Drawing It Out - UCL Discoverydiscovery.ucl.ac.uk/1467832/1/Geismar, H. Drawing it out .pdf · Drawing It Out HAIDY GEISMAR The ﬁeldwork sketches of Arthur Bernard Deacon, made

Drawing It Out

HAIDY GEISMAR

The fieldwork sketches of Arthur Bernard Deacon, made in Vanuatu in 1926–27, give us insight into the earlymethodologies of social anthropology and into the role of images in anthropological ways of thinking. Here I developa perspective on field sketches that explores them not only as visual mediations of the fieldworker’s subjectivity, butalso as genre pieces that indicate very particular forms of training in “how to see.” I draw out the visual conventions,ways of thinking and seeing, that underscore the different strategies that Deacon used in his drawing. [A. B. Deacon,drawing, Malakula, Vanuatu, visual culture]

Introduction

A rchives have an uncanny capability to make theprivate public, showing the researcher thingsnot necessarily intended to be seen by a broad

audience. Sketches, especially in field notebooks, aresimilarly private, seeming to present us with a picture ofthe ethnographic encounter that may be hard to find inan image set within a polished monograph. By makingsuch hidden documents visible we may recuperate loststories of personal experience and alternative historiesof ideas. Yet how seriously should we take images thatdo not become canonical, mainstream, exhibited, repro-duced, and printed in thinking about the history of ourdiscipline? What can we make of sketching—informal,often unpolished, often quick drawings, frequentlymade in front of their subject—in our understanding ofhow anthropologists “see” the world during fieldwork?This essay looks at the role that sketching played for akeen anthropology student working in the South Pacificin the 1920s, and asks what his example might teach usabout the process of becoming an anthropologist andabout the importance of drawing to this course of prac-tice. Tim Ingold has commented on the potential ofdrawing “to reconnect observation and description withmoments of improvisatory practice” (2011:2). Here Iexplore the provisional nature of sketching as anembodied exploration of the subject position of theanthropologist-in-making. The images I present hereinstantiate a disciplinary engagement using visualidioms gleaned from the background of the anthropolo-

gist as well as his interlocutors in the field. Sketching isnot just an immediate, relatively unmediated documen-tary practice but is both a medium of visual orthodoxyand a cultural practice inflected with multiple visualgenres—an embodied dialogue with multiple knowl-edge and aesthetic systems.

While anthropology’s relationship to drawing haschanged over time, translating between images andwords has always been a key part of our methodology.During fieldwork, ethnographers have to continuallyprocess what they “see” and translate their experienceinto documentary media of many kinds, from writtennotes, to audiovisual recordings, sketches, tables,surveys, diaries, and so on. This “raw” material is thenreprocessed into a more formal presentation that, ingeneral, has long devalued the visual. The notebooksand other archival materials of Arthur Bernard Deacon(1903–27) give us insight into the role that sketchingplayed for a young student conducting his first researchat a time when long-term and immersive fieldwork wasstill an emergent methodology. For Deacon, drawingwas part of a wider palette of methods that anthropolo-gists had been working on since the emergence of thefieldwork paradigm in the late 19th century. However,unlike photography, object collecting, interviews, andthe making of genealogies, drawing was not fully devel-oped as a specific methodology for ethnology. Deacon,like most anthropologists even today, had to rely onpreexisting skills and knowledge of other traditions ofbotanical, archaeological, and travel illustration. Thisrelative inattention to drawing as a precise method or

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Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 30, Issue 2, pp. 97–113, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2014 The Authors Visual Anthropology Review published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalfof the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12041.

skill within anthropology provides an interestingcounter-narrative for fieldwork and dominant para-digms of visual representation (Figure 1).

This sketch, in one of Deacon’s notebooks, presentswhat might at first glance be considered to be a typicalethnographic drawing. The drawing shows severalstanding stones and carvings within the framework of asmall open house. The artifacts shown are part of aritual ceremony known locally as Nimangki in the areathat Deacon worked, South West Bay, Malakula, part ofthe New Hebrides, known as Vanuatu in the presentday.1 The artist-ethnographer seems to be positioned insuch a way as to perceive every aspect of this tableau.The carved faces of the figures are each fully visibledespite the relative angles of the posts upon which theyare carved. This play with perspective undermines thenaturalism of the sketch. This drawing shows us whatthings looked like to Deacon, visually establishing theauthority of the ethnographer’s perspective as a form ofrealist “I-Witnessing” (Geertz 1988: chapter 4). Further

exploration of Deacon’s visual archive shows that thissketch is but one of a series of drawn visual strategiesthrough which we may begin to understand thecomplex “period eye” of the anthropologist (Baxandall[1972]1988; Geertz 1976). Deacon’s sketches teach usnot only about what he was seeing, and perhaps think-ing, but also about how he was trained to see and think,both by his teachers in Cambridge and by his Malakulaninterlocutors.

Understanding Sketching in Anthropology

From the outset, the discipline of anthropology wasdefined by the experimental movement of methodsdevised within scientific laboratories into the field ofhuman interaction and experience (Schaffer 1994). The1898 Torres Strait Expedition was a seminal moment forthe institutionalization of British anthropology andanthropological training (see Herle and Rouse 1988). Bythe turn of the 20th century, colonials, missionaries, andtraders were encouraged by training manuals, such asNotes and Queries on Anthropology, published by theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science andthe Royal Anthropological Institute, to systematicallygather diverse evidence in the field as part of the com-parative “science of mankind” (Urry 1972). As scientificfieldwork turned its methods toward the comparativestudy of human culture and society, an insistent sensethat all method must be subservient to the immersivelife experience of “being there” also began to grow. Aswe shall see, this emergent tension is palpable inDeacon’s written field notes and drawings.

