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Emil August Goeldi, Indios Krahú, Goiás
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In the Western tradition, the construction of self and other is closely
associated with modern notions of subject and object, and of
consciousness
and empiricity, linked to a primacy accorded to vision above all the
other senses. Unlike touch and hearing, which blur or traverse the
boundary between
the body and surrounding space -between inside and outside- vision
locates the subject in a relation between space and place which, from
Rennaissance optics onward, was conceived in terms of a pyramid or cone
centered on a (monocular) receiver, the eye, towards and for the
benefit of which, the surrounding space rendered itself. This relation,
called linear perspective,
also implied a non-reciprocal relation between subjects and objects of
seeing, whose close associations with an emergent notion of the subject
as proprietor the term "beholder" betrays.
In the nineteenth century, the rationalist faith in the truth-value of
vision gave rise to a wide variety of machines for the recording and
reproduction of sights, primed on the linearperspectivist relation
between beholder and object, or, between a source of light and its
receiver. Photography was only the most successful and lasting of
these: in fact, as Michel Foucault has shown, a pan-optic principle underpinned the
construction of knowledge as a whole, as well as its immediate relation
to power formations now based on the abstract, regulated procedures of disciplines rather than on the
spectacle of sovereignty as in the era of absolutism. The model for
these knowledge-power relations, according to Foucault, was the
Panopticon invented by the English pedagogist and penal reformer Jeremy
Bentham, consisting in an arrangement of spaces that allowed for
comprehensive observation of their occupants (prison inmates, hospital
patients, soldiers in a barracks) from a central viewing platform that
in itself remained invisible to those subjected to its gaze.
The panoptic principle could also be associated to the visualizing
practices of emerging scientific disciplines such as anthropology and
sociology, in their attempt to record and classify the physiques and
material cultures of non-Western peoples or of the popular masses of
the new industrial metropolis. Photography was only one of many devices
of ensuring the non-reciprocity of seeing and, thus, of inscribing
power in the field of vision. Visual representations often combined
more than one of these technologies of rendering the other as an object
to be quantified and classified: the image of the top of this page
shows two indigenous men from the interior of Brazil, subjected both to
the capture by the photographic lens and
to anthropometric measurement (observe the measuring scale at the
centre of the photograph - a technique also introduced, around the same
time, for the recording of the physiognomies of criminal suspects.
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