Visual Anthropology, 15: 247±265, 2002 Copyright # 2002 Taylor & Francis 0894-9468/02 $12.00 + .00 DOI: 10.1080=08949460290009352 Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists Corinne A. Kratz Robert J. Gordon Pastoralists have long been recurrent ®gures in visual images and other representations of Africa and Africans. Whether seen in positive or negative terms, pastoralists have provided means for thinking about and imaging cultural difference and identity, with considerable continuity in representational forms and themes. As popular visual media proliferated and changed over the past two centuries Ð from postcards, trade cards, and live shows to Hollywood ®lms and video games Ð African pastoralists have continued to appear in each new form, often replicating the types and stereotypes of Euroamerican understandings even as they register new and varied circumstances. The proliferation and reverberation of similar images through diverse visual media is one way these images have come to seem ``natural'' and to develop such remarkable persistence [Kratz 2002]. Using cases drawn from eastern and southern Africa, this collection of articles considers the multifaceted processes of representation involved in imaging African pastoralists. It invites attention to how such representations are produced in diverse visual media and through interconnections among visual and verbal media, examining the range of actors, interactions, and mediations involved in crafting representations of African pastoralists at different times and in different places. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BWANA TUMBO Amidst generalizations prominent in Western discourses about Africa, some idealized types and stereotypes have shown a remarkable persistence. Pastoralists and hunters have been recurrent ®gures in visual images and other representations of Africa and Africans, both in the past and in the present. These ®gures have provided means for thinking about and imaging cultural difference and identity, whether they are portrayed in positive, exemplary ways Ðas inherently aristoCORINNE A. KRATZ writes about culture and comunication, performance, ritual, and other forms of cultural display and representation. She has been doing research with Okiek communities in Kenya since 1974. Her publications include The Ones that Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002] and Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women's Initiation [Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994]. Address correspondence to ckratz@emory.edu ROBERT J. GORDON is employed at the University of Vermont. He has done ®eldwork in Namibia, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho. His most recent book was Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997]. He is currently working, inter alia, on the anthropological history of cinema in Africa. Address correspondence to rgordon@zoo.uvm.edu 247 248 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon cratic, the last vestiges of a dying or vanishing Africa, or mystically close to natureÐor in negative terms, as recalcitrantly backward and primitive. The counterpoint between positive and negative portrayals might shift across domains of practice and over time, but many of its terms and parameters show considerable continuity. Pastoralists and hunters have been equally prominent in African cultural imaginaries, points of contrast for one another [Galaty 1979, 1982; Kratz 1981; Kratz and Pido 2000], for agriculturalists [Turnbull 1965; Wñhle 1986], and for constructions of national selves [Wilmsen 1989]. Western imagery of African hunters, in particular the San or bushmen of the Kalahari, has been subjected to critical analysis and self-re¯ection, most notably in a recent issue of Visual Anthropology edited by Tomaselli [1999; see also Gordon 1997, Wilmsen 1989, 1995]. This issue1 is concerned with the other idealized object of the West's imagery of Africa, pastoralists. While there is an extensive literature on the myth of the pastoral Other [e.g. Hartog 1988; Hodgson 2000; Rigby 1985]; this present collection seeks to draw attention to the many-sided processes of representation and imaging through which that myth is produced and perpetuated in relation to African pastoralists. It invites attention to the different and complex ways such representations are produced in diverse visual media and through interconnections among visual and verbal media. At the same time, we seek to underline the particular historical, cultural, and political economic conditions that differentiate some speci®c cases, examining the range of actors, interactions, and mediations involved in crafting representations of pastoralists at different times and in different places. The articles collected here concentrate on eastern and southern Africa, ranging from the Maasai and Samburu to the Himba and Zulu. They consider representations across time and across media to show how images of particular pastoralist groups have developed and what implications and repercussions they might have. In each case, pastoralists have been turned into types, archetypes, and/or stereotypes [Ruf®ns 1998] through selective attention to certain domains of activity and certain gender emphases, but the activities and gender foregrounded are not always the same. Similarly, relations between pastoralists and Europeans are a consistent facet of the representations, but they ®gure differently in different cases. The intention is both to move beyond simple discussion and deconstruction of the ``usual'' stereotypes and to recognize variation within broad stereotypes. Our concern is with how these generalizations have become ``usual'', how they seem to stay ``usual'' over long periods of time, and how they have at the same