Repatriating the Photographs of Albert Frisch to Caixana on the Alto Solimoes
I tightened my grip around the motorcycle driver as we navigated the slippery mud road from Tonantins to Sao Sebastiao. The preceding night’s torrential rains and the bright light of the morning lent a spectacular luminance to this incredibly lush forest area that was dotted by a remarkable number of houses in construction on the hills next to the track.
Soon, the settlement of Sao Sebastiao appeared in the distance. Edson exchanged a few words with his driver, and we took a hard left along a small bitumen road on the outskirts of the settlement. A group of people were signaling us. We had arrived at the assembly house, where we were to meet representatives of the community and show them the photographs of Albert Frisch, who traveled through this area nearly 150 years earlier, producing some of the first known photographs in the Amazon.For weeks, Edson and I had been tracing Frisch’s journey, visiting numerous indigenous communities and interrogating the photographic documents he recorded of their presumed ancestors in the same areas along the Alto Solimoes river. This was our first visit to a Caixana settlement, and we were excited to learn from them what they saw in the photographs, among which half a dozen reportedly depicted Caixanas inhabiting the area between the cities of Tonantins and Tefe. On several occasions when mentioning Caixanas to people we encountered, they would tell us that the Caixana were “not really indigenous.” While some claimed the Caixana had become “extinct,” most claimed that they were Aculturaςdo (literally “acultural”), arguing that, due to persistent processes of acculturation, they had no distinct culture of their own, as opposed to other groups such as theIndigenous, I Presume? 57 Ticuna and Miranha, among whom we had worked in the preceding weeks.3 In spite of my limited knowledge on the matter of both Caixana and the vast and contested literature on acculturation theory,4 this question intrigued me and I was curious to learn more.
As we dismounted the motorcycles and thanked our drivers, who quickly left to return to Tonantins with the promise of picking us up in the same place at the end of the day, a group of people welcomed us warmly.
To our immediate surprise, we discovered that two chairs and a table were positioned in the center of a significant circle of approximately 35 people under the roof of the open structure that constituted the assembly house. They were expecting us. Several of the people who had found their way to this meeting were eagerly photographing and filming us with their smartphones. It felt somewhat awkward. Almost as if we were inhabiting roles—or, indeed, reenacting stereotypes—in an all-too-familiar script: the cliche of the white anthropologist encountering the “natives.” The magnitude of the interest was new to us, as we had grown accustomed to smaller and more informal elicitation sessions of the archive material. An elderly man by the name of Paulo cordially greeted us and guided us to the center of the circle with an authoritative gesture. The stage was ours, microphone and loudspeaker provided. We played our part by initiating a customary introduction on our part, in which Edson would translate my brief explanation for our visit. This included a general and by no means an exhaustive presentation of Albert Frisch and his work. Rather than explicitly asserting authority as a scientist framing the ensuing photo-elicitation with a detailed contextualization, the ambition was to provide just enough information for the people themselves to define the premises of their analysis, and progressively introduce layers of complexity to the discussion.5 Rather than confirming some predefined scholarly hypothesis, I was excited to learn what they derived from the archives we were repatriating.While I initially explained how Frisch, according to his notes, visited this area in 1867, making photographs as part of a commission from the Swiss- Brazilian agent Leuzinger, I did not disclose that Frisch made extensive use of the technique of photo-collage (Kohl, 2015), or that he—as Edson and I had discovered through photo-elicitation and dialogues with indigenous Ticuna and Miranha further upstream—employed a number of people as preferred models, dressing them up to represent different ethnic groups, in addition to merging these figures with disparate backgrounds of natural habitats in entirely different parts of the Amazon (Vium, forthcoming).
From Frisch’s album of 98 photographs, a reproduction of which I carried with me, half a dozen photographs—some portraits and some overviews— are attributed to the area inhabited by the Caixana we visited (Frisch, 1869; Kohl, 2015; Vium, forthcoming) (see Figure 4.1). These became the natural focus of our conversation that afternoon in Sao Sebastiao. Already during our introduction, the excitement of the people assembled was palpable. They could hardly wait to see the images but politely tried to hide their
Figure 4.1 No. 13. Tonantins (rive gauche). Albert Frisch. 1867.
No. 14. Tonantins. Une habitation de la ville. Albert Frisch. 1867.
No. 15. Le Lac de Tonantins avec le vapeur Bravo. Albert Frisch. 1867.
No. 16. Malocca (rive gauche). Une habitation des indiens sauvages Caizanas. Albert Frisch. 1867.
No. 17. Caixanas (rive gauche). Indiens sauvages a la chasse dans la foret avec Carabatana, un carquois plein de fleches empoisonnes et le sac de sumauma. Albert Frisch. 1867.
