Oldal 67 [67]
Ethnographers’ Self-Depiction in the Photographs from the Field. Post-War Ethnology in Poland
him. These scenes are not the scenes that we usually see or that as anthropologists
we show to others after returning from an ethnographic exploration. Neither do
they appear in the books or in the articles written by the ethnographers.
Browsing through the archives of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural An¬
thropology in Cracow (formerly the Chair of Ethnography of South Slavs), one
might find such small-format black-and-white photos, not of the best technical
quality with hard-to-read handwritten notes on the back, hidden in small storage
boxes. Although many years have passed since they were taken (most of them date
from the middle of the last century) their status of being a source of knowledge and
archival material was complex and not entirely clear.? Even now their cataloguing
has become somewhat confusing.
‘The first recognition may therefore be that those photographs showing ethnog¬
raphers in the field reveal something that should be invisible: researcher’s scientific
approach and work, specific experience being with/encountering the Others, and
finally voyeurism and subsequent stages of the research investigation. For a long
time the ethnographers work in the field was based on myth and an assumption
that there was no ethnographer in the field, in the sense of the lack of impact on
the community. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes claims that this kind of
perception was based on the illusion that an ethnographer is “an invisible and
permeable screen through which pure data, facts, could be objectively filtered and
recorded” (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 23). The “unclear” procedures in the process of
acquiring anthropological knowledge by an ethnographer from the beginning of
fieldwork to the writing of a scientific text continues to be “unspoken” even today
(cf. Buliñski & Kairski 2013).
In his artistic action, Schumann attempts to speak about the “unspoken”, by
displaying such photographs in the framework of the project entitled “Folk. Per¬
sonal Ethnography”. It means that somehow he locates them in the sphere of com¬
memorative or private photography. His curatorial decision may also be useful for
a visual anthropologist nowadays who attempts to analyse photographic materials
created by ethnographers in the field. The clue may be that the photographs, cer¬
tainly those presenting a group of ethnographers against the truck transporting
them in the field everyday but also the ones that present the ethnographers during
their fieldwork (drawing, taking photos, interviewing local people), may have at
the same time the status of private and public photography. On the one hand,
they could be created as a testimony of being in the field, on the other hand, as
a private memorial. These photographic presentations seem to operate at the junc¬
tion of public and private collections and might be related to the issue of the social
? For example, in a report about the archive of the Chair of Ethnography of South Slavs from the 1965
by Barbara Olszowy, illustration material was included only in one section and concerned merely mate¬
rial culture. The snapshots depicting researchers in the field are not mentioned in the volume at all (see
Olszowy 1965).
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