Date:         Wed, 15 Mar 2000 03:00:55 -0600
From:         Mike Salovesh <t20mxs1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU>
Subject:      Seeing and believing?

Ron Kephart said:

>>Perhaps it was because your drawing had little real
>>resemblance-content in either case (no reflection on your artistic
>>ability intended),  but in your Spanish class, unlike for the
>>Aymara, the drawing had much convention-content:  the children were
>>accustomed to stick-figure representation.
>
> Not exactly. In Aymara, even a photograph doesn't work.
>

For comparison with what Ron reports, let me describe a case where
photos didn't work with Tzotzil and Tzeltal speakers in Chiapas, Mexico.
What turned out to be interesting was that the reasons photos didn't
work turned out to have nothing to do with "resemblance-content" or
whether the informants were accustomed to photographic representation.

Background: Three universities (Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford)
cooperated in ethnographic projects in Highland Chiapas, Mexico in the
late 1950s early 1960s. Design of the Chicago Chiapas Project called for
parallel studies conducted in a string of communities where the
predominant language was either Tzeltal or Tzotzil, languages of the
Mayan family.

Part of the design called for collecting materials for comparative
psychological evaluation.  One of the tools proposed for this task was a
variant of TAT, the Thematic Apperception Test.  Photographs of
individuals wearing clothing that approximated local Indian costume, in
settings that would be familiar to people living in Highland Chiapas
communities, were substituted for the standard drawings of the TAT. The
photographs were selected so as to show scenes that were open to
ambiguous interpretation; the kinds of ambiguities paralleled those
depicted in standard TAT drawings.

The idea was for project workers to hand the photographs, one at a time,
to an informant and ask the informant to tell a story about what the
people in the pictures were doing.  The plan was to tape record as many
of the responses as possible; the recordings would be transcribed,
translated if necessary, and given to specialists for standardized TAT
evaluation.  Where local conditions made tape recording impossible,
field workers were to transcribe the responses on the spot. With
standard eliciting stimuli, and with fieldworkers trained to set the
framework of each interview in a standardized way, the whole procedure
was supposed to . . .  well, at this point, I can't remember what we had
in mind.  Some kind of culture and personality study as one feature
among many in the whole comparative study of Tzeltal/Tzotzil
communities, I guess.

The attempt at collecting TAT materials with photos was a total flop.

Before anyone suggests that maybe our informants weren't used to
photographs, or to telling stories about what could be seen in a
photograph, let me save you the trouble.  People have been taking photos
in these communities for more than a century.  (I just ran across a
photo taken in this general area that was published in National
Geographic in 1915. I've seen older ones in the field.) Every local
fiesta is likely to have itinerant photographers offering the chance to
pose for and purchase a picture, and many homes have photos pinned to
the walls or standing on the tables that support house altars.

I have shown older informants copies of photos taken 10 to 30 years
earlier in their own communities, and they have eagerly identified those
who appear in the pictures. Sometimes discussions got pretty lively when
there was some uncertainty about the identity of some individual in an
old photo -- and sometimes those questions were settled by sending for
someone recognizable in the picture, or for a relative of a known
individual appearing there.  Once people were pretty well agreed as to
the identity of those who appeared in the photos, they would turn to
guessing when the pictures might have been taken and who the
photographer might have been. Then people would tell stories recounting
what was happening in the lives of those people back when the picture
was taken, or what they must have been doing that provided the occasion
for the photo.

What went wrong with the attempted photo-based TAT equivalents was that
people did not react to those pictures in ways we expected.  A typical
reaction to a picture might go like this:

"Can you tell me a story about the people in this picture?"
"No, I don't know them."
"Well, can you tell me what you see in the picture?"
"It looks like a man is standing there, and a woman, and they are in
front of a house."
"What are they doing?"
"I don't know.  I have never seen them before.  Who knows what they
could be
doing?"

Once in a while, there would be a markedly different reaction.

"Ah.  That looks like old Bartolo X, not the one who is here today but
the one who died maybe ten years ago.  One day he was coming home from
the milpa, it was a long time ago, when his son Mikel was still at the
breast.  It was a hot day, so Bartolo sat down to rest when he came to
the Rio Seco.  It was the rainy season, and there had been so much rain
up in the hills that the Rio Seco was flowing as it does when it rains,
not dry as you might see it today. . . "

In a sense, the photo had served as a stimulus to telling a story -- but
the only element in the photo that had anything to do with the story
told was the slight resemblance between the photo's subject and someone
the informant had known in the past.  The standardized stimulus produced
no responses that could be used as planned.  (They did produce lots of
information anyhow, mostly by accident and the good luck of one
fieldworker or another.)

