On the train to school today, I was hallucinating. Last night I did it to console myself. This time it was involuntary. He emerged next to me and I wanted him to go away.
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1015 Film History/Historiography (Streible)
November 29, 2009
The Significance of Through Navajo Eyes in Film History: Why is the Glass Half Empty?
Through Navajo Eyes is a series of seven films made by seven Navajo film students under the supervision of Sol Worth, a communications professor, and John Adair, an anthropology professor in 1966. Worth and Adair undertook this project because they were interested in how people of a different culture and language from them would use the camera differently to tell their own stories. Initially, the innovativeness of their project caught my attention, so did the possible groundbreaking results that the project promised. However, after having studied the Navajo, the seven films, as well as the various components of the project, I came to view the connections between the films and Navajo culture rather superficial. Even though I was delighted to then examine the contributions of this project to visual anthropology, I was still not convinced of its influences on other projects as direct or significant. The project is like an impromptu speech marked by grandiose gestures coupled with loud slogans; it lacks both the thoroughness and coherence of a well-prepared speech that is able to generate sustained debates and discussions. It is difficult to think of what use these films will provide in the future besides perhaps their sentimental values. In this paper, I will make informed and systematic arguments about why this work has failed to deliver its full potential in the context of ethnographic film history and theories.
I would like to begin my description of the historical currents that gave birth to this project with a fact that most people do not know about today.
In the Second World War, the US Army Signal Corps used men from several Indian nations. Most significantly, the US Marine Corps deployed 420 Navajo men to convey the most important messages among Allied forces in the Pacific. Navajo is spoken by very few people outside the tribe and the Japanese were never able to crack the encoded Navajo communications. The recruits coined the new Navajo terms for unfamiliar military concepts. For example, “submarine” was translated into Navajo as “Iron Fish.”[1]
I will come back to the major features of the Navajo language in the later part of this paper. The point of the above passage is to show that even though when we think of wars, hard sciences like physics and chemistry that are directly related to weaponry tend to come to our minds first, they alone do not exhaust the military vocabulary. There was a strategic benefit of having Navajo soldiers as code talkers, and this shall make a toast both to the Navajo and soft sciences.
In fact, the Cold War period in America was when soft sciences came into the limelight and began to flourish. According to one source,
When the Soviets launched their Sputnik in 1958, the United States was shocked into awareness that it was lagging behind in the hard sciences. Government funds were poured into a crash program designed to improve the teaching of science at all levels. But within a few years social scientists began to be concerned that their fields were being neglected. One result was the establishment of Educational Services Inc. (ESI)—which later became the Educational Development Center—in Cambridge, drawing on Harvard and MIT intellectual resources and funded by the National Science Foundation. It was decided that the social sciences could best be represented in the primary grades by anthropology, using the exoticism of other cultures to convey basic concepts.[2]
As an added validation to this source, among the founding fathers of visual anthropology, quite some studied or taught at Harvard during this time, for examples, John Marshall, David Gardner, and Timothy Asch. Worth and Adair’s Navajo project was partially funded by the National Science Foundation too. Unfortunately, despite having the grant numbers of their project on hand, GS 1038 and GS1759,[3] I was unable to get hold of the documents associated with these grants. I was even told by the Award Search branch of the NSF that they “could not find awards (active or expired) associated with Sol Worth or John Adair,”[4] which came as almost too big a surprise for me. Consequently though, I was forced to think of other ways of assessing how this project was important to larger institutions in society.
As a side note, there are some other instances of unverifiable information in Worth and Adair’s book, Through Navajo Eyes. It is stated in the book that “copies of all the film materials made by the Navajo and all the notes and interview transcriptions are on deposit at the Library of Congress and can be viewed there.”[5] However, from the correspondence that I had with a librarian at the Library of Congress, the library did not have such materials.[6] The librarian also directed my attention to Willow Roberts Powers’ book Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word. In it, Powers writes,
Adair recorded some discussions between Navajo filmmakers as part of a project carried out in the 1970s. He labeled the tapes with the names of the discussants, but the original quality was very poor, and the speakers were clearly at variable distances from the tape recorder. It is difficult to distinguish one speak from another, and, of course, the listener does not know which voice belongs to which name. Adair himself could have identified them at the time, but the poor quality of the tapes makes it possible that, twenty-five years later, even he might not have been able to identify all the voices. Transcription now would be neither easy nor worth attempting.[7]
The year in the paragraph about the project should be a mistake on Powers’ part.