Anthropological empiricism generally rests intension with discussions about reflexivity, subjectivity,and the competing worldviews of anthropologists andtheir interlocutors. At the same time, discussions ofmethod are as much techniques for reproducing patternsof interest and engagement within the discipline ofanthropology as they are for establishing empiricalmodes of inquiry. Discussions about cultural relativismmay have, in the present day, morphed into conversa-tions about perspective and ontology (see Viveiros deCastro 1998), but they continue to explore how theanthropological project of ethnography can mediatebetween cultural worlds. While these conversations tendto focus on writing, exemplified by the emergence of a

Haidy Geismar is a reader in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Her research interests include thehistory of anthropology and photography, and the contemporary resonances of archives. She is the founder of http://www.materialworldblog.com and the current editor of the Journal of Material Culture.

FIGURE 1. Drawing of Nimangki shrine, S W Bay, Malakula, byA. B. Deacon, in small fieldwork notebook. MS 90/4/D365.

98 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 2 Fall 2014

new field of “ethnographic theory” exemplified by thejournal Hau (http://www.haujournal.org), both film(Griffiths 2002; Grimshaw 2001; MacDougall 2006) andphotography (Edwards 1992, 2001; Pinney 2011) havealso been historicized as ethnographic methodologieswith their own visual cues and codes for representingthe fieldwork encounter. A vibrant literature that under-stands film and photography both as method and formfor anthropology has emerged in which the subjectposition of the photographer is unpacked alongside thatof the photographed or filmed (e.g., Banks and Morphy1997; Castaing-Taylor 1994; Wright 2013). Far lesscritical attention has been paid to the production ofother kinds of visual images by anthropologists despitethe fact that, as Taussig notes, “drawing intervenes inthe reckoning of reality in ways that writing and pho-tography do not” (2011:13).

Despite our increasing awareness of the fact thatmany anthropologists do indeed sketch and draw(famous sketchers include A. C. Haddon, Alfred Gell,Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, and Michael Taussig, and nodoubt the practice is extremely widespread), little atten-tion has been paid to the stylistic conventions andmateriality of these images, or to the role that the veryspecificity of sketches and sketching (rather than simplythe fact of their existence) plays in the formulation ofanthropological knowledge. I focus here on sketches asa particular subset of drawing because our ability todeconstruct visual images into bigger cultural frame-works seems to end at the sketch—a form of drawingunderstood to be so immediate as to present us with asnapshot of both subjective and objective reality. Suchperceived indexicality of sketching might be argued topresent an “image” of sketching as quasi-photographic.We are only just starting to see sketches as we see otherforms of artistic production, as stylized representationalforms that mediate the real in different ways from thatof photography, and that initiate conversations anddialogical modes of engagement with others bothduring and after their making.

The dominant approach to understanding drawingwithin anthropology focuses on drawing as a visualstrategy and form of embodied practice in which “theline” becomes an ontology for the production of anthro-pological knowledge (Ingold 2007, 2010, 2012). Whetherit be Ingold’s development of a “graphic anthropology”in which “the drawn line can unfold in a way thatresponds to its immediate spatial and temporal milieu”(2011:239) or Taussig’s assertion that sketching is a formof homeopathic (and surrealist) magic, “the magic oflike affecting like” (2011:106), contemporary celebra-tions of ethnographic drawing as a technique of bothanthropological documentation and understanding

rarely unpack the visual styles and strategies that struc-ture these images or locate them in the comparativecontext of other drawings, either of the time or withinthe discipline. In an exceptional study, RudiColloredo-Mansfeld (2011) explores the resonance of hisown drawings alongside a group of Tiguan artists, com-paring their understandings of stylistic convention,perspective, and perception by working through themedium of drawing itself. Colloredo-Mansfeld andothers (e.g., Hendrickson 2008) use drawing as whatBallard (2013) terms a “dialogic” practice—a way toengage visually with others in the field.

Here I focus not only on careful drawings, designedperhaps to be shown to others, or even made withothers, but also on more intimate sketches, hidden awaywithin fieldwork notebooks, many of which have rarelybeen seen until now. Hendrickson (2008) describes theways in which her sketchbooks formed part of the“visual processes of coming-to-know” during her ownfieldwork (2008:120), and uses the technique of collage,of both sketches and media images, as a way to generateunderstanding and knowledge of tourism and media inthe Yucatan. Here I develop the idea that sketching is aform of (visual) thinking and an embodied and situatedpractice that reflects cultural norms about being situ-ated, looking, as well as stylistic and representationalconventions. In my discussion of Deacon’s sketching, Iunpack these visual images as part of complex culturesof looking, which bring together the image worlds ofanthropologists and ni-Vanuatu. In providing anaccount drawn from the early days of anthropology Iprovide a depth to descriptions of sketching that locatethem within fieldwork encounters that are always pre-sented as contemporary, but, as far as I can tell, neverlocate sketching as part of a broader history of drawingwithin fieldwork. This essay domesticates the work ofBernard Smith, humbly adding to his magisterialaccount of European Vision and the South Pacific(1985) the marks of a young anthropologist workingquietly in 1920s New Hebrides.

Arthur Bernard Deacon

Born to British parents in Nicolaev, Southern Russia in1903, where his father worked for a shipping firm,Deacon was sent to Nottingham High School at the ageof 13, leaving his parents in Russia. He was deeplyunhappy to be separated from them, but performed wellat school, winning a scholarship to Trinity College Cam-bridge where he read Natural Sciences, French, andRussian. He wanted to apply for the Civil Service butwas too young to sit the exam after graduation, and

