2020/08/24 by Mascha Gugganig, Sophie Schor · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Museums and Cultural Heritage
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/aman.13435
As ephemera, postcards are often dismissed as unworthy objects for scholarship. For anthropologists, historians, and other scholars, they have long been considered “low” culture and insignificant, lacking the effective trendsetting status of newspapers, being an unreliable systematic source of data (due to their dispersive nature), or being written off as a personal and individualized form of communication with no larger social ramifications (Ferguson 2005; Peterson 1985). Yet, this neglected status of postcards has undermined a medium that in fact offers creative openings for ethnographic work. In this essay, we expand upon existing literature on postcards’ multimodal virtues (Andriotis and Mavrič 2013; Hall and Gillen 2007; Rogan 2005) in a more systematic way to highlight engagement with a mundane, though no less complex, colonial medium. Bringing together multimodal approaches in anthropology (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019; Dicks, Soyinka, and Coffey 2006; Powis 2017) with the idiom of ethnographic work in/of/as open systems (Fortun 2003), we offer a theoretical elaboration on this visual and tactile medium by attending to the focus (of), context (in), and method (as) of postcards (Fortun 2003, 172). Based on an open call for postcards,1 this essay also relates to the online special section “Multimodal Postcards” that presents seven projects using postcards in innovative ways. This special section (Schor and Gugganig 2020) includes contributions by (in alphabetical order): Mascha Gugganig (2020), Anna Harris and colleagues (2020), Charisma K. Lepcha (2020), Nicola Levell (2020), Tony and Gareth Page (2020), Sophie Schor (2020), and Martina Volfová (2020). This essay offers a brief summary of the origin of postcards and their role as research subjects. We go on to elaborate how ethnography in/of/as open systems resonates with multimodal approaches in anthropology. Subsequently, we introduce multimodal ethnography in/of/as postcards and conclude with a discussion of how such approaches may encourage scholars to open up spaces for more experimental formats. Postcards have served many functions over time—as souvenirs, mementos, methods of communication, modes of domination, or avenues of resistance. During the Golden Age of postcards (1900–1914), at the height of their popularity, two hundred billion to three hundred billion postcards were produced and sold, turning into a widely used communication medium before the use of the telephone (see Ferguson 2005, 170; Rogan 2005, 18). In tandem with an emerging global tourism industry, the Golden Age turned the picture postcard into a tool of consumer culture (Goldsworthy 2010; Urry 1990), which also perpetuated exoticizing, and at times racist, depictions of faraway places and people (Albers and James 1988; Alloula 1986; Waitt and Head 2002). Postcards in fact served colonial ends by both providing a physical souvenir that traversed between the colony and the metropole and by disseminating images of the Other as seen by the colonizer. Academics have long held a prejudice against postcards, for two main reasons. First, the postcard was considered a banal expression of popular culture (Ferguson 2005). Only in the postmodern era, when (visual) representation became a prime focus of research, did scholars start to pay more attention to postcards’ depictions and underlying messages (Ferguson 2005; Moors and Machlin 1987; Peterson 1985). Ever since, scholars have attended to the social (Fraser 1980), colonial (Albers and James 1988), economic (Kohn 2003), linguistic (Östman 2004), aesthetic (Kelly 2004), and cultural (Rogan 2005) cosmos that postcards are both embedded in and reflect. For instance, through a compiled “album” (and critique) of French postcards of Algerian women, highlighting their colonial and gendered gaze, Alloula (1986, 4) illustrates that the colonial postcard “marks out the peregrinations of the tourist, the successive postings of the soldier, the territorial spread of the colonist.” Goldsworthy's (2010, 165) postcolonial critique of Moroccan postcards demonstrates how postcards were also spaces of resistance and ambiguity, such as when racist depictions were combined with “anti-colonial messages.” Second, and related to this, the postcard gained little interest with its status as an “unclear genre” that seemed difficult to analyze: people's written messages (the content) often did not “match” the postcard image (the visual representations of a place, people, or a subject) (Andriotis and Mavrič 2013, 31; Ferguson 2005; Rogan 2005, 8; Schor 2020). As a result, researchers focused on one modality only, mostly the image, and thereby often mimicked their research subjects’ proclivity—for example, postcard collectors—who paid less attention to written messages (Baldwin 1988; Hall and Gillen 2007). Yet even in the Golden Age, postcards were popular exactly because of their enmeshed functions as collectible, ritual communication, and (visual) gift exchange, making them objects entangled in relationships, which formed around these diverse uses (Rogan 2005, 18). In fact, the purportedly messy virtue of postcards—as data, as medium, as dispersed material object, as methodological tool—shows that they are a “meeting place for a variety of cultural phenomena” (Östman 2004, 427). Descriptions of postcards as the “incredible chameleon,” with their “chimeric nature” (Ferguson 2005, 168, 183) and “enmeshed functions” (Rogan 2005, 1), indicate a shift in academic research toward an analysis of postcards as documentary image, correspondence, photographic print, advertisement, or ephemera—that is, as “multifaceted objects” (Andriotis and Mavrič 2013, 35). This interplay