Implicações entre olhares: etnografia, fotografia e performance

Abstract

Appealing to a 'theatrical' figuration of image-based representation, this essay focuses upon certain aspects of the photographic 'look' that renders it different from the anthropological vision incarnated in an ethnographic text. But rather than offer one more way of distinguishing between the respective roles of 'image' and 'text' -a distinction over which plenty of ink has already been spilled, my appeal to a performance-based perspective aims to offer instigative ways of dribbling the boundaries imposed by such classifications: if both photographic images and ethnographic texts can be approached in terms of the scenarios they enact, it is not because there is little difference between them, but rather because there are as many differences between forms of images as there are between textual genres, such that the differences in question only make sense when placed 'in play' in a shared context: in this case, the ritualized game and danced fighting-form know as Capoeira Angola.