Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2020) 0, 0 1–16. © 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12732
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ANNA GRIMSHAW
Telling stories, screening lives: notes
towards an anthropological biography
Anthropological work that focuses on individual lives, what Zeitlyn calls a ‘sample of one’ (Zeitlyn, 2008,
Social Anthropology, 16, 154), has long hovered on the edge of disciplinary respectability. At best it is viewed
as a fieldwork methodology, a way of collecting data; at worst, a kind of popularisation. This essay is a
response to an emerging interest in anthropological biography. Drawing on the rich history of innovative
work with individuals, it presents an argument for taking seriously ‘person‐centered ethnography’ (Langness
and Frank 1981). Through a juxtaposition of classic texts and films, the paper articulates a case for recognising
person‐centred ethnography as an unusually generative anthropological form, offering a critical context for
the development of contemporary practice. Finally, in seeking to distinguish what might constitute anthropological
biography as a particular mode of inquiry, I propose a realignment of the life‐writing project with
humanistically oriented work in biographical studies.
Key words   biography, ethnographic film, subjectivity, experimental life‐writing
Introduction
The genre of biography enjoys broad popularity today. From established historical,
political and artistic figures to contemporary celebrities, there is enormous interest
in the lives of people. Nevertheless, biography hovers uncertainly at the edges of academic
respectability. For some biographers, this marginal status offers advantages, not
least because it frees work from disciplinary strictures and conventions. For others,
the refusal to accord the genre proper academic standing is to deny the possibility of
critical dialogue around questions of narrative, subjectivity and textual form (Holmes
2002; Lee 2009).
Ambivalence about biography is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the field
of anthropology. ‘Biography is anything but innocent’, the Comaroffs (1992: 25)
once declared. In their view, it was an endeavour hopelessly compromised. For the
Comaroffs, the genre emerged and was profoundly shaped by 18th‐century ideas
about ‘bourgeois personhood’ (1992: 26). As a narrative form, it presented lives as
being comprised of orderly, self‐directed individual actions. By working uncritically
with the notion of biography or life history (or autobiography), anthropologists, the
Comaroffs warned, were in danger of imposing a historically and culturally specific
model of the individual onto lives unlike their own.
But if anthropologists have until recently shied away from using the term ‘biography’,
there has nonetheless been a longstanding interest in the representation of individual
subjects. Classic texts include Mintz’s Worker in the cane (1960), Shostak’s Nisa
(1981) and Behar’s Translated woman (1993). Work of this sort is, however, usually
referred to as ‘life‐writing’. Although biography and life‐writing are synonymous, the
terms have increasingly designated different kinds of projects. Biography tends to be
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seen as a branch of history and literature, while life writing is more closely associated
with feminism, cultural studies and literary theory (Renders et al. 2017). The former is
suggestive of an older enterprise – classic stories of male heroes. The latter is identified
with the recuperation of ‘other’ lives, most notably people excluded from established
narratives on grounds of race, class and gender.
Until recently, the distinction between biography and life‐writing was clearly
expressed within anthropology. Biography was almost exclusively reserved for texts that
focused on the discipline’s founders and major figures – Malinowski or Levi Strauss, for
instance (Young 2004; Wilcken 2010). Life writing, by contrast, referred to accounts of
anthropology’s ‘traditional’ subjects. As a broad and amorphous category of work, it
encompassed life histories, life stories, life narratives, memoir, auto‐ethnography, native
autobiography.1 At particular moments in anthropology’s history, interest in life writing
has emerged as a focus for lively debate – most notably in the 1980s, following the publication
of Crapanzano’s Tuhami (1980) and Shostak’s Nisa. But such moments tend to
be short lived. The status of life‐writing within the discipline is unstable, not least because
of the association of this work with popularisation and general readerships. For many
anthropologists, it is often not clear what focusing on the life of an individual offers,
conceptually or theoretically, to the discipline. If deemed to have value for professional
anthropology, it tends to be presented in methodological terms (Langness 1965; Langness
and Frank 1981) – that is, life‐writing as a potential fieldwork strategy that yields insight
into broader questions about how cultural and historical forces impact the lives of
individuals.
Within contemporary anthropology there is evidence of a renewed interest
in particular lives – from Biehl’s moving account of his work with Catarina in
Vita (Biehl and Eskerod 2005) to Zeitlyn (2008), Niehaus (2012) and Smith and
Mwadime (2014). Perhaps most surprising is the dedication of an entire issue of
Social Anthropology to Biography in 2018, with the choice of term signalling a distinction
between current concerns and the older genre of life‐writing. Building on
Beatty’s recent call for ‘ethnographic biography’ (2018: 32), a primary objective here
is to revisit work that focuses on individuals and to assess how it might contribute
to the development of biography as a particular mode of inquiry. Taking seriously
what has often been scanted by the discipline reveals an unusually creative anthropological
genre. Moreover, it is the indispensable ground for new biographically
oriented work in the discipline.
I begin by exploring different approaches toward the representation of individual lives.
