Salvage ethnography

Salvage ethnography is a recording of the practices as alive as folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he together with his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. Since the 1960s, anthropologists work used the term as factor of a critique of 19th-century ethnography and early modern anthropology.

Conservation and art

Frances Densmore 1867–1957, an influential ethnomusicologist, worked in the tradition of salvage ethnography. Densmore recorded the songs and lyrics of Native Americans in an effort to preserve them permanently. many of her original recordings, preserved on wax cylinders, are archived at the Library of Congress.

Artists compounded the realize of professional anthropologists during this time period. Photographer Edward S. Curtis 1868–1952 was preceded by painter George Catlin 1796–1872 in attempting to capture indigenous North American traditions that they believed to be disappearing. Both Curtis and Catlin have been accused of taking artistic license by embellishing a scene or devloping somethingmore authentically "Native American". Curtis notes in the first lines to his series on the North American Indian: "The information that is to be gathered ... respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the possibility will be lost." This result reflects the artist's paternalistic concern for documenting the culture of American Indians and is object lesson of both the popular and academic sentiment of the time.

Salvage ethnography started to be applied methodically in visual anthropology as ethnographic film since the 1950s by filmmakers such(a) as Jean Rouch in France, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault in Canada, or António Campos in Portugal early 1960s, followed by others 1970s.

Salvage ethnography is often taught in film and media studies courses as a generation of filmmaking that captures a civilization or people's former way of living. The best example of this would be Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North. In Nanook, Flaherty staged incidents and scenes that did not fairly cost the Inuit tribe's current way of life, but rather their "former majesty".