The Life and Work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin, an Early Visual Anthropologist

Abstract

This article traces the life and work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre (1888–1971), a Belgian explorer and ethnographer. While fragments of his oeuvre are familiar to scholars of South America, he is almost completely unknown in historical studies, and largely forgotten within anthropology too. Here we will explore his filmic work as well as its contribution to the history of visual anthropology. While de Wavrin’s work cannot be divorced from the discipline’s colonial and Eurocentric heritage, we show that his visual record provides notable historic insights and merits further scholarly attention.

DE WAVRIN’S EARLY LIFE

Born in 1888 into a noble family, the Marquis Robert de Wavrin spent his childhood in Ronsele, a village in Flanders. Following home-schooling and secondary school in Namur, he studied natural science for two years at Ghent University. Little else is known about his early life, and he appears in official documents for the first time only in 1913. The young de Wavrin, then 25 years old, had shot a pellet gun at two children attempting to steal hazelnuts in the orchard on his family’s estate. The prosecutor argued that the nobility’s privileges had been rescinded in 1789, and so de Wavrin was sentenced to one year of prison in absentia—after he had fled the country to avoid punishment, embarking thus on his first journey to South America. So began a life of traveling that lasted for over 30 years (Moderbacher 2017, 2019a; Winter 2017).

This brief introduction to Robert de Wavrin might not seem to offer much justification for sketching his life and work in the following decades. But moving from Paraguay, to Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia,¹ de Wavrin lived with indigenous communities for long periods and thereby underwent a personal transformation from curious traveler to amateur ethnographer attempting to understand the lives of the people he lived amongst. The resulting work encompasses more than 6,000 meters of film, 2,000 photographs, 14 books and numerous other French publications, which together constitute an important contribution to early French-speaking ethnographic work.

TOWARD THE PORTRAYAL OF DAILY LIFE IN SOUTH AMERICA

Soon after arriving in Buenos Aires in 1913 de Wavrin left that city as well as other European settlements behind. He traveled inland, at first with only a few local companions, and subsequently with indigenous interpreters: “[there] one feels so peaceful,”² he recalled later in an interview (Ciné-Miroir 1925). From the outset, he was attracted to journeys that would allow him to follow his passion for hunting. In handwritten notes kept by his son Hellin, he recounted the many places that he had visited, and in his first notebook, “Voyage de Mendoza au Chile” (1914), he carefully listed the animals he had killed. From his very first travels he carried a photo camera, though what kind is unknown.

These early “hunting” images are probably the most obvious indication of his aristocratic origins: he poses for the camera, with animal carcasses spread out at his feet, like any another European “adventurer,” proud of his kill (e.g. Moderbacher 2019a, 61 and 66), the clichéd Western explorer who dreams of freedom and independence in an “exotic world.”³ In his written work, as well as in the voice-overs he wrote for his films, de Wavrin was likewise constrained by the structures and language usage of his time, for example describing people as “sauvages” (savages; de Wavrin 1926, 18), “très sauvages” (very wild; 1926, 18), “dégénérés physiquement” (physically degenerate) and “sales" (dirty; 1953, 221). This use of common language has to be read against the backdrop of the early 20th century, when “scientific” racism, occupied in collecting data from anthropology, biology and psychology to support theories about “superior” and “inferior” races (Comas 1961),⁴ was at its height. For example, people were exhibited in “Human Zoos”—which became banned in Belgium only in 1958. (We will return to the issue of the extent to which de Wavrin was a man of his time when contextualizing his work.) A glimpse of just the titles of his works reveals language that is often shocking by today’s standards. At the same time, there are many surprising statements that pique a reader’s interest. For example in his first book he states that the indigenous people he encountered were “by no means of lower race” (1926, 6); or in his notebook, upon learning of the start of World War I, less than a year after his arrival, he wrote: “I hear the news of the Austro-Serbian declaration of war and the mobilization of various European nations. They all want to steal and to fight. Blood will flow while I am here, far from this uproar, where I will visit savages who are much less savage than the civilized” (July 30, 1914, trans.).

What makes de Wavrin’s work interesting, then, is this co-existence of two paradoxical registers: the cliché of the “white explorer” driven by a desire to discover the “exotic” and “unknown,” who refers to indigenous people as “savages” while at the same time refraining from reproducing the racist and misogynistic stereotypes that so many travelers took with them into the field. This contradiction is present throughout his entire work; he labels people “primitive” or “savage” while simultaneously criticizing “the civilized,” who believe they are superior to those they “study”:

At first, it appears easy enough to understand the manners of tribes we call savage … . To the layman, their social life is no more than the simple interaction between inferior beings. For the civilized and short-sighted individual, infatuated by his own superiority and whose pride belies his incomprehension, all savages, even those who have a certain level of civilization, are inferior beings he despises without trying to understand and often even without approaching them. Did we not see the Conquistadores destroying civilizations that were in many ways superior, especially those of the Incas and the Aztecs, who could have taught us many things? (de Wavrin 1948, 7, trans.).

de Wavrin became increasingly curious about some indigenous groups of South America, an interest that resulted in a large multi-format oeuvre, some aspects of which have only rarely received attention.⁵ Given the space limitations of this article, we provide only a glimpse into a selection of his books in the next section, before turning to focus particularly on his filmic work. However, we should note that his photographs show a similar development to the filmic work to be discussed: inspired by his first prolonged stay with the indigenous groups Lengua, Mataco and Toba in Paraguay between 1919 and 1923, de Wavrin’s vast landscape shots and colonial poses were increasingly superceded by portraits of people that he had become acquainted with. The roughly 2,000 photographs of numerous indigenous South Americans and their villages show de Wavrin’s knack at framing the intensity of nature. His first portraits clearly reflect that he was not immune to that epoch’s exoticism: he took pictures of Lengua people in poses that seem to document the particularities of the “other” (e.g. Moderbacher 2019b, 95). His exoticizing gaze when photographing young women during his early travels is also noticeable. These photos, however, are increasingly replaced by detailed observations and intimate portraits of daily life, as we shall show in more detail when exploring his films.

