Summary Of Mead's Ethnography

In Mead’s ethnography, she has extensive and intensive research which she thoroughly explained. She not only explained her research, but also why she did her research and why each photographic plate was selected for analysis. With full disclosure there is a mention of photographs that were believed to be staged. In an effort to be completely transparent there is much explanation given to the selection of the photographs, retouching of photographs, notes taken and even how the frames were numbered. The way in which this ethnography was done is inclusive of all possible aspects of the Balinese culture, but as Mauss mentioned even if she spent four years studying the culture it would still not be enough. This method is not perfect, but it explanatory …show more content…
Pinney’s mentions that Im Thurn argues that cameras are used by anthropologist to record lifeless bodies and that they are distracting from live culture (Pinney, p.36). Cameras are focused on capturing one moment, so they are like the death of the rest of the culture because that one moment gets immortalized. As in death the one moment a person dies is finalized and immortalized nothing comes after the moment of death. When the focus of an anthropologist is on the most “other” aspects of culture, there are parts of the everyday culture not documented. A lot of the missing pictures not only are not taken, but are discarded in the editing process. When editing film, the photographer is looking for the images that answer questions that the research is asking. Other pictures that answers questions that were not asked of the culture are not used. Perhaps a parallel to this is the short film on the “The Falling Man”. This film shows the selection process of the image used for an article written about the 9/11 attacks. It shows how selecting the perfect image is important to a work because the image not only has to depict reality, but has to sit with the reader. There were many images taken of the same falling man, however he selected the images that was the most powerful and stood out. The other images were discarded. While the other images did not have any telling features about the man falling the fact that they were not used, shows how in anthropological works some of the images that depict everyday life are not used. This could be a problem because those images might contain something telling about the culture. When anthropological images transitioned from being moral to scientific this problem became more prevalent when informants were taken out of everyday life and posed in front of grids. Grid photographs are major disruptions to cultural life, but there are subtler disruptions as