With the government’s support and the funds attached, it was only natural that researchers from various fields came up and busied themselves with innovative projects. However, we ought not to rely on these factors alone to understand the coming about of Worth and Adair’s project. Visual anthropology as a new branch of anthropology had been maturing itself up to this point due to factors both within and beyond the discipline. Firstly, in terms of technology, mid-1960s saw the arrival of light-weight synchronous-sound cameras in the market. This new technology reduced the amount of equipment that anyone needed to carry in order to make visual and audio records of events on film. Anthropologists, or more specifically ethnographers, who worked in primitive societies where travelling light meant a great deal to them, suddenly had the opportunity to shoot film with sound without the help of a sound crew. 1963, the year that David Gardner released his ethnographic film, Dead Birds, was regarded widely in the field as a watershed in the history of ethnographic film: “Before Dead Birds, there was a mere handful of films that could be called ethnography; in the decades since Dead Birds, thousands have been made.”[8] The key factor contributing to the transition was the sync-sound camera.
Secondly, within the discipline, there had been at least three shifts in terms of the development of its practices before 1966. It was only with the accompanying theoretical development, previously absent or marginalized, that university-based visual anthropology projects appeared on the horizon. I shall note that different authors have written the history of visual anthropology differently. My goal is to find the common threads that run through all of them. The first stage in the development of visual anthropology is the era of explorers and scientists who pointed their cameras at other people to reveal other ways of life. Robert Flaherty was an explorer living with the Inuit in the Arctic who staged Nanook of the North and sold the film to his own people to let them experience the exotic; Felix-Louis Regnault was a physician who subsequently became interested in anthropology and filmed human movements for his own studies.[9] Pioneer anthropologists Alfred Cort Haddon (a zoologist), Franz Boas, and Baldwin Spencer shot footage of Torres Strait, the Kwakiutl, and the Australian Aborigines respectively. All these films are exhibitionist in nature and frequently self-explanatory because they show actions mainly. A viewer does not necessarily need any accompanying text to understand what is going on in the pictures; it did not matter whether the actions were simple like dancing or complex like making an igloo.
The second stage in the development of visual anthropology shows an increased emphasis on the potential of the film camera to capture atmosphere; this roughly covers the period between 1930s and 1950s. As can be noted in ethnographic films during this period, visuals are not simply used to illustrate pictorially what is present in the text; they are used to convey what words fall short of describing. To put it another way, ethnographic films were becoming more observational than illustrative. Margaret Mead is an important figure during this period because of her proactive advocacy for the use of film and video in ethnographic research. She argued that sending an ethnographer to a remote place on earth where a culture or a language was either rapidly dying or rapidly changing with only a pen and a notebook was an obsolete practice. As an experienced fieldworker well-trained in ethnography, she had gone through the problems with relying on words only to bring to life the day-to-day experience of another people and culture. She called for the incorporation of film into ethnographic research and practice.[10] In fact, it is also she who invented the term “visual anthropology.” Unfortunately, at the time, her ideas were too progressive; many of her contemporaries hesitated to adopt such a practice in their research immediately.[11]
The third stage in the development of visual anthropology shows the shift of ethnographic films from being observational to reflexive; it roughly corresponds to the 1960s and beyond. Instead of trying to pretend that the camera was invisible in the space that it intruded, ethnographic filmmakers made its presence openly felt. People in the film knew that they were being filmed, and a great part of the final films consisted of interviews. Jean Rouch is remarkable for using this method to elicit and sometimes provoke responses from his filmed subjects. He even went ahead to build his own film school based on this concept, which he named cinéma vérité. Rouch’s influences were felt all over the world. Today, we consider that he has inspired a generation of ethnographic filmmakers to use the camera creatively by going beyond the surface and delving deeper into the cultures that they are filming.
