Читать книгу Visual Methods in Social Research - Marcus Banks - Страница 13

Seeing is not natural, however much we might think it to be. Like all sensory experience the interpretation of sight is culturally and historically specific (Classen 1993). Equally unnatural are the representations derived from vision – drawings, paintings, films, photographs. While the images that form on the retina and are interpreted by the brain come in a continual flow, the second-order representations that humans make when they paint on canvas or animal skin, or when they click the shutter on a camera, are discrete – the products of specific intentionality. Each has significance by virtue of its singularity, the actual manifestation of one in an infinitude of possible manifestations. Yet in Euro-American society we treat these images casually, as unexceptional presences in the world of material goods and human social relations.

This is partly because for centuries vision – sight – has been a privileged sense in the European repertoire, a point well-established by philosophers, social theorists and other cultural critics. Native speakers of English are quite accustomed to the use of visual metaphor in the language: ‘Look here …’ says one beginning a discussion, or an argument; ‘I see what you mean …’ says their interlocutor conceding defeat. The point is sometimes over-emphasized (Fabian 1983: 105–9): Classen points out that the historical importance of other sensory experiences in Europe tends to be ignored by those anxious to establish the historical dominance of visuality (1993: 6–7 and passim), while other societies have established ocular significance quite independently.³ In Hindu India, for example, the core aspect of much religious devotion before temple idols or pictures of deities is direct eye-to-eye contact between deity and devotee. Diana Eck (1985), Lawrence Babb (1981) and others have shown how darshan (‘seeing [the divine]’, or the mutual exchange of looks) structures much Hindu ritual. Moreover, in Hindu philosophy vision can carry the same implications of understanding as we recognize in contemporary English usage; early Indian society also used the term darshan to refer to schools of thought, ‘points of view’, distinguished by differences in practice or politics (Eck 1985: 11). What distinguishes the Hindu approach to darshan from mere ‘seeing’ in English is that it is an active gaze: Babb cites an example from the famous Bombay Hindi film Jai Santoshi-ma in which the (female) deity’s gaze when angered is like fire, desiccating the unworthy (1981: 393).

Among the Jains – the Indian religious group with which MB has worked – a newly made idol of a tirthankara (one of the religion’s revered founder figures) is considered to come to life, or be animated, only after a ritual is performed in secret and at night during which bright staring glass eyes are fixed to the carved eye sockets. Eck notes that Hindu images are imbued with life by opening the eyes with a golden needle, or by the final stroke of a paintbrush; the deity’s first glance is so powerful that it can kill a man and so the image is first shown a pleasing thing, such as sweets, fruit or flowers, or even its own reflection in a mirror (1985: 7). In some Jain and Hindu temples, especially those on busy city streets, screens are placed just inside the threshold to prevent inadvertent darshan on the part of those who are temporarily or permanently impure who may be passing by – menstruating women, for example, or those classed as untouchable. Also in India, and elsewhere in the world, fragments of mirror glass are incorporated into embroidered textiles to divert or reflect back the gaze of the evil eye. Furthermore in India, women, especially childless women, may refrain from looking too long at another woman’s child for fear of witchcraft accusations. Wherever they work, anthropologists and other social researchers need to spend as much time considering how and at what people look, as listening to how and what they say.

While vision may be a privileged sense in some Euro-American contexts, these societies are also strongly in the thrall of language – both oral and written. In many cases the use of vision and appreciation of the visual is compartmentalized or constrained, as appropriate for some contexts but not others. This containment is largely effected by language, by placing the visual and visible aspects of culture within a language-based discourse that has primacy. Such containment of social and cultural activity – of breaking up the business of living and hence the organization of society into named and categorized chunks – is a feature of many Euro-American societies, notwithstanding what others have said about the distinct character of ‘Western’ society (e.g. Jay 1993). While the appreciation of fine art is a social skill and a class-bounding diacritic (as Bourdieu et al. have pointed out [1991]), going to the cinema or taking family snapshots are straightforward cultural practices predicated upon a visual sense. These and many other activities must be enmeshed in language to become meaningful or valuable. Moreover, while cultural activities that centre on vision and the visual are valued in some contexts, they are clearly not in others. Education provides a good example. Preliterate children, and even pre-linguistic infants, are encouraged to engage with picture books, not in order to develop their visual sense but in order to familiarize them with books of words they must learn to value and rely on in later life. As Alice noted before she disappeared down the rabbit hole, the absence of pictures denotes the intended adult readership of a book. While some higher education disciplines such as art history clearly must engage with the visual manifestations of culture, others that are expressly concerned with the organization and flow of social life, such as sociology, place a far greater reliance on language both to investigate and then report on human social relations.

It is almost as though the removal of visual culture from its original context of production and its enwrapping in a discourse of ‘art’ has caused a suspicion of images in other contexts, and a consequent need to constrain and limit the work that they do. This is apparent, for example, in the contrast between the flagrant disregard for language that some artists and fine art photographers employ by captioning their works ‘Untitled’, and the apparently exegetical or descriptive captioning employed by academics (and others, such as newspaper editors) for images that are inserted into primarily written texts (see Section 2.2).