Journal article
For the Future Viewer: Salvage Ethnography and Edward Curtis's “The Oath – Apsaroke”
Journal of American studies, Vol.55(1), pp.165-195
03/12/2019
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875819000070
Abstract
Since its reclamation in the 1970s, Edward S. Curtis's project to exhaustively photograph and describe American Indian cultures in the early twentieth century has invited shifting critical assessments. Complicating earlier arguments that it represents a nostalgic and inauthentic drama of a “vanishing” race, in which Indians functioned merely as props, recent scholars seek to recover his sitters’ agency or contemporary artists’ acts of reclamation. This article contributes to those efforts, but by exploring the temporal ambiguities inherent in the notion – then common among ethnographic photographers – of “preserving” a people for future viewers. It thus examines a photograph that Curtis contributed in 1913 to the Modern Historic Records Association, a short-lived organization that intended to assemble time capsules and archival vaults for historians in the distant future. Focussing on this single photograph – “The Oath – Apsaroke” (1908) – also allows us to track the way that Curtis's images could break free from his book project and resonate unpredictably across multiple domains, such as debates over the existence and meaning of Indian oaths.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- For the Future Viewer: Salvage Ethnography and Edward Curtis's “The Oath – Apsaroke”
- Creators
- NICK YABLON
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of American studies, Vol.55(1), pp.165-195
- DOI
- 10.1017/S0021875819000070
- ISSN
- 0021-8758
- eISSN
- 1469-5154
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/12/2019
- Academic Unit
- History; American Studies
- Record Identifier
- 9984025535802771
Metrics
13 Record Views