Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Representation of an American People

Rating:
Summary: Photographs 10, text 0!
Review: Chapter 1, sentence 2: "The West had long privileged scopic enterprises and visual modalities, and by the mid-nineteenth century an observational visualist hegemony became a persistent focus of modernism in social, scientific, and aesthetic endeavours - and certainly of anthropology." The photgraphs are new and wonderful; Professor Faris's text is no match for them. First, it is largely unreadable (see sample above). Second, what I could read was tediously PC (that "hegemony" should have tipped me off!). Third, it adds very little to my knowledge of the "juxtaposition of cultures" as promised on the dust jacket. Where was the editor who should have read this manuscript with an active red pencil? Ok, perhaps this is just an extreme example of scholarly writing - not intended for the general reader like myself. If so, too bad. Professor Faris has succeeded in turning a tremendously interesting selection of photographs into a book that is dense and unenlightening.