Drawing It Out GEISMAR 99

following the suggestion of Cambridge anthropologistsW. E. Armstrong and A. C. Haddon sat for the Anthro-pology Tripos, passing with a first-class mark in 1925.Haddon suggested that he work toward a Ph.D. and thathe undertake fieldwork in the New Hebrides. W. H. R.Rivers, who along with Haddon was one of the foundersof anthropology at Cambridge, and his student JohnLayard had both worked on the island of Malakula,where they had focused on a megalithic ritual culturethat extended through the island throughout theWestern Pacific. Rivers had died in 1922, and Layardhad not yet written up his fieldwork from 1914 to 1915due to illness and a subsequent breakdown (see Geismarand Herle 2010: chapter 1). There was a strong sense ofwork to be done to consolidate knowledge about thisritual complex that comprised the raising of standingstones and carvings, and in a shared ancestor deitycalled Tamat or Ambat. Following on from Rivers’ inter-ests in cultural diffusion, the Cambridge School at thetime was interested in the migration of culture, in theform of language, ritual, song, music, and mythology,and in broad questions of similarity and difference,cultural stability, and change over historical time (Urry1985). Deacon’s generation of students, the first forwhich long-term fieldwork was fully institutionalized,was charged with filling in the local details within thesweeping brushstrokes of regional interest that Riversand Haddon had already established in the South WestPacific. Deacon was to connect to Layard’s work in thenorthern part of Malakula (Layard 1942) and to follow

up on Layard’s preliminary observations of a megalithicculture in South West Bay, Malakula (Layard 1928).

With only the most rudimentary historical informa-tion about the New Hebrides and only one year ofstudying anthropology, Deacon set out for Malakula inDecember 1925. He traveled to Cape Town, then toSydney and Melbourne, where he met Radcliffe Brown.He also met several missionaries who had worked in theNew Hebrides. He proceeded via Norfolk Island to thecapital of the New Hebrides, Port Vila, where he workedwith men in the prison there from various islands andtook notes for what would be published as “Notes onSome Islands of the New Hebrides” (Deacon andWedgwood 1929). As soon as he could, he took a ship toSouth West Bay. During the 14 months that he spent inthe New Hebrides, he was based in South West Bay andhis main contacts with non-indigenous people were twomissionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd, and two traders: EwanCorlette, the British District Agent who lived at Bush-man’s Bay, an extremely literate man who was to giveDeacon much conversation and advice in the field, and aFrench trader, Mr. Dillenseger (Figure 2). During field-work, Deacon spent most of his time at S. W. Bay withshorter trips to North Malakula, Lambumbu in the NorthWest, and a six-week trip to Ambrym, where he “discov-ered” a six-class marriage system that was to cause muchanthropological excitement (see Deacon 1927; Rio 2002).

During his fieldwork, he frequently sent notes andphotographs to both Haddon and Radcliffe Brown forsafekeeping, provoking much excitement in Cambridge

FIGURE 2. “Copy of a snapshot of Deacon taken by Mr Plowman a planter in Malekula abouta week before the death of the former in 1927. The original is in possession of Deacon’smother. Photograph given to Mr G.B. Milner in Samoa by Mr Plowman, 27/04/1956.” RAI

photo archive 3805.


and Sydney, and many admiring letters flew back andforth across the ocean. While still in the field, he wasoffered a lectureship by Radcliffe Brown at SydneyUniversity. However, in 1927, while packing up to leavefor Australia, Deacon contracted Blackwater fever anddied a few days later, nursed by Mrs. Boyd. He wasburied on the island. Since then, locals have professedto see his ghost wandering through the dancinggrounds, and some posit that his death was caused bypowerful spirits who had been inflamed by the fact thathe had trespassed to take photographs in a sacred space(Clifford 1997; Geismar 2006).

Upon Deacon’s death, his personal effects were sentto his parents, but because of his sponsorship by Cam-bridge his photographs, field notes, artifacts, and otherspecimens became the property of the Cambridge Uni-versity Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.Some of his field notes and many of his letters toHaddon and Armstrong are now in the Cambridge Uni-versity Library. This material includes an extensive andcharming correspondence with his Cambridge girlfriend,Margaret Gardiner (who later published extracts of theletters in a book called Footsteps on Malekula), and withhis supervisors in which he discusses in detail his expe-riences and feelings during fieldwork. The objects hecollected (54) and the original photographs he took onhis small Kodak vest pocket camera (71) are held in theCambridge Museum (with copy prints in numerousother archives in London, Oxford, and Vanuatu).

Despite their sadness at losing their best and bright-est, the home team in Cambridge rapidly set aboutestablishing Deacon’s legacy. A fund was established inhis name, and Haddon commissioned a fellow student,Camilla Wedgwood, to work with Deacon’s field notesand edit them into a volume, which was published in1934 under a title suitable for the salvage anthropologyof its time: Malekula: A Vanishing People in the NewHebrides. Haddon and Wedgwood also edited a lengthyarticle for the Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute (Deacon and Wedgwood 1934). After finishingher editorial work Wedgwood deposited all of Deacon’sfieldwork notebooks, close to 50 different volumes of allshapes and sizes, and the other materials she had beenworking with, alongside her own research notes, in thearchives of the Royal Anthropological Institute inLondon.2

Deacon used small notebooks to record the locallanguage in words and stories. He used lined notebooksto take down oral histories and to transcribe ritualmusic, and plain sketchpads to both take notes and todraw. He also produced a number of loose-leaf drawingsand paintings, primarily of ritual objects, alongside anextensive number of sheets documenting family trees,

making use of the genealogical method originallydeveloped by Rivers. In 2012, the RAI Deacon collectionwas awarded status of documentary heritage by UNES-CO’s Memory of the World program.3

Beyond Text

Writing is so unreal, so terribly unreal, lending theillusion of movement to quiet and stillness, andholding back desire and vision and the cool, clearwelling up of things.4

Notwithstanding the tragedy of his early death,Deacon’s archive allows us to explore the process ofresearch and writing, and the entanglements of imageand text as methods of knowing and studying, and it iscritical to this understanding to understand how thisarchive has been remediated many times by many dif-ferent interlocutors. Malekula: A Vanishing People inthe New Hebrides is a strange text: a combination ofDeacon’s field notes and personal letters to his advisors,with the occasional editorial footnotes by Wedgwood. Itis written in the present tense about a culture thatDeacon obviously felt was already in the past. He com-mented with exasperation in a letter to Haddon that“everyone has been led away by the glitter ofcivilization—rifles, gin, rum, watches, electric torches,condensed milk, tinned meat (both consumed in con-siderable quantities); the price of cotton, the doings oftraders, these are becoming more and more the principleinterests of the natives.”5 Deacon’s work has to beunderstood in the light of the “salvage” agenda of histime. Traditional cultures were perceived to be decliningirreparably and it was the self-defined task of thisgeneration of anthropologists to inscribe traditionsbefore they disappeared entirely.

