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Anthropology of art, media,music,dance andfilm
Basic concepts Color symbolism Visual culture Body culture Material culture New media
Case studies Art Art of the Americas Indigenous Australian art Oceanic art Film Nanook of the North The Ax Fight Nǃai, the Story of a ǃKung Woman Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza The Doon School Quintet
Museums National Anthropological Archives Centro Cultural Mexiquense Museum of Anthropology at UBC Museum of Anthropology, Cambridge Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Robert Hull Fleming Museum List of museums
Related articles Ethnographic film Video ethnography Ethnocinema List of ethnographic films Margaret Mead Film Festival Cantometrics Museum anthropology Salvage ethnography Tribal art/Folk art
Major theorists Tim Asch Gregory Bateson Franz Boas Pierre Bourdieu John Collier Frances Densmore Robert J. Flaherty Robert Gardner Alfred Gell Robert Hugh Layton Claude Lévi-Strauss Alan Lomax John Marshall Margaret Mead Alan Merriam Bruno Nettl Hortense Powdermaker Jean Rouch David MacDougall
Social andcultural anthropology
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Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization and assimilation. It is generally associated with the AmericananthropologistFranz Boas;^[1] he and his students aimed to record vanishingNative American cultures.^[2] Since the 1960s, anthropologists have used the term as part of a critique of 19th-centuryethnography and early modern anthropology.^[3]

The term "salvage ethnography" was coined byJacob W. Gruber, who identified its emergence with 19th-century ethnographers documenting the languages of peoples being conquered and colonized by European countries or the United States. According to Gruber, one of the first official statements acknowledging that a major effect ofcolonialism was thedestruction of existing languages and ways of life wasThe report of the British Select Committee of Aborigines (1837).

As a scholarly response, Gruber quotesJames Cowles Prichard's address before theBritish Association for the Advancement of Science in 1839, referring to theOld Testament tale ofCain and Abel:

Wherever Europeans have settled, their arrival has been the harbinger of extermination to the native tribes. Whenever the simple pastoral tribes come into relations with the more civilised agricultural nations, the allotted time of their destruction is at hand; and this seems to have been the case from the time when the first shepherd fell by the hand of the first tiller of soil. Now, as the progress of colonization is so much extended of late years, and the obstacle of distance and physical difficulties are so much overcome, it may be calculated that these calamities, impending over the greater part of mankind, if we reckon by families and races, are to be accelerated in their progress; and it may happen that, in the course of another century, the aboriginal nations of most parts of the world will have ceased entirely to exist. In the meantime, if Christian nations think it not their duty to interpose and save the numerous tribes of their own species from utter extermination, it is of the greatest importance, in a philosophical point of view, to obtain much more extensive information than we now possess of their physical and moral characters. A great number of curious problems in physiology, illustrative of the history of the species, and the laws of their propagation, remain as yet imperfectly solved. The psychology of these races has been but little studied in an enlightened manner; and yet this is wanting in order to complete the history of human nature, and the philosophy of the human mind. How can this be obtained when so many tribes shall have become extinct, and their thoughts shall have perished with them?

Frances Densmore (1867–1957), an influential ethnomusicologist, worked in the tradition of salvage ethnography. Densmore recorded the songs and lyrics of Native Americans in an attempt to preserve them permanently. Many of her original recordings, preserved onwax cylinders, are archived at theLibrary of Congress.

Artists compounded the work of professional anthropologists during this time period. PhotographerEdward S. Curtis (1868–1952) was preceded by painterGeorge Catlin (1796–1872) in attempting to capture indigenous North American traditions that they believed to be disappearing. Both Curtis and Catlin have been accused of takingartistic license by embellishing a scene or making something appear more authentically "Native American". Curtis notes in the introduction to his series on the North American Indian: "The information that is to be gathered ... respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost."

Salvage ethnography started to be applied methodically invisual anthropology asethnographic film since the 1950s byfilmmakers such asJean Rouch in France,Michel Brault andPierre Perrault in Canada, orAntónio Campos in Portugal (early 1960s), followed by others (1970s).

Salvage ethnography is often taught in film andmedia studies courses as a style of filmmaking that captures a civilization or people's former way of living. The best example of this would beRobert Flaherty'sNanook of the North. InNanook, Flaherty staged incidents and scenes that did not fairly represent the Inuit tribe's current way of life, but rather their "former majesty".

• Documentary film
• Ethnofiction
• Ethnographic film
• Nanook of the North – 1922 American silent documentary film
• Salvage anthropology – related to salvage ethnography, but often refers specifically to the collection of cultural artifacts and human remains, rather than the general collection of data and images.
• Visual anthropology – a subfield of social anthropology, of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production andreception ofmass media.

• Elias Bonine – American photographer known for his portraits of 19th centuryNative Americans.
• George Catlin – American painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits ofNative Americans in theOld West.
• Edward Sheriff Curtis – Americanphotographer andethnologist whose work focused on theAmerican West and onNative American peoples.
• Frances Densmore – American anthropologist,ethnomusicologist, and ethnographer focused on Native American music and culture.
• Germaine Dieterlen – Frenchanthropologist and student of Marcel Marcel Griaule, known for her studies of theDogon people ofWest Africa.
• Marcel Griaule –Frenchanthropologist known for his studies of theDogon people ofWest Africa.
• Alfred L. Kroeber – Americancultural anthropologist.
• Felipe Lettersten – a Peruvian artist who believed he was preserving theAmazon rainforest cultures by casting sculptures of indigenous people.
• Robert H. Lowie –Austrian-bornAmericananthropologist, focused onNorth American Indians.
• Geraldine Moodie – Canadian photographer who took early photos ofIndigenous peoples in Northern Canada.
• Jimmy Nelson – British photojournalist and photographer known for his portraits of tribal and indigenous peoples.
• Jean Rouch – French filmmaker and anthropologist focused on Africa.

• Conn, Steven (2004).History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.ISBN 0-226-11494-5.
• Redman, Samuel (2021).Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.ISBN 9780674979574.
• Smith, Sherry (2000).Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-515727-3.
• Carter, Edward, ed. (1999).Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.ISBN 0-87-169231-7.

• Ethnography
• Anthropology

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