February 13, 2004
Field Costumes of Bontoc Igorrote Women, Philippines.
This woman "in working dress," is described by Dean Worcester (Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Islands) as "suggestive of the style prevalent in the days of Eve." The photograph was taken either by Worcester or Charles Martin for the Bureau of Science.
Such photographs taken for the ethnological archive were later commercially reproduced in National Geographic (see the November 1913 issue for the same photograph, cropped and hand-tinted), or, as we see above, as a divided back postcard from 1910, sent to a Mr. Percy Breece of Delaware.
(Click on the images for a bigger version, then turn your head to the right to read the back.)
One not only sees, in the example above, the generation of ethnological types that legitimated the fiction of colonial "tribal" categories. It is also an interesting blurring of photographs made for anthropological analysis and public, indeed, prurient consumption -- a mixture of scientific rigor and commodified entertainment similar to that of the Philippine Reservation at the St. Louis World's Fair.
Posted by the wily filipino at February 13, 2004 09:19 AM