The book, as a hefty encyclopedia of customary lifein Malakula, was deconstructed almost from the get-go.Fellow Cambridge anthropologist John Layard, who hadworked in Malakula ten years earlier and had lent hisfield notes to Deacon for him to take into the field, washorrified to discover, upon receiving the proofs toreview, that Wedgwood had unwittingly incorporatedhis notes into Deacon’s and quoted him without attri-bution. He threatened Routledge with legal actionunless they allowed him to insert errata into the textwith his own preface, and the pages of the first editionare interspersed with inserted annotations and criticisms(see Geismar 2006:539).6

These exchanges underscore the intense uncertaintythat surrounded the translation of Deacon’s field notesinto an authoritative ethnography. Deacon had left for


Malakula in 1926 filled with youthful energy, but soonbecame disillusioned and overwhelmed. The paradigmof “salvage anthropology,” of preserving and collectingthat which was rapidly being lost, provided a meta-narrative for his fieldwork experience. The local culture,as he perceived it, was in decline due to the influence ofmissionaries and the interests of Western traders. Wholelanguage groups were dying from introduced diseases.The area where he lived was infested with malarialmosquitoes. Deacon was profoundly ambivalent aboutanthropology during his fieldwork, Wedgwood wasambivalent during her editing, and Layard was anambivalent reader. In light of this lack of confidence,perhaps it is more productive to look at these texts asextensions of an exploratory practice, perhaps even assketches themselves. No coincidence that this is verymuch a moment in which some anthropologists werestarting to detach themselves from the natural sciencesto construct the interpretive paradigms of the socialsciences. In one of his letters to Margaret Gardiner,Deacon commented:

It is so different in physics and chemistry—thereyou have a vast structure of really beautiful theory,experimentally verified in enormous numbers ofways, and as undoubtedly true, I suppose, as any-thing of the kind one can think of—so research hasa great theoretical searchlight, there is coherenceand direction. Here (in ethnology) it is all a mess—Isuspect most ethnologists are bad historians, orbad psychologists, or bad romanticists. [cited inGardiner 1984:44–45]

By moving away from Deacon’s published workand looking at the rest of his archive, specifically hisdrawings, we may reconstruct not only some of thetraditional lifeways of Malakulans but also the thoughtprocess of the budding anthropologist who is usingfieldwork as both tool of empiricism and a form ofreflexive critique that precipitated a “crisis of recogni-tion in the human sciences” (Marcus and Fischer1986:7). Indeed, we might think of the salvage paradigmas a representational crisis avant la lettre.

In a volume edited by W. H. R. Rivers entitledEssays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (1922b), mis-sionaries, traders, and ethnologists discussed contempo-rary theories of population decline in the region andconcluded that the rapid decline of Melanesian peopleswas a result of the negative effects of colonialism,missionaries, and trade that had brought disease,alcohol, and detrimental innovations in clothing,housing, and feeding, resulting in a profound shift inthe psychological state of native peoples and a “loss of

interest in life” (Rivers 1922a:97). The paradoxical roleof the anthropologist was, therefore, to document andrecord what was disappearing. Preserving, while at thesame time facilitating the disappearance of the docu-mentary record:

Even if it were decided utterly to destroy the oldreligion there is no way in which these difficultiescan be met so successfully as by a study of the oldreligion and of the mental attitude upon which theold religious practices rested, for this attitude mustinevitably influence the reception of the new reli-gion. If, on the other hand, it be decided to preservesuch elements of the old religion as are not inconflict with the new, this study is even more essen-tial. How can it be possible to decide whether anative practice shall be preserved unless the natureof the practice is thoroughly understood and itsrelations with other aspects of the native culturerealised? . . . Whatever the policy adopted towardsthe indigenous religion, it is of the utmost impor-tance that this religion shall be understood andthat, even if no concerted effort to study nativereligions is made, attempts in this direction madeby individual missionaries shall be encouraged.[Rivers 1922a:112]

Deacon was well aware of this mission and directlyexperienced its paradoxes. For instance, he was chargedby Haddon to collect skulls for the Cambridge Museumof Archaeology and Anthropology, which he did, evenas he was lamenting the disappearance of entire vil-lages, clans, and even language groups. This precipitousdecline generated not just collections of objects, but theentire anthropological project of the time. Deacon madeexemplary use of the genealogical method developed byRivers in Cambridge to record extensive family treesand histories of families and lineages that were, he felt,coming to an end. He wrote to Haddon: “nothing hashappened since I have been here except funerals . . .everything has gone, or is going, in the New Hebrides.I’m just getting what I can before it goes altogether.”7

The immediacy, indeterminacy, hesitancy, and evenhidden nature of sketching were suited perfectly to thisuncertain time.

Sketching Bodies, Embodied Sketching

With a keen artistic eye, visual practice was evidentlyimportant to Deacon during his fieldwork and it wasone of the ways in which he explored the methods andideas he had been trained to use at Cambridge. Within


his notebooks Deacon made use of sketching in anumber of different ways. He used drawing in the fieldas a schematic, as a form of annotation, and as a formof place-making. This is an interesting correlate to hisphotographic practices. He took only 71 photographsand used drawing much more as a visual aid thanphotography. For instance, it is pretty clear from theirabsence, despite the strength of the genre at the timeand his collecting of skulls for the museum, that Deaconwas unmoved by the genre of anthropometric photog-raphy as a tool of racial classification. Rather, even thisanthropometric style of photography was co-opted toexpress Deacon’s ambivalence and loneliness as he con-templated the project of salvage anthropology.

