By Elizabeth Edwards

Photographs have had an critical and complicated function in lots of anthropological contexts, from fieldwork to museum exhibitions. This publication explores how drawing close anthropological photos as 'history' can provide either theoretical and empirical insights into those roles. pictures are notion to make tricky historical past due to their ambiguity and 'rawness'. in brief, they've got too many meanings. the writer refutes this prejudice via exploring, via a chain of case experiences, exactly the capability of this uncooked caliber to open up new perspectives.

Taking the character of images as her place to begin, the writer argues that images aren't only photographs of items yet are a part of a dynamic and fluid old discussion, that is energetic not just within the production of the picture yet in its next social biography in archive and museum areas, earlier and current. during this context, the e-book demanding situations any uniform view of anthropological images and its ensuing information. Drawing on a number of examples, mostly from the Pacific, the publication demonstrates how shut readings of photos display not just western agendas, but additionally many layers of differing old and cross-cultural studies. that's, pictures can 'spring leaks' to teach another standpoint. those subject matters are built extra by means of interpreting the dynamics of images and concerns round them as utilized by modern artists and curators and offered to an more and more diversified public.

This ebook convincingly demonstrates photos' capability to articulate histories except these in their instant appearances, a possible which can now not be overlooked by way of students and institutions.