Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology
Brian Hochman
Abstract
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, American writers and anthropologists believed that evolutionary forces had pushed the world’s primitive races to the brink of extinction. They also believed that films, photographs, and phonograph recordings—modern media technologies then in their historical infancy—were specially suited to capture and preserve primitive life before it disappeared forever. Savage Preservation examines the surprising connections between thinking about race and thinking about media in the turn of the century period: from the photographic documentation of ... More
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, American writers and anthropologists believed that evolutionary forces had pushed the world’s primitive races to the brink of extinction. They also believed that films, photographs, and phonograph recordings—modern media technologies then in their historical infancy—were specially suited to capture and preserve primitive life before it disappeared forever. Savage Preservation examines the surprising connections between thinking about race and thinking about media in the turn of the century period: from the photographic documentation of American Indian sign languages in the Great Plains; to the phonographic collection of Afro-Creole slave songs and spirituals in New Orleans; to the cinematic portrayal of tattooing rituals in colonial Samoa. Drawing extensively on seldom-seen archival sources, the book considers how the ethnographic project of racial documentation shaped audiovisual innovation, experimentation, and use in turn-of-the-century America. While conventional scholarly wisdom suggests that media technologies work to construct popular ideas about race and cultural difference, Savage Preservation reveals that the reverse has also been true. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, ethnographic encounters with race and cultural difference actually worked to construct the authority of new media technologies, both as socially intelligible inventions and as reliable archives of the real.
Keywords:
media,
technology,
audiovisual,
race,
culture,
preservation,
evolution,
historical,
primitive,
modern
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816681372 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816681372.001.0001 |