Specifically, I argue that the juxtaposition of anthropological work pursued through film
and text offers an expansive context for emerging interest in biography. It allows for a more
nuanced understanding of how, as anthropologists, we might approach lives understood
in their full complexity – as embodied states of being as much as discursive constructions.
Hitherto old disciplinary divisions have inhibited the exchange of anthropologies pursued
in different media. But there is much to be gained by exploring how analytical perspectives
distinctive to text and to film might be brought into productive dialogue.
1	 Although some texts include images, they are usually included for illustrative purposes rather than
as a counter‐narrative or as ‘another way of telling’ (Berger and Mohr 1982). An exception is Biehl
and Eskerod (2005).
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My interest in the creative possibilities of anthropological biography grows out of
a long‐term filmmaking project I have developed in Machiasport, Maine.2 Working
closely with certain individuals – not as representative of something or as parts of a
study about something – I have been interested in exploring who they are at a particular
moment in their life. One of the main problems I encountered was how to move
beyond documenting the external contours and trajectory of a life to approach and
evoke more elusive aspects of character. In this task, I found myself drawn more to
models from literary biography than anthropological life‐writing. For although I
sought to remain attentive to context, I was equally fascinated by the puzzle of individual
temperament, motivation, interiority – and by the challenge of how to render such
qualities through the medium of film.3
Describing my work as anthropological biography made it difficult to place. On
the one hand, given no such category existed within the field of ethnographic film
(though many films might be considered part of such a genre), there was no established
critical discourse with which to engage. On the other hand, within mainstream
anthropology, there was the amorphous category of ‘life‐writing’ which, as its name
indicates, consisted solely of textual models. In recognising that I was working with
film as a medium of inquiry (harnessing of image, sound, movement to a process of
investigation), I wanted to find out what might be distinctive about using an ‘image‐
and‐sequence’ rather than a ‘word‐and‐sentence’ approach in exploring individual
subjectivity (MacDougall 1998: 68). What examples from the tradition of ethnographic
film might I draw on and how might these serve to broaden anthropological thinking
about individual lives?
Over the last three decades or so, conceptual and methodological changes in the
discipline have brought human subjectivity into new focus. From Abu‐Lughod’s
advocacy of ‘writing against culture’ (1991) to the emergence of phenomenological and
sensory perspectives (Csordas 1990; Jackson 1989; Stoller 1997), anthropology’s long‐
established theoretical frameworks and its central structuring principle – culture itself
– have been subject to sustained challenge. No longer approached as a simple cipher
for cultural forms, recent work has addressed the complex ways that human subjects
are enmeshed in the lifeworld. This reorientation raises questions about how to explore
2	 Films include: Four part series entitled Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods (2013, Spring
in Dickinson’s Reach, A Summer Task, Autumn's Work, Winter Days), At Low Tide (2016) and
George’s Place: the cellar (2018). Distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute.
3	 Of course, these concerns could be seen as a personal idiosyncrasy and, for many within the discipline,
they would not be considered legitimate areas for enquiry but instead the preserve of the
novelist, literary biographer or creative writer. Beatty raises a similar problem in his discussion of
emotion. Writing about the limitations of existing work, he observes: ‘What is needed … is a form of
writing that captures dimensions of life too often left to fiction, parceled out among experts in other
fields, or left out of account altogether: something like that narrative and imaginative engagement
that enables the historian to make the past present’ (Beatty 2019). See also Narayan (2012). But there
are two additional questions here. The first relates to the distinctiveness of film as a medium through
which human subjectivity is explored. As a filmmaker, one’s anthropological sensibility is attuned
in very distinctive ways. Film is relentlessly specific, dense in detail (indeed ‘excessive’), and evokes
the corporeal, sensory and affective textures of human experience. Hence the filmmaker’s attention
is oriented differently than that of the writer and different questions about individual lives come
into view. The second question, which Beatty’s approach also implies, relates to where one situates
oneself as anthropologist between the social sciences or the humanities. The differences between
these alignments – conceptual, epistemological and ethical – are profound.
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and render the ways that lives take shape within a continually unfolding world (Ingold
2011; Jackson 2012).
Anthropology and life‐writing
I knew better than she did [Marjorie Shostak] that anthropological life‐histories
were not a compelling genre. They tended to be either wooden recitations of ethnographic
facts organized biographically or tendentiously, theoretically driven
psychological studies. (Konner 2011: 73)
Despite the popularity of a few anthropological life histories such as Lee
Simmons’s Sun Chief (1942) and Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez (1961), the
life history has been somewhat of a conceptual – and an emotional – embarrassment
to academic anthropology and has remained on the periphery of the
discipline. (Crapanzano 1984: 954)
The beginning of anthropological life‐writing is usually traced to Radin’s work –
specifically The autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), the life story of Sam
Blowsnake (S.B.). In his introduction, Radin explained his motivation: ‘One of the
greatest drawbacks in the study of primitive peoples is the difficulty, one might
almost say the impossibility, of obtaining an inside view of their culture from their
own lips and by their own initiative. A native informant is, at best, interested merely
in satisfying the demands of the investigator’ (1920: 1). But he goes on to acknowledge
the lack of what he calls ‘atmosphere’ in ethnographic description. For Radin,
only ‘direct expression’ from a native subject can provide proper description of cultural
life, suggesting that ‘personal reminiscences and impressions’, though inadequate,
offer more insight into ‘the workings of the mind and emotions of primitive
man than any amount of speculation from a sophisticated ethnologist or ethnological
theorist’ (1920: 1–2).
