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Using Old Photographs in Interviews: Some Cautionary Notes About Silences in Fieldwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Bill Bravman
Bill Bravman*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

In September 1987, early in my research at the Kenya National Archives, I came across a collection of photographs taken by a British missionary during the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection contained nearly 250 photos of the terrain and people of Kenya's Taita Hills, where I would soon be going for my fieldwork. I pored over the photo collection for a long time, and had reproductions made of twenty-five shots. The names of those pictured had been recorded in the photo album's captions. Many of the names were new to me, though a few WaTaita of the day who had figured prominently in the archival records were also captured on film. When I moved on to Taita in early 1988,1 took the photographs with me. Since I would be interviewing men and women old enough either to remember or be contemporaries of the people in the pictures, I planned to show the photos during the interviews. At first I was simply curious about who some of the people pictured were, but my curiosity quickly evolved into a more ambitious plan. I decided to try using the photographs as visual prompts to get people to speak more expansively than they otherwise might about their lives and their experiences.

In the event, I learned that using the photographs in interviews involved many more complexities than I had envisaged in my initial enthusiasm. I found that I had to alter the expectations and techniques I took to Taita, and feel out some of the limitations of working with the photographic medium. I had to recognize the power relations embedded in my presence as a researcher in Taita, in my position as bearer of images from peoples' pasts, and in the photos themselves. I found, too, that I needed to come to grips with a number of issues about the politics of image production, and the historical product of those politics: the bounded, selected images that are photographs. Finally, I had to address some of my own cultural assumptions about photography and how people respond to pictures, assumptions that my informants did not necessarily share.

Type
Silences in Fieldwork
Information
History in Africa , Volume 17 , January 1990 , pp. 327 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1990

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References

Notes

1. My research in Kenya was funded by a Fulbright Hays DDRA fellowship. Grateful acknowledgement is due to the photographic section of the Kenya National Archives; to Adele Greenspun and Bill Goidell, professional photographers both, for discussions on some of the ideas in this paper; and to the many WaTaita who welcomed me into their homes and communities during my fieldwork.

2. A few of the people in the photos were in fact still alive.

3. Using a single informant, A. H. J. Prins confidently posited an explanation of Taita in-migration in The Coastal Tribes of the Northeast Bantu (London, 1952).Google Scholar Using different informants, James Mwakio criticizes Prins, and suggests a different migration history, in ‘The Origin of the WaTaita, Their Culture, and Their Political Evolution Between the Early 16th Century and 1963” (M.A. Thesis, University of Nairobi, 1978).Google Scholar For still other versions, see Bostock, P.G., The Peoples of Kenya: The Taita, (London, 1950)Google Scholar; Merritt, E. Hollis, “A History of the Taita of Kenya to 1900,” (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1975)Google Scholar; and Nazzaro, Andrew, “Changing Use if the Resource Base Among the Taita of Kenya” (Ph.D., Michigan State University, 1974).Google Scholar Most—though not all—of these scholars at least agree that the major in-migrations to Taita came from several different directions.

4. The weakness of oral traditions here may largely be due to people having migrated into Taita from a number of different directions across a large span of time; to the relative autonomy that people of different geographical regions within the Hills maintained; and to the relatively informal and decentralized nature of political authority structures. Nazzaro discusses contradictions in oral traditions in his dissertation. The differences in migration histories provide one example of such contradictions. Versions collected and assembled by Bostock, , Prins, , Mwakio, , Merritt, , Nazzaro, , and Harris, Grace, Casting Out Anger: Religion Among the Taita of Kenya, (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar range from slightly to dramatically different. The same scholars also each offer somewhat different explanations of Number Groups that still exist amongst the Taita, indicating a further lack of agreement among their informants. Another example is the very different stories told to me about whether or not people from Taita participated in the ninteenth century slave trade.

5. ‘Piecing together an interpretation’ in this (or any other) way raises important questions for the researcher about fieldwork, writing, and the production of knowledge. Other papers in this set examine how the intellectual frameworks one takes to the field, the way one uses them there, and the way one incorporates them into subsequent writing affect the production of knowledge. This paper has benefited from and reflects the discussion and diversity of opinion on the subject within our working group, even though the paper's focus lies elsewhere.

6. Although I stumbled into an appreciation that photographs are not objective through my fieldwork experience, this understanding is hardly recent news to photographers, photography critics, and, no doubt, many others. Walter Benjamin long ago took for granted that such objectivity was impossible; see his “A Brief History of Photography” in Creative Camera International Yearbook, (London, 1977)Google Scholar, originally in Literarische Welt, (Berlin, 1931)Google Scholar; also, more recently, Freund, Gisèle, Photographie et Société (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar; Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Beloff, Halla, Camera Culture (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar

7. The body of literature attacking the notion that fieldwork can be “objective” is now considerable, e.g. Asad, Talal, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Shostack, M., Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Karp, Ivan and Kendall, M., “Reflexivity in Fieldwork” in Secord, P., ed., Explaining Human Behavior: Consciousness, Human Action, and Social Structure (Beverly Hills, 1982)Google Scholar; Clifford, J., “Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule's Initiation,” in Stocking, G., ed., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, (Madison, 1983)Google Scholar; Clifford, J. and Marcus, G., eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (Berkeley, 1986).Google Scholar

8. Geary, Christraud, Images from Bamum: German Colonial Photography at the Court of King Njoya, Camaroon, West Africa, 1902-1915, (Washington D.C., 1988), 11Google Scholar; see also Alloula, Malek, The Colonial Harem, (Minneapolis, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Monti, Nicholas, Africa Then (New York, 1987).Google Scholar Typical of photography books that still perpetuate old stereotypes is Fabb, J., The British Empire from Photographs: Africa (London, 1987)Google Scholar, whose text and photograph choices underline African exoticism, primitivism, and moral decadence, while celebrating European military conquest, the spread of white Christian civilization, and big game hunting.

9. Germans who photographed Bamum before World War I included missionaries, merchants, military men, colonial agents, colonial administrators, and anthropologists, (Geary, Images from Bamum, chs. 3, 6). Each brought agendas to the images they framed, and in each case there were no doubt politics of image production that shaped the relationship between the photographer and the subject.

Reworking traditions to accommodate changing circumstances was not, of course, unique to Bamum; see, for example, Moore, Sally Falk, Social Facts and Fabrications: Customary Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; for a study of the mutability of ‘tradition’ more closely relating historical change with ritual performance see Kratz, Corinne, “Emotional Power and Significant Movement: Womanly Transformation in Okiek Initiation” (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1988)Google Scholar

10. Interview with R.N, Wumingu location, Taita District, 1 Oct 1988.

11. For a lengthier meditation on how overview knowledge constructs part of the fieldworker's authority among the people s/he studies, see Clifford, “Power and Dialogue in Ethnography.”

12. For a related examination of the limitations of a fieldworker's good intentions, albeit in far more highly-charged circumstances, see Swedenburg, Ted, “Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography,” in Cultural Anthropology, 4/3(1989) 265–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Lance, Jim, “What the Stranger Brings: The Social Dynamics of Fieldwork Among the Mamprusi of Northern Ghana,” HA, 17 (1990).Google Scholar

13. Murray Photograph Collection, photo 247/81, Kenya National Archives.

14. Interview with A.M., Mbale Location, Taita District, 4 Nov 1988.