“A COLLECTION OF PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS”—DE WAVRIN’S WRITTEN WORK

Beginning in 1924, de Wavrin wrote 14 books and several articles in academic journals as well as popular media.⁶ His articles are mainly devoted to linguistic and archaeological subjects (e.g., de Wavrin 1936). While his first book, Au center de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue (1924),⁷ hardly talks about indigenous groups, his second one, Les derniers Indiens primitifs du bassin du Paraguay (1926),⁸ gives a detailed overview of the indigenous inhabitants of that country. Some of his books are dedicated to one country (e.g. Colombia, 1953) or one group (e.g. the Shuar, 1941), but two large works attempt an overview of a variety of indigenous South American peoples (1937, 1948). Although these books, like his photographs, pay much attention to his adventures and hunting, they show growing evidence of his interest in the lives of the indigenes he encounters. de Wavrin rarely referenced other scholars (1937, 9),⁹ nor did he theorize his observations. Instead, what distinguishes his work is its “respectful attitude in the ‘discovery of the other’ and an often affectionate empathy that allowed him to describe South American Indigenous societies in a scholarly and experienced way” (Rivarola 2017, 9, trans.).

His books Le mystère de l’Orénoque (1939a) and Les Jivaros réducteurs de têtes (1941)¹⁰ are probably the most captivating in terms of narrative and writing style, albeit generally not comparable in this respect to the work of some of his famous contemporaries, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss.¹¹ In contrast to him and most contemporaries, de Wavrin received little recognition from the scientific community, despite having joined the Société de Géographie de Paris in 1920, the Société des Américanistes de Paris in 1923 and the Société d’Américanistes de Belgique in 1928. Aside from critics, for example in the Belgian journal Études (1937), who described his books as “lacking structure” but also as a “prodigious mess of an undeniable authenticity,” very few documents still exist that mention or even evoke the value and impact of his written work, as Bour (2018) has summarized. The historian Bolen and Vermeylen, the co-founder of Cinematek, dedicate a couple of pages in their Histoire authentique du cinéma belge to de Wavrin’s work, underlining that by describing indigenous people as loyal and pacifist he swam against the tide of his time (1978, 160–61). So far as we know, the book Les derniers Indiens primitifs du bassin du Paraguay (1926) received equally little attention within francophone academia. As Bour writes in her recent study of his photographs (2018), de Wavrin received a letter from the Belgian Embassy in Paris in 1937 praising his work as being “as passionate as it is scientific,” and as forming a “considerable contribution” brought to science.¹² In a similarly appreciative tone, the French ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep described the work as “one of our best monographs” (ibid., 45). It is also one of de Wavrin’s few publications to receive attention decades later. In 1996, the journal L’Ethnographie ¹³ reissued the book, illustrated with 106 photographs, thus acknowledging the new importance of visual anthropology within the discipline as well as de Wavrin’s courage and skill in portraying the indigenous people of South America (Lacombe 1996, 8).

Regarding the ethnographic value of his written work, de Wavrin himself described his awareness of his aims as well as limitations when writing in the book Moeurs et coutumes des Indiens sauvages de l’Amérique du Sud:

I will restrict myself to adding a collection of personal observations to the information furnished by the Indians themselves as well as some details obtained from hunters or other travelers who had directly observed what they said. Even then, I discard all that seems the most unreliable to me. With some reservations, I record the statements of certain witnesses, only reporting them because this information is first-hand and otherwise inaccessible… . I contented myself with classifying all these materials into chapters, making additions where I noted an oversight. … These are the materials that I offer here; I make no claim that this work—abandoned, resumed and rapidly revised—is what one would be entitled to expect of a rigorous composition by an author or scholar who treats such a subject in an orderly fashion after having gathered and ranked all the documents. (1937, 9, trans.)

Echoing de Wavrin’s own words, we would like to point out that while he did not attempt any detailed or theoretical analysis in the written work, he did assemble an impressive number of observations, albeit grounded in a specific era, that certainly can be of use in further scholarly research, as we will explore below. In contrast to his written work, however, the films prove to be more interesting for our discipline in that they demonstrate an approach that was exceptional for his time. They underline that de Wavrin was an important pioneer of an anthropology that puts everyday life at the center of ethnographic theory, by using the still and later on the cine camera as a tool to capture the ordinary.

THE FILMING ETHNOGRAPHER

Between 1924 and 1937, de Wavrin¹⁴ released four major films: Au centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue (1924), Au pays du scalp (1931), Chez les Indiens sorciers (1934) and Venezuela, petite Venise (1937).¹⁵ In addition, he produced several shorter films which are now entirely lost.¹⁶ Grace Winter, a trained anthropologist, researcher and archivist at Cinematek, enabled the four major films to be digitized and they are now accessible to a wider audience. In 2006 she started viewing his three preserved films as well as reels stored in 48 boxes labeled “de Wavrin,” which contained rushes of his films. They had been in storage at Cinematek since the 1970s.¹⁷ For over a decade she studied de Wavrin’s life and work and inventoried the content of the 48 reels which later formed the basis of the fourth (reconstructed) film. That film is now available on a recently produced DVD compilation (Winter 2017) edited by Cinematek (Brussels), which brings together his four main films.¹⁸ In summary, his visual work offers an exceptional insight into the everyday relationships between an anthropologist and his informants, which is “not obscured by pejorative suggestions of ‘barbarism’” (Rivarola 2017, 9, trans.).