In the 1920 publication, S.B.’s autobiography is presented as the central element in
the text. Surrounding it stands a range of secondary materials – Radin’s introduction,
his footnotes and an additional section that serves as a kind of appendix, also by S.B.,
entitled ‘My Father’s Teachings’. According to Radin, the life story or autobiography
was written by S.B. in two sessions (‘no attempt of any kind was made to influence
him in the selection of the particular facts which he chose to present’; 1920: 2) and,
presented chronologically, Radin arranges the narrative as a series of short sections,
beginning with S.B.’s early years, moving through marriage, difficulties and setbacks,
imprisonment, visionary experiences, to, finally, Christian conversion.
The organisation and layout of the text is revealing. As noted above, Radin prefaces
the autobiography with a short introduction that provides the broad context
for its presentation and the means by which it was obtained. Then, as the story itself
unfolds, Radin’s interventions are manifest in the numerous footnotes that stand at the
bottom of each page (1999 [1926]). In fact, as Krupat points out (1999: xii), there are
351 footnotes in the book – indicative of the importance Radin attributes to supplementing
and contextualising the cultural details, experiences, events and relationships
that S.B. describes in his narrative.
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Radin’s text stands as a model for later life‐writing in anthropology. At the centre
is an individual’s self‐presentation (what Radin calls ‘autobiography’), a life story
organised chronologically. Accompanying it are contextual materials and interventions
by the anthropologist. The latter provide an introduction and interpretive framework
for the narrative that follows. Some 30 years after Radin’s publication, there was a small
resurgence of anthropological interest in life‐writing. Mary Smith published Baba of
Karo (1981 [1954]), which was followed by Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the cane (1960)
and Oscar Lewis’s The children of Sanchez (1961). Although these texts do not follow
exactly the layout used in Radin’s classic 1920 work, they nevertheless contain the same
elements and are organised according to the framework established by The autobiography.
Radin’s innovative textual presentation – positioning his own active voice on the
same page as his subject’s, such that it reads as a kind of open dialogue – is replaced in
later texts by an absence of footnotes or their removal to the back of the book. As
compensation, Smith, Mintz and Lewis provide more extended introductions to the
presented life stories as a way of giving the reader contextual details and an account of
how the work was done.4
Although these mid‐century texts are widely admired as classics of anthropological
literature, they are not considered major works in the development of the discipline.
Given the structural functional orientation of Anglo‐American anthropology
and commitment to Durkheimian notions of culture, this is perhaps not surprising.
Individuals have tended to be seen as cultural composites and of limited interest except
in terms of broader structures. During the 1980s, this began to change as part of other
disciplinary developments (Clifford and Marcus 1986). At the same time, life‐writing
was given new focus with the publication of Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami (1980) and
Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa (1981). If the former sparked a good deal of professional interest
by its unusual, experimental form; the latter was widely reviewed by major newspapers
of the day and engaged a broad, public readership.5 The success of Nisa reflected
the growing strength of the women’s movement, serving also to remind anthropologists
that the lives and experiences of women had long been overlooked within the
discipline. Unlike Crapanzano’s text, however, Nisa broke no new ground in terms of
its techniques, hewing closely to the well‐established model pioneered by Radin.
By contrast, Crapanzano explicitly eschewed the conventions of anthropological
life‐writing – namely the contextualisation and presentation of a ‘native’ autobiography.
Instead he placed his encounter with Tuhami at the heart of the work. Declaring the
text an “experiment” Crapanzano (1980: ix) presented a radically different framework
by which to explore and represent an individual life. Consequently, the organisation
4	 Smith’s presentation of Baba’s autobiography is for the contemporary reader a most curious text.
In the original edition, the book opens with an introduction by Smith’s husband, the ‘professional’
anthropologist, MG Smith. He explains: ‘The following autobiography was recorded by my wife in
Hausa, as far as possible verbatim, during a period of six weeks …’. For the next almost 80 pages,
Smith goes on to provide his context for his wife’s and Baba’s work. At page 87, Baba finally speaks.
In many ways, Mintz follows Smith in his organisation of the text, Worker in the cane. We find here,
too, a central story – the life of the Puerto Rican farm worker Taso, as told to the anthropologist.
It is framed by Mintz’s long and detailed introduction and concluded with his Epilogue. In places,
Mintz includes his questions as interventions into Taso’s story, as he seeks clarifications and amplification
of certain points. Although Lewis’s work is contextualised autobiography, its innovative
quality derives from the juxtaposition of life stories from different family members.
