Drawing as ethnographic practice: Miguel covarrubias's balinese drawings & sketches as visual anthropology

Abstract

In recent years the use and significance of drawing as a research method for recording ethnographic information has undergone renewed analysis by anthropologists. Their interests have ranged from a focus on the epistemological status of the line to the dialogical dimension of drawing as social practice. While art historians have celebrated Covarrubias's work in terms of his “drawing a cosmopolitan line” and archaeologists have acknowledged the importance of his Olmec drawings to Meso-American archaeology, cultural anthropologists have overlooked Covarrubias as a visual anthropologist. His drawings in Island of Bali (1937) as well as his archived sketches are important contributions to the ethnographic record of Balinese culture at a significant moment in the transformation of Balinese society. His sketches, in particular, offer a rich corpus of cultural information on everyday life in Bali in the early 1930s, as well as ethnographic information about non-verbal dimensions of the Balinese that complements other anthropologists' analyses of Balinese culture. In contrast to the more Orientalist images he produced for murals, maps, and paintings, Covarrubias's drawings and sketches warrant new appreciation as ethnographic documents and visual anthropology.