Roger Sandall's films and contemporary anthropology: Explorations in the aesthetic, the existential, and the possible. By Lorraine Mortimer, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019, 347 pp. ISBN: 9780253043948

Abstract

The website rogersandall.com¹ helpfully informs us that the original title of Mortimer's book, when it was at manuscript stage, was Letting Things Live: Roger Sandall's Films Meet Contemporary Anthropology. This is a much more apt title for this book, and it is regrettable if it was IUP that requested the change. The original title is a useful clarification for anyone wanting to read and engage with this book: the main argument of this book is in support of a style of film, an anthropology, and an orientation towards the world which “lets things live.” It is a plea to make room for moments free from editorialising, abstraction, or judgement, moments that allow some sense of the rich fulsomeness of life as lived. This move towards “letting things live” is an increasingly articulated feature of contemporary anthropology, as seen for example in the thinking of Stengers and Haraway. And it was also, Mortimer argues, pioneered by the beautiful observational films Sandall made (even if these films predated this theoretical turn). Mortimer takes Sandall's films as a core theme only by way of example of her much broader argument about how observational film, ethnography, and anthropology might best go on today, even (or especially) given the troubling situations and pained histories that so plainly frame our lives and works.

Readers will have to look elsewhere for an account of Sandall's life or his written works. They will not have to look far: the website mentioned above contains an archive of his writings, which towards the end of his career appeared mostly in conservative periodicals, and often took the form of satire and withering dismissals of mainstream anthropology and left-wing politics. A lengthy Obituary was published in Quadrant. Say no more.

At first, it seemed strange to me that Mortimer persisted in this project even though she differed so profoundly from Sandall in politics and understanding of anthropology: why give this detractor any more oxygen? And why do women so willingly and often do the work of memorialising dead men? But as I read, I realised that by steadfastly attending to what she loved in Sandall's work (his beautiful and observational films), even when there was so much that might raise one's ire elsewhere in his work, Mortimer was again demonstrating her vision for an anthropology that “lets things live”. She could have told a “killer story” about Sandall, finding clever ways to debunk and dismiss this so-called “father” of Australian ethnographic film, in the same way Sandall himself told “killer stories” about his own discipline later in his life. But Mortimer takes her readers along a different path. She leads us there not by devoting long passages to agonising over her textual choices, but by showing us her vision of anthropology by going ahead and doing it. She lets Sandall's films live in her prose. Sandall's films, Mortimer insists, were “so good at capturing the tacit and expressive in relation to people in their environment that interests many anthropologists today” (p. 297). I was reminded of the Lao concept of Metta Kaluna: often translated as loving-kindness, this is a way of living that also encompasses ideas of generosity, compassion, selflessness. Mortimer shows us how, with “goodwill, good manners, and a shared love of film” (p. 302), even people as different as Sandall and Mortimer can find something in common. And that which they hold in common is, in a sense, what we all hold in common, and that which observational film and ethnography—at their best—also allow us to experience even when we are at a distance. This is our common being in the world. While this something can be theorised, at the same time it always exceeds any abstractions.

Accordingly, Mortimer's book is arranged into chapters that (in roughly chronological order) each give a comprehensive, highly readable and lovingly close description of a set of Sandall's films, scene by scene, as they unfold for the viewer. These descriptions are interspersed with flights of theorising: here, Mortimer thinks through ethnography, anthropology, and observational film by linking the films in question with her key reference points. These are often written sources, including publications by and interviews with filmmakers, but also texts from philosophy, anthropology, and film theory. The book benefits from Mortimer's talent with French, which enables her to read key reference points—like Stengers and Latour—in the original.

Reading Mortimer is like flying along with a migratory bird: when she takes us places, she really dwells in them. Her descriptions of the scenes of Sandall's films immerse the reader in a series of very different worlds: we find ourselves in a muster at Coniston, admiring a cowboy, or a marriage in the Wayside Chapel in 1970s Sydney, a Walpiri fire ceremony, or at a ritual presided over by a cloistered woman addressed as “Anointed Queen, Mother of heirs”, or a Rabari nomadic pastoralist woman who extolls the benefits of her more adventurous life. But then Mortimer flies home to nest in the theories and thinkers she loves: Peter Kroptkin, Michael Jackson, Tim Ingold, James Ferguson and David Graeber, to name some of the more prominent. In bringing it all home to roost in this way, Mortimer is showing us part of her vision for anthropology: this is anthropology that dwells in the world as it is, but which is also enacted as participation in a long-running conversation.

Readers will not find hit-and-run citations in this book. When Mortimer quotes a reference, she tends to give them at least a paragraph, often with a long quotation. She lets the thinkers that orient her discussion speak not just for her own purposes, but in their own voice. Although she is critical (for instance, she makes it clear when she disagrees with Ginsburg's conclusions about Sandall's films, or with Sandall's vision for anthropology) she never cites people simply to discredit them: she shows an anthropology that “lets live” by giving a full-bodied engagement to the reference points that frame her thinking.

There are light-hearted moments, too: such as when Mortimer describes for us the anxieties around marriage in the 1970s, and the contribution anthropologists Nena and George O'Neill made in Open Marriage around that time, where they framed relationships as ideally vehicles for “personal growth”. Mortimer quips “It makes you wonder how big people can get” (p. 213). And when describing a seminar by James Ferguson on cooperative movements in Africa, which insisted that the world's wealth belongs to all of us, Mortimer describes how the anthropologists in the audience tended to dismiss his argument as irrelevant (he was citing Kropotkin after all, an “obscure Russian”) or assumed that his arguments only applied to poor “others”, without realising that these were actually inspirations for how to live their own lives: they were “like lobsters in a global seafood restaurant, they too cooking – if less quickly and evidently—in Big Capital's stew” (p. 271).

Mortimer's book, then, is not so much a plea or a plan for a certain kind of anthropology, as it is an enactment of it. In place of earnest and dictatorial statements of what anthropology should or could be, we accompany Mortimer as she soars to fields anew, but always coming home, carrying another thread to weave into that nesting place of what we seem to have no better word for than “theory.”

This book is highly recommended for those teaching or researching the anthropology of film. It is also—more adventurously—suitable reading for advanced anthropology students wondering “where next” for anthropology today and into the future. Finally, it is recommended for anyone interested in the history of anthropological thought, particularly anarchism and anthropology. Anarchism is discussed explicitly at roughly nine points throughout the book. Although it is not identified as a main theme, the underlying presence of anarchism in the book is consistent with Mortimer's overall arguments, especially with her patient dwelling on the films, and in her vision for anthropology. From the vantage Mortimer develops by way of this material, it becomes clear that non-alienated existence absolutely exists—both as potential and as actuality—in the richness and diversity of lived experience. The task of anthropology is to make this apparent, and to expand the possibilities people have of accessing such experiences: film and ethnography, we see, are two important ways of doing such work.