5	 See Di Leonardo (2000).
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of the book departed significantly from Radin’s template. In place of different sections
that reflected successive life‐stages, Crapanzano offered a handful of extended chapters
that alternate between dialogues with Tuhami and ongoing reflections on the research
process. By shifting decisively away from the role of anthropologist as facilitator of,
or conduit for, a self‐standing autobiographical account, Crapanzano made clear that
the subject’s self‐presentation did not exist independently of the encounter with the
anthropologist. Indeed, he goes further in recognising his own role in the shaping of a
particular subjectivity, casting the unfolding dialogue between himself and Tuhami as
something that resembled a western therapeutic relationship.
Crapanzano’s approach in Tuhami followed an earlier exercise pursued with a single
subject and published as The fifth world of Enoch Maloney (1969). Here, too, the
relationship between the anthropologist and Maloney forms the book’s structuring
narrative. In both cases, Crapanzano used the term ‘portrait’ in the books’ subtitles,
revealing his conceptualisation of the task – one analogous to the emblematic case of
a painter and subject. He makes manifest the centrality of his role in the creation and
interpretation of a life. To offer a portrait, not an autobiography, a life story or life
history, Crapanzano abandons the model of anthropological life‐writing as about the
presentation of a self‐standing story or narrative that extends through time. In its place,
he proposes a very different kind of temporality forged in a contemporary moment of
encounter. If Crapanzano emerges from the shadows of the text, so to speak, some critics
have suggested that it is less a progressive move and more of a strategy for making
himself the focus of the representation at the expense of the subject (Brumble 2008).
This is a question raised with respect to Ruth Behar (1993), an anthropologist especially
identified with life‐writing as a contemporary approach within the discipline.
Behar’s book, Translated woman (1993), is in some ways a synthesis of the
established model of anthropological life‐writing and the approach represented by
Crapanzano. It is both narrative and portrait, a chronological life story and the representation
of an encounter. On the one hand, Behar presents Esperanza’s autobiography,
acknowledging it to be a highly crafted story; on the other, she makes their
relationship a central part of the work. Not only does she chart the changing dynamics
between herself and Esperanza, but Behar intervenes in numerous other ways in the
text – from an extensive use of epigraphs and introductions to the different parts of
Esperanza’s story, to the entire third part of the book that includes the much‐debated
‘The biography in the shadow’. It is hard not to feel that Behar, like Crapanzano, cannot
relinquish the traditional trappings of authorship and she, rather than Esperanza,
threatens to become the work’s dominant presence. Unlike Crapanzano, the central
question of subjectivity remains untouched. Despite the braiding of different voices,
Translated woman presents two complementary self‐standing narratives – Esperanza’s
and Behar’s – linked by means of a retrospective account of their production.
What the approaches of Crapanzano and Behar underline is the experimental
breadth of anthropological work that engages individual lives. Although often overlooked
or perceived as somewhat ad hoc interventions rather than an expansive field
of enquiry, the innovations that have followed from a radical shift of perspective from
generalities to particularities, abstract concepts to actual lives, offer important models
for contemporary practice. Attending carefully to questions of textual form, not as
something fixed but generative, establishes ground for a critical apprehension of how
individual lives have been conceptualised within the discipline. But it is only one part
of the story.
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Ethnographic film and individual lives
Anthropological work with individual lives (as autobiography, life story, life history,
portrait, biography) has been conducted almost exclusively through interview, dialogue
and conversation – later transcribed into textual form. But is there more to a
life than can be said about it? How might work in the medium of film challenge these
models and evoke aspects of subjectivity not satisfactorily encompassed by language?
By looking closely at selected examples, I suggest they allow us to think about subjectivity
in more expansive, corporeal terms. They also point to an ambitious, open‐ended
inquiry into subjectivity that in important ways exceeds the textual innovations of
anthropological life‐writing.
Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) stands as an important point of departure.
It has long stood as a model (positively and negatively) for filmmakers committed
to working closely with particular individuals. Some two years after Radin
published The autobiography, Flaherty released his classic film. It captured the
popular imagination, enjoying unprecedented commercial success with audiences
in Europe and North America. For the first time, the life of a native subject was the
focus of cinematic attention. For this reason alone Nanook has enduring significance.
Flaherty’s exploration of character was also distinctive. His approach as a
filmmaker represented an attempt to move beyond merely documenting the external
aspects of culture. Instead, using particular camera and editing techniques,
Flaherty sought to open up an interior or imaginative space around his central
subject. As MacDougall puts it: ‘It [Nanook of the North] demonstrated … an
entirely new use for film – not merely a record of activities, nor an instructional
tool, but a doorway one could step through imaginatively into the life of another
people’ (MacDougall 2006).6
Made before the coming of sound in cinema, Flaherty’s unusually intimate portrayal
of an Inuit man, ‘Nanook’ (played by Allakariallak, a long‐term collaborator of
the filmmaker), comprised extended observational scenes and textual interventions in
the form of intertitles. According to some commentators (Huhndorf 2000), Flaherty’s
depiction of Nanook’s central character is narrow and stereotypical. For these critics,
the filmmaker presents his subject as simple, childlike and primitive and, as such, consistent
with an established history of western images of the Eskimo. But far from countering
what is understood to be Flaherty’s denial of agency to his Inuit subject, it can
be argued that the critics themselves collude in such a denial, refusing to acknowledge
the possibility of Allakariallak’s skilful, self‐conscious crafting of a particular persona
for the film (Grimshaw 2013).
