The Colonization of Media: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Social Science between the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

This dissertation considers the impact of colonization on the creation and use of images, specifically as manifests in European social science. I focus on Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Pierre Bourdieu, all three of whom made many photographs while conducting fieldwork in Indigenous communities relatively early on in their lives and who also went on to engage with many other visual mediums as well. I find a predisposition to see images produced through lens-based technologies as what I call "self-evident" images, capable of being used as data without attention to their character as created and mediated images. I then turn to how Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu discuss painting. Far from viewing this medium as similarly self-evident, they provide exhaustively detailed readings of paintings that refuse to reduce that medium to some more fundamental social reality. Rather than attribute these differences to technology, I offer another account that links them to their experiences photographing Indigenous peoples, which they believed could be "captured" through photography in a way they wouldn't believe their own cultures could. Once made, this association exerts its own influence, shedding light on Bourdieu's disdain for others lens-based mediums like television, which for him lacked the aesthetic "autonomy" of painting. I explain Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu's preference for French painters depicting French subjects in French settings like François Clouet and Édouard Manet by suggesting that thus freed of the expectations of a self-evident medium, painting could accordingly hold open a metaphorical space in which the French and other Europeans could reflect upon their own subjectivity. Although he also relied upon photographs, Boas would himself perform Indigenous practices as an option of last resort. While it's sometimes assumed to have lower verisimilitude than lens-based mediums, I find these performances are less exoticizing than the photographs I discuss.