Moving Images: John Layard's Ethnographic Fieldwork and Photography in Malakula Since 1914 - Historical Anthropology Study for Researchers & Pacific Culture Enthusiasts" (Note: This optimized title improves SEO by including key terms like "ethnographic fieldwork," "photography," "Malakula," and "historical anthropology." It also adds a use case for researchers and Pacific culture enthusiasts.)

This is a review of Moving Images by Prof. Margaret Jolly, Australian National University. Published in The Contemporary PAcific, 23:1, pp. 246-249"Moving Images: John Layard, fieldwork and photography on Malakula since 1914. By Haidy Geismar and Anita Herle. Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, in association with University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2009. pp. xii, 308.This fine book is an important contribution to both the history of anthropology and the history of Vanuatu. John Layard's fieldwork, primarily on Atchin and Vao in Northeast Malakula in 1914 and 1915, was contemporaneous with Malinowski's first trip to New Guinea, but he has not been accorded the same status as a `founding father' of British social anthropology in the conventional genealogies of the discipline. Paradoxically perhaps, Layard has been more positively remembered in those `Small Islands' where he lived for barely nine months. This book both reveals and transforms his Janus face in these twin genealogies.The authors articulate these histories through the medium of Layard's photographs. Using a cumbersome early camera he produced c. 450 images. He deposited the glass plate negatives and donated selected copy prints to the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The fragile materiality of these photographs is consummately evoked from the first image: the back of Tawas, paddling his canoe laden with fresh food and water and John Layard, perched precariously behind the frame of his large camera and tripod. The image bears the marks of its passage: a sinuous black line testifies to a tear and peeling emulsion, a fingerprint is smeared on Tawas' spine. The authors' observation is apt: `Layard's photographs ...continually reference both the anthropologist's presence and the dynamic interactions outside the frame' (p. 4). There are more formal photos: the `stone men' megaliths and slit gong orchestras planted on dancing grounds, male club houses, the ritual of the Maki through which men assumed titles, individual and family portraits (all individuals are meticulously named). Yet the stunning front cover image is symptomatic: a boy returning from his initiation, `the pilgrimage to Oba' (Ambae), whirling in celebration on a boat, where salty spume and rhythmic dance condense in a white wave of movement. Layard did not heed the anthropological manuals of the period whereby fontral and profile portraits were enjoined to assist the comparative anthropometry of race. Rather it is a Malakulan couple who measure the `white man': intrigued Layard's long nose, they scarify their daughter's shoulder with a mark of identical length, a memento of Layard in her skin reproduced in the eye of his camera (pp. 295-6).The girl has her back turned to us, as do most other women Layard photographed, a sign of deference to men as much as shyness with strangers. We rarely see female faces except in family portraits or in the distance in ceremonies. Yet in a set of somber photographs at Père Jamond's Roman Catholic Mission station on Vao, women and men co-mingle, long, modest dresses and shirts and trousers signalling conversion. Layard's resolutely masculine perspective on Malakulan kastom is palpable: men and boys stand confidently facing the camera, often with hands on hips, or stretched wide, smiling in informal groups, more often standing solemnly beside stone megaliths or slit gongs. All Layard's main interlocutors and friends were men. He celebrated the pleasures of male company, especially with Buremin, `my chief linguistic instructor, song-maker and organizer of my evening singing parties' (p. 128). He wanted to travel to England but Layard refused because `I felt sure he would have died with boredom and the strangeness of it all' (p. 128). Buremin appears in different moods: in one portrait beaming with pride (p. 129), in another, majestically erect, face and torso blackened with soot and etched in lime to simulate a hawk (a symbol of man's soaring spiritual ascent in the Maki), wearing a superb pandanus apron from Ambae, finely plaited and dyed red by women (p. 33 and back cover).Indigenous agency has been much vaunted of late for a range of seemingly `European' sources: texts, paintings, engravings, photographs. Here it is indubitably present, if in markedly masculine mode, in the cross-cultural encounters captured by Layard's camera. Layard's ethnography was focused on recording kastom rather than the `coming of the white man', for him a tragic history of misunderstanding and violent destruction (pp.147-168). Several photographs record the activities of missionaries and traders. We see how Malakulans appropriated some foreign things with alacrity. Introduced cloth is everywhere - calico loincloths and leather straps instead of pandanus penis sheaths and bark belts, cotton skirts in lieu of `grass'. A consecrated whaler was used instead of a canoe on the initiation journey to Ambae (pp. 245-56). Indigenous agency is