Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer- E.E. Evans-Pritchard and the Nuer Rite of Gorot

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Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer: E.E. Evans-Pritchard and theNuer Rite of gorotChristopher Morton

To cite this Article Morton, Christopher(2009) 'Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer: E.E. Evans-Pritchard and theNuer Rite of gorot', Visual Anthropology, 22: 4, 252 — 274To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460903004896URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460903004896

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Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer:E.E. Evans-Pritchard and the NuerRite of gorot

Christopher Morton

Examination of Evans-Pritchard’s photographic record of the Nuer rite of gorot thathe witnessed in 1936 raises important questions about the historical relationshipbetween anthropological fieldwork and visual methods, and in particular photogra-phy’s relationship to both methodological observation and participation within early20th-century fieldwork practice. This article explores the question of why the photo-graphs are characterized by a sustained engagement with two distinct stages of therite, but why other aspects of the ceremony are not recorded. In order to explore thisquestion, which was first prompted by a detailed engagement with the entire archive,the article proposes a model of Evans-Pritchard as ‘‘participant-photographer’’—amodel that understands his activity during the rite as being composed of periodsof ‘‘photographic engagement’’ interposed with observation and note-taking.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ‘‘PARTICIPANT-OBSERVATION’’

This essay is intended as a contribution to recent research on the historical rela-tionship between anthropological fieldwork and visual methods, and especiallyphotography’s relationship to the methodological preoccupations of an emerging‘‘social’’ anthropology in the early 20th century.1 In particular I seek to addressresearch questions posed by both Edwards [2001: 89] and Herle [2008: 75–120]concerning photography’s inherent relationship to both methodologicalobservation and participation in early 20th-century fieldwork practice; but Ialso explore the extent to which the layering and accretion of archival meaningover time makes such questions problematic. The essay also seeks to redeem apromise made in my earlier commentary [Morton 2005: 400] to explore the

CHRISTOPHER MORTON trained in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute of Social andCultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and carried out fieldwork in northern Botswana in1999–2000. He was a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project Recovering the Materialand Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource, during 2003–2005. He isnow Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collections and Career Development Fellow at the PittRivers Museum, University of Oxford. His current research focuses upon the historical relationshipbetween photography and anthropological fieldwork, as well as working on archival projects withindigenous communities. E-mail: [email protected]

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relationship between Evans-Pritchard’s archive and his fieldwork practice inmore detail.

By here specifically discussing Evans-Pritchard’s photographs of the Nuer riteof gorot during his last six-week fieldwork trip of 1936, it will be necessary tokeep open two streams of evidential awareness, that of the indexical imageand that of the archive. This dual awareness is essential if we are to understandthe notion of photographic evidence as an essentially historical construction, andto see the accrual of meaning as reaching beyond the photographic frame towardboth archival and situational relationships. The essay seeks to extend Pinney’s[2008] discussion of the shifting understanding of photography’s intrinsic rela-tionship to notions of evidence by arguing that photos, particularly in anthropol-ogy, have often gained their evidential activation from their situational contextswithin an archive—photos are relational entities, embodying complex visual andtechnological relations with other images, both within a specific archive andbeyond. Although attention to the relational and material nature of the photo-graph has long been evident in some writing on the history of anthropology’svisual deposits [e.g., Edwards 2001: 88], elsewhere analysis has too often beenrestricted to the evidential possibilities of isolated and de-contextualized images[e.g., Wolbert 2000].

Much of the analysis of anthropology’s visual deposits over the last 25 years orso has focused attention on the categorization, dissemination and collection ofvisual imagery in the late 19th century, especially in relation to the growth ofresearch in the area of physical anthropology [e.g., Edwards 1990]. Most of theessays presented in the volume Anthropology and Photography [Edwards 1992]—aturning point in the research, interpretation and publishing on the visualcultures of anthropology—are informed to some extent by theoretical modelsthat had been developed in relation to text, for instance the work of Clifford andMarcus [1986] and Fabian [1983], which provided a stringent critique of the pro-cesses through which anthropology had traditionally made its object and articu-lated its disciplinary authority. In relation to photography, the methodologicaland analytical focus engaged with, on the one hand, a broadly Foucaultian config-uration of surveillance, gaze and objectification [Foucault 1979; Green 1984; Tagg1988], and on the other, the influence of linguistic semiotics in the reading ofimages [Barthes 1977; Street 1992]. Photography, because of its analog andindexical nature—a trace of light reflected off the colonial body—and given themanner in which it had been objectified, reified and controlled within the dis-ciplinary archive, constituted a potent and fertile field for such analyses. Morerecent work, however, has sought to modify the overly deterministic tendenciesof analyses that privileged colonial power relationships. Geismar has even sug-gested recently a role for historical photographs as ‘‘creative actors within, notmerely representations of, the development of ‘anthropological’ ideas’’ [2006: 524].

This noticeable shift in current research directions has had an important influ-ence upon recent writing on the historical relationship between photography andanthropological fieldwork, and indeed photography has been used as evidence toquestion the legitimacy of long-held assumptions about the existence of a suddenmethodological shift towards a more participatory form of fieldwork, as instilledby Malinowski in his students at the London School of Economics from the 1920s.