Flaherty’s exploration of character is more interesting and complex than many
commentators would have us believe. The fact that the film remains such a focus of
debate, almost a century after its release, is surely an indication of the unresolved questions
about its central figure. Nanook exceeds whatever interpretive frame is placed
around him – including the filmmaker’s. A first step in recognising this excess is understanding
the relationship of text and image in the film. It is not one of correspondence
– textual description and illustration. Instead the relationship is a dynamic interplay
6	 In relation to the failure of his early Inuit work, Flaherty said: ‘I had learned to explore, I had not
learned to reveal’ (quoted in Flaherty 1972: 13).
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between linguistic propositions and visual evidence, in which the latter serves to continually
raise questions and challenge the former.
Flaherty’s Nanook of the North is in some ways the filmic counterpart to Radin’s
Autobiography. There is a shared commitment not to explain or speak about a native
subject but rather to work collaboratively with him in the articulation of a representation.
But, unlike Radin’s subject, Nanook’s life story is not conceptualised as
something autonomous, recounted, recorded and contextualised by the filmmaker. In
foregrounding the performative nature of the encounter between filmmaker and subject,
Flaherty’s film reminds us that stories about individual lives are not straightforwardly
‘found’ but are created in and through relationships – and, crucially, they are
theatrical, involving performances of the self.
If Radin provided an important model for much life‐writing in anthropology
– what might be called the contextualised autobiography – Flaherty’s film has been
influential in a different way. Nanook of the North did not establish a template for
subsequent work, but it pointed to some of the qualities that make the medium of film
distinctive in the exploration of individual lives. For, although it is common to talk
of ‘reading’ a film, this fails to describe the centrality of corporeality to the viewing
experience.
The continuing debate about Nanook and who he (really) is reflects the openness
of an image‐based form. Specifically, it throws into focus the way that the film’s subject
eludes or exceeds the work’s interpretive frame, revealing a space between what
MacDougall (2006) calls ‘being’ and ‘meaning’: ‘When we look, we are doing something
more deliberate than seeing and yet more unguarded than thinking. We are putting
ourselves in a sensory state that is at once one of vacancy and of heightened
awareness. Our imitative faculties take precedence over judgment and categorization,
preparing us for a different kind of knowledge’ (MacDougall 2006: 7). The cinematic
techniques that distinguish Nanook of the North – the extended sequences, the construction
of scenes around moments of discovery, the tactility and affective texture of
the images, the emphasis on showing not telling – invite an experientially based
response from the viewer. It is not organised according to discursive expectations but
hinges on an imaginative and exploratory response generated by relationships of association
and resonance. Understood in this way, a film’s structure is aligned not with
argument but instead with poetic form.7
Some 30 years later, Jean Rouch (an anthropologist always quick to acknowledge
his debt to Flaherty) experimented with the film medium in his engagement with individual
lives. His films with West African migrants proposed new anthropological conceptions
of subjectivity. Drawing on Flaherty’s practice of collaboration and
acknowledgement of the centrality of performance in self‐presentations, Rouch’s 1958
film Moi, un noir, is an important example of his approach. It both challenged static
anthropological generalisations about African subjects and subverted disciplinary
expectations about the veracity of life stories.8
7	 This confusion is often at the root of anthropology’s puzzlement as to what to do with films and
how to evaluate them (MacDougall 2006).
8	 Feld’s (2003) edited volume is an indispensable source on Rouch and the anthropological significance
of his work.
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Rouch’s film, made in Treichville, a migrant quarter of Cote D’Ivoire’s capital,
Abidjan, tells the story of Edward G. Robinson (Oumarou Ganda), a migrant from
Niamey who works as a day labourer in the port. Over the course of a week, Robinson
presents a narrative of his life, contrasting his marginality as a day labourer with the
freedom of Saturday and community of Sunday. But Moi, un noir is no straightforward
autobiography. Robinson’s life story is self‐consciously crafted and shaped in collaboration
with his Treichville friends, Eddie Constantine, Dorothy Lamour, Tarzan and
Rouch himself. As the names indicate, fantasy and imagined identities are inseparable
from the ‘real’ ones.
Moi, un noir is notable for many reasons, not least because for the first time an
African subject was the central character of a film. Shot silently, with a soundtrack
added later, Rouch made the theatrical, improvised nature of the life story the central
dynamic of the work. Indeed he is an active participant in its creation, expressed
in his mobile, vibrant camera work and the picaresque narrative through which
Robinson’s story is told. Although Rouch’s verbal interventions, placed around the
edges of the work, resemble in some ways the ‘anthropological’ voice in Mintz or
Shostak, the filmmaker does not supply conventional information about his subject.