From a historical perspective of visual anthropology, Worth and Adair’s project does not seem to fit into the illustrative, the observational, or the reflexive model very well, but some anthropologists find a smart way out by coming up with two even broader categories of ethnographic film, namely, filming others and filming selves. I will discuss why Worth and Adair’s project fails to contribute significantly to this conceptual framework either when I discuss the project in detail later. Here, however, by outlining the history of visual anthropology, I only want to point out why the project is innovative but albeit a little foreign to the field in the traditional sense. The researchers seemed to want to find out everything by putting the camera into the hands of their subjects, but they were clearly lacking a direction.
Here are a few more major factors that could help contextualize the Navajo project. First, “[t]he mid-1960s and into the 1970s was a period of intense research integrating research in anthropology, cognitive studies, and generative linguistics.”[12] Many cross-disciplinary topics became questions of interest and problems of contention, which encouraged any number of collaborations between researchers of different academic backgrounds and trainings. In the case of the Navajo project, Worth was a communications professor who had been involved in teaching film to a diverse group of people whereas Adair was an anthropology professor who had done fieldwork in the Navajo community twenty-eight years ago. Secondly, the African American civil rights movement, which lasted from 1955 to 1968, was still underway in America when the project took place. The fact that Worth had previously taught African American youth to make film to tell their stories may be taken into account for the fact that he wanted to work with another type of less privileged minority group. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans were indeed pressing hard for their civil rights. In fact, 1968 was the year that the US government passed the Indian Civil Rights Act. Thirdly, Native Americans had been in the popular imagination of American general public since their appearance in a number of westerns as early as 1939 in John Ford’s Stagecoach. Yet, these immensely popular fiction films often portray Native Americans as hostile, lawless, and uncivilized salvages. Since anthropologists are always concerned with painting accurate pictures of ethnic groups, Worth and Adair’s project might have a hidden purpose of countering some of these stereotypes of Native Americans. Last but not least, in 1959, George Mills, then a Ph.D. candidate, undertook a project in which he had a random sample of Navajo adults draw pretty, ugly, and free-style pictures of anything they wanted. Mills studied these paintings with great care. His goal was to find out if there were any substantial connections that he could draw between Navajo art and culture.[13] Just like Worth and Adair, Mills also published his findings in a book. I doubt if Adair was unaware of Mills’ book because he was an expert on the Navajo. The two projects seem similar in that both have the goal of gaining an understanding of the Navajo through their artwork and the making of their artwork. However, to my disappointment, Mills demonstrates much more in-depth understanding of the Navajo culture and makes much more meaningful connections in his book than Worth and Adair in theirs.
I have missed factors like the development of tourism and transportation to account for the increasing awareness of Navajo culture in the larger world. However, these will show up in my paper shortly because they are also more directly related to the project. My biggest criticism of the project is its lack of a proper hypothesis. Worth and Adair did not have anything specific to prove or disapprove in mind when they started it. Instead, they seemed simultaneously interested in many aspects of film, communication, and anthropology. Their most pressing question is too broad to answer: “If people can communicate through film—if people of varying cultures can use it widely as both makers and viewers—it becomes necessary, in order to understand this form of human interaction, to find or formulate some of the patterns, codes, rules, conventions or even laws by which such communication takes place.”[14] They mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of the principle of linguistic relativity, which states that “each language provides particular grooves of linguistic expression that predispose speakers of that language to see the world in a certain way,”[15] but they did not provide a thorough understanding of the Navajo language in the book. As a result, we are never sure if their findings add proof to or contradict the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. They included a short chapter on the Navajo history and culture in the book, but they formulated no hypotheses from there either. They assumed that the “patterns, codes, rules, conventions or even laws” that they spoke of would grow out of the project and catch their attention immediately, but how could they recognize these features without some ideas about what they were or could be at least?