time transformed and been incorporated into other realms Ðbe they East African political rhetoric or various domains of American mass media. This collection builds on earlier work, including Knowles and Collett's sketch of the contradictory representations of Maasai by British colonials and of®cials [Knowles and Collett 1989]. They show how the ``warrior'' image of Maasai, one of several possibilities found in early explorers' texts, was elaborated in relation to notions of ``natural man'' in ways that justi®ed colonial policies, and later became the basis for postcolonial development initiatives. We seek to integrate such historical analysis and concern for the implications of visual representation with a sensitivity to the differentiated perspectives included in the process of representation. The latter is also illustrated in Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists 249 article on Mayer's Ranch in Kenya [1994]. They show, for instance, how Maasai now portray ``traditional'' versions of themselves for tourists, maintaining a welldeveloped sense of on-stage=off-stage and of self-objecti®cation. These two articles are also related because many explorers' accounts were in their time as popular as tourist performances are today. While our concern is with the ``popular,'' be it culture or representation, that concept has long been debated and recognized as problematic. The standard dictionary de®nition of the term encompasses several distinct activities which can be mutually compatible: ``Suited to or within the means of ordinary people; Of representing, or carried on by people at large; Being a favorite; Widely known and discussed.'' As Marx would put it, ``It is a chaotic conception embracing too wide a range of disparate phenomena. It consistently slides into other social practices.''2 Just who, exactly, are ``ordinary people'' or ``people at large'' can easily become points of contention and lead to the discussion being mired down. With Tony Bennett, then, we take the popular as most usefully considered a terrain or social ®eld in which cultural values and ideologies are contested [1986: 19] and note that popular forms at any particular time may exhibit both resistance to and compliance with dominant cultural values [Hall 1981]. Thus, we propose to focus on the means of popularization, in particular performances and visual representations as captured by the mass media or displayed before tourists, of®cials, aid workers, missionaries and others, and to consider how these diverse viewers and producers actively collaborate in the creation and maintenance of these images. Benedict Anderson has made much of ``print capitalism'' in the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century [1983] but what we are dealing with here is an oft-ignored sequel, the transformation of print capitalism into picture capitalism.3 This was clearly realized by Heidegger, who is famously remembered for claiming that ``the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture'' [1977: 134 (1938)]. A growing literature on postcards, which were enormously popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has begun to examine some of the dynamics of this shift [Prochaska 1990; Geary and Webb 1998]. Several authors in this collection extend this work by relating postcards to other media. One observation that emerges from this collection is that show business, broadly construed, has been one of the most underrated forces of colonialism, and now of globalization [Lindfors 1999; Boon 1999]. In a brilliant article, the Australian ethnohistorian Greg Dening [1996] has demonstrated how pioneering European travelers to exotic lands used, as role models for their behavior and interactions with Others, their observations and experiences derived from seventeenth and eighteenth century pantomimes and freak shows.4 Over time these freak shows were transformed from features on the midway of international expositions to ``museums'' (like P.T. Barnum's famous ``American Museum'' in which ``human oddities'' were featured prominently) and to the exhibition halls of the latter half of the nineteenth century [Altick 1978]. There shows frequently featured people from other parts of the world.5 The Fierce Zulus and Farini's ``Earthmen''6 were instant hits in places like London. But the popularity of these shows extended well beyond the English-speaking world. Indeed in German-speaking countries a new phenomenon, VoÈlkerschauen (people shows), emerged, and a cursory glance at whom they displayed suggests that the most popular draw-cards from Africa 250 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon were mostly people who already had a reputation for exceptionality and to whom these impresarios had access. Thus, in addition to Nubians and bushmen, Zulus and Maasai were popular on the German circuits largely because of their links to German colonies, and to German-speaking missionaries and traders [Sangiro 1947; Schmidt-Gross 1999; Debusmann and Riessz 1996]. Indeed a troupe of Maasai were trapped in Nazi Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War [D. Henrichsen, personal communication].7 At the beginning of the twentieth century these live shows were being displaced as mass entertainment, ®rst by magic lantern [e.g. Landau 1994] and stereoscopic shows and their technological cousin, the illustrated travelogue8 [Gordon 1997: 92±100], and later by still other forms. These new visual forms retained connections with earlier representations and settings; stereoscopes, in fact, were ®rst introduced at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 in London [see Sobania, this volume]. Sobania makes the point that Zulu amd Maasai were amongst the earliest African people speci®ed and named in mass-produced European images. Signi®cantly