Student talk - A Woman in the Field photography exhibition

“‘Esta es nuestra historia’: the afterlives of a collection of ethnographic photographs from Jamiltepec, Oaxaca”with Paula López Caballero (CEIICH-UNAM)

In this talk I will discuss the collective process that took place in the village of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca (Mexico) to prepare the curation of photographs for the exhibition A Woman in the Field (May 2022), currently on display at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of Social Anthropology and in CRASSH. It was there that the young student Susan Drucker-Brown did her first anthropological research almost 70 years ago. I will also discuss the reception of the exhibition in that village (mounted in October 2022) and its most recent mounting in a neighbouring village, this time organised by local inhabitants (March 2023). In addition to detailing a process of restitution of Drucker-Brown's ethnographic material, I am interested in exploring the analytically productive tension between, on the one hand, the critique of the potentially objectifying gazes produced by classical anthropology and mid-twentieth-century indigenism on rural inhabitants and, on the other, the reception of these images at the local level, perceived as representative of the community itself, as something that allows contemporary inhabitants to reconnect with local and family history.