Next, the analyses of the findings do not contextualize the Navajo universe well enough and therefore often pass as a group of sporadic comments. The amateurish nature of the films adds further question marks to the analyses. For example, it is hard to tell whether the Navajo students really felt prohibitive to show close-ups of people’s faces because of their culture or because they did not know how to use the film language effectively. There are a total of three close-ups shots in the seven films. The numbers are not indicative of anything. For another example, in The Old Antelope Lake, Mike Anderson shot footage of the Old Antelope Lake by going clockwise around the lake and using 360 degree pans. When asked by Worth if the edited footage seemed odd to him, Anderson responded negatively because Navajos always surveyed the land clockwise. It would be interesting if Worth and Adair had gathered others’ reactions about Anderson’s film. However, the fact that this stylistic choice was not made in the other films leaves us question too if this is indeed an instance of indigenous aesthetics. As a matter of fact, Worth and Adair never went further to discuss indigenous aesthetics.
After the films were completed, Worth and Adair noted that some of their students borrowed film of sheep roaming and gazing from one student, Susie Benally, who had plenty of it. The analysis they made was that the students were not comfortable shooting anything that did not belong to them because they did not want to get into undesired disputes with other members of their community about property. At the time, not many households in their community, Pine Springs, Arizona, had sheep; showing sheep near whichever family lived was only a symbolic prestige. I am not sure how valuable this is to any anthropologist who studies the Navajo, but it is clear that whoever wishes to use it needs to dig it from Worth and Adair’s field notes.
Another important finding was the amount of walking in the finished films. In A Navajo Weaver, Susie Benally shows her mother taking several trips to gather needed raw materials for weaving. In The Navajo Silversmith, John Nelson shows a Navajo silversmith out in the field searching for a silver mine. In Intrepid Shadows, Al Clah uses extensive amount of footage of a man walking on land. In The Spirit of the Navajos, Mary-Jane and Maxine Tsosie follows their grandfather Sam Yazzie as he gathers ingredients for a curing ceremony. While the content of their films was expected by Worth and Adair for they knew that Navajos were proud of their rugs, their silver crafts, and their traditions, the extensive walking scenes surprised them because they could not see any meaning in what they deemed as simply connection shots. They expected the Navajo film students to cut these scenes out, yet the students insisted on having them. Sometimes the choices were even made against shots which apparently had more important actions taking place. Worth and Adair tried to explain their students’ choices by making connections of the act of walking to Navajo myth and storytelling. They discovered that getting from one place to another occupied great lengths in Navajo folklore and concluded that walking was a unique feature in Navajo’s way of seeing and understanding the world. In fact, this is reflected in Navajo language too. Mills quotes Clyde Kluckhohn, an expert on the Navajo language:
Navaho is overwhelmingly a verbal language. Most nouncs may be thematic, and adjectives are slightly altered verbs. The most fundamental categories distinguish types of activity. Similarly, Navaho thinking is relentlessly concerned with doing, with happenings. This fits with the view of the universe as a process, with the emphasis on the interconnections between events, with the stress on situation as opposed to qualitative absolutes, with the animation attributed even to natural phenomena.[16]
The word “interconnections” stands out in the above quote. Clearly all the students did not just happen to show more excessive footage of walking in their films, but must have at some level tried to reenact the importance of journeying in the well-known stories in their culture. However, as much as I agree with Worth and Adair that scenes of walking are more than a mere amateur mistake in the Navajo films, I also want to know why in their analysis, except the translations of three folk tales, no other quotes from famous anthropologists or linguists on the Navajo, such as Harry Hoijer, are used, at least not in this section. The importance of this finding contrasts unfavorably with their blatant negligence of others’ works on similar subjects. Therefore, like an orphan, the project is left pathetically to fend for its own.
Worse yet, sometimes Worth and Adair are just not well-informed by Navajo culture. In their analysis of Al Clah’s film, it shows that they forget to consult proper references: “Perhaps following his actor in his search for the mine or for herbs, for roots, for stone or for the source of the wheel that turned gave him a sense of assurance in an unfamiliar situation—certain this is characteristic of Navajo psychology: if you are uncertain of yourself in a particular situation, don’t remain still—travel.”[17] This is clearly a contradiction to what Mills has in his book on Navajo art and culture. Mills writes, “When in a new and dangerous situation, the Navaho tends to do nothing…The American tradition says, ‘When danger threatens, do something. The Navaho tradition says, ‘Sit tight and perhaps in that way you may escape evil.’”[18] In the next bullet point, Mills adds, “Escape is an alternative to doing nothing.”[19] To run away is only an option when the danger becomes too great for anyone to sit and wait.