This is palpable within (Figure 3) in which, whileconforming to the conventions of the anthropometricgaze, Deacon also resists this frame, captioning thephoto as “The Last Survivor of the Melpmes Clan, Telvu-Suaga Kabat Wuk. Side View of Head.” The intention-ality of physical anthropological documentation is herepartially subverted by a more dominant narrative ofcultural decline and also by a personal interaction inwhich this man is presented as a named individualrather than just a racial exemplar. Despite theaffordances of photography as a tool of racial docu-mentation par excellence, Deacon activated this genreto make a very different point. It is telling that bothhis field notes and published writings contain verylittle written discussion of, or emphasis on, physicalanthropology.

Given this disinterest in, even subversion of, thephysical anthropology project, I was surprised to dis-

cover in one of Deacon’s notebooks (MS90/2/B) anumber of sketches that express interest in very par-ticular issues within physical anthropology, showingthat Deacon was thinking and engaging quite clearlywith Darwinian theory and its application to theoriesof evolution (even at the time when this was beingrejected in Cambridge), and that he was not completelydisengaged with visual methods that allowed anthro-pologists to focus their gaze intimately upon the bodiesof their interlocutors (Figure 4). Page after page in thisparticular notebook are covered with disembodiedsketches of ears. The close attention to these ears sug-gests a different kind of intimacy to that of the moreformal photograph of Telvu-Suaga Kabat Wuk, in whichDeacon must have been sitting close to people, withtheir permission to scrutinize their faces, casuallydrawing as they talked. As in the anthropometric pho-tograph of Telvu-Suaga Kabat Wuk, the owners of theears are also named. This easy intimacy sits alongsideDeacon’s interest in drawing the specific shape ofcertain ears tracking the presence of an “overfoldedhelix and an antihelix,” the other terms he uses toannotate his drawings.

The sketches indicate a particular understanding ofdrawing as a vehicle of intimate and detailed connec-tion with scientific theory. Darwin’s opening pages ofDescent of Man (1871), his treatise on the evolutionaryorigins of human beings, sexual selection, and humanrace, used as an example “one little peculiarity in theexternal ear,” a little projection from the inwardlyfolded margin of helix. Darwin considered this to be “avestige of formerly pointed ears” and an indicator of the

FIGURE 3. “The last survivor of the Melpmes clan, Telvu-Suaga Kabat Wuk. Side View ofHead.” Photo by Deacon, reproduced in Deacon (1934: plate II.3).


relationship of human beings to monkeys. FollowingDarwin, the (over)folded helix was considered byanthropologists to be an evolutionary throwback, andthey were interested in discovering this among so-called“primitive” peoples.

In a 1907 article, entitled “The Head of an Aborigi-nal Australian,” D. J. Cunningham, professor ofanatomy at Edinburgh University, observed that “theexternal ear is distinctly human in all its elements andparts, although it also exhibits in a small degree certainanthropoid characters; further if we are to regard thehuman auricle as undergoing a process of retrogradedevelopment, the Australian ear has apparently pro-ceeded along this path to a greater extent than theEuropean ear” (1907:53). The article is illustrated with aphotographic plate presenting a montage of ears, visu-ally positing connections between monkeys andAboriginal peoples (Figure 5). Putting aside our owndistaste for these kinds of comparative illustrative prac-

tices (and their scientific questionability), Deacon mayhave been thinking through these arguments by sketch-ing the ears of those in his company in Malakula (therewas certainly no admonition to pay particular attentionto ears in Notes and Queries). Yet at the same time, thesesketches are annotated with people’s first names and lieon pages interspersed with drawings of ritual artifactsand notes about magic, health, poison, and sickness,suggesting a more visceral engagement with Malakulancorporeality and a more intimate respect for the peopleto whom these ears were attached (Figure 6).

These ears indicate a transitional moment for anthro-pology as it shifts away from the natural sciences, moving

FIGURE 4. Annotated drawings of ears, indicating both the namesof the individuals, with notes about the physical characteristics oftheir ears. Annotations: rainbow+mbat imeet; (top ear) slightwidening; Masenrean; antihelix = in level to helix; pl of attach-ment; (middle ear) distinct overfold; no overfold; slight depres-sion; pt att. Antihelix depressed below level of helix. Angle 1;(bottom ear) MILMILIAG Albino at Venian, man and his mother

albinos. LOKON MS 90/2/1632.

FIGURE 5. Plate from Cunningham’s article on “The Head of anAboriginal Australia,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Insti-tute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1907: Vol XXXVII, plate IX.Caption reads: “The head of an Aboriginal Australian. Fig. 2. Exter-nal ear of Boco. Fig. 3. External ear of Australian (A); fig. 4.External ear of Australian (B). fig. 5. External ear of gorilla. Fig. 6.

External ear of chimpanzee. Fig. 7. External ear of orang.”


from interests in evolution to interests in social psychol-ogy, diffusion, and sociology (Urry 1985). Ears aresketched, collected, but it is telling that there is no indi-cation of Deacon’s interest in ears in his field notes them-selves, or in the texts that were eventually published. Iinterpret this as an instance where it seems to be impos-sible to translate from the archive into formal text. Thesesketches were not considered evidential or reliable asanthropological documentation but rather demonstrateDeacon’s more speculative explorations of physicalanthropology, ways of working through the key words ofhis disciplinary moment (“overfolded helix”). Deaconcould observe, record, and draw the ears of his interlocu-

tors. But neither he nor Wedgwood could, or wanted to,translate that into more conclusive exegetical thinking,especially given the paradigm and politics of increasedrelativism and historicity that dominated the anthropol-ogy of the time. Despite drawing several people’s earsseveral times over several pages of his notebook, there isan indeterminacy to these sketches. In many ways, theyrepresent a visual dead end—they do not translate intoother registers of knowledge or information; they cannotbe translated or used as illustrations (Figure 7).

