Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker turned philanthropist founded “The Archives of The Planet” in 1912. The project described in the reading as an “exhaustive visual survey”, presented photographic and cinematic material documenting small indigenous cultures. The reading suggests that using photographic and cinematic mediums, The Archives of The Planet project presented “visually objective” material.

While I do think these archival materials are important I think that their value is represented most in the insight they give anthropologists and historians now about the Western, imperialistic gaze. Do I think the photographs and film materials in Kahn’s archive are “visually objective”? No. The reading presented reasons that counter the aim of objectivity such as the colonialist officer operating the camera imposing his own aesthetic viewpoint in French Indochina (present-day Vietnam and Cambodia). While it can be argued that Kahn had good intentions in creating this project, there is something uncomfortable about the reality that Western nations have the power to pick and choose which cultures get validated or recognized. The conclusion of this reading really threw me off. I thought the additional information about Kahn’s “financial activities to the development of the Japanese military machine” came out of left field.

In the lecture from Brian Jacobsen yesterday we talked about the idea of building on what is already known in order to be able to imagine a new reality. In terms of science fiction movies, we talked about taking everyday technologies, things that are recognizable, and placing them in a fictionalized setting. In conversation with altering our knee-jerk connotations of things, I think what the Werner reading interestingly brings up is the organization of the archive under scholar Jean Brunhes in which he sees the archives as documenting the most trivial facts of human life. By dividing the material into categories such as human geography, ethnography, social, economic, or political, it could have been intended to act as a humanizing or universalizing notion?