though, livestock Ðso central to pastoralists' own sense of identityÐ played an insigni®cant role in these images produced by Americans and Europeans. That production involved several layers of selection. After photographers selected (or created) the ®gures and scenes they found worth recording, editors and distributors made further selections from the photographic corpus. The image identity produced through these selective processes was not only narrow, but highly gendered. This representational narrowing was the antecedent for much of what comes later, and characteristic of each case considered here. Magic lantern and slide shows were soon supplanted, however, dramatically ®rst by movies and then too by their current successor, videos. Pastoralists continued to be prominent representatives of African life in the newer visual forms as well. It is perhaps signi®cant that one of D.W. Grif®ths' earliest ®lms was The Zulu's Heart (®lmed in New Jersey in 1908). So common were ®lms on Zulu that the longest chapter in Peter Davis' In Darkest Hollywood [1996] deals with ``Zuluology.'' Zulus would even pop up unexpectedly elsewhere, as for example in the ®lm footage shot during Teddy Roosevelt's famous East African safari. In the interwar years the dominant ®gures in the ®lmic packaging of Africa were Martin and Osa Johnson, the subjects of a thorough biography [Imperato and Imperato 1992].9 As Kas®r shows in her essay in this collection, the representational narrowing has continued up to the present, creating a predominant image in feature ®lms of Maasai and Samburu pastoralists as young male ``warriors.'' In the Himba case described by Bollig and Heinemann, on the other hand, young women emerge as the dominant focus of recent representations. Though age and gender emphases vary across cases and through time, such representational narrowing creates general social categories that function as ethnic ``characters'' in larger narratives of cultural difference, as Galaty explores in his article. Examining which aspects of pastoralist lives are taken as key signs can illuminate the question of what issues and identities are at stake and for whom? Much of the knowledge conveyed through imagery was, indeed still is, packaged in the seductive allure of infotainment±effective precisely because it merged the desires for pleasure in the guise of seeking knowledge. It has also relied on popular understandings of photography and ®lm as evidence of both truth and Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists 251 documentary realism [Tagg 1988; Edwards 2001]. Sangiro, an Afrikaner from South Africa who worked as a guide in East Africa to numerous German ®lmmakers, relates a delightful vignette which demonstrates this merging of knowledge and entertainment and how it was all part of show business. At the 1932 Berlin premiere of an East African documentary, the most memorable scene showed a Maasai ``prince'' being devoured by a lion. An African-American in the audience stood up and launched an emotional protest about the producer's ethics in allowing such an act to occur. Not only did this lend credibility to a completely fabricated scene but it was also good publicity [Sangiro 1947]. The visual media of popular imagery and entertainment, then, have proliferated and changed over the past two centuries, from postcards, trade cards, and live shows to Hollywood ®lms and video games. As these articles will show, African pastoralists have continued to appear in every new form, their images replicating the types and stereotypes of Euroamerican cultural understandings even as they might register new and varied contexts and circumstances. The proliferation and reverberation of similar images through diverse visual media is one way these images have come to seem ``natural'' and to develop such remarkable persistence [Kratz 2002: 104±111]. The diverse visual echoes are further ampli®ed and de®ned by verbal images and narratives. Visual images by themselves do not create or perpetuate stereotypes. Indeed, as Sandberg recently concluded in a study of Scandinavian folk museums: It may well be that narrative was more important to spectating . . . than has been assumed, serving as the unobtrusive safety net that made the unmooring of the eye in modernity possible and pleasurable. Perhaps a neglected component, even a buried precondition of modern vision may in fact be the narrative controls surrounding the modes of display, which unobtrusively yet ef®ciently make possible the games of visual pleasure. [Sandberg 1995: 354] Visual images need to be underwritten by narratives. Here David Livingstone can serve as an apt illustration. An indifferent missionary and a questionable geographer [Jeal 1966: 13], Livingstone is still one of the European names most closely connected to Africa. How he achieved this near iconic status teaches us a great deal about the persistence of certain African images, and how cross-cutting echoes across the media are established and put into widespread circulation. Livingstone's ®rst book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa [1858], sold over 70,000 copies. It was published just as the ``graphic revolution'' (to use Boorstin's term) started to gain momentum. Changes in lithography and the emergent ``penny press'' ensured that illustrated books like those by Livingstone enjoyed a wide and rapid distribution not just among the upper classes but also among the aspiring lower-middle classes as well. Given the inherently proselytizing nature of his mission work both in Africa and at home (perhaps one of the earliest and more successful examples of the use of "adventure" for mass fundraising), he soon became a household name of great persistence.10 And then he got ``lost.'' At least, that is how it seemed. In 1871 