He inserts pieces of poetic commentary. Interwoven with Rouch’s voice are
the film’s other voices combined to create Moi, un noir’s unusual soundtrack. After
completing the editing, Rouch invited Robinson and his friends to improvise a
commentary, recorded while they watched themselves on film. In this way, Rouch
added another layer of complexity to the work, drawing attention to the creative
ways that lives and stories are continually being made and re‐made. The film’s central
character, Edward G. Robinson, is a subject in movement. His life cannot be
encompassed within a fixed or retrospective narrative. As Rouch makes evident, it
is oriented toward a future and constituted through a complex, ongoing practice,
taking its shape in and through particular relationships. It shifts and changes with
each instance of telling.
Rouch’s filmmaking techniques in Moi, un noir express this distinctive interpretation
of subjectivity. The camera is not used straightforwardly to portray or document
an individual life. Rouch conceives of the camera as a transformative instrument, a
catalyst for the invention of new selves or subjectivities; and, as such, he eschews many
of the conventions of anthropological life‐writing to embrace unashamedly the performative
and fantastical dimensions of character. For Rouch, the camera facilitates the
construction of life stories, not as something stable or pre‐existent but as a generative
or improvisatory form. Using the term ‘ethnofiction’ to describe his approach, he suggests
entirely novel forms of selfhood that do not exist prior to their invention and cannot
be contained or expressed within traditional frameworks or narrative structures.
Moreover, in Rouch’s hands, cinema itself is approached as a site of transformation,
bringing together filmmaker, subjects and, crucially, audiences in a charged encounter
that has the potential to catalyse new conceptions of subjectivity.
A decade or so after Moi, un noir, Jorge Prelorán completed Imaginero (1970) a
portrait of Hermógenes Cayo, an image maker, living high on the Argentinian plateau.
The film presents the life of a self‐taught folk artist, whose intricate work as a wood
carver and painter was inspired by his profound religious devotion. For Prelorán,
Imaginero was part of an extended project of work that focused on particular individuals.
In decisively shifting his attention as a filmmaker from anthropological topics
toward an intimate engagement with lives, he called these films ‘ethnobiographies’
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(1987).9 Prelorán followed what he called a ‘subjective’ approach, proceeding ‘intuitively
rather than methodologically’ (1987: 466), allowing the distinctive aesthetic contours
of his work to be an integral part of his interpretation of character. This is
particularly striking in the case of Imaginero. For the film is not ‘about’ Cayo’s life in
any direct way as one reviewer pointed out (Carter 1971). Instead Prelorán draws on
the distinctive qualities of film – image, audio, editing – to create a work that in its very
structure and aesthetic organisation expresses an understanding of Cayo’s artistic
personality.
Imaginero is both an interpretation of a singular life on film and a filmic interpretation
of an artistic personality. It is articulated through Prelorán’s unusual angles, compositions
and framings, through the careful interplay of landscape and subjects, the
use of light and shadow, still and moving images and, not least, in the complex sound
track that accompanies the images – layers of sound that encompass Cayo’s voice, his
wife’s voice, Prelorán’s English translation, along with other sounds (children’s voices,
the wind, sounds carnival, music and silence). Not least, Prelorán eschews the chronological
conventions of anthropological life stories. He begins the film in the middle of
his subject’s life, before moving back in time and completing the work after Cayo’s
death. There is no straightforward linear trajectory and there is no satisfying closure.
Eschewing the conventions of anthropological contextualisation or explanation,
Prelorán poses a more difficult question about what constitutes a life.
Finally, David and Judith MacDougall’s Lorang’s way offers yet another anthropological
approach toward working with particular individuals. Made in 1973–4, their
film poses a simple question – who is Lorang? As with the other filmmakers discussed
above, the MacDougalls’ concern is neither to assemble a chronological narrative of a
person’s life nor to serve as a facilitator of Lorang’s autobiography. Instead they establish
the contours of an inquiry into a Turkana man – his character, his place in the
world, his relationships with others, his past experiences and so on. It is an open‐ended
exploration assembled from different sorts of evidence – what particular people say
about Lorang, what Lorang says about himself, questions from the filmmakers, Lorang
observed in different situations with his wives, sons and children, with other Turkana
elders and so on. The MacDougalls use strategies of distanciation such that the viewer
is always conscious that they are watching a film and being presented with a range of
materials from which to fashion an interpretation of Lorang. In this way, the filmmakers
refuse to align straightforwardly their audience with Lorang. They make us aware
that this is an investigation comprising questions, propositions and observations. The
MacDougalls have their own interpretation, of course, articulated through how and
what is chosen to be filmed. Nevertheless, the film remains open, allowing viewers to
weigh, carefully, the available evidence and explore their own responses to its central
subject.
In Lorang’s way, the particular nature of the MacDougalls’ inquiry is expressed
through their filmmaking techniques, but these do not exist independently of an
interpretive perspective toward their subject. Lorang’s life story is not poured into
a pre‐existing model or organised according to chronology. It is shaped through the
relationships that constitute the film. The MacDougalls build their work from short,
9	 It included Cochengo Miranda (1974), Zerda’s children (1978) and Zulay: facing the twenty first
century (1989). For a discussion of Prelorán’s ‘biographical’ orientation within the context of his
broader approach, see Sherman (1985).
