Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re-visioning
Authors: Shankar Arjun 
Published: October 2020

Ethnographic film, given its history as a vestige of colonial visual culture, has been defined by and constrained by the racist and imperial ideologies of those who were the earliest ethnographic filmmakers. Scientistic, distanced, observational film-making techniques continued the colonial quest for totalizing knowledge through the romantic ideal that film was “objective.” At the same time, the earliest ethnographic films relied on the perceived difference between white, Western, “civilized,” “modern” filmmakers and non-white, “primitive,” tribal, backwards peoples rendered mute on-screen. This ethnographic film history was predicated on observing and salvaging the histories of the “primitive,” soon-to-be-extinct peoples through visual documentation and, in so doing, these ethnographic films neatly mapped race onto culture, unabashedly fixing “primitive” practices onto bodies. Such films also differentially imposed sexist stereotypes on both men and women, pre-determining hierarchies of colonial heteronormative masculinity and femininity within which non-white Others were slotted. In the past thirty years, anthropologists realized the fallacy of essentialized biological racial difference and began reckoning with the role that visual technologies played in re-producing “culture-as-race” mythologies. And yet, ethnographic filmmakers have largely neglected the explicit conversation on race and racialization processes that their projects are inevitably a part of despite the fact that the subjects and objects of ethnographic filmmaking continue to be, for the large part, previously colonized peoples whose contemporary practices are still heavily impacted by the racialized values, institutions, and technologies of the colonial period. As a response, this entry provides a history of ethnographic film which focuses on processes of racialization and the production of “primitive” subjects over time. Part of the task in this entry is to begin to “re-read” or “re-see” some traditional and iconic ethnographic films through an attention to how decolonial visual anthropologists have theorized the ways that the film camera (and visual technologies more broadly) has been used to primitivize, facilitate racializing processes, and produce the expectation of radical cultural alterity. The entry will engage with content that has been produced by anthropologists while also engaging with films outside of the anthropological canon that disrupt, disturb, and unsettle anthropological ways of seeing. These disruptions have obviated the fact that anthropological filmmakers cannot revert our gaze, but instead must find new ways of acknowledging the complex and messy histories from which the discipline has emerged while carefully engaging with the emerging global hierarchies that rely on neocolonial ideologies and produce new racist ways of seeing for (still) largely white and white-adjacent audiences. Each section will include texts and films as examples of how various visual techniques have emerged in order to challenge earlier processes of visual primitivizing. Note: Words such as primitive, tribal, and backwards are used here to describe characterizations imposed on anthropological subjects by (neo)colonial ethnographic filmmakers and do not reflect the views of the author.