Video technology and indigenous cultural identity

Who gets to show us a culture? At first, Western anthropologists controlled the camera. Now inexpensive video equipment lets indigenous people record their own lives. That changes more than the amount of available footage: the people being studied can help determine how they are represented.

The opening's unfamiliar language is worth slowing down for. An unself-conscious colonial gaze suggests that filmmakers may bring an outsider's Western perspective to their work without recognizing it. Anthropologists have been trying to overcome that problem. The newer development is that their subjects can now do the filming themselves. Don't confuse the old problem with the change we are about to discuss.

At first, that change sounds promising. Why wouldn't it help to hear directly from the people whose lives we want to understand? But the reaction is divided. That is our cue to identify the disagreement, rather than assume that more footage must be better.

James Weiner supplies the objection. He thinks adopting video technology changes the cultures it is supposed to preserve. In his account, genuine differences in language, history, and social life give way to superficial differences among images. The recordings might look different while the people making them increasingly adopt the same Western ways of seeing and expressing themselves.

Western ontology is dense language, but we don't need a philosophy lesson to follow its role. Here, think of a Western way of understanding the world, which Weiner associates with realism, immediacy, and self-expression. His claim is that video inevitably carries that outlook to its users. The troubling possibility is that the act of recording a culture helps erase its distinctive identity.

He also rejects the assumption that a recording must be especially truthful merely because an indigenous person made it. If the technology has already influenced the culture being recorded, handing over the camera does not automatically give us an untouched version of that culture. Keep the target of this criticism straight: he calls the anthropologists who make that assumption naive.

Faye Ginsburg challenges the inevitability. She concedes that Western objects have not been culturally neutral. But having an influence is not the same as making their users Western. People might use a camera to preserve their own language and traditions instead of adopting the conventions of the culture that supplied the camera.

Imagine the difference between using video to imitate another culture's popular performances and using it to record your own community's ceremonies. Both involve the same kind of equipment. They need not have the same effect on cultural identity. Ginsburg thinks video can be especially valuable to oral societies because a recording can preserve words and practices that might otherwise be lost.

That leaves a useful question: what actually happens? Weiner and Ginsburg have offered competing accounts of what the technology does. Evidence about its use should help us decide between them.

Terence Turner's work with the Kayapo supplies that evidence. They record ceremonies and transactions with Brazilian government representatives. The transactions are recorded to create legally binding records. For a primarily oral society, that gives video a practical use beyond cultural documentation: preserving a record of an agreement.

The ceremonial recordings provide the stronger answer to Weiner. Their camerawork and editing follow the same principles of beauty as the ceremonies, including repetition and sequential organization. The Kayapo are not simply putting their activities in front of a Western camera. They shape the resulting videos around their own aesthetic values. The tool is being adapted to the culture, rather than automatically replacing it.

One society does not establish that video is harmless or beneficial everywhere. It does give us evidence against the claim that using the technology inevitably destroys cultural identity. That is the scope to preserve in our main point: anthropologists disagree about video, and the Kayapo example supports the possibility of using it while maintaining a distinctive culture.