“My natives to myself”: A critical perspective on ethnographic films

Alongside written reports, the colonial apparatus has often been accompanied by ethnographic films—at least since the inception of the medium—assembling a substantial corpus of footage of the people studied. While this documentary material has occasionally been subjected to postcolonial critique, early ethnographic films—particularly those from the pre-1960s period—have remained largely overlooked, despite the critical insights they can offer into both the colonial legacy and the practice of anthropology itself. This article is an effort in that direction. It examines the work of two women anthropologists, Beatrice Blackwood and Ursula Graham Bower, who conducted fieldwork in colonial contexts during the 1930s and 1940s respectively, compiling extensive visual records of the people they studied alongside their written ethnographies. The films depict indigenous groups in two territories under British colonial rule: Papua and New Guinea and Northern India. The analysis is based on a selection of these films, to which we have applied a decolonial framework structured around three analytical categories: self-referential authority, state of exception, and performative authenticity. What emerges is a contradictory “visual account” that blends romanticised and pseudoscientific views, deeply entangled in the complex and often ambiguous relationship between anthropology and colonialism.