ABSTRACT

The few existing pictures of Indigenous peoples of Baja California before the age of photography offer a precious window into the peninsula’s past inhabitants. The synoptic analysis of the material culture depicted in this imagery, from both religious and secular sources, reveals that the credibility of the pictures is based on highly contingent notions of truth that emerge from contextual relationships between images and texts. The essay maintains that representational differences mirror distinct ways of thinking about the depiction of ethnographic subjects. Although variability in style may depend on artistic ability and skill, diversity in subject and mode of representation are as much the product of multiple intermedial entanglements as they are the result of implicit aims and purposes. This unprecedented comparative exercise, while eliciting questions about what counts as accuracy in distinctive artistic and literary genres, encourages a reflection on the nature and role of images whose lives straddle between art and anthropology.

摘要

摄影时代之前的下加利福尼亚州原住民的照片为数不多，为了解该半岛过去的居民提供了宝贵的窗口。从宗教和世俗来源对这些图像中描绘的物质文化进行概要分析表明，这些图像的可信度是基于图像和文本之间的上下文关系中出现的高度偶然的真理概念。该文章认为，代表性差异反映了对民族志主题描述的不同思考方式。尽管风格的变化可能取决于艺术能力和技巧，但主题和表现方式的多样性既是多重中间纠葛的产物，也是隐含目标和目的的结果。这种史无前例的对比练习，