SCA Section News from the Anthropology Newsletter of the AAA
January 2012

Society for Cultural Anthropology
Jean M. Langford, Contributing Editor

Gregory Bateson Book Prize

SCA is proud to award the third annual Gregory Bateson Prize to Karen Strassler (CUNY) for her book Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, published by Duke University Press. Strassler’s sophisticated, engaging, and beautifully produced ethnography explores the many ways in which photography became integral to the fashioning of national identity in Indonesia from the pre-independence period through the contemporary moment. Strassler tacks skillfully across photographic genres, examining amateur and studio photography, government identity photos, the introduction of the camera into family rituals, and the creation of a visual record of political protest. In the spirit of the Bateson Prize, she also moves across disciplines to parry with writers as diverse as Walter Benjamin (with her ethnographically grounded argument that photographic reproduction can enhance rather than diminish aura), Mikhail Bakhtin (with an innovative elaboration of the concept of refraction), and Benedict Anderson (with a compelling claim that Javanese photographs blend “revelatory” and “documentary” features in a way that necessarily complicates modernist readings of the nation-state as a political formation which replaces messianic with secular time). The artistry in her account lies in the way that she takes photographs seriously as arguments rather than mere illustrations. By placing her own “ethnographic” photos alongside archival images and photographs created by her interlocutors, she emphasizes that the photographs she details are not simply ethnographic objects, but ethnographies themselves. In the broadest sense, Refracted Visions encourages us to rethink the concept of documentation (especially in its relationship to modernity) as well as the notion that photography is delimited to the products of a camera in a world where a painting of a figure from the Javanese spirit world can be described as a photograph.

The Bateson Book Prize Committee would also like to recognize four Honorable Mentions from this year’s shortlist: Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China by Julie Y. Chu; Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti by Erica Caple James; and Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War by Carole McGranahan.

Contributions to this column should be sent to Deborah Thomas, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, University Museum 335, 3260 South Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398; deborah.thomas@sas.upenn.edu. The SCA website is found at www.aaanet.org/sca/index.htm. Click here for Cultural Anthropology.