I'm not sure I know why our careful plans failed.  I observed, on lots
of occasions, that when Indians in Chiapas talked about those whose
likenesses they saw in a photograph, they didn't mention individuals
they didn't recognize.  Nobody volunteered any explanation.  I wasn't
smart enough to ask, either.

Nonetheless, I may have an explanation.  I learned it this way:

In the field, I took the advice of more experienced investigators and
tried follow strict rules about giving away copies of my pictures.  One
of those rules was never to give a copy of a photo to someone who did
not appear in it.  (I made exceptions when asked to take a posed
photograph of an individual who agreed to it.  When the developed
pictures came back, I would give a copy to the person who posed and
another copy to the person who had asked that the photograph be taken.
But I would do so only if I had explicit permission from the photo's
model, and the model was present when I passed on the copy.)

I had many reasons to be glad I followed such rules. For example, young
Andres, one of my informants, kept pressing me to take a picture of a
girl named Angelita and give it to him.  Something felt out of kilter
about the urgency of his requests, so I decided to ask Andres' mother,
Tia, what she thought of it.  (Tia was an old friend and one of my best
informants.) Tia explained that Andres was enamored with Angelita.  But
Angelita was raised by Tia's half-sister, Lola, who was said to have
taken her in as an abandoned infant.  (Although both Tia and Lola
vehemently denied it, there were rumors in the town that Tia's father
had incestuously sired Angelita with Lola.) Tia asked me not to give any
photographs to Andres, because it would not look good.  She had arranged
for Andres to marry somebody else to put an end to any possible
relationship with Angelita.

I concluded that what Andres had in mind was some kind of love magic
involving a photo of Angelita.  I never got direct confirmation of that,
but the interaction suggested that there might have been some local
beliefs that there are things you can do with photographs that will
affect the person depicted.  The implication would be that photos have
someting to do with witchcraft.  It's very hard to get information on
witchcraft in the community I studied, so it took some time to confirm
my hunch.  It does turn out to be true. It's also true that there is a
great deal of fear of the possibility of witchcraft, and a belief that
talking openly about witchcraft powers often leads to supernatural
attacks on the speaker.  (Another belief is that the only defense
against witchcraft or other supernatural attack is to acquire the power
to do it yourself.  Curers can only cure those diseases they know how to
cause.  Thus someone who talks too openly about witchcraft is, ipso
facto, claiming to have strong witchcraft powers. There is a whole
spectrum of social consequences that can follow being accused of having
such powers.  Ritual assassination is one possible result -- a kind of
killing that happens almost every year. That sure puts a damper on any
attempt to dig deeply into witchcraft beliefs in anthropological
interviews.)

Here's a different kind of case illustrating the same principle.

There is a report, in an old issue of American Anthropologist, that
speakers of Isthmus Zapotec have no generic word for "bird". That
remarkable information was elicited by handing photos of a variety of
birds and other things to Zapotec-speaking kids and asking them to do
alternative sortings, then describe what the pictures in each stack had
in common.  No general word for "bird" emerged from this procedure.

There was a great weakness in the whole setup. The bird pictures
included an owl and an eagle, among others.  Pick up practically any
ethnography of the Isthmus Zapotec and you'll see why that throws the
whole article into question.

Zapotecs tell their kids that owls are evil, and that they have great
powers to harm children who do wrong.  "The owls will get you if you do
that!"  Eagles are the animal companions of those with strong
supernatural powers.  (Only those whose companion spirits are jaguars or
hurricanes are said to be more powerful.) In the sorting situation, kids
gave laconic responses through their bilingual schoolteacher, who
translated for the investigator.  I'm not surprised that ten or twelve
year old kids whose first language is Isthmus Zapotec said very little
about stacks of pictures that included depictions of an owl and an
eagle. I'm not surprised that they didn't come up with a card-sort
including the eagle and the owl with all the other birds.  I'm not
convinced, on that evidence, that Zapotec doesn't have a generic word
for "bird".  I think those kids, talking to an outsider through the
mediation of a major authority figure, were just scared and didn't want
to talk.

What I'm suggesting is that when people "don't recognize" what's in a
picture, it doesn't have to be because of unfamiliar
resemblance-content.  Some content can be so inherently threatening that
it's better to look stupid for not recognizing a representation of that
content than to be forced to deal with the threat it represents.  There
can be strong rules against talking about what appears in a picture.

All I've dealt with here is one kind of reason for "not recognizing" the
content of a picture.  I can easily dream up others, but I leave that to
the rest of you. Why should I have all the fun?

-- mike salovesh     <salovesh@niu.edu>      PEACE !!!