A PERSPECTIVE ON HOW
ANTHROPOLOGY HAS CHANGED IN RECENT YEARS:
OBSERVING WITH CLEARER VISION
by Susan Krook
What began in the Nineteenth Century as an academic
discipline seated in observational studies soon became a text-driven library of
interpretive work written by European and American scholars, many of whom,
while simultaneously entranced with what they saw, were bogged down in the
mountains of books and journals dedicated to explaining cultures through
various theoretical orientations by the mid-Twentieth Century and beyond. Today, many of those sources are gathering
dust on the shelves in academic institutions and private collections, where
they stand ready for anthropologists’ use if and when they are needed. Historical films and photographs spell out a
resurgence of new interest for their value in anthropological work today,
however, and they could possibly reveal far more about cultural practices than
many of those written accounts. By
examining the work of a non-anthropologist but very well-known photographer of
American Indians, Edward Curtis, in comparison to the photographs taken by the
Father of American Anthropology, Franz Boas, we can see how historical films
and photographs are especially valuable to our understanding of previous cultures.