attested by absence too: the interiors of male clubhouses and those more covert phases of male initiation to which Layard's camera was likely denied entry.Layard's life in England after Malakula was less happy. The rigors of fieldwork, his father's mental illness and his brother's death in World War One induced psychological upheavals and incapacity to work. He was successively in therapy with his adored supervisor W.H. R. Rivers (until their split and River's early death in 1922), the unorthodox Homer Lane and, from 1936, Carl Jung, in a protracted mutual psychoanalysis. Much has been made of his psychological turbulence and the homoerotic dimension of his early emotional life and later associations with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in Berlin in 1929, where Auden saved him from an attempted suicide (e.g. MacClancy 1986). Although vilified as `loony Layard' and extruded from the dominant lineage of British social anthropology, Layard's magnum opus Stone Men of Malekula (finally published in 1942) and several papers in anthropological and psychoanalytic journals revealed a creative combination of ethnographic experience and scholarly theory. Although adjudged `old-fashioned' by British functionalist anthropologists, Stone Men has proved of enduring worth for both foreign and ni-Vanuatu ethnographers. As Anita Herle perceptively points out, his diffusionist and psychoanalytic theories both privileged stratigraphy, the layering of culture and mind through traumatic intrusions (p.116). Despite later satisfactions - collaboration with Tom Harrisson in talks for the BBC, belated scholarly creativity, a psychoanalytic practice, marriage to Doris Dingwall and the birth of his son Richard (later a distinguished economist) - Layard was often plagued by debilitating reflexive self-criticism. It is agonizing to read the scrawled corrections on successive drafts of his unpublished autobiography, History of a Failure (1946-67). Until his death in 1974 he hoped to complete later volumes about Malakula. He reminisced about how ni-Vanuatu had adopted him as a young man and how people in South West Bay spoke of earlier immigrants in large sea-going canoes: `white-skinned', with long `aquiline noses', `definitely not Polynesian, but "just like me" (p. 149).Layard's photographs have catalysed positive memories in Vanuatu. Kirk Huffman (p. 205-44) traces the fascinating intersection between Layard's recording of kastom and his own project of cultural revitalization as Curator of the New Hebrides Cultural Centre from 1973. Huffman met Layard and his wife in Oxford before first visiting Malakula and carried copies of Layard's photos, papers and recorded messages from Layard. Chief Along of Atchin and other old men on Vao, remembered `Mista Jon' or `T'soni' as a man who often recorded songs (on a wax cylinder phonograph), wore the nambas (penis sheath) and participated in rituals. They recorded reciprocal messages for Layard telling of friends long dead, remembering the killing of seven Presbyterian missionaries in 1914, the last Maki on Atchin in 1942, and their eventual conversion to Christianity. They bemoaned the loss of kastom, less intensely on Catholic Vao than on Atchin, where most had converted to the SDA religion.Haidy Geismar continues the story from 2003 in her superb chapter on `visualising the past on Atchin and Vao' (pp. 257-92). She highlights how people incorporate photographic images into historical narratives. Her project, a collaboration with Numa Fred Longga of the Malakula Cultural Centre, entailed not just repatriating photographs from foreign museums to `source communities' to foster the national reanimation of kastom. It also occasioned Indigenous documentation and reflection. Her interlocutors were eager to retrace Layard's steps. In many of her restaged photos senior men simulate ancestors in situ and embody connections, e.g. by touching slit gongs on ancient dancing grounds to emphasise contemporary claims to their ancestral ples.Geismar acknowledges how given `the gender segregation that is at the heart of much customary knowledge and practice on Malakula' (p. 264) men, and especially older men, dominated public meetings and official recordings while women rather discussed Layard's photos in private with her. She was subject to `complex, hierarchical and often restrictive politics around knowledge transmission' (p. 264), restricted by both gender and seniority. Layard's book, Stone Men of Malekula, as `an embodiment of male ancestral authority, has been co-opted by elder men [to] maintain traditional gendered hierarchies of authority' (p. 268). The book's stunning graphic images are widely circulated and the text is locally seen as an accurate record of genealogies, histories and local language. In such processes of `cultural reawakening', Geismar stresses, images of the past can make things happen in the present. This book is a superb testament to that."Professor Margaret Jolly, Australian National UniversityREFERENCESLayard, John 1942. Stone Men of Malekula: The Small Island of Vao. London: Chatto and Windus.MacClancy, Jeremy 1986. `Unconventional character and disciplinary convention: John Layard, Jungian and Anthropologist' in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on culture and personality. Edited by G.W. Stocking Jr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 50-72.