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Herle [2008], for instance, has recently analyzed the archive of John Layard(1891–1974) whose fieldwork on Malakula began in 1914, the same year asMalinowski’s, and traces the influence of A. C. Haddon in the photographicactivities of both anthropologists. Haddon had written a long appendix on field-work photography in the 1912 edition of Notes and Queries in Anthropology, andwe know of the influence of this text on Malinowski’s fieldwork from diaryentries such as ‘‘[t]hen I wrote my diary and tried to synthesize my results,reviewing Notes and Queries . . . Read some more N&Q and loaded my camera.Then I went into the village’’ [Malinowski 1967: 30]. The text of the 1912 editionof Notes and Queries makes it clear that photography was seen as a crucial tool fora more responsive and participatory method of fieldwork, arguing that ‘‘foranthropological work a snap-shot camera is quite indispensable; many incidentsmust be seized as they occur. Some people will not consent to be photographedand must be taken instantaneously, without their knowledge’’ [Freire-Marrecoand Myres 1912: 268]. The suitability of a mobile snap-shot camera for the seizureor capture of ‘‘incidents’’ can be compared to the concern with more ‘‘scientific’’photography (physical types, artifacts), for which a stand camera was consideredmore appropriate: ‘‘a certain number of typical individuals should always betaken as large as possible, full face and exact side view; the lens should be ona level with the face . . .’’ [1912: 269]. As Herle notes, it is perhaps surprising giventhe influence of both Haddon and Notes and Queries on Layard’s fieldwork that anattention to such ‘‘scientific’’-reference photography is absent from his archive.Herle suggests that one reason for this may be the influence on Layard’s theore-tical interests of W.H.R. Rivers, whose emphasis upon the genealogical methodof investigation had less use for physical-type imagery. Layard’s archive, Herleargues, thereby already suggests a transition from a more typological to a moresociological mode of enquiry, in which ‘‘the developing observational style attimes breaks through to a much more participatory and experiential mode’’[Herle 2008: 95]. This process is also shown to a certain extent in the archive ofanother early fieldworker, Diamond Jenness, working in the D’EntrecasteauxIslands in 1911–1912 [Edwards 2001: 83–105]: his albums show ‘‘an evidenttension between personal impression and scientific expression’’ and his photosdemonstrate ‘‘a nascent observational model’’ and ‘‘non-interventionist quality’’that ‘‘challenge the stereotype of pre-Malinowskian fieldwork as distanced andnon-participatory’’ [Edwards 2001: 89]. Ironically, despite our greater knowledgeof Malinowski’s photographic output [Young 1998], the relationship between hisphotography and fieldwork methodology remains unexplored in any greatdepth. Young asserts that, in his emerging functionalism, Malinowski was sub-consciously anxious to photograph the context of social activity rather than thedetail, which resulted in a methodology that privileged the middle distance[Young 1998: 19]. Although his diaries show an ongoing concern with photogra-phy throughout his fieldwork, there is little sense of a nascent participatory styleof photography in his archive. Instead, Edwards argues, Malinowski’s photo-graphic methodology ‘‘exemplified a realist discourse of unmediated observa-tion, given authority through the fieldworker’s embodied eye . . . Malinowskidoes not appear to use photography as a site of interaction with his indigenoussubjects in a way many anthropologists of the period did. That is, photography

254 C. Morton


served as a crucial tool of his observation but not of his participation’’ [Edwards2000: 600].

These studies highlight the importance of the whole-archive approach toanalysis, in which an entire extant body of work is considered in the context ofhistorical developments in the discipline, using photography’s indexical natureto reinterpret previously assumed fieldwork relationships. As Edwards argues,the intention that directed Jenness’s image making created a specific form ofanthropological gaze, and this ‘‘intention, meshed with the evidential, articulatesa meaning to be communicated. However, inscription outlives intention by thevery nature of the photograph, and thus we have the beginning of a refiguration’’[Edwards 2001: 89]. In this formulation, photography’s indexicality transcendsboth the ethnographer’s intention and subsequent communication of ideas, andretains an infinite recodability, legitimizing its later use as evidence in oftenradically altered cultural contexts, such as alternative (and often indigenous) his-tories. For me, the usefulness of this approach is only tempered by an awarenessthat the ‘‘recodability’’ argument often in fact seeks just to replace one set ofevidential readings (reinterpretation) with another (ethnographic intention),reconsolidating rather than questioning anthropology’s relationship to theindexical nature of the image. Are Layard’s photographs evidence of a moresociological and participatory approach to anthropological fieldwork? What isthe evidential basis for asserting that Jenness’s photos do not show the ‘‘tensionof intrusion’’ by a fieldworker [Edwards 2001: 89]? The value of any archivalreinterpretation is of course limited by its ability to offer a nuanced and reflexivecritique of the evidential basis upon which it rests.

The problems surrounding evidential value and archival reinterpretation areparticularly acute in the case of an archive such as that of Evans-Pritchard’s.During the process of cataloguing the approximately 4000 photographic objectsin the collection, it became clear that the photography of his first period of field-work in late 1926, among the Ingessana of Blue Nile Province in the Sudan, wassometimes markedly different from that of his subsequent Zande fieldwork.Among the Ingessana, Evans-Pritchard took a number of physical-type photo-graphs, usually both profile and full-face, occasionally using his coat for a back-drop [Figure 1]; whereas such scientific-reference imagery is entirely absent fromhis Zande photographs, though they were taken on the same expedition to theSudan. Although Evans-Pritchard took a large number of Zande portraits theyare all characterized by a less scrutinizing style and a more distanced position;and although often repetitive (such as the series of portraits of the sons of PrinceRikita) each image allows for significant personal and cultural inflection[Figure 2]. On the surface, a cross-section through such an archive could be takenas evidence for a shift in Evans-Pritchard’s fieldwork methodology—a develop-ment represented in the retreating focal depth of the images—from scientificscrutiny to relaxed portraiture, from an approach where context is intentionallyexcluded to one where context crowds in. Following Edwards’s formulation that‘‘intention, meshed with the evidential, articulates a meaning’’ [loc. cit.], wemight interpret a progression in Evans-Pritchard’s intention for photographicinscription as well as communication of meaning, suggesting that the Ingessanaphotos demonstrate the characteristic concerns of more limited ‘‘survey’’



Figure 1 Ingessana man, photographed using a coat as a backdrop. Tabi Hills, Blue Nile, Sudan.Photograph by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nov.–Dec. 1926. (Courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum,University of Oxford. PRM 1998.344.7.2).

Figure 2 Portrait of Awagi wiri Rikita, a son of Prince Rikita. Yambio, Western Equatoria,Sudan. Photograph by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, probably 1927. (Courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum,University of Oxford. PRM 1998.341.500.2).

