The fin-de-siecle incarnation of a specifically ethno-graphic anthropology is
arguably marked out by one trait more than any others: its burning
epistemological, aesthetic and ethical impulse to inscribe - to write, to draw, to
photograph, to phonograph, to film - to deploy, in other words, an array of
-graphic technologies to represent its 'ethnic' object. Such technologies overlap
and interweave in complex ways, rise and fall in relative popularity and produce
archival traces that call for multiple readings and rewritings. Focusing on a case
study of the intermedial writings of zoologist-turned-anthropologist, Alfred Cort
Haddon (1855-1940), this thesis is an attempt to thrust deep within the roots of
such an impulse. It traces these roots to a pivotal historical and philosophical
moment (the late nineteenth century) within which the nascent discipline of
anthropology, armed with an array of such' -graphic' technologies, conjured forth a
spectral object: at once vanishing and vanished, disappearing and disappeared.
Death was both to-come and already there, and this spoke to a desire for an
Indigenous plenitude that was both threatened and lost.
However, in the emerging play between these two plenitudes, both were replaced
with a (technologically mediated) spectre. Subject to the brute force of an all-
powerful 'external' world-system (capitalist, colonialist and Christian), but without
the means of even documenting the history of its own destruction, much less
challenge it, such populations were posed as being hopelessly cast adrift: forever
dead and dying, and in need, therefore, of representational 'salvation'. How, then,
do these two sets of processes (inscription and loss) interact with one another, and
what is their role within the vast archival writing 'machines' of colonialism?
Exploring the interstitial space between medium specificity (photography-
cinematography-phonography) and intermediality, this thesis is an attempt to
resonate such questions, to set them in motion, to make them sound.