from Research in African Literatures Volume 35, Number 4

Excerpt from:

Ethnography, Literature, and Art in the work of Anne Eisner (Putnam): Making Sense of Colonial Life in the Ituri Forest

CHRISTIE MCDONALD

Harvard University

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions, use our online reprint request form. 

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the transformation of ethnology and interpretation in the work of artist Anne Eisner (Putnam) and anthropologist Colin Turnbull. Eisner, who made her home at the edge of the Ituri Forest of the former Belgian Congo (DRC) during the 1940s and 1950 and again in 1957-58, transcribed two hundred Mbuti Pygmy legends; Turnbull used these legends (in the case studied here, transformed one of them) to map an oppositional world view: the Mbuti Pygmy/Bira villager, forest/village, good mother/ bad mother. Eisner looks to crossovers and intersections rather than the polarizations of inclusion and exclusion presented by Turnbull. Her complex view of this society can be understood from her painting and comes out of her own situation as one of the “mothers,” a woman, a Westerner, and a painter. What is at stake is the dialogue between the foreign and the familiar that creates differing interpretations, often blurring the line between observation and its transformation into writing or art.

What assumptions and fictions guide the transformation of ethnography and art? How do differences not only between ethnographers and informants, but also between anthropologists and artists, signal the transformation of experience to interpretation?

From the late 1940s to late 1950s, in the period before the collapse of Belgian colonial rule and Independence in the former Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo), the people of the Ituri forest in Central Equatorial Africa were of compelling interest to researchers and tourists. And as of the 1960s, one dominant view emerged of the Mbuti Pygmies out of Colin Turnbull's celebrated and beautiful book, The Forest People: a life of purity, harmony, equality, and goodness found in the forest, which was opposed to farmer villagers and everyone else who lived outside the forest: “There is an unbridgeable gulf between the two worlds of the two peoples” (227). Part of Turnbull's effort to separate the communities had to do, beyond debating methods of investigation, with a search for purity; part had to do with creating a convincing anthropological voice in his writing. In writing about the Mbuti Pygmies, Turnbull eclipsed the other researchers, celebrities, tourists, game hunters, and art collectors who came together at Camp Putnam to gain first-hand experience of the African rainforest and the Pygmies of the area. In particular, he barely mentioned Anne Eisner (Putnam) who made access to Epulu possible and her extensive ethnographic notes available to him in the 1950s. Differing views about life at Camp Putnam and interpretation of Mbuti life contributed to a conflicted professional and personal friendship that lasted until Eisner's death in 1967. Having put together Anne Eisner's archive when it came to me in the mid 1980s, I began to study the contributions she made to the history of the Epulu area.1 In what follows, I will examine how Anne Eisner presented through her art a perspective on life at Epulu different from the polarizations of inclusion and exclusion presented by Turnbull. What is at stake is the dialogue between the foreign and the familiar that creates differing interpretations, often blurring the line between observation and its transformation into writing or art.

IU Press Journals
Home Page
More about Research in African Literatures
Tables of
Contents
Library
Recommendation
Advance
Information
Copyright
Clearance