TELLING STORIES, SCREENING LIVES     11
© 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
self‐contained sequences interspersed with text that chart an episodic investigation.
The discrete segments or components map a range of interpretive possibilities. They
are carefully juxtaposed to raise questions about what is said and what is observed,
what can be understood through language and through image and sound. In these
ways, the MacDougalls foreground the complexity of the task. In particular, their techniques
reveal an approach toward Lorang that does not conceptualise an individual life
as unfolding according to a linear path. The representation offered by the filmmakers
invites us to evaluate critically how Lorang sees and understands himself, and to test
his constructed self against other evidence that comprises his world.
Towards anthropological biography
The life history is more ‘literary’ than ‘scientific’ – and yet more ‘scientific’ than
‘literary.’ It mediates, not too successfully, the tension between the intimate field
experience and the essentially impersonal process of anthropological analysis and
ethnographic presentation. The commentary attached to it can be saccharine in
its sentimentality and overambitious in its justification. (Crapanzano 1984: 954)
Not parallel but tangential: biography fits awkwardly with ethnography, doing
well what ethnography does well to avoid. (Beatty 2018: 30)
In this essay, I have highlighted different anthropological approaches to the exploration
and representation of individual lives. One of my intentions has been to establish
the contours of existing work as a basis for newly emerging practice. Mindful of
earlier surveys by Langness and Frank (1981) along with more recent essays by Zeitlyn
(2008) and Beatty (2018), I have sought to extend the boundaries of what is usually
known as ‘life‐writing’, bringing examples from the tradition of ethnographic film into
dialogue with textual forms. Moving beyond an exclusive linguistic bias, I have suggested
that not only does work in the medium of film introduce new dimensions of
human subjectivity into the existing models (foregrounding the experiential, sensory,
imaginative and corporeal dimensions of being) but it significantly expands the range
of anthropological models with respect to individual lives. Such an exercise reveals the
rich history of this kind of work. It offers a critical context for contemporary practice.
In particular, it makes clear that explorations of individual lives (whatever the disciplinary
preconceptions) comprise an unusually fertile anthropological form. Like their
literary counterparts, anthropological filmmakers have experimented with a range of
techniques in response to the distinctive personalities of those individuals with whom
they work and, as such, they have offered new ways of thinking about subjectivity,
including their own.10
Lives are ‘made’, not found. It is this acknowledgement that has been such a creative
impulse in anthropological work focused around particular individuals. As my
10	 Films discussed here challenge the terms of existing debates about authorship in life‐writing. As
examples of what MacDougall has called ‘deep’ rather than ‘external’ reflexivity (1998: 85–91), they
suggest ways of thinking in more subtle and nuanced ways about the different subjectivities at work
in person‐centred ethnography.
12    ANNA GRIMSHAW
© 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
examples reveal, there has been a sustained engagement with the problem of subjectivity
and with the challenges of how to move beyond external aspects of a life to embrace
the complex and imaginative dimensions of personhood. The experimental quality of
the work is not, however, something self‐consciously designed. It is a response on the
part of the anthropologists to the unique lives of their subjects. At the same time, it
expresses the complex intertwining of subjectivities emerging through the encounter
between anthropologist and subject.
Hitherto anthropologists have used terms such as life history, life story, biography,
auto‐ethnography, autobiography, portrait somewhat loosely or interchangeably
to describe work that engages individual lives. While distinctions are not hard and fast,
it is also important to recognise significant differences in the modes of inquiry and
knowledge forms that constitute person‐centred ethnography. For example, although
life history is built on the collaboration of anthropologist and subject, the encounter
is neither – as in the case of a portrait – the primary focus of the inquiry nor explicitly
foregrounded in the final representation. In pursuing a life history, the objective is to
chart the temporal arc of a life, how it unfolds over time and elicit, organise and understand
another’s narrated trajectory by means of a chronological framework. Such an
endeavour might also be called a contextualised autobiography, since it is a story of a
life taken at face value, so to speak, and given meaning through the interventions of an
outside perspective. By contrast, a portrait has no temporal extension but is primarily
a representation of an encounter between anthropologist and subject. At its core is a
dynamic forging of subjectivities. It is not predicated on an interweaving of self‐standing
life stories or contextualised autobiography, but it involves the creation of a hybrid
narrative generated at a particular moment in time. Such an approach does not offer
perspectives outside of the encounter nor is there a concern with charting an extended
chronology of life trajectories.
In proposing ‘biography’ as a distinctive mode of anthropological inquiry, I seek
to reclaim the term from the reductionism of the Comaroffs and link it, crucially, to
a broader field of literary studies. In so doing, I propose a realignment of the project
away from social science conventions, asking: how might humanistically oriented
interpretive perspectives facilitate more productive engagement with individual lives
and offer new ways of thinking about anthropological biography?