But despite this failure, there are ways in whichother sketched images, for Deacon, played a role in theconsolidation of academic and anthropologically disci-plined knowledge—ways that sidestep the most literalexpectations of how sketches like the ears may, or maynot, be translated into anthropological theories, andthat focus on how sketching, like photography, can beunderstood not just as a depiction of other bodies, butas an embodied way of knowing that contributes to asense of scale or positioning during fieldwork. Along-side the exploration of scientific theory, Deacon useddrawing as a determinedly material way into the culturehe was studying. His drawings were not only withinfield notebooks, but also migrated into other media. Forinstance, among his papers are a series of images of thecarved faces of slit gong drums, made by rubbing blackcrayon on packing paper recycled from his own parcels.Their presence in the archive provides a sense of scale tovisual imagery that had been lost from fieldwork pho-tography by this time (Deacon worked with a small vestpocket Kodak using standard negatives that provided auniform scale and depth of field to all of his images)(Figure 8).

FIGURE 6. Interspersed among the ears in, MS 90/2/1619. Deaconcopied this image as a larger drawing with the caption “TemesMalau, [Malau = bush turkey] a mask of the Nalawan. The mask isjust over 8 ft in height. It is extremely heavy and can only be worn

for a few minutes.”

FIGURE 7. Rubbing of the carved face of a drum. “Nevet” crayonon packing paper. MS 95/7.


Instead, these rubbings provide us with a sense ofthe “real” size of the drum face and by extension asense of Deacon’s physical engagement with the drumthrough the process of transferring an image from woodwith wax crayon onto paper. The reverse of the papergives us another tangible impression of Deacon’spresence in the field—these images are made withrecycled packing paper torn from a parcel sent throughtrade routes to the ethnographer—and his desire tomake use of these precious pieces of paper, to save thesecareful traces of home, is almost palpable. Here sketch-ing becomes a multilayered form of collecting—a literaltransference of the face of the drum onto packing paper,a domestic moment of consolidation for the homesickanthropologist (Figure 9).

Sketching Place and Space

For Ingold, “the practice of drawing has little or nothingto do with the projection of images and everything to do

with wayfaring—with breaking a path through a terrainand leaving a trace, at one in the imagination and onthe ground, in a manner very similar to what happens asone walks along in a world of earth and sky” (2011:178).Deacon also used sketching as a way to locate himself,not just more abstractly in space or in relation to thecultural objects surrounding him, but also within aspecific environment. In another notebook are a numberof drawings that seem to have been made from thevantage point of the water as he tracks the coastline ofMalakula in a dugout canoe or whaler boat. Pages andpages go by as Deacon traverses the coastline, sketchingand annotating as he went (Figure 10).8

Being in the archipelago of Vanuatu is an experi-ence that continually balances being on land with beingon sea. A visual sense of the land, as seen from the sea,is vital not only to finding one’s way, but also tounderstanding how to be and who to connect to. Points,headlands, and bluffs are often the boundary markers ofclan territories, and significant markers to delineateaccess to coastline, reefs, and beaches. A view from thesea is often the only way in which this visual sense ofcoastline can be apprehended. The dense foliage of lushtropical forest necessitates a heightened awareness ofplace markers. Only from the sea can these rocky out-crops, the relative topology of hills and mountains, andbays and inlets be fully perceived and understood toform a specific cartography. For local people, eachheadland signifies a boundary marker between areasowned by kin groups. Being in a coastal landscape, fromthe interior, requires a sense of placement that oftenrefers back to the experience of moving between placesby canoe. People’s connections to land are traced asmoving up and down from the sea into the hills. Dea-con’s own awareness of the genealogies and family trees

FIGURE 8. Full-length rubbing of Nimangki figure. MS 95/9/.

FIGURE 9. Detail of reverse showing Deacon’s name and address.MS 95/9/.


he was collecting would have necessitated an under-standing of how places were marked out and recognizedlocally. Sketching here is a way of generating a cross-referenced understanding of place-making and a way ofunderstanding and locating knowledge within specificplaces.

At the same time, these images are more than justimmersive conduits transferring Deacon’s experienceonto paper or reflecting his growing understanding oflocal technologies of place-making. Just as Deacon wasthinking through the theories of physical anthropologyhe had become familiar with in Cambridge, he musthave also been influenced by the pictorial conventionsof landscape within the genre of illustration that dateback to the work of the artists who accompaniedCaptain Cook on his Pacific voyages and that alsoestablish a certain kind of cartographic perspectivewithin the so-called “Age of the World Picture”(Heidegger 1977). In another sketchpad are a number ofdrawings also made from the vantage point of the wateras he tracks the coastline of Malakula and which areannotated accordingly. In his famous analysis of theartistic traditions and legacies of Cook’s voyages,Bernard Smith (1950, 1985) unpacks the picaresqueconventions that lay underneath the “documentation”of Pacific landscapes by artists such as Sydney Parkin-son and William Hodges. While Parkinson’s imagesreflect the cartographic and documentary imperative ofCaptain Cook’s voyages of discovery, Smith notes thatHodges in particular was adept at combining the docu-

mentary with the picturesque “without sacrificing therequirements of either” (1950:73) (Figure 11).

