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Tangible testimonies of intangible heritage

Peddlers in Beijing. Fortune teller, barber and peanut seller. Photographed by C. E. LeMunyon, ca 1905. Collection National Museum of Ethnology, the Netherlands.
Till 1950 peddlers were an integral part of Peking's urban culture. They provided for the basic needs of the citizens by selling food, drinks and household necessities or services like repairs, hair cuttings and fortune telling. Some of them - tanfan - had fixed stands at marketplaces or in main streets. Others - xiaofan - were permanently on the move, mainly in the hutongs, the crowded neighbourhoods of the cities. Their announcing calls, songs and music pervaded the streets. Pedlers were a favourite subject for western photographers, especially barbers and fortune tellers. Till 1911 the barbers shaved the front part of the male' s heads and wove their queue. Fortune tellers took care for the mental part by telling their clients about the good and bad omen in their lives.

Our memory is filled with events that were seemingly unimportant at the moment they were passing by. The smell of the bakery round the corner, the flavors of the meals we shared with family and friends, streetnoise, songs, voices and the stories we were told. They are all deeply moored in the culture we belong to. By smelling, tasting or listening they surge up spontaneously. At these moments we feel connected with our past, with our culture.
That is why we make photographs: as an attempt to freeze time by transforming a moment into a tangible image, an object. Although photographs do not record smells, flavours or sounds, we use them for keeping memories alive. Our personal photographic archives are filled with visual recordings of special events, festivals, holidays and unique moments. But there is one part missing. We forget recording the time in between, daily life, self-evident and seemingly unimportant events, because they are never extraordinary at the moment itself. Our photoalbums are hopping from highlight to highlight and only tell a part of the story.

But we are lucky. The missing images are made by others. We can find them in the archives of museums for ethnology, for example. Who made these images, why and how did they get there?

Photography and museums of ethnology are strongly interwoven in time. Their common origins are to be found in 19th century Europe: the age of colonial expansion, exploding western technology and new social sciences. More precise: the age of invention of photography as a new technique for documenting reality, of anthropology as the scientific offshoot of colonialism, and in the center of these the ethnology museum acting as the collector of exotic objects and photographs, as researcher of non-western cultures and intermediary of the representation of cultures in the world.

Through studying cultures living in the remotest corners of the world, anthropologists thought it possible to find out how one’s own ancestors had lived. Hottentots (Khoi), Bushmen (San), Aborigines, Papuas and Tierra del Fuego Indians lived their 'primitive' lives, like time capsules from the Stone Age, lacking high-quality technology, the western standard of the degree of civilisation. As long as they would last. Their cultures were changing rapidly or disappearing because of the contact with western civilization.
Early anthropology was mainly conducted from the armchair. Travelling to other continents was expensive, dangerous and time-consuming, the tropical conditions unhealthy and too uncomfortable for these scholars. They themselves felt no need to travel the world. After all, the objects of other cultures were brought in by shiploads into the European museums and together with photographs of material culture and human physical characteristics; there was enough information worth studying.

How much value scholars attached to photography as a source of information is evident from the collection that the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology began to assemble in the 1860s.The first images were a series of ten photographs made in July 1865 just after an earthquake on Java. They were donated by the Ministry of Colonies, as were a series of 45 ‘photograms’ made by the Danish photographer Kristin Feilberg, who in 1870 had accompanied J. de Haan, the Dutch inspector for the ‘Internal Administration’, on an expedition to the Batak lands on East Sumatra. The first purchases were made in 1881, when the museum acquired 255 photographs from the Oceania collection of the firm of Godeffroy in Hamburg. They were made by photographers travelling around the Pacific Ocean in the firm’s pay and included such well-known names as Richard Parkinson, Amalie Dietrich and Johann Stanislaus Kubary.

Soon after the invention of photography in 1839 professional photographers settled their studios in the major cities of Asia, Australia and Africa. They sold photographs of native inhabitants posing in supposedly ‘authentic’ attire and with ‘authentic’ attributes in front of an artificial decor suggesting an exotic environment. Their clients were mostly Europeans who pasted the images of this exciting part of their colonial lives in their albums. Photographers also offered their material to museums like the National Museum of Ethnology. The museum bought them or acquired them by donations. Some of these photographers also ventured out of their studio to photograph the native population. This resulted in the so-called ‘types and scenes’ photographs, in which scenes of daily life and the landscape were depicted in a charming and idealised manner. At that time nobody was particularly fussy about the trustworthiness of the depiction. It made little difference how, by whom and with what intentions the photographs had been made. The hunger for photographic images was considerable and nobody thought too much about the photographer’s subjective gaze and intentions.