When Worth and Adair first went into the project, they could have formulated a few workable hypotheses, not necessarily in relation to ethnography or communications. For example, Native Americans are famous for their non-linear but circular ways of viewing and constructing history. Worth and Adair could have narrowed down the scope of their project by only investigating if the Navajos’ way of filmmaking complied with their story-telling. However, they did not. Their ambition spanned both the fields of communication studies and ethnography. Although I appreciate their collaborative endeavor, I remain skeptical about the outcome. I have explained why their project lacks anthropological contextualization, now I will turn to why even from a communications perspective, their project, though making some exciting discoveries about different people’s learning abilities in the context of filmmaking, still is problematic in its entirety.
For example, Worth and Adair learned that the Navajos were fast at learning skills like operating the camera, using the light meter, and cutting film. They had a great sense of distance and light, and these strengths combined helped them master the technical aspect of filmmaking more quickly than most mainstream Americans. Worth said that he was impressed by the progress of his Navajo film students. He probably has an authoritative voice in making such a comment because he had worked with middle-class white youth, graduate students, as well as African-American youth before.
As a contrast to the graduate students that Worth had taught who often had trouble coming up with stories to be made in a film, and a contrast to the African-American youth who were spontaneous and had an easy time using up whatever film they had, Worth also noted that the Navajo students went about making their films in a very moderate and admirable manner. All of them had in mind exactly what their stories were going to look like before they started shooting. Like good weavers who start thinking about the design of a rug or a scarf when they are out gathering raw materials, the Navajo film students too, had the stories to be made in their minds early in the preparation stage.
Because control factors apply to this project, one factor being not allowing any outside influence on the students’ choices of what to film and how to film, one member of the group, Al Clah, an artist, was clearly not given enough help to fully develop ideas for his film. Clah expressed his wish to make a film of what it felt like to be an outsider in a Navajo community other than his own (he was the only one who was not from Pine Springs but a community fifty miles away). He struggled hard with bringing his emotions on to images. Yet, Worth and Adair refrained from giving Clah extra attention. Another student, John Nelson, stumbled upon the meaning of montage in one of the very first lessons by asking if people would get confused if he showed the picture of a crow next to that of some other birds. However, Worth and Adair did not give Nelson any straight answers to his question or explain to him how montage worked. In their book, Worth and Adair repeatedly mention that film is a language; but in the project, they refused to furnish their students with the full vocabulary of this language, even when the needs presented themselves. This suggests how desperately they wanted to prove that a different people could use the camera differently from them, but not how a different people could use the camera the same but express themselves differently.
In the next portion of my paper, I will show how others think about this project and what they perceive to be its influences. Positive reviews include Karl G. Heider’s. Heider argues,
If Worth and Adair are right, then Navajo films would be somehow “in Navajo” and would therefore be the raw material for ethnography, not ethnography itself. The most valuable aspect of the project was to raise the question of the culturally specific nature of films. The implications of this are of great importance to ethnographic films. There is a great need for more research in this direction.[20]
Kimberly A. Sultze, a Ph.D. student at New York University, actually wrote her dissertation on the cultural specificity versus universalism of film in 2001. She uses the Navajo films as an example in her discussion. Her conclusion about the project is that Worth and Adair had a strong will of finding differences between Navajos and them, yet they could not justify if their own way of making films was the western way, neither could they know “what a failure to speak film could look like.”[21] She also notes some inconsistencies in their book. For example, some of the interviews were not transcribed from the actual tape-recordings but their field notes. Even though she strives for a balanced view of the project in the end by crediting Worth and Adair for other parts of their research, I do not think she has made any attempt to wipe out the problems that she has stated about the project.