No. 18. Caixanas (rive gauche). Indiens sauvages (homme et femme). Albert Frisch. 1867.
No. 19. Caixanas (rive gauche). Indiens sauvages (homme et femme). Indien avec la lance et la couronne de Lianes sur la tete, peuplade tres passifique d’un teint tres clair. Albert Frisch. 1867.
Source: © Albert Frisch images courtesy of Weltmuseum Wien.
impatience. Once we had finished our introduction, the stage was set for the ensuing dialogue: we could begin the collective photo-elicitation session (Buckley, 2014; Campt, 2017; Edwards, 2006; Richard and Lahman, 2015; Vium, 2018, 2020).
Let us pause for a moment and arrest the notion of (re)enactment. Strictly speaking in the etymological sense, reenactment bears upon the noun “enactment,” which signifies both “the process of passing legislation” and “an instance of acting something out” (Gove, 1961). Adding the prefix re-establishes and underscores the notion of “acting out a past event” or “bringing a law into effect again.” By implication, reenactment is a contestedIndigenous, I Presume? 59 practice vested with politics and power as it relates to a form of testimonial with reference to something identified as having happened.
Adding the element of photographic documentation, the notion of enacting—as in passing legislation—is further accentuated as a matter of making history. Reenactment is a profoundly creative and (inter)subjective activity carried out by one or more actors, typically with an intended audience in mind, with reference to something that is believed to have transpired previously. As Vanessa Agnew argues:The substitutive character of reenactment themes suggests that if reenactment performs the work of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past), then this process is not directly tied to a specific historical process, conflict, or set of agents. In fact, the contrary is true. Reenactment’s emancipatory gesture is to allow participants to select their own past in reaction to a conflicted present. Paradoxically, it is the very ahistoricity of reenactment that is the precondition for its engagement with historical subject matter.
(Agnew, 2004, p. 328)
Reenactment entails, I argue, the implication of a “worlding,” an affective-aesthetic-socio-political form of embodied poiesis (Mendoza, 2018; Mignolo, 2000; Tsing, 2010). Perhaps more accurately, it may be conceived of as a re-worlding in which what is reenacted is de facto refigured or reframed through the imaginative analytical conflation of past and present with a view to the future, in the sense that an audience for the output is also part of the equation (Vium, 2018, forthcoming). Reenactment, in my experience, affords poetic articulations that hold the potential to radically reconceptualize history.
A reenactment is a circumscribed performance: it gathers together a set of “actors” within time and space, and it is contingent upon a complex number of interrelated elements—such as imaginations, beliefs, memories, and interpretations, among others—relationally configured and enacted between the participants. The initial stage of the encounter is absolutely paramount to a productive outcome: too much explanation and contextual- ization, in my experience, makes for a rigid framing that disables this creative process of collective enlightenment, which I have elsewhere referred to as a form of cultural critique, in which established discourses and narratives are recontextualized (Marcus and Fischer, 1999; Vium, 2018). In this particular case, our hosts had set the stage for our encounter, the main challenge being to navigate this dynamic field of interaction in a manner that would leave space for chance (or “grace,” as ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch would call it) to fertilize the dialogue (Fulchignoni, 2003, pp.
150, 152; Henley, 2010, pp. 257, 259, 263; Leth, 2009). In other words, improvisation and patience are central to the process of reenactment in my approach. The main challenge on the part of the “intervenor” is precisely to evaluateand anticipate how little framing is necessary for the (re)enactment to unfold productively. For reenactment to realize its potential “as a vehicle for historical inquiry,” as Agnew argues (2004, p. 335), “broad interpretative questions are the very ones that reenactment must pose by inquiring into the ethics and politics of historical representation. Rather than eclipsing the past with its own theatricality, reenactment ought to make visible the ways in which events were imbued with meanings and investigate whose interests were served by those meanings” (Agnew 2004, p. 335). One way I attempt to do this is to pay particular attention during the initial photo-elicitation sessions that establish the basis for the ensuing photographic reenactments.Upon ending the short introduction, I unpacked the reproductions of Frisch’s original photographs on the large table at the center of the assembly house and invited people to examine them. And they did—with tremendous interest and excitement. People were passing the photographs between each other, touching, discussing, laughing, and wondering, all the while rephotographing the original photographs meticulously with their smartphones. These reproductions of 150-year-old glass plate negative photographs made by a German (presumably) passing through the area appeared, in the words of Elizabeth Edwards, as “agentive material objects” actively performing themselves through the stories people enacted in engaging physically with them (Edwards 2001, pp. 1-22). Groups of people were forming around the individual images, discussing details, arguing, and approaching me from time to time with questions that I attempted to respond to: “When did you say these photographs were made?” a woman asked, to which I responded, “According to what I know, Albert Frisch spent five months traveling from Tabatinga to Manaus in the year 1867.
