ABSTRACT
Vision undergoes re-vision; intention, symbol, reality are the factors that undergo constant change in the appearance of any art form. A consideration of ethnographic film history has both permitted and demanded that we explore the historicity of vision itself. An anthropological critique of realism must ultimately challenge both representational aesthetics and the tacit dimensions of vision itself. Under the influence of functionalism and cultural anthropology's fetishism of the potlatch, salvage ethnography assumed a symbolically archaeological role, becoming a kind of "museum without walls" in which the screen replaced the glass case and cultures became traces of object forms. The more that social anthropology shifted away from its initial natural-history orientation and the more dominant the culture concept became, the less useful seemed photography. An analysis of the ways of ethnographic looking immediately demands recognition of how the field of anthropology ramifies outward into endless and intertextually linked circles that traverse a multitude of discourses and media.