de Wavrin started to shoot moving images during his second period of travel, in 1919, when the Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP) sent a letter encouraging him to take a cine camera with him: “We are pleased that the Gaumont Film Company was able to provide you with a film camera; you will be the first to bring back moving imagery from these unique regions …” (January 28, 1920). The resulting material covering his journey from northern Argentina and Bolivia, all the way across Paraguay to Brazil, was edited and presented in Brussels in 1924 under the title “Au Centre de l’Amérique du Sud inconnue.” Despite various press articles related to the screening of the film in Belgium and France (including La Meuse, October 7, 1924 and Ciné-Journal, April 3, 1925), only 12 original minutes were found in Cinematek (Brussels). It was possible to reconstruct the film (now 39 minutes long) based on a lengthy, descriptive article in the Ciné-Miroir magazine (March 15, 1925), the photos published in Les derniers Indiens primitifs du bassin du Paraguay (1926), as well as excerpts found in the collection of CNC (Centre National du Cinéma, Paris). In keeping with his general interest at the time and the development of his photographic work, mentioned above, only the last part focuses on the indigenous population. The footage mainly shows the Lengua, but also has sequences on the Mataco and the Toba, as well as shots of a group described as “the Pareci of the Rio Guapore” (Brazil), the Chiriguano of north-east Argentina and the “fishermen of Rio Grande” in Bolivia. According to the analysis by the visual anthropologist Paul Henley in his ongoing project “The Silent Time Machine” (forthcoming), the images of indigenous people are mostly distant shots, not yet based on an intimate relationship between the filmmaker and the subject,¹⁹ as is the case in his later films. Nevertheless the visible traces of a growing empathy for his subjects bear no comparison with the big “scientific” exhibits common at the time that were exclusively concerned with capturing physiological data to be used in physical anthropological studies. Rather, the people Marquis Robert de Wavrin filmed at times look directly into the camera, curiously, fearlessly.

de Wavrin’s second film, Au pays du scalp (1931), earned him fame with a wider audience.²⁰ That film resulted from 20,000 meters of footage that had been shot between 1928 and 1930 during an expedition that de Wavrin described as follows:

Of all my trips to South America my favorite is the one described in “Au pays du scalp.” Not only is it the most interesting due to the scientific research I was able to conduct but also the most fascinating. Departing from Guayaquil, I first went to the Galapagos Islands, in the Pacific, several hundred kilometers from the Ecuadorian coast. Upon returning to the capital of Ecuador, chance brought me to the Ocaina Indians, the Boros, the Napos, the Jivaros and the Piros. I explored the Incan mines of Machu Picchu, discovered only a few years earlier, and ended my journey in the famed islands of Guano. It took three years to complete this itinerary and along the way I gathered legends and traditions, observed customs and I recorded many idioms. (L’ami du Peuple, April 29, 1931, trans.)

Although a considerable amount of this film concerns the landscape, the flora and fauna and the few cities through which de Wavrin and his companions passed, the indigenous communities he visited occupy a much larger proportion than in his previous film. Besides the Shuar community (that de Wavrin calls Jivaro), de Wavrin filmed among the Otovalo in the Ecuadorian Andes; the Ocaina, Bora,²¹ Witoto, Canelos and Piro communities in Amazonian Ecuador and Peru; as well as among the Uro living on Lake Titicaca and Qechua in the Bolivian Andes. It was the then famous Brazilian editor Alberto Cavalcanti (1897–1982) who worked this material into the 72 minutes of the final film, accompanied by a musical score written by the noted French composer Maurice Jaubert.²² The film was released in France by the Compagnie Universelle Cinématographique (CUC) at the Olympia in Paris. Numerous reviews, written in a general tone of admiration and surprise, provide detailed descriptions of the scenes in the film, for example that by the French art critic Jean-Paul Dreyfus: “It is actually one of the best documentaries of the moment, providing something of real value to the public and especially so because it is devoid of any imperialist or colonialist propaganda” (Dreyfus 1931, as quoted in Winter 2017, 93). But while critics in Belgium likewise described the film as a “unique document” and “extraordinary” (Le Vingtième Siècle 1931, as quoted in Bour 2018, 46), the Ecuadorian embassy asked de Wavrin to change the title of his film because “it discredits the country.” In one of the first English-language studies of Belgian cinema, the film theorist Philip Mosley writes that the “lurid” title was imposed by the producers of the film to gain a larger audience, while “the film was a sensitive study of several Indian tribes, most of which hunted no heads at all” (2001, 58). This is also reflected in Henley’s analysis, which states that rather than the scenes of hunting and shrinking heads, the film’s richest material was the footage of the “Bora,” which revealed de Wavrin’s intimate relationship with some of the people as well as their fearlessness toward the camera in various scenes.²³ Notable in this respect, and perhaps one of the most expressive scenes in de Wavrin’s work, is when one of the dancers comes right up to the camera, “performing” for the spectator. In general, it has to be said that certain dance or ceremonial scenes improve when watched without the outdated soundtrack and commentaries, which were, like the titles, written when de Wavrin began to commercialize the films. As Winter (2017, 87) has previously written, the audio, music and narration appealed to the “taste for exoticism” fashionable in the “Thirties and at times they contradict the poetic quality of the imagery”.

With the release of Au pays du scalp, de Wavrin became part of a growing movement in ethnographic cinema characterized by increasing numbers of filmmakers joining scientific "missions", instead of accompanying expeditions solely driven by economic interests. Other examples include the author and anthropologist Marcel Griaule, who returned from a multidisciplinary mission to Dakar–Djibouti between 1931 and 1933 with roughly 1,600 meters of film; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who filmed only a few years later, between 1936 and 1938, in Bali and New Guinea; the filmmaker Fred Matter, who shot the documentary Expédition française en Haut-Amazone covering a French expedition under Bertrand Flornoy in 1937; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who filmed the Nambikwara in Brazil between 1936 and 1938.