The album he produced was published in 1869. But I do not have individual dates for each photograph.” “Why don’t they smile in the photographs? They look very sad and troubled,” another woman commented, to which I proposed that it might have been due to them having to stand completely still during the long exposure required for the image to expose itself onto the emulsion-covered glass plate in the camera. “But it could also very well have to do with the relation between the photographer and the people portrayed. It is difficult to know for certain.” “Why is this man sitting down and the woman holding her hands like that?” a man queried, finding her appearance in particular strange. Again, all I could offer as an explanation was that perhaps she had been told to stand like that so as not to move her arms or hands during the long exposure. “Why don’t you know their names?” one asked, to which I replied that to my knowledge, Frisch had not noted down the names, or perhaps this information had been lost with time. Edson and I were frantically attempting to make sense of the polyphony of stories arising and interweaving: Edson’s filming and translating, my noting, photographing, and trying to simultaneously converse in my rudimentary Portuguese. It must have been quite the spectacle to behold.Consensus seemed unanimous: these images depicted Caixana people, and at least one of them, they argued, was photographed in this very location. I asked them to elaborate on how they knew this from the images, and they referred to the clothing as significantly Caixana; in particular, headpieces and skirts and the woven baskets and mats attracted their attention. Three of the relevant photographs by Frisch are portraits (see Figure 4.1). Each image is an arrangement of two persons, a man and a woman, in front of a background of foliage in the form of plants. In two of the images, numbers 18 and 19, the couple is the same, but with their positions inverted. The third image, number 17, stands out in that the two persons are imposed onto the background manually and not during the actual recording. This technique, known as photomontage or combination printing, was employed extensively by Frisch (Kohl, 2015; Vium, forthcoming).
Upon close scrutiny of these three images, it becomes evident that they all bear the traces of manipulation both during and after the actual recording, be it of the foreground or background. The photographs appear to have been made in the same location; however, the left side of the background discloses that Frisch has added plants through collage after the recording. Similarly, when inspecting the foreground, one can tell that he has arranged it for the recording (Figure 4.1, image 17), adding leaves, a thatched mat, and a woven basket, while removing the wooden log visible on the ground in the right-hand side of Figure 4.1 (images 18 and 19). Frisch’s aesthetic manipulations raise a number of questions that I shall describe in the latter part of this chapter. For now, what is important is that none of our interlocutors at the assembly house commented upon these manipulations, of which number 17 (Figure 4.1) is particularly striking. Rather than instructing them on the nature of Frisch’s manipulations, I was paying close attention to what they saw in the images and how they conceived of them. The simple answer was that they identified and proclaimed these manipulated images as historical documentation of their Caixana ancestors. This was further substantiated during one particular moment in the photo-elicitation, as I describe below.
As for the question of location and whether these photographs could have been made here, discussions were many. However, an elderly man by the name of Agostino was absolutely certain that one of the photographs was indeed made here. To make his case and convince the others, he went to his house nearby and returned with a series of photographs he had made in the 1990s from the settlement looking out on the river, an island visible in the middle ground. The perspective was almost identical to that of Albert Frisch (number 15, Figure 4.1). This temporal comparison was the cause of much discussion among the people present at the assembly house, many of whom recalled how the water level had changed over time, how new structures had been constructed, as evidenced in the sets of images that effectively covered a timespan of more than a century. Agostino explained that present-day Sao Sebastiao was in fact the site of the original Tonantins, which was relocated to its present location on the banks of the Solimoes river in the early 1940s to facilitate easier access to this crucial logistical artery. Judging from the two photographs, it seems probable that Frisch did, indeed, visit and photograph in this very area 150 years ago. The juxtaposition seemed to further confirm the validity of Frisch’s documentation in the eyes of our interlocutors: both the subjects and the location paid testimony to the Caixana occupancy of the area over time, although nothing attests to whether the portraits were made in this place.
Agostino, who had brought the new images of the settlement, Sao Sebastiao, positioned himself as an authoritative mediator between us and the group of people at the assembly house. As our elicitation session of Frisch’s photographs drew to an end, he suggested that we all take a walk around the settlement so that we could learn more about the history of the place. We happily accepted the invitation, and a dozen people from the assembly house walked along with us. Adolfo and a group of elders guided us, providing a detailed history of the place, the history of individual houses and public spaces such as the boat landing place on the river, the churches and storage houses for fish, etc. Along the way, we met several inhabitants who invited us into their homes, and over the course of our walk, I made a fair photographic mapping of the settlement, which included GPS logging of each image along with detailed notations for future reference. Again, our companions were more than happy to provide us with a wealth of information.