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ethnography, whereas the Zande portraits are redolent of social relationshipsestablished over time, and thereby are an indirect product of the longer-termfieldwork method. Tracing our development from the surface of the image, itcould be argued that Evans-Pritchard’s archive demonstrates vividly the identitycrisis of British anthropology during the 1920s, with radically different notions ofwhat constituted a ‘‘scientific’’ approach laid bare in the photographic record.2

The evidence for this interpretation is complicated by the written record, whichin fact indicates not a linear progression in Evans-Pritchard’s methodology, noran identity crisis, but the co-existence of parallel ethnographic investigationswith differing methodological concerns, one of which was being undertakenon behalf of his supervisor C.G. Seligman. The written record for instance statesthat Evans-Pritchard did in fact carry out physical measurements during hisZande fieldwork [Seligman and Seligman 1932: 496], and that although not takenaccording to accepted methods, six of his Zande portraits were cropped andenlarged to provide a comparison of ‘‘Zande types’’ in Seligman’s survey ofthe Sudan [1932: pl. LVI]. Evans-Pritchard later wrote that on his first expeditionsto the Sudan he had ‘‘taken around . . . callipers and a height-measuring rod . . . toplease my teacher Professor Seligman. I have always regarded, and still regard,such measurements as lacking scientific value, even being almost meaningless;but so it was at that time’’ [1973: 242]. Evans-Pritchard’s Ingessana photographscan in one sense be understood as those of a research assistant, operating accord-ing to the needs of Seligman’s project. This example demonstrates the inherentproblem of using photography’s indexicality as unproblematic evidence in anyarchival reinterpretation, since there is a tendency to replace one set of naiveassumptions about the evidential value of photographic inscription with another.The reinterpretation of focal depth in Evans-Pritchard’s Ingessana and Zandeportraits shows how a preconceived analytical structure can heavily influenceour reading of intention, evidence and meaning in historical photography.Further, it excludes other possibilities, such as the agency of Azande in shapingthe photographic record, as well as the apparently contradictory existence of par-allel and contrasting fieldwork methodologies (such as survey and participant-observation) rather than a smooth, or even abrupt, Malinowskian revolution.

GOROT

I now want to consider further the question of evidence and interpretation in thephotographic archive, in relation to two further abstractions, those of serialityand partiality, by which I refer to the relational situation of a photograph toothers in a series, as well as the interpretive problems that surround the fragmen-tary narrative of the photographic series. The most obvious example of the rela-tionship between photographic seriality and the methodology of participant-observation in Evans-Pritchard’s entire collection, or for that matter any that Iam aware of, is the series of 12 images (probably taken in 1927) devoted to theinitiation of Kamanga as a binza (witchdoctor), where Evans-Pritchard embodiesthe role of the participant-photographer in a dramatic fashion, standing onthe edge of the ritual ‘‘grave’’ where he ritually acts as sponsor of the initiate,



throwing offerings into the hole, while at the same time taking images of theritual sequence [Figure 3]. However, it was not until his purchase of a Rolleiflexcamera sometime in the early 1930s that Evans-Pritchard began to photographsequentially in any systematic way, the most extensive being his record of the riteof gorot.

In 1936, after carrying out a brief survey of the Luo of western Kenya,3

Evans-Pritchard spent seven weeks in western Nuerland, his fourth and finalpiece of fieldwork among this Nilotic group. Most of this time (5 weeks) wasspent in Nyueny, the home village of a youth called Nhial whom Evans-Pritchardhad employed on both his first and second expeditions to Nuerland in 1930 and1931. The long-term connection with Nhial meant that, as in 1935 when he visitedthe home village of another former servant Tiop (at Mancom at the mouth of theNyanding River), he was able to conduct fieldwork ‘‘as a friend of the family’’[Evans-Pritchard 1956: 35]. This binding of the ethnographer into Nuer socialrelations had been something entirely lacking in Evans-Pritchard’s longerand yet ultimately frustrated expeditions of 1930 and 1931. This shift in socialacceptance also had a dramatic impact upon Evans-Pritchard’s photography.Whereas the political situation in 1930 meant that he had ‘‘abstained from photo-graphing a single cow’’ [Evans-Pritchard 1937: 242], as a result of the mistrustcaused by punitive strikes against Nuer herds by the colonial administration,his photographs from both 1935 and 1936 show that he was at liberty to photo-graph within the cattle pens of his hosts. Although relatively brief, the improvedaccess to Nuer social and ritual activities that he enjoyed in 1936 meant that the

Figure 3 Zande abinza (witchdoctors) gathered around the ritual burial of an initiate (Kamanga,Evans-Pritchard’s servant). Yambio, Western Equatoria, Sudan. Photograph by E.E.Evans-Pritchard, probably 1927. (Courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. PRM1998.341.163.2).

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information he gathered then came to dominate his subsequent analysispublished in Nuer Religion.4

According to Evans-Pritchard’s published account [1956: 217–218] the Nuerrite of gorot was carried out by female diviners (tiet) to ensure the fertility of acouple married at an unusually early age. It involved the suffocation of an oxby blocking its orifices with grass, the cooking and feeding of some of its meatto the young couple, the circling of the couple’s hut by the wife’s young brotherwith the boiled hump of the ox on the end of a spear, and the smearing of bloodand butter on the body. When cataloguing these photos it became apparent to methat, although subsequently disassociated within the archive, Evans-Pritchardhad taken 30 photographs (3 films) around the time of this ceremony,5 one ofwhich was published in Nuer Religion [1956: pl. 3]. According to him, gorot is verydifferent to most Nuer sacrifices since the ox was not stabbed through theheart but suffocated, no invocation to God was made before it was carried out,and since female diviners (tiet) were involved when senior male family memberswere more usual. Although it bore similarities to sacrifices to the python-spirit inwhich she-goats were sometimes suffocated after the manner of a python, and asalso probably having been adopted from the neighboring Dinka, Evans-Pritchardwas unsure of how to consider it aside from it being a notable aberration, admit-ting that ‘‘I cannot explain the symbolism, if it has any’’ [1956: 218].