Three years after his biggest cinematic success, de Wavrin’s third film, Chez les Indiens sorciers, was released in Paris in 1934, following a trip to Colombia that he undertook at the behest of the Belgian Ministry of Education to collect ethnographic objects for Belgian museums. For an unknown reason the film was not shown in Belgium until 1939. It consists of sequences shot with a number of different indigenous groups scattered around the country, for example the Choco/Embera, Guahibo, Arhuaco and Yukpa. As an article in the Revue Belge du cinéma (1939b, 3–4) reveals, a new temperance law that had been passed in Belgium in 1939 obliged de Wavrin to cut three sequences from the film.²⁴ Although the music is rather annoying at times, unlike Jaubert’s praised score for Au pays du scalp, the film has historical value in that it portrays the life of many people whose future was already increasingly threatened—a topic that de Wavrin revisited in his book Chez les Indiens de Colombie in 1953. It is not only this aspect that makes de Wavrin’s footage valuable but also its cinematic qualities: well framed, often poetic (e.g. a group of beautifully swirling butterflies on a river in Venezuela, petite Venise (1937)), it evokes persons comfortable in front of the lens, looking into the camera, smilingly, while going about their daily routines. The images, even if at times blurry and not technically perfect, reflect his interest in daily life and mirror his relationship with the people. As we have mentioned before, de Wavrin’s photographs and films are driven by a concern to document and “preserve” a “fading civilization.” The films however go beyond mere salvage. As with his photography, they demonstrate a sensitivity toward the subject which moves beyond the clichéd images of early 20th-century colonial cinema.

Presented at the Brussels “Eldorado” cinema in 1937, Venezuela, petite Venise was de Wavrin’s fourth and last film. Driven by a desire to discover the source of the Orinoco River, which at the time was still unknown, de Wavrin had embarked on a journey to that river, during which he had made contact with the Yukpa, whom he wrongly called “Motilones.” This was the same group he had spent a long time with on the Colombian side of the border during his previous trip to South America in 1932–33. Only the last sequence of the film accounts for its title. It offers a series of shots of houses on stilts in the water of the Laguna de Sinamaica, north of Maracaibo, which are supposedly the origin of the name the explorer Amerigo Vespucci gave to the country in 1499. Unfortunately, de Wavrin never got close to the houses’ inhabitants and, as Henley stated, “does not even name them” (Henley, forthcoming).²⁵ It is this last film that met with the most controversy from the press. It enjoyed considerable recognition in Brussels and Paris but also attracted criticism, especially regarding the banality of the commentary, for example in the L’Indépendance Belge newspaper (February 9, 1937). Furthermore, the Venezuelan embassy reacted harshly, claiming that the film portrayed the country wrongly by taking an interest in indigenous people instead of in its emerging industry.²⁶

In the preface to her Spanish translation of de Wavrin’s second book, the historian Milda Rivarola observes that he was one of the few Europeans “denouncing the exploitative and ethnocidal cruelty of entrepreneurs, rangers and the military in the region” (2017, 8, trans.). Likewise, the Paraguayan historians Manuel Cuenca (2009) and Hugo Gamarra (2011) acknowledge the importance of his films in their writings on Paraguayan cinema.²⁷ Finally, in his article on the representation of the Amazon in American movies of the Thirties, Oscar Guarin-Martinez (2012) mentions the film Au pays du scalp, which at the time he thought was lost. While these authors could only make brief references to de Wavrin’s films because at the time of publication the films had not yet been rediscovered and restored, in 2019 the journalist Juan De Frono acknowledged him as “one of the pioneers of recording the indigenous communities of this part of the world, and perhaps even the first to capture moving images of the natives of Colombia, like the Guahibo and the Motilones” (in Arcadia 2019, 18). He also distinguishes de Wavrin’s work from that of his contemporaries because he did not focus solely on “the difference of the Other.”

The next section²⁸ of the paper attempts to place the Marquis de Wavrin within the context of these other ethnographic image producers of the early 20th century, with special attention paid to those working in South America and specifically the Amazon region.

SITUATING THE MARQUIS DE WAVRIN IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Film and anthropology have been intertwined, albeit cautiously, for well over a century. Although Robert J. Flaherty is widely considered as the forefather of ethnographic film (with Nanook of the North, 1922), it was the French physiologist and anthropologist Félix-Louis Regnault who was the first to show animated images in an ethnographic context. During the Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique occidentale in 1895, he showed images of a Wolof woman from present-day Senegal making pottery without a wheel. With the help of Étienne-Jules Marey, known for exploring the field of chronophotography, he not only produced several series of chronophotographs but also was the first to propose having archives of anthropological research footage. Then in 1898, as is well known, Alfred Cort Haddon used a film camera (a Lumière) in addition to still cameras and a phonograph during an expedition organized by Cambridge University to the Torres Strait Islands. Haddon’s resulting fame led many scholars to visit him before leaving on their own fieldtrips. Among them was the Austrian Rudolf Pöch, who shot more than 2,000 meters of film in Papua New Guinea in 1904 and then between 1907 and 1909 in South Africa. The images he captured, however, form only short sequences that last just a few minutes.

If we turn our attention to the Amazon, Theodor Koch produced the first animated images in 1911, showing the life of the Taulipang in a film that lasts 11 minutes.²⁹ Shortly afterwards, accompanying the famous Rondon expedition in 1913, which established phone lines throughout Brazil under military escort, Major Luiz Thomas Reis filmed in Matto-Grosso. Reis showed populations that he encountered along the way for state propaganda purposes. In addition, he made a film in 1913, Sertaos de Matto-Grosso, among the Pareci and Nambikwara, of which there are, unfortunately, only written records. In 1916, at the invitation of the Bororo, he spent three months with them filming funeral rites (Caiuby Novaes, Cunha, and Henley 2017). In 1914 Silvino Santos from Portugal released the documentary Rio Putamayo, while working for Julio Arana, the director of a rubber company. The latter hired him to counter accusations that his company was abusing the indigenous population. His most famous film, No Pais das Amazonas (1922), was made for another rubber baron, J. G. Araujo.

Similarly in 1914, the first feature-length ethnographic film appeared on screen: Edward C. Curtis’s In the Land of the Headhunters. He stayed with the Kwakiutl in British Columbia for extended periods, and the aim of his photographic, filmic and written work reflects the general interest of the time in preserving a “disappearing” past. It was the first fiction film with an entirely Native American cast and could be viewed as one of the first works of the early hybrid genre now referred to as “Ethnofiction” (Piault 2000, 46–47). Curtis’s approach, working with indigenous actors in a “western” scenario, inspired a few other films, including Grass (1925), shot among a branch of the Bakhtiari group in the highlands of Iran.³⁰ It stands alongside explorer films and “fiction films set in exotic locations” (de Brigard [1975]2003, 22), which enjoyed great popularity between the wars (e.g. Tarzan, the Ape Man, 1932). De Brigard’s article contains the only mention of the Marquis de Wavrin in historical studies on ethnographic film, where his best-known film, Au pays du scalp (1931), is briefly mentioned. He does not surface again in the anglophone literature until the beginning of the next century, in Mosley’s study of Belgian cinema (2001).