Brief theoretical praises for the project could be found all over the place, but very often, they are made without intending to be questioned further. Mead supported Worth and Adair’s project from the beginning. In her article “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” Mead argues against a form of protectionism in visual anthropology, which she means for “the isolated group or emerging new nation” to “[forbid] filmmaking for fear of disproved emphases.”[22] She uses Worth and Adair’s project as an example for this type of constructive solution. Basically, Worth and Adair’s project demonstrates “the articulate, imaginative inclusion in the whole process of the people who are being filmed—inclusion in the planning and programming, in the filming itself, and in the editing of the film.”[23]
To Emile de Brigard, Worth and Adair’s project is a continuation of Jean Rouch’s legacy of eliciting responses from filmed subjects. According to her, they went further by “elicit[ing] a ‘visual flow’ that could be analyzed semiotically.”[24] Earlier in the paper I argued that Worth and Adair’s project was not exactly in the vein of ethnographic film. My opinion still holds because the most valuable responses that Worth and Adair have elicited are not captured on film. For one thing, the content of the films is not interactive. The Navajo film students basically used the camera like the founding fathers of visual anthropology; they shot images that are largely illustrative. They meant for the films to teach their younger generation how to do things correctly. For another, Worth and Adair did not assist their students fully to find the right expressions for their stories-to-be-told. Al Clah is again an example.
Timothy Asch and Patsy Asch exalt Worth and Adair’s project for “[making] an important contribution toward developing ways to get film that illustrates the perspective of subjects.”[25] A slight variation of this kind of praise is that the project is “a ‘revolutionary development of emic understanding.’”[26] “Emic” is just another way of saying “that which pertains to the insider” for linguists. I feel responsible in telling those who think so that the Navajo film students did not always honestly present their life on film. For example, Navajos have never excavated silver mines, yet John Nelson shows in his film The Navajo Silversmith the silversmith walking to a silver mine to get silver. When asked, Nelson responded that this was how to tell a story.
Even though I have been criticizing Worth and Adair’s project so far, it would be hard for me to deny its inspirational value in other academic fields. Both Fadwa El Guindi and Richard Chalfen, who was a graduate assistant to Adair when the Navajo project was taking place, see Beryl Bellman and Bennette Jules-Rosette’s sociological project in 1977 as being influenced by Worth and Adair’s project. In the 1977 project, video cameras were handed out to two informant groups, one in West Africa and the other in Central Africa. Both groups were asked to film similar events. The goal was to study how the two groups differ in constructing visuals and in turn also study their different cognitive systems.[27]
Another related area, which I hesitate to call it an area of influence, of Worth and Adair’s project is indigenous media. None of the Navajo film students of Worth and Adair went on to become filmmakers, so the direct link to indigenous media is absent. In Steven Leuthold’s book Indigenous Aesthetics, he discusses the works of two indigenous videographers, George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva Jr. I can see the great values of their films and videos to the Native American communities that they belong, especially because they were broadcast on television. I can also understand why some use the term “bio-documentary” coined by Worth for the Navajo students’ films to describe Masayesva’s video art. However, I cannot convince myself that the Navajo project has had direct impact on a number of indigenous media both in Native American nations and elsewhere in the world. These include The Video in the Villages Project, directly by Vincent Carelli, the Mekaron Opoi Djoi Project, and even the establishment of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in Canada.[28] Additionally, neither Burdeau nor Masayesva have ever been aware of Worth and Adair’s project.
In writing about the future of visual anthropology, Sarah Pink conceives of three ways that visual anthropology can be used. First is for visual anthropology to continue revealing human commonalities and differences beyond the power of words. She also emphasizes that ethnographic films shall always be made with sufficient “cultural contextuali[z]ation and theoretical framing.”[29] Second is for visual anthropology to be “a conduit of the public responsibility of anthropologists.”[30] Although she does not, I think she can expand her category to include indigenous media. Often these indigenous videographers or filmmakers or television programmers are not anthropologists, but anthropologists are invited to participate in these programs by being interviewed or by playing other related roles. The third way that visual anthropology can be used is to let it engage with various “interdisciplinary social sciences.”[31] In my paper, I have listed Bellman and Jules-Rosette’s project in 1977 as an example. There shall be many more fascinating research topics in the production, content, dissemination, and interpretation of audio-visual materials too.