For Woolf, the problem of biography was the need to use what she called ‘devices
of fiction’ to communicate ‘personality’. In her eyes, the latter implied a kind of
truth incompatible with the ‘truth of real life’ (2008: 99), though as contemporary
Wittgenstein biographer, Monk, has suggested, this is a false opposition. It follows
from Woolf’s conception of fiction as the only way to move beyond documentation
of the external world to access ‘life’ (2007: 541). In revisiting early models of biography
represented by Boswell and Johnson, Monk argues for the creative fusion of
‘granite’ and ‘rainbow’ through the articulation of an interpretive stance by the author
with respect to their subject – one predicated on a particular kind of hermeneutic. For
Monk, what Wittgenstein called ‘the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections’
offers a framework for grasping the peculiar nature of the biographical task
(2007: 567). Approached as a practice of description, rather than explanation, the biographer
seeks not to argue but to persuade a reader to see a subject in a particular way.
In a largely overlooked essay from 1980, the anthropologist Kenneth Little highlighted
problems with the way individual lives were studied within the discipline. He
noted that life histories were motivated by concerns with broader cultural phenomena
TELLING STORIES, SCREENING LIVES     13
© 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
and not primarily by an interest in a particular individual. Moreover, he argued that
work with individuals tended to be viewed as straightforwardly descriptive and, as
such, preliminary. Further analytical attention was deemed necessary to render it useful
to anthropology (1980: 216). Returning to the early example of Radin, however,
Little articulates a case for anthropology’s reengagement with humanistic principles as
the foundation for taking individuals as individuals seriously. It is the sort of understanding
that is achieved through ‘comprehension’, not ‘explanation’ (1980: 217). Little
highlights essential qualities of insight and acquaintance as constitutive of ‘imaginative
description’, writing: ‘[T]he foundation of this kind of understanding is an aesthetic
hermeneutics. The elements of this foundation are an insight, acquaintance and mediation
between writer and the native person being described. It is through this kind of
understanding that the life history work becomes a work of imaginative description’
(1980: 222). Imagination is crucial then to the interpretive dynamic of biographical
work. The latter is, as Little emphasises, a demanding practice, involving:
a critical self‐reflection, an inner positioning and recognition of one’s self as a
living person, and an insight into the knowledge self‐reflection brings to the
understanding of another life. Accordingly, the writer cannot stand apart from
himself/herself to study the reified mind and matter of another’s life. For such a
step replaces empathy with object, insight with method, imagination with conceptualization
and comprehension with explanation. The writer then may be
able to formulate a conceptual model; and thereby gain an operating, perhaps
even manipulative, knowledge of the other’s life but will not be able to understand
the life from within. (1980: 224)
I began by noting ambivalence in the academy about biography. The genre is often
seen as popularising, whimsical and impressionistic rather than scholarly and theoretical.
Following the semiotic turn, scholars (including anthropologists) largely turned
away from questions of authorship and human subjectivity. Hence there was no secure
conceptual basis for biographical work in many academic fields. Furthermore, in the
case of anthropology, there was an assumption that biography was a static genre of
limited cross‐cultural use. But this was to ignore the overwhelming literary evidence
to the contrary and, significantly, to overlook the flexible ways that have been used
to engage individual lives within the discipline itself (Arnold and Blackburn 2004).
Anthropology has long manifested anxieties about the exploration and representation
of individual lives. But, increasingly, analytical focus on structures and fixed
overarching notions of society or culture have given way to concern with process,
with practice, subjectivities and relationality. Here, I suggest, anthropological biography
can find a new place. Individuals are no longer seen in terms of representativeness,
fitting into some imagined collectivity, nor are they simplistically conceptualised as
sovereign subjects. Biography offers creative ways of exploring the complexities of an
individual life, while recognising its embeddedness in a web of relationships that open
out to include the anthropologist and others.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the anonymous readers for their critical input and suggestions.
14    ANNA GRIMSHAW
© 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Anna Grimshaw
Department of Anthropology
Emory University
1557 Dickey Dr NE
Atlanta, GA 30322
USA
agrimsh@emory.edu
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Raconter des histoires, projeter des vies: notes
vers une biographie anthropologique
Le travail anthropologique qui se concentre sur la vie individuelle, ce que Zeitlyn appelle un
"échantillon d’un" (Zeitlyn, 2008, Social Anthropology, 16, 154), a longtemps demeuré à la limite
de la respectabilité disciplinaire. Au mieux, il s’agit d’une méthodologie de travail sur le terrain,
d’un moyen de collecte de données ; au pire, d’une sorte de vulgarisation populaire. Cet essai
est une réponse à un intérêt émergent pour la biographie anthropologique. S’appuyant sur la
riche histoire du travail novateur avec l’individu, il présente un argument en faveur d’une "ethnographie
centrée sur la personne" (Langness and Frank 1981). A travers une juxtaposition de
textes classiques et de films, l’article articule une argumentation en faveur de la reconnaissance de
l’ethnographie centrée sur la personne comme une forme anthropologique exceptionnellement
générative, offrant un contexte critique pour le développement de la pratique contemporaine.
Enfin, en cherchant à distinguer ce qui pourrait constituer une biographie anthropologique en
tant que mode particulier d’enquête, je propose un réalignement du projet d’écriture de la vie
avec le travail humaniste des études biographiques.
Mots-clés: biographie, film ethnographique, subjectivité, écriture expérimentale de vie