During World War II, while stuck in Belgium, de Wavrin met Marguerite Le Maire. They married in 1944 and settled down in a villa in the Uccle district of Brussels. His son, Hellin, was born that same year. de Wavrin had hoped to emigrate to South America, but his wife did not want to leave Belgium. It was during this period that he wrote his book, Les Indiens sauvages de l’Amérique du Sud: vie sociale (1948),³¹ in which he—following Mœurs et coutumes des Indiens sauvages de l’Amérique du Sud (1937)—offered various methodological reflections, to be discussed in the following section. From then on, he occasionally wrote articles, spoke at conferences and on the radio, and continued collaborating in linguistic studies led by Paul Rivet, the director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.³² In 1948, de Wavrin took part in the Congrès international des sciences anthropologiques in Brussels. He appeared in public one last time in September 1961, when the Ministry of Education organized a major photographic exhibition at the Maison de l’Amérique latine entitled “The Expeditions of Robert de Wavrin,” featuring 77 photos. de Wavrin died in Uccle ten years later, aged 83. Thereafter his work gradually passed into oblivion.

It is almost impossible from today’s perspective to determine fully why de Wavrin’s work has remained almost completely unrecognized within the history of visual anthropology. However, having never held an academic position, de Wavrin might have seemed “outdated” to the younger generation of ethnologists trained in renowned university structures, such as the l’Institut d’ethnologie de l’université de Paris, whose members, men like Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, are considered the first generation of anthropologists (with doctorates) in France. de Wavrin, like many others before him, made an attempt, which ultimately failed, to discover the source of the Orinoco River,³³ then returned to Belgium in 1937. He launched another attempt, setting up a multidisciplinary expedition including 40 people who were to study the fauna, flora, archaeology, culture and ethnographic details of the Orinoco region. He planned to acquire the necessary funds from academic institutions and several countries, but while at first the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) refused to participate, it was World War II that ultimately put an end to these efforts. Soon after, the Institut d’ethnologie de l’université de Paris added fieldwork to the curriculum, making the services of self-taught explorers redundant (Delpuech, Lauriere, Peltier-Caroff 2017, 405, as quoted in Bour 2018, 59). Such unschooled travelers can thus become hard to trace when examining anthropology’s academic origins and subsequently have often become forgotten. That the written history of visual anthropology thus far deals largely with the Anglo-American traditions and only a few investigations have been made into French or even southern European anthropology certainly also fostered de Wavrin’s slow disappearance. It is only within the last decade that researchers have given more attention to visual work produced outside the English-speaking world. Among the most notable are Paul Henley’s recent papers in this journal and his ongoing online research project, “The Silent Time Machine.” This aims not only at reconsidering the history of early ethnographic film by reevaluating the works that are already part of the “established canon,” but also at identifying little or unknown works, with particular emphasis being given to films produced outside the English-speaking world. Recently, the Marquis de Wavrin and his four major films have been added to Henley’s study of early ethnographic film. In what follows, we will address why this should be simply the start of writing de Wavrin—albeit critically—into the history of early visual anthropology.

FRAMING AMBIGUITY

Having given an overview of Robert de Wavrin’s films and written works, while also outlining his work and life as well as the specific time and places he traveled and lived in, we will now bring together the most important yet enduringly ambivalent aspects of his legacy. In a letter to de Wavrin of 28 January, 1921, the French geographer and ethnologist Guillaume Grandidier (a master of Malagasy studies) wrote that with the camera de Wavrin had just received, he would be “the first to bring back moving views of these very curious regions, where the life of natives has not yet been too changed by civilization.” Given its date, the letter makes it clear that de Wavrin was filming at the same time as Robert J. Flaherty, who, as mentioned, is widely credited as the forefather of visual anthropology. However, this letter confirms that de Wavrin was among the first anthropologists to use a 35 mm camera to film indigenous groups.

It is not solely this temporal factor that prompted us to explore de Wavrin’s work. Unlike most other explorers of that day, who took part in profitable missions or worked for Western companies mainly interested in rubber (in the case of de Wavrin), the fortune he inherited from his aristocratic family, who owned coal mines in Bois-du-Luc, generated all the income needed for his travels. But, as Mosley underlines: “Wavrin was certainly no aristocratic imperialist with a condescending eye for the native people. Financing his own work, he used his privileged social status to make films that sought to demystify ethnic cultures” (2001, 57). His work is marked by a curiosity about people who were very different from himself. As Brumagne, who remains the only humanities scholar to date to have offered an overview of his work, in French, summarizes: “Curiosity is the basis of all his work. He is curious about what is different, the Other, but open-minded in his approach” (1989, 84, trans.). One of de Wavrin’s informants confirms this view, “That you want to know everything, your desire to study even how we build our bridges, shows me again that you are interested in us, you are my son” (Mama-Vi, in de Wavrin 1937, 645). This is not to deny however that while he often refrained from ethnocentrism, sometimes clear judgements can be found in his texts and voice-over narration, for example where he describes homosexuality as “abnormal friendship” (1948, 140)—a common view. In addition, as mentioned earlier in discussing the ambiguity that characterizes his work and life, his grounding in the still current evolutionism is traceable throughout his written work, for example: “on the other hand, the study of races, including the most crude, can give us indications of the early stages of humanity and its gradual development” (1948, 7, trans.). As described at the outset of this paper, despite his respectful attitude toward people he got to know, de Wavrin was free neither from language usage³⁴ nor from the colonial, racist ideas of his day, and he described some indigenous groups as “among the most backward primitives” (1924, 7, trans.), frequently using words like “race” (“race” in French; de Wavrin 1924, 22 and 97), which also comes to the fore in the often lurid titles given to his works.