The “faithful pictorial record” was thus suffusedwith enlightenment idealism and romanticism about thetropical climes of the Pacific and its peoples. Sketchesand drawings were just as mediated by the “culturaleye” of the artist as finished paintings and engravingsmade later on, back in the British Isles (see Geertz 1976).Smith’s work was important in unpacking the “visualculture” of the early Pacific voyaging and understand-ing the ways in which discursive, political, and culturalnarratives were embodied within the artistic produc-tion of the nascent genre of “documentary.” His workanticipates a second wave of analysis that seeks toembed these voyages within Pacific perspectives(Dening 1980; Salmond 2003; Thomas 1997). I think itis fairly clear that just as Deacon was thinking throughthe theories of physical anthropology he had becomefamiliar with in Cambridge, he was also influenced byan internalized understanding that sketching or drawingin the field was itself a visual convention that hadbecome a part of anthropology as much as it was a partof the fieldworker’s personal experience. It is striking,considering how we usually think about sketching (as aspontaneous, immediate version of the direct experienceof the artist in his or her environment), how generic andconventional Deacon’s drawings in fact are: Despite thefact that they were so embedded in the immediacy of afieldwork experience so remote from the author’s ownplace and history, they are also genre works, the set

FIGURE 10. Sketches of the Malakulan coastline, “[upper level]: distant hills; [middle level]:distant range; bay; d.n.; [lower level]: bay” interspersed in a notebook with notes on kinship

terms, naming, and genealogies MS 90/7/H33A.


pieces of a diligent anthropologist recording in anappropriately “anthropological” manner.

Sand Drawing Sketches

There is, however, one exception within the corpus ofDeacon’s visual practice, and this group of sketchesand drawings brings together all of the other genresdescribed here (Figure 12). One of Deacon’s mostimportant contributions to anthropology was hisextensive documentation of the sand drawings of theislands of North Central New Hebrides (now Vanuatu),most especially from the islands of Malakula, Ambrym,and Ambae (see Huffman 1996). Sand drawings areperhaps the ultimate form of sketching—complexdesigns are marked out momentarily in sand or dirt,disappearing almost as soon as they are finished. Likefield sketches, they instantiate the process of knowing-through-drawing, rather than simply producing a fixedobject of contemplation. Deacon was clearly entrancedwith these geometric forms that he viewed as visualexemplars of the cultural diffusion across the SouthWest Pacific he had been trained to document. From

his letters, he made it clear that he considered thisdocumentation to be his most “original” contribution.He recorded 118 different designs, noting the mythicsignificance of the drawings, and the role they play inallowing access to the world of the dead and of theancestral spirits. Many drawings are connected to theimagery of secret societies, while others are represen-tations of birds, animals, fishes, and plants. Theembodied knowledge or visual thinking needed tocomplete these transient drawings requires a sophisti-cated memory work that begins in childhood with theeasiest designs and progresses into the more esotericdrawings that can only be acquired by men through aprocess of ritual initiation. Deacon’s own process ofvisual inscription literally traced a life history of sanddrawing, from its most ephemeral moments, throughthe scientific lens of documentary standardization, tocreate enduring templates for future images. This shift,from indeterminacy to the predetermined, mirroredDeacon’s own visual pathway through anthropology.Just as sand drawing was a form of knowing onMalakula, it also became the model for a new kind ofanthropological inscription that was located on theground, in the field (Figure 13).

FIGURE 11. A view of the north side of the entrance into Poverty Bay and Morai Island inNew Zealand. 1. Young Nick’s Head. 2. Morai Island. View of another side of the entranceinto the said bay. Plate XIV. [London, 1784]. Parkinson, Sydney, 1745–1771: A journal of avoyage to the South Seas, in his Majesty’s ship, “The Endeavour.” Faithfully transcribed fromthe papers of the late Sydney Parkinson. London; printed for Charles Dilly, in the Poultry,and James Phillips, in the George-Yard, 1784. Ref: PUBL-0037-14. Alexander TurnbullLibrary, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22725530. Reproduced

with permission.


Deacon noted that in the process of creating a sanddrawing, “the finger never truly traverses the same routetwice” (1934:133). His own documentation initiated anexploratory process of schematization and standardiza-

tion of these designs that unlike any of his othersketches took seriously an alternative visual traditionand rendered it legible (in turn developing a systematicformalism that would not have been necessary to trans-mit knowledge of how to do these drawings in NorthCentral Vanuatu). For ni-Vanuatu, sand drawings werelearned via intergenerational transfers of knowledge,through embodied observation and practice. Deacon’sdrawings created a visual collection that in the presentday is used as a how-to manual, even within Vanuatu(Figure 14).

Deacon’s schematization of sand drawings may beseen, continuing his role as an exemplary student, to bea visual correlate of a broad interest in cultural pattern-ing that had developed at Cambridge, particularly underthe influence of Rivers (1914). In this context, sanddrawing was more than just a charming visual tradition,and it was more than an indigenous visual culture; inthe context of anthropological interest it was, and is, avisual aesthetic of patterning that could be magnified,like a fractal, into a broader picture of interconnection.Sand drawing embodies the very definition of diffusionitself as it was imagined in Cambridge in the 1920s: itstransient nature necessitating the transferal of culturalknowledge between minds, mediated only by thetemporary manifestation of images. I have argued else-where (Geismar 2013: chapter 1) that sand drawing mayalso be seen as an indigenous theorization of connec-tivity and cultural entanglement, and it was certainlythe recognition of the systematic yet transient nature ofthis cultural practice that inspired Deacon, and others,to link these images to other models of cultural trans-mission, such as kinship (see Rio 2005; Taylor 2005).

FIGURE 12. Schematized sand drawing showing Ambrym geo-metrical figure named “The Turtle” MS 94/7/20.

FIGURE 13. A geometric design (drawing of a fish “nimbumnbuk”) on a blackboard atSeniang, photographed by Deacon RAI 3864.


Deacon photographed, sketched, and carefully drew thedrawings, and he asked local people to draw them inchalk on blackboards that he then photographed (seeGeismar 2006:537–548). The migration of sand drawingacross these different media exemplifies how theseimages make meaning through movement: the drawingsvisually instantiate key cultural narratives, some ofthem puzzles that must be solved using the sanddrawing (as in the case of the drawing of which half adrawing is presented by the spirits to the deceased afterdeath and which must be completed in order to enter theafterlife within the fiery volcano on Ambrym). At thesame time, the fragility of sand drawings, the ways inwhich they needed to be made and remade, also spoketo both the entangled imperative to both document andsalvage. Sand drawing itself, as an indigenous form ofhesitant but meaningful inscription, was thereforeextremely significant to Deacon, not only as an illus-tration of culture of Malakula, but as a mode of record-ing and representing.

