (Breaside), Honolulu in the spring of 1913, while our phonograph played Spiritu Gentile, Caruso singing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 6 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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References

1 Joseph Francis Charles Rock, Diary, 25 Mar. 1934, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (hereafter RBGE). While copies of parts of Rock's diaries exist in several locations, the complete, original notebooks are kept at the RBGE.

2 Rappaport, Roy, A., Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24Google Scholar.

3 Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Sen, Satadru, “Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M. V. Portman and the Andamanese,” American Ethnologist 36, 2 (May 2009): 366CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A selection of the literature on colonial photography that has influenced my approach here includes: Edwards, Elizabeth, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Landau, Paul and Kaspin, Deborah, eds., Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas, eds., Photography's Other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pinney, Christopher and Thomas, Nicholas, eds., Beyond Aesthetics: Art and The Technologies of Enchantment (Oxford: Berg, 2001)Google Scholar; Poole, Deborah, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Kaplan, Ann E., Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar; Harris, Clare and Shakya, Tsering, Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947 (Chicago: Serinda Publications, 2003)Google Scholar; Ryan, James R., Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997)Google Scholar.

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11 Gunning, Todd, “Never Seen this Picture Before,” in Prodger, Philip, ed., Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 247Google Scholar.

12 Solnit, Rebecca makes this argument forcefully in River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003)Google Scholar. See also the essays in Prodger, Time Stands Still; and Braun, Marta and Marey, Etienne-Jules, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

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16 Rock, Diary, Apr. 19, 1922.

17 Rock, Diary, 14 Feb. 14, 1922; 13 Feb. 1925.

18 Rock, Diary, 4 Oct. 1922.

19 Rock, Diary, 10 Jan. 1922.

20 Rock, Diary, 16 Mar. 1923.

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25 Rock, Diary, 18 Dec. 1924.

26 Rock, Diary, 13 Feb. 1931.

27 Ibid.

28 Joseph Rock to David Fairchild, 1 Nov. 1922, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pittsburg, Pa. (hereafter, Hunt Institute).

29 Ibid., Rock's emphasis.

30 Rock to Fairchild, 22 Sept. 1922, Hunt Institute.

31 See, for example, Liang, Linxia, Delivering Justice in Qing China: Civil Trials in the Magistrate's Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Rock to Fairchild, 1 Nov. 1922, Hunt Institute.

33 Rock, Diary, 9 May 1922.

34 Rock to Ralph E. Graves, 17 May 1925, Arnold Arboretum.

35 Rock, Diary, 17 Jan. 1930.

36 Rock to Fairchild, 22 Sept. 1922, Hunt Institute.

37 Joseph Rock, “Bandits—a Government Asset,” unpub. MS, Arnold Arboretum.

38 Rock, Diary, 14 Dec. 1924.

39 Rock, Diary, 4 and 5 Apr. 1925.

40 Rock, Diary, 11 Apr. 1925.

41 Rock, Diary, 9 May 1926.

42 For some of the many analyses of this evolution, see Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, and the other essays in that volume; Griffiths, Alison, “Knowledge and Visuality in Turn of the Century Anthropology: The Early Ethnographic Cinema of Alfred Cort Haddon and Walter Baldwin Spencer,” Visual Anthropology Review 12, 2 (1996): 18–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poole, Deborah, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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47 Ibid., 84.

48 Rock, Diary, 13 May 1926.

49 New York Times, “America's Advance Guard,” 5 May 1910: SM2.

50 New York Times, “Thrills in Motion Picture. ‘The Wild Heart of Africa’ Shows Game at Close Range,” 27 May 1929: 20, 3, quoted in Gordon, Robert J., Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925 (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

51 Foucault, Michel, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Rabinow, Paul, ed., Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 200Google Scholar, quoted in Laidlaw, James, “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 2 (2002): 311–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.