ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on primarily on that wider debate but on the work of photography within anthropological praxis. It aims to bring to the analytical surface the relationships on which cultural translation depended. The photographs considered here suggest the complexity of anthropological interpretation and translation, and indicate their intersection with wider debates around the idea of "cultural translation". Anthropology, an essentially humanist discipline, is constituted through the human experience of complex cross-cultural encounter with a range of hopes, expectations and suspicions on both sides of the relationship. Photography here stands for a relationship of multiple sites of translation and interpretation which were inflected with the desires of disciplinary anthropology, the political history of the Zande region, the invisible distribution of anthropological labour and the relations of a colonialized environment. Photography is integrally connected to EP's central field methodology of the collection of vernacular texts, but its contribution becomes strategically submerged and marginalized in anthropology's own historiographies, hagiographies and critiques.