ABSTRACT
The series of photographs that forms the focus of this chapter was the product of nine months' fieldwork in 1911-12 in the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, Massirn, off the south-east coast of Papua New Guinea. The photographs were taken by a young Oxford anthropologist of New Zealand origin, Diamond Jenness, a student of R. R. Marett. Jenness based his fieldwork on Goodenough Island, one of the principal islands of the D'Entrecasteaux group. In the contexts of Jenness's field photographs we see, very literally, different performances in shifting space, both in and outside the archive. The chapter considers these photographs in terms of the history within them and the histories around them: their historical refiguring. It argues a form of social biography, namely the way in which different forms of truth value are attributed to photographs over time and space.