At the end of the 19th century photography within anthropological research began to distinguish itself from commercial studio photography. Modern anthropology was concentrating on new cultural themes, such as familial bonds, power structures, language, myths and 'rites de passages'. In the first decades of its existence photography had been a complicated technique, only known by professional photographers. It was hardly possible to record dynamic processes. But thanks to technical improvements like sensitive films, short exposure time, easy film development (Kodak advertisement: "You press the button, we do the rest"), photography became a democratic technique, accessible for anthropologists and other amateurs. As a direct result of new developments in both disciplines the 'old' photographic view was superseded by a less detached, more concerned, dynamic and contextual approach. Everything differing from their own culture was photographed by scientists, travellers, administrators, missionaries and professionals. They had different intentions, but all focussed on the exotic. Nowadays these photographers are often qualified as eurocentric because they caused or supported existing prejudices about people living in other parts of the world. But photographs don’t speak for themselves. The context in which they are presented determines the way they are interpreted. This can be opposite to the intentions of the photographers. Although there is little evidence that photographers worried about the use or misuse of their images, we may assume in retrospect they would not always be happy with the way authorities, museums, publishers and scientists used their material. We must be grateful that they took the effort for making them in the first place. Thanks to these cultural outsiders we still have visual testimonies of street life in Peking, wrestlers in Teheran or South-African daily life. Photographs of events and subjects hardly anybody pasts in one's personal photo album because of their ordinariness. Only years and years later when looking at these images, we realize their importance: how strongly they remind us of the past that shaped our memories and identities. Then the outsider's perspective can become an advantage: photographs made with a personal approach, a remarkable technique and artistic impact attract our attention and invite us to have a closer look.

Apart from its traditional role in documenting other cultures and its more recent role as a resource in studying the formation of the image of ‘the other’, anthropological photography is acquiring yet another function. The most remote regions can be reached with organised travel and more images of other cultures are available via the media and the Internet than the museum could ever keep pace with. The other is no longer the old familiar ‘other’. He no longer lives at a safe distance from us, but around the corner and for many European city dwellers his way of life seems, on closer acquaintance, to be more an anathema than something you could be interested in. The museum can demonstrate that it is not an anachronism in post-colonial times. By presenting these photographs to a worldwide public and making them accessible via the Internet, in books, magazines or exhibits. Not just as the visual remains of vanished cultures and nostalgia, but as time capsules in a fast changing and globalizing world, awaking and evoking dozing knowledge of traditions we still feel connected with.

A group of wrestlers with their exercise instruments in a zurkhaneh (Iranian gymnasium) in Teheran. Iranian martial arts (varzesh-e Pahlavani) date back to pre-Islamic times and reached a peak in the second half of the 19th century during the Qajar Dynasty. The values of this mental and physical training moored in sufism, Mithraism and Iranian nationalism, are respected and elevated by the Iranian Republic. Photograph by Antoine Sevruguin, Teheran, ca 1890. Collection National Museum of Ethnology, the Netherlands

An attar selling perfumes, spices and herbal medicines. Photograph by Antoine Sevruguin, Teheran, ca 1890. Collection National Museum of Ethnology, the Netherlands


A miracle play (tazieh khani) during Muharram (festival of the first month in the Islamic calendar) at the Armenian caravanserai in the cloth sellers bazaar in Teheran. Photograph by Antoine Sevruguin, Teheran, ca 1890. Collection National Museum of Ethnology, the Netherlands

Man and woman building their hut. Photographed by Trappist Mission Mariannhill, Natal, South Africa 1894

In 1882 German trappist monks appeared as if from nowhere in Natal, South Africa. Within a few years they built a monastery complex named Mariannhill with houses, schools, workshops, warehouses and a photographic studio. The monks lived in the midst of the people and studied their language and culture. Their snapshot-like photographs of customs and rituals of the Zulu’s show that the monks had a modern approach in regard to anthropological photography. In 1899 the National Museum of Ethnology purchased a series of 156 photographs ‘of great importance for ethnography’ as the annual report says.

“Kaffirs always march in single file, never in ranks” (original title). Photographed by Trappist Mission Mariannhill, Natal, South Africa 1894.

(Written for the International Journal of Intangible Heritage. Published by The National Folk Museum of Korea)