Uses of Early British Photographs of Indigenous Peoples in the Yunnan-Burma Borderland

• In Event: Imaging Peripheral Others: Medium, Ethnographic Representation, and Empire

Abstract

Photographs of Yunnan and Burma by nineteenth-century British photographers were widely circulated. Travelers frequently adopted these photographs to “illustrate” the accounts of their travels in this area. Take, for instance, “Autumn Tour 1898,” an album that features the Viceroy of British India Lord Elgin’s Burma tour in late 1898. In addition to newspaper cuttings of reports about Lord Elgin’s tour, this album (which is now deposited at the British Library) uses commercially available photographs of various sites, architecture, and indigenous groups by photographers such as Felice Beato (1834-ca. 1905) and Philip Klier (fl. late 19th century) to “illustrate” Lord Elgin’s visit, although none of these photographs was taken during the tour. While these pictures seem neatly incorporable into the album’s unabashedly self-proclaimed imperialist agenda, used in other contexts, such apparently Orientalist images may acquire meaning not neatly compatible with imperialist discourse. This paper examines how the photograph’s interaction and competition with its verbal contexts affect its meaning. In particular, I focus on the album’s use of portraits of indigenous peoples, especially the Shans and the Kachins, who inhabited the strategically critical borderland between Yunnan and Burma, with the aim to understand how different forms of ethnographic representation are used to control the production of meaning. I pay particular attention to how the album’s manipulation of the verbal and the visual served British Empire’s imperialist and colonial agenda, which reflects their anxiety over China’s strong presence in the region, and how the verbal was used to tame the visually unruly indigenous bodies and to transform them into loyal subjects of a multiethnic empire.

Author

• Jie Guo, University of South Carolina