Just what the gorot rite did symbolize within Nuer religious practice formedthe basis of a heated debate between T.O. Beidelman and John Burton andWilliam Arens, in the correspondence pages of the journal Man between 1969and 1976 [Beidelman 1969, 1976a, 1976b; Arens and Burton 1975; Burton 1976],in which Evans-Pritchard’s description and published photograph of the gorotrite were drawn on as evidence on both sides. Beidelman’s original commentwas a brief suggestion that the symbolism of gorotwas ‘‘to contain the taint trans-ferred within the animal . . . that the sacrificial animal absorbs the pollutingaspects of the couple who were married somewhat irregularly, and that this taintis then mastered by being consumed as flesh’’ [Beidelman 1969: 290]. Arens andBurton’s later objection to Beidelman’s analysis [Arens and Burton 1975] was thatgorot should not be understood as a sacrifice at all, and that Evans-Pritchardmakes this point.6 They further argue that Beidelman’s proposition—that thetaint of an unusual marital union is being mastered through the consumptionof the ox’s flesh—is not in accord with any evidence of Nuer ritual practice,which usually privileges the position of sacrificial blood in the removal of taintor evil. The two then appeal to the evidence of Evans-Pritchard’s publishedphotographs of Nuer ritual to argue that it is ‘‘typical of sacrifices . . . for theparticipants to shave their heads and affect special bodily ornaments. However,a glance at a photograph of the ritual in question indicates that here this is not thecase’’ [Arens and Burton 1975: 314] [Figure 4]. In formulating their own inter-pretation, they again turn to the published image: ‘‘The photograph of the gorotritual . . .depicts forcing grass into the orifices of the ox. Unlike Nuer sacrifices, inwhich there is a preference as to which side the animal should fall, in thisinstance it is actually positioned on its left side’’ [1975: 314]. According to Arensand Burton the ox’s death by suffocation and the spitting-out of the ox meat weresymbolic of a youthful marriage that, although consummated, had not produced



offspring. Other elements of the gorot rite symbolized the desired state—theproduction of a child. Beidelman’s defence [1976a: 119–121] focuses upon thedefinition of sacrifice within Nuer religious practice as well as the distinctionbetween magic and religion, but he also returns to Arens and Burton’spoint about the ritual preparedness of people depicted in Evans-Pritchard’sphotographs:

A. & B. observe that Nuer shave their heads and wear special ornaments when involvedin sacrifice and note that this is not the case in a photo of gorot, arguing that this demon-strates that gorot is not a form of sacrifice (1956: plate 3). Photographs are sometimesdeceptive, yet in all the other photos of sacrifice in this same book, most of the protago-nists appear unshaved and adorned in no special manner (plates 8, 9, 10, 11) . . . [Beidel-man 1976: 120]

The question of context hangs over not only the published image of gorot but overall the other images in Nuer Religion, and yet the appeal to its veracity and indexi-cality as an unmediated window onto Evans-Pritchard’s vision of Nuer ritualcontinues. This debate over the significance of gorot demonstrates an ongoingambivalence in anthropology’s relationship to the archival image, in which bothtruth and deception are equally possible outcomes of the interpretive process.

Figure 4 ‘‘Sacrifice of ox by suffocation,’’ published as Plate III in Evans-Pritchard’s NuerReligion [1956]. Nyueny village, southern Sudan. Photograph by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1936.(Courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. PRM 1998.355.296.2).

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SERIALITY AND PARTIALITY IN THE ARCHIVE

It appears that Evans-Pritchard took three films of photographs at the time of thegorot rite at Nyueny village.7 One of the films focuses upon the suffocation ofthe ox [Figure 5], another the young boy circling the hut of the young couple withthe ox’s boiled hump [Figure 6], and a third film contains portraits of seatedparticipants and onlookers as well as possibly the distribution of cooked meat[Figure 7]. The text description of the gorot ritual in Nuer Religion, however,includes additional elements such as the distribution of cooked ox meat to themarried couple and other kin, as well as ritual activity within the hut by thefemale diviner. Evans-Pritchard’s photographic record of gorot then is markedby an attention to the seriality of two elements of the rite, and yet by partialityin its record of the overall event. One reason for the partiality of the recordmay lie in the proxemics [Hall 1968] of Evans-Pritchard’s involvement withevents—that certain areas or elements of the rite were not judged appropriateto photograph, or since some events took place within the hut of the young cou-ple, which Evans-Pritchard does not seem to have entered. However, most otherelements not photographed, such as the smearing of butter on the participants,happened outside and presumably for all to witness. Instead the record ismarked by intense photographic engagement with two elements of the ritualactivity, and complete non-engagement with other elements. Just whyEvans-Pritchard was careful to record two aspects of the rite visually and not tobuild up a representative series of the overall rite is a question that has no defini-tive answer, and yet it provides important evidence about the role of photographyin his fieldwork.

Film 7

This group of eleven images [Figure 5] shows the suffocation of the ox as part ofthe gorot rite, perhaps the most ethnographically significant aspect of this parti-cular rite, since it differs from the invariable Nuer method of sacrificing an oxby piercing the animal’s heart with a spear. This part of the rite was describedby Evans-Pritchard thus:

An ox was thrown and its forelegs and back legs tied in pairs. It was then slowly suffo-cated, grass being first pushed up its anus with a stick, and then into its mouth and nostrils(Plate III). During its sufferings the husband and a youth of his age-set, the wife and amaiden of about her age, and a small boy and a small girl sat on its flank. After a whilethey rose and the ox’s throat was slit. [1956: 217–218]

As earlier discussed, the abnormality of this method of killing for the Nuer, inaddition to the lack of any consecration of the beast or invocation to God beforekilling it, are central to the interpretation of the rite within Nuer religious prac-tice. The repetition of views of the killing method in this sequence indicates adesire to record something of ethnographic rarity, and yet also since an especialawareness of Nuer sacrificial method in form of the presentation, consecration,invocation and immolation of a beast was to be central to Evans-Pritchard’s



Figure 5 Eleven prints identified as Film 7 within Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer photographs, showingthe suffocation of an ox as part of the Nuer rite of gorot (original sequence not identified, however).Nyueny village, southern Sudan. Photographs by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1936. (Courtesy of PittRivers Museum, University of Oxford. For accession numbers, see Note 5).

