Imaging Minority Culture: Photography, Digital Sharing, and Cultural Survival in Northeast China

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This is a project to research a previously unseen and recently digitised photographic archive of two ethnic minorities in northeast China: the Ethel John Lindgren Collection of Evenki and Orochen communities at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Cambridge. This unique archive of 8000 photographs was collected by Cambridge anthropologist, Ethel John Lindgren, and her Norwegian husband and photographer, Oscar Mamen, who undertook field research between 1919-1921 in what was then northeast Manchuria. They amassed an invaluable visual record of the people, places, and inter-ethnic relations of the region during a formative period in pre-communist China history - before they were sedentarised and classified as 'ethnic minorities' by the Chinese state. More importantly, however, the photographs are also a highly personal community-record for Evenki and Orochen people living in China today, who are the direct descendants of those depicted in the photographs, and in many cases the images represent the only visual documentation of their grandparents and kin relations. Research will first be carried out on the photographs at the MAA to document their historical information, identifying locations, landscapes, social characteristics, and material culture. As the photographs depict communities when they were still fully nomadic, when subsistence hunting was permitted, clan identities were prominent, and both everyday and ritual activities were still widely practiced, documenting this will be key to better understanding the ethno-history of the region through the lens of nomadic communities, and how they embodied their cultural lifeworlds before the founding of the PRC. Next, the project will first use the photographs as tools during ethnographic fieldwork amongst contemporary Evenki and Orochen communities, identifying locations, landscapes, practices, and material objects to better understand everyday social life during this formative period in pre-communist China. We will also use the photographs as hermeneutic tools in order to prompt responses and discussions, elucidating people's experiences of more recent changes and state policies, such as sedentarisation, modernisation and economic development, environmental degradation, the impact of the logging industry and shift towards conservation, a hunting-ban, and the recent shift towards ethnic tourism and its significance for the politics of representation. The project also has an important community-based component, and by partnering with a Hong Kong-based NGO it will incorporate the collection into existing and new cultural revitalisation and community-outreach initiatives in minority villages and centres across northeast China. For example, we will use the photographs in educational programmes at local schools, language training, teaching skills such as hunting and craft production, music and dance, forest activities, as well as working with elders in documenting aspects of traditional culture to be re-developed for the new ethno-tourism industry and to help generate alternate livelihood opportunities. The project will also work alongside elders and community leaders to reconstruct un-recorded family and clan histories, develop individual biographies of minority officials, prominent shamans, and the wider communities, and assist people in identifying individuals and family members often not seen in photographic form before. Given the recent history of the photographs and their direct connection to communities today, the project has a unique opportunity to help disentangle people's actual lived-identities from state classifications, which often cut across ethnic categories through kinship, intermarriage, and shifting historical alliances. More broadly, we document the process of digital repatriation and sharing and describe their uses by community and state actors in the context of surging interest and investment in 'protecting' minority heritage and culture.