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4.33 AVERAGE
4.33 AVERAGE
A gorgeous photobook I found searching Goodreads for information on the Kawésqar tribe of South America. Their depiction in David Grann's The Wager really peaked my interest. They only occupy a small part of this book and the indigenous people of the area so I was glad to be able to borrow this through the library's interloan and learn more.
Most of these photos were taken almost two-hundred years after The Wager made its journey and it's impossible to remove these photos from their colonialist context and not feel the influence since then. Martin Gusinde was visiting these tribes by way of missionary work and a lot of the tribes had acclimated to a lot of Western influence like haircuts, clothing, housing, and even the animals they domesticated. Still, a lot of their traditions remained. This book is generally photos of rituals, portraits of individuals, landscapes, and housing. All of them are incredibly beautiful! It seems that the main focus is on the rituals. Gusinde had visited these tribes over a period of several years and in every case was the first to witness any of these moments. He took advantage of that and a lot of the photographs are the costumes and painting of these ceremonies paired with the larger mythologies that surround them. I think all of them are fascinating but both Gusinde and the publishers have done an amazing job of illuminating the richness of these cultures beyond just being exotic curiosities on large-format film.
Before this project, thousands of these negatives were just sitting in storage, so it's wonderful they've been made available to the public. It's a portal to a world that has largely disappeared; all tribes shown here are either considered extinct (or assimilated) or endangered.
Most of these photos were taken almost two-hundred years after The Wager made its journey and it's impossible to remove these photos from their colonialist context and not feel the influence since then. Martin Gusinde was visiting these tribes by way of missionary work and a lot of the tribes had acclimated to a lot of Western influence like haircuts, clothing, housing, and even the animals they domesticated. Still, a lot of their traditions remained. This book is generally photos of rituals, portraits of individuals, landscapes, and housing. All of them are incredibly beautiful! It seems that the main focus is on the rituals. Gusinde had visited these tribes over a period of several years and in every case was the first to witness any of these moments. He took advantage of that and a lot of the photographs are the costumes and painting of these ceremonies paired with the larger mythologies that surround them. I think all of them are fascinating but both Gusinde and the publishers have done an amazing job of illuminating the richness of these cultures beyond just being exotic curiosities on large-format film.
Before this project, thousands of these negatives were just sitting in storage, so it's wonderful they've been made available to the public. It's a portal to a world that has largely disappeared; all tribes shown here are either considered extinct (or assimilated) or endangered.
I hope that this book will not be pigeonholed as an esoteric, academic collection of obscure photographs meant for a miniscule group of specialists. The adjective "Lost" in the title should not be taken to mean that this book is a euology for the indigneous peoples who have been totally eliminated from their native Tierra del Fuego through genocide. Instead, as the book's three major essays demonstrate (written by Christine Barthe, Marisol Palma Behnke, and Anne Chapman), these peoples, ostensibly so far away in both time and place, deserve our sustained attention. They are Selk'nam, Yamana, and Kawésqar, and the study of them is active and exciting, primarily because the ancestors of Martin Gusinde's subjects persist to this day, though substantialy removed from the material conditions of the photos. Indeed, they deserve our attention because sitting with this book is an invaluable act of practiced empathy; a quote from Martin Gusinde at the end of the book says as much: "Little by little, I was able to enter a strange world... For hours, I sat in a circle with these people, like a pupil avid for knowledge. I tried to strip myself of European thinking, the values of modern life and all personal feeling, in order to try and understand a conceptual world that was strinkingly singular." It is one of the great joys of anthropology, as well of one of its most relevant takeaways for laymen.