in one of the greatest scoops in the history of journalism, The New York Herald's man, H.M. Stanley, met and interviewed him In Darkest Africa (150,000 copies), and in 252 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon the words of one 1890 reviewer this book was ``read more universally and with greater interest than any other publication'' [cited in Brantlinger 1988: 180]. Various factors contributed towards making this ``pseudo-event'' one of the milestones in the history of the mass media. Changes in print technology and ``print capitalism'' had unleashed a heavy competition, especially in the United States, among what was later dubbed the ``Yellow Press''Ð all of which served to create and sustain the Myth of the Explorer [Riffenbaugh 1992], epitomized by the remarkable success of the slew of self-promoting books that Stanley later wrote. The wood-cut illustrations used in these books were important too because of: their ability to encapsulate major issues in a format that was small, vivid and easily understood. While it would be misleading to consider the corpus of images . . . as an accurate survey of the landscapes and peoples of mid-nineteenth century Africa, they can be regarded as powerful emblems of one culture's view of another . . . accorded with the central preoccupations of the age, mingling humanitarian concern with dreams of cultural and economic, if not yet explicitly imperial, expansion. [Barringer 1996: 196] Visual representations were crucial in framing the Victorian public imagination of Africa and perhaps none more famous Ðand pertinent to our argument Ð than the image of Livingstone being attacked by a lion [Figure 1]. From ®rst being published in the 1850s as a relatively passive woodcut, it was transformed into a scene of high drama as part of a magic lantern slide set of 40, illuminating the Life and Work of David Livingstone. The set was produced by the London Missionary Society circa 1900 as part of one of those interminable publicity and fund-raising drives on which mission societies were so dependent. The lion attack image epitomizes masculinity and courageous Christianity at work. It encapsulated and reinforced what most lads growing up then in settler southern Africa and in the United Kingdom ``knew'': that Maasai were courageous lion hunters who would steadfastly prefer using spears rather than modern technology in their hunts. This was a theme of countless English, German,11 and French travelogues made about Africa, like Martin and Osa Johnson's classic Simba [1928] and Walter Futter's Africa Speaks [1929] featuring Paul Hoe¯er.12 Similarly, one of the dominant tropes when representing ``the Zulu'' was their ``warrior'' courage. Colonial and bourgeois notions of gender, in particular of masculinity and later of femininity, were to play an important role in shaping these persistent images of pastoralists.13 Expeditions and safaris commonly provided a frame for these images, de®ning the kinds of settings and circumstances in which encounters with pastoralist Others might take place. This frame also heightened the salience of gender in roles imagined for Europeans. Even when actual expeditions are not depicted, however, understandings of ``the safari'' have often provided basic assumptions and scenarios for the de®nitive ways to experience Africa. Before turning to the speci®c articles in this collection, a brief consideration of the safari theme that can point to the long history and in¯uence of this framing device, to variations across images of African pastoralists, and to the cross-media interconnections and transformations involved in each case. Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists 253 Figure 1 Magic lantern slide of Livingstone being attacked by a lion. Directly inspired by the tales and journeys of Livingstone discussed above was Francis Galton, a cousin to Charles Darwin, the founder of eugenics and second President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Today Galton is usually remembered in anthropology for having raised what is known as ``Galton's Problem.'' What is less well-known about Galton, but perhaps more signi®cant, is that as a twenty-something he was emboldened by Livingstone's ``discovery'' of Lake Ngami to undertake a journey through what was to become South-West Africa in 1851±1852. In particular, his ambition was to be the ®rst European to reach the famed lake from the west. Although he failed in this endeavor, he did manage to write about his experiences. Within a year after his return to England, he published his book Tropical South Africa [1853], for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Silver Medal of the French Geographical Society, and was elected to both the Royal Society and the Atheneum Club. The book went through at least four editions and was translated into 254 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon German in 1854. Buoyed by this success he immediately started work on a second book, also based on his travels. This was his even more successful bestseller, The Art of Travel; or, Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries, ®rst published in 1855 and eventually running to eight editions. Clearly its numerous sales were to be found not so much among the emergent professional Africanists as among the armchair travelers. It provided the stuff from which narratives were constructed and which sustained Victorian visual imagery of Africa. This is clear from the ®rst sentence of the book: ``If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a de®nite object, which old travelers do not think impracticable, then Ð travel by all means.'' The Art of Travel provides us with the nitty-gritty of how these early explorers=missionaries=traders claimed they went about their business.14 Originally