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analysis of Nuer religious thought [1956: 215]. Although frame numbers are notrecorded, the photos demonstrate his movement within the ritual arena: hebegins to photograph from where onlookers are gathered, getting gradually clo-ser in his desire to record the technique of suffocation, until he is finally standingnext to the female diviner (tiet) and is able to record the stuffing of grass into theox’s anus. He then moves round the assisting senior male family members torecord the insertion of grass into the ox’s nostrils. Although the suffocation tech-niques form a series of images across this film, there are no images recording thesitting on the ox by the husband or other ritual participants, an element that

Figure 6 Nine prints identified as Film 4 within Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer photographs, showingthe circling of the young couple’s hut as part of the Nuer rite of gorot (original sequence not iden-tified, however). Nyueny village, southern Sudan. Photographs by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1936.(Courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. For accession numbers see Note 5).



Figure 7 Ten prints identified as Film 9 within Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer photographs, showingmostly portraits taken at the time of the Nuer rite of gorot (original sequence not identified, how-ever). Nyueny village, southern Sudan. Photographs by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1936. (Courtesy ofPitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. For accession numbers see Note 5).

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forms an important part of not only Evans-Pritchard’s description but alsosubsequent interpretation of the rite [Beidelman 1969: 290; Arens and Burton1975: 314]. The proxemics of his movement within the ritual arena are of interesthere, since the sequence demonstrates his movement from a more distanced posi-tion (of lower social status or relevance to the couple involved) to one very closeto the activity itself (highest social status or connection to the couple). This move-ment through social and ritual space was of course occasioned by his desire torecord close detail of the suffocation, but it also evinces a tolerance by the socialgroup of his movement into the heart of the ritual arena, something made possi-ble by the transformation over five years of his relationship to this communitythrough his servant Nhial. Both the immediacy and performative flow of the suf-focation event are perhaps why Evans-Pritchard takes so many similar images ofthe suffocation, revealing a heightened concern with capturing in a cinemato-graphic manner the temporal flow of events. Most fieldworkers have probablyalso experienced this repetitious element with their own fieldwork photography,with some significant situations leading to numerous exposures in an attempt tocircumscribe the experience, or perhaps rather to capture it from the all-too-rapidflow of experience. In other words, by considering the seriality of the fieldarchive, we get an intimation of Evans-Pritchard’s relationship to photographyitself and the manner of his engagement with the medium during key eventsduring fieldwork.

Film 9

The series of nine images identified as Film 9 [Figure 6] relate to the circling of theyoung couple’s hut with the boiled hump of the suffocated ox. Evans-Pritcharddescribes it as follows:

The door of the hut was then closed and the butter was placed on the fire. While it wasmelting, a boy, the wife’s brother, circled the hut outside with the boiled hump of theox on the point of a fishing-spear. When he stuck the hump through the first windowof the hut the diviner asked ‘‘what will you give me?’’ and someone in the hut answeredthat she would give a brown calf. The action was repeated at the other windows of the hut,the answer referring to either a brown or black calf. Then the door was opened andthe diviner hung round the wife’s neck the stomach lining of the ox and the skin of itsumbilicus to which brass rings and part of its tail had been attached. [1956: 218]

In comparison to the ritual elements surrounding the suffocation aspect of theritual, in this series of photos Evans-Pritchard seems to attempt to construct avisual sequence, beginning with the female diviner standing outside the hut, lead-ing the boy around the windows, and finally the opening of the door and the feed-ing of pieces of meat to the couple. In several of the images he does not have adirect view, but instead we gain a vivid impression of his position within a gath-ered group of onlookers, with family members all around him. All the images aretaken from a position adjacent to the door of the hut, suggesting that he did notfollow the boy as he was led around the hut by the female diviner. Althoughhe records the female diviner offering meat to the couple, there is no photo of



the tiet placing the ritually important parts of the ox around the wife’s neck, sug-gesting that his view of this stage was impeded by other onlookers who werebeginning to gather closely around the doorway at this point.

Film 4

The series of ten images identified as Film 4 on the print reverse [Figure 7] is amixed group of portraits taken around the homestead at the time of the gorotevent, as well as views across the courtyard. They may have been taken dur-ing the wait for the rite to begin, but one of the images shows a group ofyouths and others gathered on the spot where the ox was killed, with whatmay be the indistinct form of the ox on the ground visible between them,suggesting that these images were perhaps taken at some point after the suf-focation. Three of the images were taken with the Rolleiflex resting on theground—which Evans-Pritchard props up and turns slightly to the left inorder to take a portrait of a youth sitting nearby. In only one of the other por-traits is the subject seemingly aware of the photographer’s attention, that of asmiling youth. This print has been marked by a printer for cropping on theright side, but evidently was not used since it does not seem to appear inany of Evans-Pritchard’s publications. These images vividly demonstratethe use made of the Rolleiflex to take photos in an inconspicuous manner,by lining up the portrait by looking down into the top-viewer and takingthe image from chest-height, angling the camera upwards for the portraitof the man with the ivory arm-ring, and downwards towards a seated manwith an ornament tied at the back of his head. All of the images in this filmare of people seated or standing in the homestead, and their peripatetic nat-ure also resonates with the waiting, perhaps impatience, of the ethnographer.Evans-Pritchard described Nuer ritual as ‘‘a rather lengthy affair, and for aEuropean rather tedious to assist at. He has to sit in the sun for several hourslistening to addresses that are difficult for him to follow. Some of thesentences may be inaudible, the speaker speaking too low or having his backturned to the audience, who may also be talking among themselves’’ [1956:209]. It would be easy to over-interpret this film in the context of its evidentconnection with the gorot event. It seems clear that Evans-Pritchard did notuse this film to document Nuer social activity preceding or proceeding froma rite, but rather to take the opportunity as an accepted part of the gatheredgroup to take some close portraits, something hitherto difficult during hisearlier periods of Nuer fieldwork. Given that scenes of ritual action entirelyfill the two further films, there is the possibility that these portrait imageswere actually taken in the long build-up to the gorot event, and that he tookthese portraits in order to finish one film and have a new one ready forthe rite to come that might require quick and repeated exposures. AlthoughI am reluctant to over-interpret this film of peripatetic portrait taking, theirinherent visual excess allows us to witness far more than Evans-Pritchardintended of the occasion, especially those onlookers less central to the riteitself.

