Jean-François Werner’s article is a helpful introduction to Albert Kahn and his “Archives of the Planet,” but I wish Werner had been more nuanced in his analysis of the relationship between imperialism and the Archives. I wonder if there are underlying disciplinary assumptions of anthropology inherent to this article but I had numerous questions about the stakes of this archive: how does this archival impulse reflect a humanistic endeavor or an anti-humanist one? What does it mean to build a planetary archive as opposed to a global one? Planetary connotes more than humans as an object of study. Is this a kind of French navel-gazing reaffirming French nationalism in contrast to non-European cultures? Or something different?

I’m curious about the employment of the autochrome and cinematograph as more “authentic” tools (“judgment-free representations” 442) in the service of salvage ethnography and the distinct irony that the supposed threat modernization posed to indigenous communities could be mitigated, at least from an ethnographic perspective, by the newest technological innovations. To that point, I also wish Werner had offered clarity about what was different about Jean Brunhes’s “scientific” method from other anthropologists/ethnographers? I found it particularly interesting that Werner describes that the cinematograph would be used explicitly to capture motion, whereas the autochrome was for still objects, but both example figures of autochromes seem more appropriate for the cinematograph by these guidelines. As Werner points out, the immediacy of both media was essential to their educational function—but this seems prescriptive for Werner points out that few of the archive’s autochromes were used in this way.

I was especially confused by Werner’s conclusion—when he introduces his own confusion over Kahn’s profiteering from the Japanese military machine (a fact that goes unmentioned until the conclusion). How useful is biography in this case? And assessing the degree of culpability of a Frenchman in imperialism and militarism 100 years ago based on his inconsistent practices? To end by distinctly connecting a “fascination for mechanical ways of representation” with the “growth of 20th-century warmongering imperialism” (448) feels like an argument one can make with more evidence and discussion that is absent from Werner’s article. In this particular context, it feels like a stretch to conflate the two.