tourists were known as ``sightseers,'' and this book focuses the way travelers and tourists see the world they traverse. What is interesting, indeed surprising, about The Art of Travel is that it contains very little advice on how to deal with indigenes, both in terms of general etiquette and in ``extracting information,'' to use Galton's term. In general, and in accordance with the prevailing theories of Victorian Europe, indigenes were simply seen as adults with puerile minds, and the traveler was advised to act like a somewhat overage Boy Scout. Nevertheless in studying various editions of this book one can see some not-so-subtle transformations in the etiquette of dealing with indigenes. For example, the chapter entitled ``Matters of Discipline'' later became ``Management of Savages.'' It contains such gems of advice as the following: Bearing towards natives Ð A frank, joking, but determined manner, joined with an air of showing more con®dence to the savages than you generally feel, is the best. It is observed, that a sea-captain generally succeeds in making a very good impression on natives; they thoroughly appreciate good practical common sense, and are not half such fools as strangers usually account them. If a savage does mischief, look on him as you would on a kicking mule or a wild animal whose nature it is to be unruly and vicious, and keep your temper quite unruf¯ed. [Galton 1855: 60±61] The fantasy nature in which many of these travelers imagined themselves comes out most eloquently in his advice on how To take a strong man prisoner single-handed, threaten him with your gun, and compel him to throw all his arms away, then marching him before you some little distance, make him lie ¯at on his face and put his hands behind him. Of course, he will be in a dreadful fright, and require re-assuring. Next take your knife, put it between your teeth, and standing over him, take the caps off your gun, and lay it down by your side. Then ®rmly lash his thumbs together, and afterwards more leisurely complete the handcuf®ng process. The reason of setting to work in this way is, that a quick supple savage, while you are fumbling with your strings, and bothered with a loaded gun, might easily spring round, seize hold of it, and quite turn the tables against you. [Galton 1855: 63] However if fantasy turned nasty and the traveler found himself faced with ``great emergencies,'' then a bit of contemporary technological magic was in order, Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists 255 namely rockets: ``Of all European inventions, nothing so impresses and terri®es savages as ®reworks, especially rockets'' [Galton 1855: 69±70]. Galton was one of a number of travelers and administrators whose written and pictorial legacy underwrote and gave credence to fantasy images of Africa. This extraordinary, generalized framework for cross-cultural encounters by safari eventually became de®ned more speci®cally, peopled with particular ethnic characters, and revised in accordance with regional variations. Later, all these works informed the famous safari of ex-President Teddy Roosevelt or ``Bwana Tumbo.'' Roosevelt's huge media-derived East African safari led to yet another best-seller, his African Game Trails [1910], in which the fearless lion-hunting Maasai featured prominently as part of a ``journey back in time.'' Roosevelt's book did more to stimulate hunting and tourism in East Africa among the American public than did any other single event [Bodry-Saunders 1991: 214±215].15 It may also have done more to propagate popular stereotypes about the Maasai than any other single book, at least in the United States.16 The stream of exploration accounts, travelogues, and expedition and safari journals Ð full of images visual and narrative Ðhas its counterparts today, and the safari is surely the dominant imaginary model for contemporary tourism to much of Africa. Though undoubtedly safer and more predictable, tourist safaris may entail as much fantasy about local people as Galton's account. Pastoralists are often seen as people who have resisted the onslaught of Western civilization, and this appeals precisely to the particular audience which seeks in their safari to escape, albeit for a very temporary moment, from the burdens of civilization. Yet the Zulu images discussed by Sobania remind us that there are exceptions to these broad currents, and contemporary tourism to Shakaland, the South African cultural village or living museum made from the set of a popular ®lm on Shaka Zulu, does not ®t the standard safari model either [Hamilton 1998: 187±205]. One of the differences is that visitors to Shakaland are placed in the position of guests entering a Zulu homestead. The grounds of such an encounter make for a different kind of fantasy, one that necessarily takes some account of the culture and social conventions of their putative hosts. This certainly does not mean that the longstanding images of Zulu and other African pastoralists will soon be on the wane, but it does signal shifts in the other kinds of images and counternarratives that are also increasingly in circulation. It may also point to increasing efforts on the part of those portrayed to manage or capitalize on the production of popular images. Robert Gordon recently attended a Bushman Cultural Festival in D'Kar, Botswana, for instance, and noted signi®cant differences in admission prices: $50 to enter with a video, $20 if with a still camera, and free if one had no such visual recording devices. Although images of African pastoralists are likely to continue as persistent as ever, the range of identities and representations may become more varied or take on different valences if shifts in the conditions of production and circulation continue to take hold. FOUR CASES OF PASTORALIST