His attitude regarding the living conditions and exploitation of the indigenous population again paints a mixed picture of the man. While at times praising Catholic missions (e.g. 1926, 142), he also denounced their maltreatment of indigenous people: “One day a week, all Indians must work free for the mission, which does not feed them even during working hours” (1926, 146, trans.). Likewise, he wrote in Moeurs et coutumes des Indiens sauvages de l’Amérique du Sud that “The savages are only hostile when they have reason to complain about contact with the civilized, if there have been skirmishes and deaths, or civilized people have stolen, ransacked their property or abused them in any way” (1937, 438, trans.). With particular reference to his last film, Venezuela, petite Venise (1937), Mosley points out de Wavrin’s “determination to contrast the impositions of the petroleum industry with the traditions of tribal life” (2001, 58). de Wavrin also took an increasingly explicit position in interviews and press articles, thus strongly denouncing “the authorities who allow these practices” (Brumagne 1989, 96, trans.). In 1933, for example, he published an article in the Belgian newspaper Le Peuple entitled “The Odious Tyranny of a Congregation of Capuchins” (14 October, 1933), in which he condemned harshly the hideous treatment of the indigenes. The article reports on the mistreatment of young Arhuaco escaping the “orphanages” that were set up by the Capuchin congregation, which took away all rights of parents over their children. de Wavrin concluded by stating that the Colombian government seemed to turn a blind eye to these practices and “that an intelligent and friendly race will be extinguished soon if no power intervenes” (1933, 61, trans.).

His visual ethnographic work makes a particularly significant contribution to the discipline. Already in 1893 Sir Everard im Thurn, referring to anthropometrics of the period, had advocated “the use of the camera for the accurate record, not of the mere bodies of primitive folk—which might indeed be more accurately measured and photographed for sure purposes dead than alive, could they be conveniently obtained when in that state—but of those folk regarded as living beings” (Im Thurn 1893, 184, as quoted in Edwards 2015, 237). It is exactly these “living beings” who are the center of de Wavrin’s attention. Less and less are the subjects in his photos and films arranged in poses, and his four major films show this development from the very first scenes of the Lengua, Mataco and Pareci at the beginning of the 'Twenties up until the 'Thirties, when he lived for many months among the Shuar and the Yukpa. Considering that early anthropological literature is filled with descriptions of indigenous people’s resistance to having their pictures taken, de Wavrin’s ability to photograph moments of daily life, such as people playing with their children or preparing daily meals, suggests that he had established a relationship of deep trust. He describes how:

I started by showing them photos of white people, then of themselves, then fellow members of the tribe. In general, an Indian does not recognize himself, — “he does not see himself.” But in the portrait of a companion he will find the smallest detail with an almost childlike joy; he admires the art of the portraitist, without knowing the miracles of photography; much less still of cinema. (de Wavrin 1939a, 49, trans.)

Maybe the indigenous people did not see and recognize themselves inside this strange, unknown machine, but his visual work proves that Robert de Wavrin did. He achieved this by adopting anthropology’s most important tool, participant observation. Unlike other expeditions at the time, already mentioned, such as the Rondon expedition in Brazil whose members crossed the country under constant military escort, the Marquis traveled with small groups, gradually prolonging his stays among the indigenes: “What I say in this study, I know from personal experience; I was able to observe it, to note it during my stays in the country. It is also based on my conversations with the Indians; but the information they furnished me with thus came naturally” (de Wavrin 1948, 10, trans.). This sets de Wavrin apart from many other contemporary anthropologists, who preferred to gather their information through people on site while themselves remaining behind their desks; as Lévi-Strauss most famously described: “Anthropology is a profession in which adventure plays no part; merely one of its bondages. It represents no more than a dead weight of weeks or months wasted en route; hours spent in idleness when one’s informant has given one the slip; hunger, exhaustion, illness as like as not” (Lévi-Strauss [1955]1961, 17). The Machian philosopher Malinowski introduced what later became known as “participant observation” (1913 and [1922]1960) to a broader academic audience. However, de Wavrin began to do the same intuitively, although it seems that he did hear about Malinowski’s writings. He reiterated the core idea of participant observation in 1948:

To understand the Indians’ mentality, you have to be alongside them, setting aside your own knowledge or perception of things, to see just with the knowledge of those you are trying to understand …. You need to live with them, like them, to share their way of life, living in their villages, traveling, hunting and camping with and among them. (1948, 109–10, trans.)

That he only wrote about participant observation in 1948 does not negate the fact that he had already put the same ideas into practice in the 'Twenties, “living” Ingold’s definition of participant observation as a practice “that calls upon the novice anthropologist to attend: to attend to what others are doing or saying and to what is going on around and about; to follow along where others go and do their bidding, and entail considerable existential risk” (Ingold 2014, 389). There were not many other contemporary anthropologists taking this risk, as de Wavrin himself criticizes: “Finally, certain ethnographers who have only superficially engaged with the Indians, or who have had rather brief contact with one or the other group, without really sharing their daily life or without living intimately with them, believe too easily that these Indians have nothing to teach them” (1948, 111, trans.).

As Brumagne likewise observed, de Wavrin not only suggested living with indigenous people for an extended period, but also advocated learning from them: “de Wavrin calls for respect for the Indians, for a better understanding of their manners and customs, which can only be achieved by learning from them” (1989, 89, trans.). His desire to “learn from them” mirrors one of the core ideas of anthropological enquiry defined by such contemporary scholars as Jackson (2013) and Ingold (2014). For Ingold, “to practise anthropology is to undergo an education” (ibid., 392). This has the means and the determination to “show how knowledge grows from the crucible of lives lived with others” (ibid., 387). According to Jackson, this “requires more than an intellectual movement from one’s own position to theirs; it involves physical upheaval, psychological turmoil, and moral confusion” (2013, 11). While Ingold prefers to describe what is fundamental to anthropology as “practice of education” (2014, 388), Jackson, following Kenelm Burridge, uses the concept of “metanoia”, “an ongoing series of transformations each one of which alters the predicates of being” (Burridge 1975, 10, as quoted in Jackson 2013, 28). Jackson writes about his own fieldwork in Sierra Leone: “Sierra Leone transformed me, shaping the person I now am and the anthropology I do.” Reading de Wavrin’s work against this idea of anthropology as a means to explore the human condition while at the same time being a self-transformative process, as Jackson (2013, 28) and Ingold (2014, 388) each in his own way describes, we suggest that de Wavrin was a man who observed and recorded the diversity of the human condition while being profoundly changed by this experience. His personal transformation, most evident in the interviews he gave in later life and occasionally surfacing in his work, constitutes an important starting-point for further investigation, if conducted from a critical stance.