Conclusion

Anthropologists are increasingly interested in drawingas part of the material and representational complexthat underpins the ethnographic encounter, yet thereare few accounts that subject these drawings to visualanalysis, or locate them within the history of the dis-cipline as an emergent genre of visual anthropology. Asa very particular kind of drawing, field sketches aregenerally understood within a realist register as media-tors between the “real” world and the curious subjec-

tivity of the anthropologist. Taussig describes sketchingas “modernist literature that crosses over into thescience of social investigation and serves as a means ofwitness” (2011:1). Here sketching as a process of wit-nessing seems self-evident: we assume it to be animmediate, informal mechanism, creating relativelyunmediated connections between the artist, his or herplace, and paper (sketching as response). In fact, fol-lowing these theoretical frames, it would seem thatsketching has an even greater indexicality than pho-tography. Field sketches can only emerge directly fromthe experience of being there, and unlike photographythere is no intervening technical apparatus. But in fact,as the examples discussed here demonstrate, sketchingis a visual culture like any other, packed with conven-tion, style, and embodying a multiplicity of culturalperspectives.

Taken together, what then can we make of the verydifferent kinds of images that Deacon produced duringhis short year of fieldwork? Each of these different kindsof drawing demonstrates an enthusiastic and seriouspreoccupation with trying to link the experience ofbeing in Malakula with conversations in Cambridge inthe early 1920s. Due to his early death, Deacon’spublished corpus of writing reflects the process andpartiality of his fieldwork experience. Few other anthro-pologists at this time have had their personal correspon-dence, and their notebooks, incorporated into the finalform of their published monographs—primarily becausethey were generally around, as writers, to translatetheir research into authoritative texts. The power ofMalinowski’s late published diaries lies in their discon-nection from his other scholarly writings, yet Deacon’s

FIGURE 14. John Teungkon drawing a sand drawing, Craig Cove, Ambrym, 1999. Photographby Stephen Zagala. Reproduced with permission.


sketches cannot be read simply as the personalexternalizations of a very subjective field experience.Rather they are also mediations and reflections of pre-vailing anthropological ideas, and as the case of thesand drawing sketches shows they are syncretic of bothEuropean and Malakulan visual traditions.

We need to locate field sketches within the same zoneof critical inquiry that pays attention to the specific mate-riality and historicity of other kinds of visual practice,such as film and photography, within anthropology.Anthropologists’ sketches are generally handled as themost unmediated, and immediate, of fieldwork docu-ments. In fact, they are often remarkably conventional.The lack of training and methods in anthropologicaldrawing compared with those that have emerged for filmand photography (and not including the training ofarchaeologists or ethnobotanists) in fact produces a visualorthodoxy that may refer to canonical visual traditions,earlier art lessons at school, the reading of other books,the practice of photography, and so on. By unpackingsome of the visual conventions and forms within Deacon’ssketchpads, I have emphasized a more general need toexpand our approaches to drawing in fieldwork andbecome more critically engaged with the actual nature(rather than the simple existence) of drawing as a toolduring fieldwork. Fieldwork drawings allow us to under-stand the emergent quality of anthropological knowledge,and the ways in which fieldwork methodologies not onlymediate between the subjectivity of the researcher and thelived experience of those around them, but also bring theacademy into the fieldwork encounter in ways both con-ventional and exploratory.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Chris Ballard for the initial suggestion that I return tothe archive to look at Deacon’s drawings and for insightful com-ments on earlier drafts of this essay. I also thank two anonymousreviewers for the journal, especially the reviewer who referred meto Martin Gayford’s wonderful book about David Hockney. Allillustrations, unless otherwise indicated, are reproduced courtesyof the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Notes

1 The island was known as “Malekula” during the time ofDeacon’s fieldwork, and most contemporary texts refer toit as such. When Vanuatu achieved independence fromBritish and French governance in 1980, the name“Malakula” was established as based more accurately onindigenous pronunciation. In this article, I use what istoday considered the correct orthography unless quotingdirectly from historical sources.

2 This biographical account has been edited and expandedfrom a biography of Deacon I wrote for the database of theCambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in2003 as part of a photographic research project funded bythe Getty Foundation under the direction of senior curatorAnita Herle.

3 http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-1/arthur-bernard-deacon-1903-27-collection-ms-90-98/.

4 Deacon writing to Gardiner, on board the SS Ormondesailing to Malakula, August 25, 1925 (Gardiner 1984:15).

5 Quoted in Haddon’s preface (1934:xxi).6 Haddon threw Wedgwood under the bus, writing apolo-

getically to Layard: “I had no idea that Camilla had playedsuch pranks with your printed statements. I told her toquote Deacon as much as possible and now find she hasparaphrased most of it, moreover, she has done the same toyou. Evidently she has not even the rudiments of editorialhonesty.” Letter from Haddon to Layard, March 26, 1934,Haddon Collection, Deacon papers, 160012, CambridgeUniversity Library Manuscripts Collection.

7 Letter to Haddon, January 25, 1927, Ambrym, HaddonCollection, Deacon Papers, envelope 16001, CambridgeUniversity Library Manuscripts Collection.

8 I was not surprised to picture Deacon sketching from insidea canoe. Indeed, for the frontispiece of my coauthoredbook on John Layard, we used an image he had taken withhis bulky box camera from inside a small dugout canoe(Geismar and Herle 2010:3). On Malakula and the smallislands that surround it, canoes are engines of movementacross and around space and place; they are stable bridgesbetween water and land.

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Documents

Drawing It Out - UCL Discoverydiscovery.ucl.ac.uk/1467832/1/Geismar, H. Drawing it out .pdf · Drawing It Out HAIDY GEISMAR The ﬁeldwork sketches of Arthur Bernard Deacon, made