REPRESENTATION From best-selling explorer's books and popular press to woodcuts, postcards, and magic lantern shows, to ®lms, tourist performances, and coffee-table books, visual 256 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon and narrative representations of African pastoralists have been repeated and refracted through different media and settings for far more than a century. Once exiting news and novel images, they eventually became part of ``common knowledge'' for adventure-loving children and adults alike. Through such processes, African pastoralists become signs of identity for others, part of a set of categories mediated through past knowledge, images, and expectations. Such mediation helps produce what an Okiot friend in Kenya once described to Kratz as ``the ones that are wanted,'' that is, images and identities that you can recognize as matching what you expect to ®nd [Kratz 2002]. This is one way identities and understandings may be narrowed, but at the same time it creates larger-than-life representations that take on a life of their own in many domains of aesthetic production and social interaction. The contributions to this volume examine these processes from a number of different vantage points. Each presents a detailed study of how particular African pastoralists have been imagined and represented. Together, they help identify and illustrate the representational practices common to these long-standing popular images of pastoralists, underlining the representational narrowing already noted but going beyond that as well. They also show how these images have been popularized and maintained through repetition, dispersal, and transformations across media and domains of practice [Kratz 2002: 109±111]. Bollig and Heinemann, for instance, show how European images of the Himba in Namibia's Kaokoland have always merged notions of person and place, beginning with vague locations and fantastic descriptions on early maps. Equations that subordinated people to place were especially prominent again in 1990s debates about the Epupa Dam, providing ways to talk about the contested project as if it would have no human impact. The power of naming emerges in this case as an important way to claim land, de®ne people, and circumscribe issues; the power of naming ®gures importantly in situations described in other articles as well. Bollig and Heinemann show how the production of popular images crosses national borders as well as the domains of government, entertainment, and science. Sensitive to representational shifts over time, they consider how different emphases in photographic portrayals of the Himba relate to changing political and economic circumstances. When social order and political relations were central concerns, there was greater photographic attention to male chiefs and soldiers, while pictures taken in the context of hunting safaris and recreational pursuits have foregrounded images of ``tradition,'' particularly images of Himba women.17 Indeed, as Namibia has been opened up to tourism and troubling images deter tourists to East Africa, the ochre-covered Himba have become the new icons, portrayed just as Maasai have been as proud and ``aristocratic'' resisters to the inextricable process of modernization and incorporation into the global capitalist system. Because those who can afford the considerable expense of hiring 4  4s and=or guides can travel to Kaoko, an area touted as ``untouched by civilization,'' this tourism is very much a product of af¯uence and, in this sense, is the lineal descendant of Theodore Roosevelt's safari [1910]. Herrensafari to the area with what Bollig and Heinemann call ``a staging of masculinity and settler elitism'' present additional echoes of that earlier journey, set in contrast to the increasingly Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists 257 female images of Himba that create a new ``feminine body cult'' that highlights their faces, breasts, and coiffures.18 Of course the Himba have never been as isolated as the tourist brochures make out. There is evidence, for example, that already in the late 1950s, Himba were traveling right across Namibia to consult with prophets in Botswana. And after the Second World War, the settler-dominated administration stationed a labor recruiter in the area, but he was so singularly unsuccessful in recruiting contract workers that the recruiting station was closed. In sum, it appears that Himba have enough (subjectively de®ned) wealth to maintain their ``tradition'' consciously. They have the luxury of making their own decisions in this regard. Yet the increasing focus on females as the objects of tourist photography in Kaoko has had profound implications for local gender politics, as young women now have direct access to cash for posing [Miescher and Rizzo 2000]. It is as if the female body bared of the accouterments of clothing represents ``Namibia's oldest tribe.'' Sobania's article focuses on images of Zulu in southern Africa and Maasai in eastern Africa. In these cases, gendered images carry strong associations with particular activities. For women, the visual emphasis is on work (especially carrying loads) and hair styles; men are shown mainly in connection with hunting and ®ghting, both encapsulated in the prominent ®gure of ``warrior.'' But there are striking contrasts in how Zulu and Maasai ``warriors'' are presented, contrasts that might be related to different colonial histories. Unlike the Nandi, who offered armed resistance to British control in Kenya in the late 1890s [Matson 1972], the Maasai signed treaties with the British in 1904 and 1912 that resulted in the Maasai Moves, con®ning them to a savanna Reserve. Maasai murran (``warriors'') are portrayed predominantly as noble and aristocratic, with the lion hunt