CONCLUSIONS

Throughout this article we have sought to contribute to the understanding of the history of visual anthropology, and argue for more detailed as well as nuanced research on early ethnographers, especially those who are not anglophone. Understanding the particularities of Robert de Wavrin’s life and oeuvre—two things that are hardly separable when talking about his approach but also should be seen in the context of the anthropology of his era—we lay the groundwork for further work on his films and texts. Or at the very least, we hope that we might have given a stimulus for more detailed engagement.

Nevertheless, one could still ask why add one more example to the narrative of great white men anchored in anthropology’s colonial past. There are many valid motives. First, although more attention to its history neither cures “the malaise” (Whiteley 2004, 488) of the discipline’s Eurocentric and androcentric colonial past, nor counters the “elite, masculine and imperial habits” (Daswani 2019) that are still internalized by many of us well into the present, engaging with the past infuses the discipline with “a stronger historical consciousness” and thereby helps develop a critical understanding of our contemporary discipline, as Pels reminds us (2008, 280). Similarly, the ethnohistorians Warren and Barnes suggest that the most important aspect of these works is what they reveal about Western thinking at the time, while simultaneously being important repositories of Native histories, cultures and representations (2018). We therefore underscore the need for anthropologists to consider more seriously the role that visual representation has played and continues to play in scholarly descriptions of the Amazon and its inhabitants, in particular. Further, as was mentioned, there is still a perceptible lack of engagement with anthropological work outside the Anglo traditions that needs to be countered with greater historical sensitivity, as others have already suggested (e.g. Darnell 1977; Pels 2008; Whiteley 2004). Preventing de Wavrin’s work from disappearing into oblivion also contributes to the historical inventory of moving images devoted to entire populations that later suffered severely at the hands of the rubber-tapping industry in the early 20th century. But there is more to it than simple commemoration of the past. To quote Fabian: “Renewed interest in the history of our discipline and disciplined inquiry into the history of confrontation between anthropology and its Other are therefore not escapes from empiry; they are practical and realistic. They are ways to meet the Other on the same ground, in the same Time” (Fabian 2014, 165). By giving attention to these images, we can thus open up ways for the creation of new and different narratives constructed through meeting the “Other,” as the following anecdote shows.

Although no formal repatriation project regarding de Wavrin’s work has yet been initiated, a variety of images found their way back through a remarkable coincidence after one of the many screenings of the documentary film Marquis de Wavrin, du manoir à la jungle, by Winter and Plantier (2017). During the Ethnocineca–International Documentary Film Festival Vienna in 2018, Winter met the Colombian filmmaker Sebastian Gomez Ruiz, who was also presenting a film, Wasi (2018), at the festival.³⁵ After having watched the film he approached Winter, claiming that the main character in his short film, the Arhuaco filmmaker Amado Villafana, was one of the last surviving sons of Duane, an Arhuaco spiritual leader who appears in a five-minute scene next to the Marquis in the documentary. Duane became de Wavrin’s friend, in defense of whom he wrote the above-cited article against the Capuchins. Following this coincidence, Winter got in touch with Amado Villafana. She sent him digitized versions of 20 photos taken by the Marquis around 1929–30 in Arhuaco villages, including pictures of his then young father surrounded by his family, as well as the five-minute extract from Chez les Indiens sorciers which is entirely dedicated to him.³⁶ Amado Villafana himself is currently working on a film about his father.

Other pictures taken by de Wavrin have been made accessible on the digital platform initiated by Bastien Bosa, a professor of anthropology at the Rosario University in Bogota, with the aim of returning the photos to their original subjects by collecting images of the Arhuacos taken by explorers like de Wavrin from the beginning of the 20th century onwards.³⁷ In September 2019, while participating in the festival of indigenous cinema in Bogota, Winter (on behalf of Cinematek, Brussels) offered copies of the DVD compilation to Daniel Ortiz and Angel Perez, leaders of the Yukpa community, who then took back de Wavrin’s films containing long sections devoted to their indigenous community. Returning images, then, is not only a strategy to “acknowledge both the colonial and asymmetric power relations of original collection” while moving them in a new direction (Edwards 2015, 246). It also enables one to retrace hidden histories such as that of Amado Villafana’s father, and of de Wavrin himself, whose memory is passed on in Yukpa oral history as the story of “a very tall man, aristocrat and friend of the Indians, who lived among us.”³⁸

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to Bastien Bosa for reading, thinking through and commenting on this article; Annika Lems and Antje Berger for their encouragement and critical reading; and Paul Hockings for his editorial support. We also wish to acknowledge Eva Brumagne and Milda Rivarola who were the first shedding light on de Wavrin’s life and work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Moderbacher

CHRISTINE MODERBACHER is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker (MA in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester). She completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and is now in the Max Planck Research Group, “Alpine Histories of Global Change: Time, Self, and the Other in the German-Speaking Alpine Region,” based in Halle, Germany. Her documentary films A Letter to Mohamed (SIC/CVB, Brussels) and Red Earth White Snow (Pinanona Production, Vienna) have been shown at international film festivals and have received a number of prizes. E-mail: [email protected]

Grace Winter

GRACE WINTER studied anthropology at the University of Brussels, with a year at the Sorbonne. Funded by the CNRS, she did fieldwork in northern Mali with the Soninke. She works as an adviser for the International Film Festival, Rotterdam, as well as the Belgian MOOOV festival. Working as a researcher at Cinematek, the Belgian Royal Archive, she realized the feature-length documentary film Marquis de Wavrin, du manoir a la jungle (2017, together with Luc Plantier), which has been shown at international film festivals and has received numerous awards. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1 He was also in Argentina and Brazil, but only for very short periods.