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SERIALITY, PARTIALITY AND COLLECTIVE WITNESS

The notion of seriality in still photography is one that stresses the dynamic rela-tionships between images, a dynamic that retains ‘‘the fetishistic power of thestill and the argumentative capacity of the moving’’ [Pinney 1990: 42]. One ofthe most interesting explorations of the relationship between the evocative powerof the still photograph and its relational and filmic potential is Chris Marker’s LaJetee [1962], a film which invites consideration of the still photograph and theconstruction of a cinematographic narrative and meaning. Two of the most inter-esting published examples of seriality in anthropology or documentary are Bate-son and Mead’s Balinese Character [1942] and Agee and Evans’ Let Us Now PraiseFamous Men [1941], two works that have their roots in projects carried out in1936—the same year as Evans-Pritchard photographed the rite of gorot. 1936was the year of Mead and Bateson’s first visit to Bali and of Agee andWalker’s original assignment for Fortune magazine. Both these projects involvedcollaboration in order that both textual and visual narratives were developedalongside each other, something only possible to a partial extent for the solefieldworker. Bateson for instance wrote that:

We usually worked together, Margaret Mead keeping verbal notes on the behaviour andGregory Bateson moving around in and out of the scene with the two cameras . . . For workof this sort it is essential to have at least two workers in close cooperation. The photo-graphic sequence is almost valueless without a verbal account of what occurred, and itis not possible to take full notes while manipulating cameras. The photographer, withhis eye glued to a viewfinder and moving about, gets a very imperfect view of whatis actually happening, and Margaret Mead . . .had a much fuller view of the scene thanGregory Bateson. [1942: 49–50]

Bateson’s model of ethnographic collaboration involving a bilateral approachto the visual and textual record of events leaves the sole fieldworker in a precar-ious position, unable to be both photographically engaged and an overall obser-ver in a position to take full and meaningful notes. The existence of partial seriesin Evans-Pritchard’s record of gorot would then be explained in a relativelycommonsense way—the ethnographer can either be photographically engagedor taking notes, but this leads to some sequences and some gaps. This modelwould then understand his sequence of photos of the ox suffocation and the cir-cling of the hut as two periods during which he was photographically engagedand with the intent of recording a sequence of events, and during otherelements of the rite he was engaged with observing and note-taking. Since noneof Evans-Pritchard’s fieldnotes has survived it is not possible to trace the patternof his observational activity from this source.

So far I have discussed two explanations for the co-existence of partialityand seriality in Evans-Pritchard’s record of gorot, both of which emerge froma close reading of the archive itself. The first suggests that since the photo-graph is a product of a camera operated by a fieldworker, the archive is neces-sarily shaped by the proxemics and spatial dynamic of the fieldworkencounter—for instance that images of the gorot rite that took place in thehut interior are not evident since Evans-Pritchard’s entry into the young



couple’s hut would not have been considered appropriate, or that photograph-ing the couple eating meat together would have been to record somethingconsidered humiliating, since married couples did not eat in each other’s pre-sence. The second explanation considers that photographic engagement andnote-taking or observation are essentially different forms of fieldwork thatthe lone fieldworker cannot hope to combine coterminously. This explanationwould thus see the partiality of Evans-Pritchard’s record of gorot as the inevi-table result of his successive attempts to combine photographic engagementalongside detailed note-taking and observation. I want to now briefly considera third approach to understanding the partiality of the gorot series, one thatpays more attention to the agency of the group in shaping the archive, sinceit directly relates his photographic engagement to the engagement of the socialgroup gathered to witness the ceremony.

Taking another look at Films 7 and 9 [Figures 5 and 7], what seems to emerge isa strong sense of the collective nature of the gorot ceremony, with family mem-bers gathered closely around, some assisting at points, and others watching.The importance of collective witness and group involvement is a common featurein Nuer religious practice, especially sacrifice, which often involves numerousrelatives who travel considerable distances to attend, and which ends with thedistribution of meat among the relatives. The group witnesses that a sacrificehas been carried out as part of the collective’s obligation to spirits; they witnesswhich direction the beast falls after sacrifice, and they gather to hear the lengthyinvocations that precede it. Evans-Pritchard as participant photographer is alsopart of this dynamic of collective witness, moving with onlookers as they witnessdifferent aspects of the ceremony. In these two films the nature of his photo-graphic engagement seems to sway with the collective witness of the group,shown by the presence of other onlookers on either side of the frame. The imagesof the circling of the hut by the youth with the boiled ox hump in particulardemonstrate that the sociospatial dynamic of the earlier suffocation element ofthe rite, where onlookers sat patiently nearby to watch, had transformed into amore participatory and informal rite, in which Evans-Pritchard had to jostle forposition to gain a view of the scene.

The importance of the active witness of kin is often an intrinsic part of theefficaciousness of ritual, and it is during these periods of concentrated and focused,almost structured, participation and witness by the wider group that Evans-Pritchard seems to become photographically engaged, rather than amore detachedobserver. The model of the participant-photographer forming part of the collectivewitness of the group is also evident in other published ethnographic series ofrituals, such as Turner’s photographs of the Ndembu ritual of isoma, where thecouple being treated stand in a ritual hole whilst the ethnographer takes his placealongside the officiants and other kin members gathered to witness and singthe kupunjila or ‘‘swaying’’ song [Turner 1969: Figs. 1–7]. From this perspective,the agency of the collective group in shaping the activity of the participant-photographer and the resulting archival record is key. The ethnographer’s engage-ment with events is often guided by the engagement of the witnessing group, andhis photographic engagement forms part of the way in which the collective witnessof the group is dynamically involved with events as they unfold.