serving as a key sign of bravery. The Zulu had famously challenged British colonial rule in southern Africa in the Anglo-Zulu war. The stereoscope images which Sobania considers often represented Zulu men with shields, spears, and knobkerries, and characterized them as a people who relish ®ghting, but accompanying descriptions also portrayed them as a defeated people.19 Sobania also traces various shifts in popular media, showing how images on trading cards and stereoscopes formed a foundation for contemporary photographic and cinematic representations of African pastoralists. As noted above, the early naming of Zulu and Maasai made them distinctive and prominent in the array of cultures included in stereoscope sets, but the visual identities constructed for them were the product of several layers of selection by photographers, editors, and distributors [cf. Kratz 1994]. Working carefully to trace particular images, Sobania shows clearly how textual additions to the images provided evaluative frames that changed over time, heightening and exaggerating portrayals of ``primitive Africa'' in ways that sometimes contradicted the images themselves.20 The evaluative narratives embedded and implied through selective imaging are a central concern in Galaty's article, which focuses on the way Maasai have been turned into icons of traditionalism. In considering the power of naming, Galaty notes how named social groups or categories develop into recognizable ``characters'' through their distinctive visual features and iconography. The tacit presuppositions that de®ne these characters have important repercussions. Like metaphors, they imply scenarios for action and project futures [Fernandez 1972]. 258 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon They inform government policies on range use so that they seem inevitable and ``natural.'' Like Bollig and Heinemann's discussion of the Epupa Dam, then, Galaty shows that entertaining visual images can have serious consequences. In examining the in¯uence that popular images can have on government and NGO policies, Galaty also traces the way popular narratives and Euroamerican tourist images buttress efforts by other Kenyans to appropriate Maasai land or to direct development resources elsewhere. The futures implied by the visual characters and narratives can thus become self-ful®lling prophecies. Yet, Galaty shows that there is a strong Maasai counternarrative to these images and policies, one that results in part from countering the highly selective nature of popular visual imagery. The question is how these other perspectives and fuller images can be included to make a difference. Kas®r, too, presents a double-sided view of popular pastoralist imagery. Concentrating on recent Hollywood ®lms, she describes both how Samburu actors experienced the ®lming as well as how they portrayed Maasai (in The Ghost and the Darkness) and a ®ctional Winabe tribe (in The Air Up There). The ®lms seemed to heighten the already selective nature of popular images of Maasai pastoralists, presenting only male characters and offering lurid caricatures of their ``warrior'' nature.21 For their part, the Samburu actors were kept at a distance, unaware of the ®lm's storyline and not always involved either in setting the terms of their employment. By the end of the ®lming, they had become increasingly sophisticated about the sale and display of their own image, however, much like the Maasai at Mayer's Ranch discussed by Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett [1994]. Other aspects of the Samburu perspective are also noted, including how they characterize Europeans and other Kenyans. Questions of naming ®gure again in Kas®r's article Ð Samburu are often encompassed under the broad category of Maasai and invoke this identity themselves in certain contexts [cf. Kratz 1981]. The ®lm casting, however, extended the issue of whose categories and names are used to include questions about who would have speaking parts; none of the Samburu did. Kas®r ends by invoking the fraught land situation of Samburu in northern Kenya, recalling Galaty's telling discussion of the potential effects of popular images. The kind of implications for the local economy and gender relations that Bollig and Heinemann identi®ed for Himba in Namibia have their echoes here as well. Young Samburu men who travel to the tourist coast of Kenya to become ``beachboys'' may expand the sense of roaming adventure long associated with their age grade, but Samburu elders are concerned about their moral decline from trysts with tourists. These four case studies show how popular images of African pastoralists have been bound up with the production of a range of identities, linked to far-reaching concerns, and embedded in long and complex histories and interactions. Problematic narratives and ®gures common to representations of many kinds of cultural difference and diverse Others appear throughout the articles Ð ``noble=ignoble savage,'' ``vanishing cultures,'' and ``tradition as resistance to civilization.'' These studies examine the speci®c forms and refractions such common narratives take in speci®c contexts, in relation to particular African pastoralists. Today, these images and tropes continue to shape many European and American notions about Africa Persistent Popular Images of Pastoralists 259 and Africans, even as they also crystallize concerns and catalyze debates within some African societies and home countries, and among scholars. These articles underline the value of considering popular imagery historically and from a variety of perspectives. Signi®cantly, they also suggest the importance of taking account of interconnections across media and modes of representation in order to understand how certain images achieve and retain their status as ``popular.'' NOTES 1. This special issue of Visual Anthropology had its start at the 1998 Triennial Conference on African Art in a session organized by Kas®r and Kratz that included a number of the present contributors. We would like to thank Ivan Karp for helpful comments on drafts of this introduction. 