between printed words and images, handwritten messages, stamps, and the overall context of postcard use as personal communiqués, items shared among collectors, or virtual artifacts (Gillen 2013; Gillen and Hall 2011; Hall and Gillen 2007; Östman 2004) encompasses the rich multifaceted and multimodal dimensions of postcards that this essay expands upon. There have been a few experimental engagements with postcards as research method (Adjin-Tettey et al. 2008; Allen and Rumbold 2004),2 and in another publication (Gugganig and Schor 2020) we detail the pedagogical possibilities of teaching with postcards. In the following, we provide a theoretical and methodological elaboration on the visual and tactile media of postcards by connecting the idiom of ethnographic work in/of/as open systems (Fortun 2003) with multimodal anthropological approaches (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019; Powis 2017). Taking up the legacy of the reflexive turn in the 1980s (Marcus and Fischer [1986] 1999), Kim Fortun (2003, 172) attests that anthropology is best understood as “operating within an open system, as an open system, and as the study and production of open systems” (emphasis in original), pointing to the context, focus, and method of anthropological work. The ethnographer “recognizes that because she operates in an open system, the experimental system that she designs for her research must itself produce the object of her study. That object, in turn, is not stabilized at the outset. It gathers contours, turns in on itself, mutates into something unexpected” (187; emphasis in original). Anthropology is always situated inside a complex world, which demands an ethic of openness: by acting as openly as our social lived-in worlds in order to produce work of that complex world (see also Pandian 2018). There are thus several parallels to scholarship on multimodal anthropology (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). First, there is a recognition that complexity and an ethic of openness condition each other, in that the former demands the latter, and the latter allows for comprehending the former. Despite rigid definitions of ethics, such as institutional settings replete with ethical dilemmas (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017, 142), or closed publishing infrastructures (Pandian 2018), an ethic of openness in anthropology implies recognizing the complexity of ethnographers’ lived-in worlds (Fortun 2003, 172; Pandian 2018). Multimodal approaches capture this ethic of openness by transgressing institutional and discursive boundaries within and beyond academia and (neo)colonial orders. Second, ethnographies in/of/as open systems show that “results” of research studies “can feed back into the larger system within which the study is carried out, provoking shifts and displacements” (Fortun 2003, 176). This resonates with multimodal approaches that focus on the “afterlife of anthropologically intended media [that implicate] the relationships between anthropologists and networked publics formed through dissemination, as well as the discussions and debates the media engender” (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017, 142). In other words, both concepts recognize the inherent need for open(-ended)ness of ethnographic practice, as is evident in the increase in various media practices by contemporary anthropologists. Finally, there is a recognition that more experimental, inventive, collaborative, and reflexive work is needed. Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón (2019, 222) make clear that multimodality's openness is connected to scholars’ willingness to innovate the production of knowledge—that is, the academic text—and to shatter exclusive forms of expertise. Indeed, the linear and singular format of an academic text hardly lends itself to epistemic diversity (for exceptions, see Cerwonka and Malkki 2007; Fischer 1986; Paper Boat Collective 2017). If one thinks of a book as something similar to a newly built house, it is the architect rather than the demolition and construction crew that receives accolades—a professional distinction between end product and process that is inherent to academia, where “architectural” features (the final house/book/article) is given recognition (Gugganig 2011; see also Chio 2017). We see the similarities between multimodality and openness to be an important part of interrogating knowledge-production methods and cultivating an ethnographic sensibility for reflexivity and ethics (see Pachirat 2017). Working with postcards ethnographically presents a material and discursive case for a multimodal anthropology in/of/as open systems (Fortun 2003). recognizes that because she operates in an open system [of postcards], the experimental [postcard] system that she designs for her research must itself produce the object of her study [the postcard, and resultant postcarding]. That object, in turn, is not stabilized at the outset. It gathers contours, turns in on itself, mutates into something unexpected [e.g., a new postcard/new genre]. (Fortun 2003, 187) The ethnographer may attend to one of these aspects while never losing sight of their interrelatedness: (1) the postcard as a focus of research; (2) the context of the postcard as open system, or the (material and discursive) openness of postcards before they became stabilized objects; and (3) the design or research methods that reflect this openness. Since comprehending a complex world requires acting as openly to produce work of that complex world, we do not suggest that this is a linear process. Contemporary ethnographic engagements with postcards often reflect several of these categories. In the following, we reference the contributions to this special section (Schor and Gugganig 2020) as we elucidate the three parameters by Fortun (2003), which we adapt as ethnography of postcards (focus), ethnography