268 C. Morton


THE SIGHT OF THE FIELD IN THE ARCHIVE

We know that Evans-Pritchard used his Nuer photographs as a source of ethno-graphic data when re-examining his Nuer notes some twenty years later, whilepreparing Nuer Religion [1956]. In the chapter ‘‘Spear Symbolism,’’ an examina-tion of the importance of left=right symbolism in Nuer religious thought and cul-ture, he argues that the Nuer invariably train the left horns of their favorite oxen,whereas they erect sacred poles to the right of their shelters. His turn to thearchive for confirmation however proved less than helpful: ‘‘All deformed hornsin the photographs are left horns. Some branches in them, however, are to the leftof the windscreens, but Nuer erect branches for practical purposes as well as forreligious reasons, and I do not think it is possible to distinguish between them bysight’’ [Evans-Pritchard 1956: 235n].

But the sight of the field in the archive, although indexically related to thenotion of sight-as-witness, has remained an ambiguous source of evidential valuein the re-interpretation of anthropological data gathered through note-taking.The reinterrogation of the field archive, premised upon photography’s indexical-ity as a store of cultural data less affected by fieldwork intentionality, is alsounderstood here, to use Pinney’s [2008] phrase, as both ‘‘cure’’ and ‘‘poison’’—both the source for reinterpretive evidence and yet also constrained by its inabil-ity to record the contextual transformation of a practical object (a pole for hang-ing personal items) into a ritual one (the ‘‘sacred pole, associated with God, thespirits of their lineages and also with its ghosts’’) [1956: 234]. Sight is here recastas an essentially limited sense, distanced from experience—a scrutiny imposedupon the visual field at one remove from the sort of understanding gained fromcultural immersion. As a reinterpretive sense, it becomes separated from thenotion of witness as a key ethnographic method, a point to which I will return.The importance of sight-as-witness to the method of participant-observationwas the subject of one of Malinowski’s letters from the field to Layard, urginghim that ‘‘I find the first rule: see it yourself. Don’t be satisfied with what themissionary and settler, nor even what the native tells you. See it; live throughit. I find this is the main thing.’’8

Throughout his published writing Evans-Pritchard also compares the author-ity of his having witnessed an event directly to that of earlier writers whose infor-mation was mediated by another—‘‘[w]hat I record,’’ he wrote in the Preface toNuer Religion, ‘‘I witnessed myself or is information given spontaneously’’ [1956:v]. Yet he elsewhere notes that the notion of witness, the passive ‘‘being-there’’ ofthe ethnographer, is only the prerequisite to the more scientific activity of anthro-pological observation, since ‘‘one has to learn what to look for and how toobserve’’ [1952: 81]. The discrimination of the trained ethnographer’s eye, hewrites, cannot be compared to the indiscriminate viewfinder of the camera:‘‘The work of the anthropologist is not photographic. He has to decide what issignificant in what he observes and by his subsequent relation of his experiencesto bring what is significant into relief. For this he must have, in addition to a wideknowledge of anthropology, a feeling for form and pattern, and a touch of gen-ius’’ [Evans-Pritchard 1952: 82]. There is of course an inherent irony in this state-ment, since both a ‘‘feeling for form and pattern’’ and ‘‘a touch of genius’’ are



qualities more usually applied to photographers than anthropologists. Althoughhis employment of the term photographic to mean the indiscriminate capture ofinformation negates the discriminatory processes involved in field photography,we take his point. What it also raises is the question of the relationship betweenthe direct observation and witness of the ethnographer, photographic engage-ment with events at the time, and the subsequent usage of the field archive inlater writing. Evans-Pritchard’s textual description of gorot occupies less thantwo pages in Nuer Religion, and as with much ethnographic writing about ritual,there is a very linear progression of meaningful elements in the description.Within this linear description, each stage is given equal weight in a this-happened-then-this-happened manner; there is no sense of greater and lesserritualized activity, gaps or secondary social events or contexts. It is a structuredprocedure, but nonetheless not abstracted from the particularity of the event wit-nessed. This is heightened by retrospective inserts such as ‘‘the husband told meafterwards that this was the most humiliating part of the rite’’ [1956: 218], whichintroduces a participant’s reflection and judgement into the flow of ethnographicdescription. There is an effortless and constant shift of the balance of ethno-graphic authority between Evans-Pritchard and informant in the text. Theauthority of the anthropologist in determining the structured linear sequenceof ritual has been addressed by Morphy [1994] in his discussion of the filmingof ritual events, where he identifies both the false concreteness of culturalevents and the posteriority or retrospect nature of ritual interpretation whichis then presented as a priori experientially. The process of building-up observa-tional notes, subsequent commentary and cross-commentary, all characteristicof Evans-Pritchard’s ethnographic method, can then be contrasted with theimmediacy of his photographic engagement with ritual events and the subse-quent textual evocation of the immediacy of participation in the publishedaccount. Geertz [1988] has described Evans-Pritchard’s writing style as oneof creating ‘‘textual transparencies’’ in which the visualizable is given pro-minence in the way in which social and cultural life is translated to thereader. According to Grimshaw [2001], Evans-Pritchard accords a central roleto vision as an observational technique, a strategy by which society may be‘‘seen,’’ thus indicating a certain conception of scientific knowledge. ‘‘Theanthropology of Evans-Pritchard,’’ she argues, ‘‘is built upon the idea of illu-mination. The world is ultimately knowable. It is rendered transparent throughthe exercise of the light of reason’’ [2001: 66]. As Grimshaw also argues, it wasperhaps the Malinowskian attention to sight and vision in ethnographicenquiry that ultimately led to the demise of the camera and other scientificinstrumentation within anthropology [2001: 54], as tools associated ironicallywith a lack of vision of the social field, focused instead upon the surface ofappearance.