I appreciate Worth and Adair’s initial ideas, I think some of which really resonate with Pink’s third category of future visual anthropology, but because the project lacks a clear focus and its findings are often shallow and eclectic, I am inclined to think of it as “‘rather short-lived and, retrospectively, is seen as a somewhat sterile and patronizing experiment’” like Faye Ginsburg does.[32] There was so much uncertainty as to where the films belonged that when the films were released, “they gained popularity mostly in experimental film circles or as avant-garde works.”[33] In the Pine Springs Navajo community, the films “continue to be shown to and viewed by families, community groups, and schools…Nelson reported that viewers were impressed, some making comparisons of environmental details, such as trees, bushes, and dry grounds.”[34] No doubt that as time goes by, the films has gained sentimental values in a closely-knit community, and people begin to recognize them as stamps of time and as local knowledge. On the other hand though, I am not sure how those are going to be incorporated into any theory in visual anthropology. Perhaps this still proves my point that the project is innovative but its course in history rather erratic.
Worth and Adair sought the approval of a famous medicine man, Sam Yazzie, in the Pine Springs community before they began their project. After hearing the two professors talking about the project, Yazzie asked three questions intermittently, “Will making movies do the sheep any harm?” If not, “Will making movies do the sheep good?” And finally, “Then why make movies?” Yazzie did not own any sheep at that time, but Worth and Adair reported that they had been haunted by Yazzie’s questions all along.[35] Ironically, Navajo living in their reservations today have electricity to power their televisions and DVD players but have to drive their trucks to places miles away to get fresh water supply.[36] I witnessed this myself when I visited Grand Canyon last year. All these facts seem to criticize Worth and Adair’s project rather subtly. I remain disappointed at their project because it has not improved the welfare of the Navajos in the region; neither has it contributed significantly to the history and theories of visual anthropology. I come to understand the sheep in Yazzie’s questions as a placeholder. I think his questions would remain valid without mentioning the sheep. If Worth and Adair had had a clearer hypothesis, if they had some ideas about what their movies would be good for, their project could have turned out much better. Lastly, I like how Navajo weavers always know the design in their heads before they start to weave. This is probably the biggest takeaway from Worth and Adair’s project.
Notes:
[1]Larry J. Zimmerman, Native North America: Belief and Ritual, Spirits of Earth and Sky (London: Duncan Baird, 1996), 54.
[2] Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film. Rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 45.
[3] Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), xxv.
[4] Hui Wang, Email, Oct. 15, 2009.
[5] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 8-9.
[6] Rosemary Hanes, Email, Oct. 21, 2009.
[7] Willow Roberts Powers, Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word (Oxford: AltaMira, 2005), 24.
[8] Heider, Ethnographic Film, 40.
[9] Emilie de Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 7th ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 15-16.
[10] Margaret Mead, “Introduction: Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 7th ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 3-10.
[11] Heider, Ethnographic Film, 28-31.
[12] Fadwa El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy: Essential Method and Theory (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004), 140.
[13] George Mills, Navajo Art and Culture (The Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1959).
[14] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 21.
[15] William A. Haviland and others, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 11th ed. (Australia: Wadsworth, 2005), 107.
[16] Mills, Navajo Art and Culture, 124.
[17] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 207.
[18] Mills, Navajo Art and Culture, 121.
[19] Ibid., 121.
[20] Heider, Ethnographic Film, 48.
[21] Kimberly A Sultze, “Looking for the Universal—Looking for the Cultural: A Critical Analysis of the Debate between the Universalist and the Relativist Perspectives on Moving Images” (PhD diss., New York University, 2001), 127.
[22] Margaret Mead, “Introduction: Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” 7.
[23] Ibid., 8.
[24] Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” 31.
[25] Timothy Asch and Patsy Asch, “Film in Ethnographic Research,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 7th ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 343.
[26] Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 73.
[27] El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy, 147.
[28] Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, 73.
[29] Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (London: Routledge, 2006), 133.
[30] Ibid., 137.
[31] Ibid., 140.
[32] El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy, 144.
[33] Ibid., 142.
[34] Ibid., 143.
[35] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 5.
[36] El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy, 145-6.