in postcards (context), and ethnography as postcards (method). Postcards have generally served as the focus of academic research, with scholars analyzing the image or the message. One way to engage in this work is by a seemingly simple analysis of postcards as objects. Yet the tactile experience of the multimodal virtues of the postcards—the chosen card, the stamps, the handwriting, the mobility, and the medium—also turns a written correspondence and personal memorabilia into a stage for ethnographic practices. In this way, engagement with postcards mirrors ethnographic work in its wider, open context. For instance, Martina Volfová’s (2020) personal essay on her great-grandparents’ correspondence is a story of postcards as wartime correspondence, yet it is also a story of a wartime love, a personal connection, and the tactile experience of the multimodal virtues of the postcards. The focus on the postcards provoked other revelations, such as Volfová’s connection to her homeland and her role as ethnographer in a distant place, thus exemplifying an ethnography of postcards, and one in postcards, in its wider context. Charisma Lepcha (2020) uses Indian postcards as a source of information, and thereby as an entry point to test the malfunctioning postal system and an opening to larger insights through a colonial analysis. Part of the same open system, the object of research, the postcard, becomes the probing point for understanding its structural context, the postal system; hence, ethnographic research of postcards is often interrelated to ethnographic research in postcards. Her critique of the contingent nature of the postal system is also an important counterpoint to our argument that postcards can be considered legitimate sources for ethnographic work due to their unreliable nature. Lost postcards trouble the linear processes of creation and circulation of knowledge: What happens when something is missing? Here, absence can be just as informative as presence. Such openness also serves as a symbolic reading of ethnographic research, where reliance on and access to data—be it postcards, a lost interview, sacred knowledge—are never a given but are part of the complex terrain of ethnography (see Gugganig 2020). Ethnography in postcards takes as a starting point the context, such as the postal system, communication practices—what Östman calls “postcarding” (2004)—or the material and discursive “opening up” of postcards by repurposing it for new modes of engagement. Harris et al.’s (2020) collaborative historic-ethnographic project “Making Clinical Sense” (Harris et al. 2019) engaged three ethnographers in different locations where postcards created a “meeting place” (Östman 2004, 427) to exchange reflections on their fieldwork. In a similar collaborative research project stretching over far distances, Endre Dányi, Lucy Suchman, and Laura Watts (forthcoming) created postcards that in later analytical stages formed props for katachresis, forcible juxtapositions of existing themes to generate new insights (n.d.; see also Ojala 2019). Indeed, the parallel between postcards and ethnography is evident in that both carry one world into another (Harris et al. 2020; Pandian and McLean 2017). In a similar way, the postcards that were sent in response to the call for postcards turned into tactile connections to colleagues in the distance, inspirations from conferences, and pieces of decoration (see Figure 1). Another example of opening up postcards is a correspondence between the brothers Tony and Gareth Page (2020), who send postcards with messages in the dystopian style of English writer J. G. Ballard. In a multimodal sense, they combine the genres of literarature, ethnography, and tourist greetings on conventional postcards. They explore the multimodal nature of postcards by mobilizing touristic images and highlighting the interrelated effect of different writing tools, stamps, and other material traces of mail delivery (see Gillen 2013). Their postcards can be read like a fragmented yet cohesive novel, perhaps a genre of postcard-fictive ethnography. Creating new genres resonates also with efforts where postcards are used as a site of resistance (see Goldsworthy 2010). In the project “Postcard Protest,” a bookstore invited customers to share their thoughts on the current US politics on a postcard to the White House (see Figure 2). Postcards are here “opened up” both in a material sense (the graphic cues of the word “RESISTANCE” that play with a tourist-postcard aesthetic) and in a discursive sense (turning a communication medium for tourists into a citizen tool for political communication). Elizabeth Egan started a similar project, “@100postcards,”3 where she sent a postcard a day to the White House and posted it on Instagram (Egan 2019). Egan thus makes use of the semi-public ambiguity of the postcard that turns into a multimodal feature; she opens up the medium for conversations among various postcardists (sender, postwoman, etc.) and across other (social) media (see Östman 2004)—not unlike Lepcha's tweets to the India post office and Schor's use of Instagram as a public gallery (2020). Using postcards as a methodical tool is another approach that may be used for research dissemination. Levell's (2020), Schor's (2020), and Gugganig's (2020) contributions expand the methodological toolbox by employing postcards as research communication, as fieldnotes, and as community-outreach tool. As open systems and multimodal approaches, the projects were “not stabilized at the outset” (Fortun 2003, 187) but took on meaning through enacted encounters that could not have been foreseen and Marrero-Guillamón of a Levell created postcards as a which the multimodal when her both the and its form 2020). Gugganig produced postcards for her beyond the on and from her ethnographic research (Gugganig 2020). 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