2. Unfortunately the laptop and back-up diskettes of one of the editors were forcefully appropriated while doing ®eldwork and thus, regrettably, we cannot supply the proper citation for this quote. 3. This went hand in hand with other technological developments and widespread social changes in bourgeois Euroamerican societies. For instance, the machine gun, that tool of mass killing, was being developed and ®eld-tested in the colonies during the same period that photographic images spewed forth in the form of postcards. Even toys started changing from being abstract and skill-oriented to being more replica-like: from stickhorse to hobby-horse, if you like. 4. Similarly, Poole [1997] shows how representations of Andean societies ®gured in eighteenth century French plays and how European representations of Andean ``Otherness'' have changed over time. 5. Museums in Europe and the U.S. ``had a long and honorable history before Barnum's involvement with them. Indeed, the vulgarization of the museum and its transformation [at this time] from a place for scholarship and rational instruction to an amusement center symbolized the larger shift from Jeffersonian republicanism to Jacksonian democracy'' in the U.S. [Harris 1973: 33]. The pioneer and perhaps the most famous or notorious person on show in London and Paris was the so-called ``Hottentot Venus,'' Saartje Baartman [Altick 1978: 268±273; Strother 1999]. Missionaries also brought a signi®cant number of Africans (including Bushmen, Zulu and Maasai) to Europe, suggesting that these shows had more than simply entertainment value [Anonymous 1826; Debrunner 1979]. 6. Several Bushmen displayed in England and the U.S. in the 1850±1860s were billed as ``Earthmen'' [Bogdan 1988]. 7. Such displays also helped make Sitting Bull and Geronimo among the most famous of Native American names; both had signi®cant careers in shows or exhibitions. Similarly, nowadays Pocahontas is remembered largely because of the recent cartoon ®lm. 8. This term was coined by Burton Howell, who gave over 8000 illustrated lectures in the inter-war years and grossed more than $4 million in the process. See the Special Issue on travelogues, Visual Anthropology, 15(1). 9. See also Landau [1998]. 10. Another genre of popular literature that needs to be analyzed is ``pulp'' adventure stories, which were probably more proli®c and directly linked to imperial outreach than the more academic texts [see, e.g., Phillips 1997: 10]. 11. For candid insights and comments on German ®lmmakers operating in eastern Africa, see the reminiscences of the Afrikaans writer, Sangiro [1947]. 260 C. A. Kratz and R. J. Gordon 12. Such ®lms remain in circulation. In 1998, Cine 16 in San Jose, California, showed Wild Men of the Kalahari [1930] as part of a ®lm series called ``Ballyhoo for the Banana Republic: the Disturbing Films of Paul Hoe¯er'' [http:==www.cine16.com=98chrono.htm]. 13. Nandy discusses how colonialism produces a kind of hypermasculinity that in turn in¯uences metropolitan understandings of gender [1983]. 14. Fabian [2000] presents a fascinating account of the less predictable and reasoned aspects of early explorers' travels and expeditions. 15. What is intriguing about this safari is that Roosevelt is alleged to have hired guides originally used by Stanley. Later Roosevelt's guides were used by those other great boosters of the pastoralist mystique, Carl Akeley and Martin and Osa Johnson! 16. For instance: Maasai ``despise regular work'' but love dangerous hunting [Roosevelt 1925: 91]. They are ``herdsmen by profession and warriors by preference'' [ibid.: 131]. The ``tall ®nely shaped savages'' had a striking likeness ``not to the West Coast negroes, but to the engravings on the tombs, temples and palaces of ancient Egypt; they might have been soldiers in the armies of Thothmes or Rameses '' [ibid.: 143]. Given the Pax Britannica, lion hunting was one of the few avenues in which a young warrior could win glory. Roosevelt was also guided by what had been written about Africa before he set foot there. Perhaps none was more in¯uential than Sir Harry Johnston, the long-term British colonial administrator who saw Maasai in terms strikingly reminiscent of British views of the Zulu, as: A magni®cent example of ®ghting man... The Masai warrior is the result of the development of Man into a beautiful Animal... the physical perfection of these East African beef-eating, bloodthirsty warriors is of the prize-®ghter's or the rowing man's ideal, rather than the aesthete's. [Cited in Hodgson 1999: 125] 17. For further discussion of photography and history in Nambia, see Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes [1998]. 18. The self-ful®lling phenomenon is also at hand. Tourists who spend so much money to travel to the area might look foolish if they admit they did not ®nd what they sought and so may tend to photograph only the beautiful as de®ned in Euroamerican intellectual and tourist traditions. This produces scenes where the detritus of Western civilization, garbage, beer-bottles and especially men in rags, seem neatly airbrushed out of existence. 19. See also Hamilton [1998] on the image of Shaka Zulu. 20. Webb [1992] shows similar care in her examination of nineteenth century photographs of Zulu and their captions. 21. Images of Maasai women, usually bedecked in elaborate beadwork, are extremely common in other popular media and genres that Kas®r does not consider. 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