To start with praise: Brian Hochman is an English professor at Georgetown who actually writes well in English—a rarity among members of his tribe who venture into the wider world of cultural studies. Many of his peers express themselves in a run-on, unrhythmic language of compound words closer to bad German than lapidary English prose. With Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press), Hochman writes with clarity and strength on a potentially interesting topic. He wants to show how ideas about race and culture prevalent at the end of the 19th century helped “construct the authority of new media”—such as motion pictures and sound recording—“as reliable archives of the real.”
Of course, the invention of photography earlier in the 19th century already set the template for the alleged ability of new media to “capture” or “document” reality without the subjective scrim of the painter, printmaker or writer. Only a fool still believes in the objectivity of the camera or the recorder (but the world is full of fools, all of them armed with smartphones). However, the notion of photography (and by extension, motion pictures and phonographs) as a window to reality had greater respectability a century ago than in today’s world of Photoshop and softwear manipulation.
Savage Preservation can be read as a work of history that questions the value of historical preservation. Hochman takes a dim view of the ethnographers who set forth in the 1880s with their fragile recording cylinders to document disappearing languages and cultures. It may be true that in the U.S. context, most ethnographers labored under the assumption of the “vanishing Indian”—the idea that a distinct Native American identity would soon be lost to the melting pot of cultural assimilation. But while we are fortunate that draconian federal policies intended to extinguish Indian languages and culture were abandoned decades ago, it should be obvious enough that the American Indians of 2015 are not culturally identical to their ancestors of 1885, and that in some cases, a generic image of Native Americans has influenced even the self-perception of the First Nations. As Hochman acknowledges in the end, some contemporary indigenous people have learned about their songs and languages through those crackling wax cylinders, preserved and redistributed in contemporary media under a federal program that began in the 1970s.
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Despite the useful archival research he conducted for Savage Preservation, Hochman looks at this subject through a narrow lens. He is apparently unaware that the nearly 100 native languages once spoken in California are extinct or virtually so—and that most of Australia’s 250 Aboriginal languages have also vanished. Were the efforts to preserve them before they went extinct nothing more than exercises in ethnographic delusion? Should we not be happy that records of the past societies were made, even if the recorders brought cultural biases to the process?
That said, anyone interested in anthropology, documentary sound recording and film—and the interaction between Western imperialism and indigenous people—should read Savage Preservation for the light it sheds on those subjects, even if the theory driving it is dubious.