CONCLUSION

In presenting the case study of Evans-Pritchard’s field photographs of theNuer rite of gorot, I have asked several questions: why is the archival record

270 C. Morton


characterized by a sustained engagement with two distinct stages of theceremony, and why are other aspects of the ceremony not represented? In orderto explore these questions, which were first prompted by a detailed engagementwith the entire archive, I have proposed a model of Evans-Pritchard as ‘‘partici-pant-photographer’’—a model that understands his activity during the rite asbeing composed of periods of ‘‘photographic engagement’’ interspersed withobservation and note-taking. I have discussed a number of ways in which the epi-sodic nature of this photographic engagement may be understood: from the per-spective of a Batesonian concern with the incommensurability of visual andtextual approaches to fieldwork; as being influenced by technical or other prac-tical considerations, such as the movement from exterior events to those takingplace inside the couple’s small hut; and finally as being influenced to some extentby the agency of the gathered group, whose role in the active witness and parti-cipation in ritual events can be seen to have helped shape the archival record. Thesight of the field in the archive, the process of reinterpreting textual notesalongside the photographic record in subsequent analysis, was also consideredin the light of debate over the symbolic meaning of the gorot rite, as well asEvans-Pritchard’s comments in Nuer Religion about the inability of Nuer photosto record the contextual transformation of everyday objects into ritual ones ‘‘bysight alone’’; an insight which suggests the need for more research into therelationship between vision, evidence and the archive in anthropology.

NOTES

1. An earlier form of this article was presented as a paper in the panel ‘‘PhotographicMediations’’ (32d), convened by Jurg Schneider and Frank Wittman, at the firstEuropean Conference of African Studies organized by the Africa-Europe Group forInterdisciplinary Studies, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Universityof London, June 29 to July 2, 2005. A revised version was also presented at the Wenner-Gren-sponsored workshop entitled ‘‘Revisiting the History of Visual Anthropology,’’convened by myself and Elizabeth Edwards at the 9th Royal AnthropologicalInstitute International Festival of Ethnographic Film, Oxford, 18 Sept. 2005. I wouldlike to thank all those who made useful comments at these presentations, and inparticular David Odo. My thanks are also due to Katrien Pype for her additionalcomments.

2. Evans-Pritchard’s training in anthropology at the London School of Economics in themid–late 1920s epitomizes the differing notions of the ‘‘scientific’’ basis of anthropologyat this time—for his supervisor Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873–1940) anthropologywas an empirical and descriptive discipline closely connected to the human sciences;yet he was more influenced by the radically different ‘‘science’’ of functionalism taughtby Malinowski, with its emphasis upon direct and unmediated observation, linguisticsand textual analysis.

3. See http://photos.prm.ox.ac.uk/luo for a full catalog of Evans-Pritchard’s photographsrelating to his Luo fieldwork of 1936.

4. Evans-Pritchard’s, Nuer fieldwork was composed of four expeditions: 1930 (about 14weeks at Yoinyang, Pakur, Muot Dit); 1931 (five months at Nyanding River, Yakwachand Kurmayom); 1935 (roughly six weeks at Yakwach and Mancom); 1936 (sevenweeks in western Nuerland among the Leek (Lek) Nuer, mostly in Nyueny). See



Johnson [1982] for an account of Evans-Pritchard’s relationship with the Sudanadministration who funded his Nuer fieldwork.

5. Professor Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) donated all of his southernSudanese field photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, in1966. See http://southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk for a full online catalog of Evans-Pritchard’s southern Sudan photograph and object collections held at the Pitt RiversMuseum. The cataloging of the Evans-Pritchard collection was made possible by a grantfrom the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to Jeremy Coote and Eli-zabeth Edwards in 2003, for a project entitled ‘‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cul-tures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource.’’The accession numbers of the gorot photographs illustrated in this paper are—Film 4:1998.355.26.2, 1998.355.73.2, 1998.355.74.2, 1998.355.75.2, 1998.355.76.2, 1998.355.77.2,1998.355.78.2, 1998.355.92.2, 1998.355.132.2; Film 7: 1998.355.239.2, 1998.355.296.2,1998.355.307.2, 1998.355.315.2, 1998.355.316.2, 1998.355.317.2, 1998.355.320.2,1998.355.346.2, 1998.355.446.2, 1998.355.532.2, 1998.355.535.2; Film 9: 1998.355.87.2,1998.355.126.2, 1998.355.137.2, 1998.355.238.2, 1998.355.264.2, 1998.355.358.2,1998.355.410.2, 1998.355.587.2, 1998.355.631.2, 1998.355.637.2.

6. Although Evans-Pritchard does claim that ‘‘what I witnessed should not be regardedas a sacrifice at all’’ [1956: 217], he titles the published image of gorot as ‘‘Sacrificeof ox by suffocation’’ [1956: 68]. Although his use of the word sacrifice in the imagecaption was probably a convenient shorthand, it also adds to the ambiguity of hisinterpretation.

7. In the fullest account Evans-Pritchard gives of Nyueny village [1990 (1951): 12–17] hestates that: ‘‘The village is spread along the arc of a sandy ridge for about a mile anda half. It comprises three hamlets, Nyueny, Dakyil, and Kamthiang, and about a mileto the north of it lies the hamlet of Dhorpan, the occupants of which used to form partof the main village. In 1936 the population of Nyueny was reckoned to be about 130souls, distributed in twenty-six homesteads’’ [1990 [1951]: 12].

8. Letter from Malinowski to Layard dated 9 June 1915 from Samarai, Papua. Universityof California at San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library, John WilloughbyLayard Papers, Box 10, Folder 6. Quoted in Herle [2008: 78].

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FILMOGRAPHY

Marker, Chrisl962 La Jetee. Paris: Argos Films.

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Documents

Fieldwork and the Participant-Photographer- E.E. Evans-Pritchard and the Nuer Rite of Gorot