2 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are by the authors.

3 One picture (ca. 1915) bears a particularly close resemblance to the famous photograph of Malinowski in similar pose with his hands on his waist, titled “Ethnographer with a Man with a Wig.” de Wavrin’s portraits may be found in the French version of Wikipedia.

4 Other anthropologists “published arguments to neutralize the pernicious effects of racial discrimination” (Comas 1961, 393) such as Boas, Benedict and Stewart.

5 The Marquis’s photographic work has already been partially discussed in the book Marquis de Wavrin: An Anthropologist in South America (Moderbacher 2019a), as well as in a recent master’s thesis in art history (Bour 2018).

6 For a detailed bibliography of de Wavrin’s entire work, see the master’s thesis by Brumagne (1989).

7 “At the Center of Unknown South America.”

8 “The Last Primitive Indians of the Paraguay Basin.” As discussed later in this article, his often problematic use of language is especially evident in the often lurid titles of his works.

9 With the exception of 1958, 185–86.

10 “The Jivaros. Head shrinkers.”

11 That this “travel account” offers an easier read than the previous publications might also be because from 1938 onwards de Wavrin was in Brussels, “writing up” his notes and memories along with his editor H. Sartini, who transformed his stories into a coherent and well-written text.

12 As far as we are aware the Belgian embassy in the 1930s did not cast a critical eye over the practices and discourses of colonial science.

13 Established in 1860 (and whose last issue came out in 2015), the peer-reviewed journal L’Ethnographie is the oldest French anthropological journal; although the Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris was founded in that same year.

14 Parts of this section of the paper have been previously published in Winter (2017).

15 Titles in English: “At the Center of Unknown South America” (1924), “In the Land of the Scalp” (1931), “Among the Indian Sorcerers” (1939) and “Venezuela, little Venice” (1937). For a more detailed overview of the four films in English also see Winter 2017 and Henley, forthcoming: https://www.silenttimemachine.net/.

16 Besides the short film “The Highest Railway in the World,” which is permanently lost, de Wavrin included parts of his short films in his longer films.

17 As described in Marquis de Wavrin: Un Anthropologue en Amérique du Sud (Moderbacher 2019a), it was also Winter who contacted the Marquis’s son, Hellin, regarding additional material. It is thanks to him that the roughly 2,000 extant photographs were rediscovered. They were subsequently digitized by the Brussels Cinquantenaire Museum and added to the film collection of the Royal Archive.

18 Cinematek–Royal Film Archive of Belgium. 2017. Marquis de Wavrin. Brussels. The DVD compilation also includes a brief overview of de Wavrin’s work, as well as the documentary Marquis de Wavrin. From the Manor to the Jungle, realized by Winter and the editor Luc Plantier (2017).

19 As, for example, images shot with the Lengua that he filmed at a British evangelical mission.

20 The film was screened over eight weeks at the Studio des Beaux-Arts (now Bozar), one of Brussels’ best-known cinemas and a center for fine arts. It was subsequently also shown in other cities throughout the country.

21 de Wavrin referred to them incorrectly as the “Boro,” one of the many indigenous groups who suffered severely at the hands of the rubber-tapping industry in the early years of the 20th century (Henley, forthcoming).

22 Cavalcanti later used an extract from Au pays du scalp in his documentary Film and Reality (1942), commissioned by the British Film Institute. The director chose 58 films–including, for example, Nanook of the North, Voyage au Congo and Grass–that according to him interact in an interesting way with “reality.”

23 Although we agree with Henley’s observation that the scenes are obviously replayed for the camera, we do not think that this diminishes their value; especially taking into consideration that “re-enactment” was not uncommon at that time (see e.g. Flaherty 1922 and Curtis 1914).

24 The censored scenes have been added by Cinematek into the above-mentioned DVD compilation.

25 See the last part of this article about the repatriation of de Wavrin’s films and photographs. For further discussion of the importance of identifying and naming previously anonymous subjects, see: Bradley, Adgemis and Haralampou 2014.

26 Lettre de la Légation du Venezuela, 1937, in Bour (2018, 47).

27 At the end of 1938, the Marquis deposited the negatives of his short films in the laboratory of the company Cosmorama in Paris in order to set them to music. Wanting to recover them after the war, he learned in 1947 that the firm had deposited the films in a suburban storage room fleeing the German occupier, but that their trace was lost. A letter from the Belgian Ministry of Education of November 5, 1952 confirmed that all attempts looking for them were definitively abandoned.

28 Parts of this section have been previously published in Winter 2017.

29 Later on Koch inspired the central character of Ciro Guerra’s film El embrazo de la serpiente (“The embrace of the serpent,” 2015).

30 The makers of Grass, Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper, later went on to produce their greatest success–King Kong–in 1933.

31 “The Savage Indians of South America: Social Life.”

32 For Example, de Wavrin and Rivet (1951a, 1951b).

33 The source was discovered in 1951 by a French-Venezuelan expedition under Cruxent, the then director of the Museum of Natural History of Caracas.

34 See, for example, Malinowski’s title Sex and Repression in Savage Society, published in 1927, and Curtis’s already mentioned film, In the Land of the Headhunters from 1914.

35 http://mediosindigenas.ub.edu/producciones/2805/, accessed 11 December 2019.

36 Already in 2013 Amado Villafana had denounced the lack of access to their visual heritage in an interview: “people came to the indigenous communities, took pictures and filmed. All these recordings have … copyright. … It is in this way that many books and research on indigenous knowledge belong to authors who are not indigenous” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEoY5AcN46Q, accessed 11 December 2019).

37 http://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/19066, (accessed 4 October 2019).

38 Conversation between Winter, Ortiz and Perez in Bogota, 2019.