ABSTRACT
Anthropological photographs have double lives – as Elizabeth Edwards once phrased it, they record parallel realities (2003: 83). One of these realities is the way in which meaning is generated within systems of knowledge constructed by scholars, depicting concepts such as race, assimilation, occupation and ceremonialism. They are catalogued and sometimes physically stored according to such anthropological meanings, and are used for teaching and illustrative purposes within these schema: an anthropometric photograph used to illustrate the relationship between anthropology and colonialism; photographs of ceremonial behaviour or age-gender roles in their appropriate places within an anthropology textbook. While the meanings of such images have shifted over time, acquiring layers of thought and critiques, because they exist within categories that our own intellectual histories have generated, we often think that we know what they mean.
