Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología

Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol | eISSN 2011-4273 | ISSN 1900-5407

Secrets of Light: Notes on an Exposed Anthropology

No. 41 (2020-10-01)
  • Cristóbal Bonelli
    Universiteit van Amsterdam, Holanda
  • Luis Poirot
    Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda41.2020.08

Abstract

Strongly inspired by the mysterious exercise of recording, protecting, and revealing the images in Luis Poirot’s photographic archive, this article experiments with a mode of ethnographic writing that, rather than trying to convince the reader about the correctness of its conceptual propositions, it simply suggests certain secrets of light. These are images appearing in multiple temporalities as vivid evidence of the presence of absences. Attempting to avoid the sterilization of ‘lived experience’ and its multiple temporalities, often produced by the anthropological discipline itself, this article imagines an exposed anthropology. Rather than being interested in the creation and analysis of concepts, this exposed anthropology focuses on opening up suggestive spaces of coexistence with the presence of absence. Thus, it offers singular evidence of the encounter of worlds occurring beyond concepts. In particular, this work gives an account of how Poirot’s photographic archive, and the present absences that inhabit his images affect, resonate and even incorporate the ethnographic writing itself within the same living archive.

Keywords: Archive, Chile, images, ethnography, multiple temporalities, photography

References

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Nueva York: Hill & Wang.

Benjamin, Walter. 1986. “Surrealism”. En Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, editado por PeterDemetz, 187-203. Nueva York: Schocken.

Benjamin, Walter. (1950) 2006. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Traducido por HowardEiland. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1992. “Las dos versiones de lo imaginario”. En El espacio literario, traducido por JorgeJinkis y VickyPalant, 243-253. Barcelona: Paidós.

Bonelli, Cristóbal. 2019. “Spectral Forces, Time and Excess in Southern Chile”. En The World Multiple Everyday Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, editado por KeiichiOmura, Grant JunOtsuki, ShihoSatsuka y AtsuroMorita, 123-139. Nueva York: Routledge Advances in Sociology.

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Ethology: Spinoza and Us”. En Incorporations, editado por JonathanCrary y SanfordKwinter, 625-633. Nueva York: Zone.

Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx. París: Galilée.

Desjarlais, Robert. 2018. The Blind Man: A Phantasmography. Nueva York: Fordham University Press.

Hevia, James L. 2009. “The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer China, Making Civilization (1900-1901)”. En Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, editado por RosalindMorris, 79-119. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kaplan, Louis. 2010. “Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image”. Journal of Visual Culture 9 (1): 45-62. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412909354255

Law, John. 2015. “What’s Wrong with a One-World World?”. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16 (1): 126-139. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1020066

Morita, Atsuro. 2019. “Afterword”. En The World Multiple Everyday Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, editado por KeiichiOmura, Grant JunOtsuki, ShihoSatsuka y AtsuroMorita, 248-255. Nueva York: Routledge Advances in Sociology.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 2008. Corpus. Nueva York: Fordham University Press.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 2005. The Ground of the Image. Nueva York: Fordham University Press.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 2004. La communauté désoeuvrée. París: Christian Bourgois.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 2003. A Finite Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 2001. The Evidence of Film. Bruselas: Yves Gevaert.

Nancy, Jean Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Pakman, Marcelo. 2014. El espectro y el signo: texturas de la imaginación. Barcelona: Gedisa.

Poole, Deborah. 2015. “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies”. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 159-179. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.144034

Rancière, Jacques. 1996. El desacuerdo: política y filosofía. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2015. Sociología de la imagen: miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.

Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. Nueva York: Doubleday.

Stevenson, Lisa. 2020. “Looking away”. Cultural Anthropology 35 (1): 6-13. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.02

Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: California University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2017. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Taussig, Michael2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawing in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.