Author, Méline’
Image Ethnography is one of the main expressions of anthropological fieldwork. It can be said that the image anthropology has a long-history origin with Yunnan. Méline undertook the study of meta cosmic ethnography in Dali 706 from December 2021 to January 2022. The reason why Dali 706 was chosen is that it is a gathering hub for Chinese digital nomads, crypto economy, Web3.0 and meta universe entrepreneurs.
Learn from the ancients and anthropologists
Yunnan was an important destination for anthropologists to conduct field investigations during the period of Republic of China. As soon as arrived in Dali, Méline began to study the famous works of “Kuige school” anthropologists such as those of Fei Hsiao-tung and Francis L. K. Hsu etc., involving those works as “Three Villages in Yunnan” and “Under the Shadow of Ancestors”. In particular, Méline’s attention was paid to the work “The Tower of Five Glories” by an Australian scholar C. P. Fitzgerald published during 1936 and 1938.
How was Dali visualized like the meta universe in those days so that anyone who had never been to the scene could be immersed in it? Reading the writings of the elders can certainly build a wonderful world, but it’s a pity that the world was just in black and white.
Appearance of Image Anthropology
After having traversed Dali archives, Dali libraries, folk libraries as well as online libraries, Méline found and collected most of the image materials of the anthropologists, explorers and missionaries who had been in Yunnan, and thus a lifelike border was reconstructed.
Seeing the Working Folk Women
Due to the limited time in the field, Méline and his partners set up a field investigation team of image anthropology to focus on the folk women and try to complete the work titled “Seeing the Working Folk Women “, so as to make C. P. Fitzgerald’s photo records of image anthropology, which has ended in 1938, continue in 2022.
The folk women photographed by Méline and her partners include those on the construction site, in farming, in housekeeping, in market, as well as those working with Web3.0.
Take photos for the 97-year-old grandma of “Lily Pond Congregation”
Among the nearly 1000 works is a picture of a 97-year-old grandmother who Méline met during the field survey of Lily Pond Congregation near Kuige. The old lady had a strong figure and a good-looking smile who was still a little girl when Charles Patrick Fitzgerald, Francis L. K. Hsu and Zhaoyu ZENG were doing fieldwork in Dali.
Decentralized Classical Photo Production of Dali Cyanotype Workshop
In order to curate a Salon exhibition of image anthropology, Méline and his partners, who had ever met Sir Herschel directing Atkins about the Cyanotype at the British Museum, built a Cyanotype workshop in 706. They bought glass in the East market and chemicals in the west market and a Cyanotype workshop that could export A0 size Cyanotype works was soon built.
Therefore, a Cyanotype Dao started and the partners organized themselves, including those who trained Harvard classical Cyanotype photo making technology, those who carried the glass, and those who were responsible for the development. Soon, a group of little partners who mastered the production process of classical Cyanotype photos arose in Dali, and about 100 Cyanotype photos for the Salon exhibition were also successfully produced. This may be a small experiment of Dao’s organizational model in the public dissemination of classical images.
706 Image Anthropology Salon Exhibition & Public Communication of Anthropology
On a night in January 2022, about 30 people participated in the Salon exhibition of image Anthropology of “2021-2022 blue Dali – Seeing the Working Folk Women”. People seem to have traveled through the night salon held by Woolf in Bloomsbury a hundred years ago. For a while, the young and the old, the works, as well as their time, have jointly built a public communication cause of image anthropology. Dali was fixed on the paper by Cyanotype and became the collective memory of a community.
The Future of the Image Anthropology
Méline’s attempt to write the ethnography of the meta universe is perhaps the most imaginative idea of image anthropology. In the future, people who want to know about Dali from 2021 to 2022 can immerse themselves in it, as if they were back to the Cyanotype production site in 2022, and came to the salon night in 2022, listening to Méline telling stories of the 97-year-old grandmother by the stove.