A Description of Salvage Ethnography as a Qualitative Research Method

Ethnography is a qualitative research method that is used by anthropologists to describe a culture. Culture has many definitions but usually consists of origins. Values, roles, and material items associated with a particular group of people. Ethnographic research, therefore, attempts to fully describe a variety of aspects and norms of a cultural group to enhance understanding of the people being studied. When engaged in ethnography, the researcher must convert the complex experience of fieldwork to words in a notebook and then transform those words into other words shifted through analytic methods and theories. The promise of ethnographic film is that it might provide an alternative way of perceiving culture-perception constructed through the lens.

Salvage Ethnography can be said to be the capturing of an authentic culture thought to be rapidly and inevitably disappearing. Film is most effective in representing the 'performative' aspects of culture defined in the broadest sense - political performances, religious rituals, aesthetic endeavors of the most diverse kinds, the symbolic aspects of everyday life. It is also particularly good at giving some idea of what these experiences mean to those who participate in them. This it does by showing the emotional or psychological impact that these experiences have or by providing the protagonists with the opportunity to give their own explanations about them.

Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" is a true classic of ethnographic film. The principle behind ethnographic film in the early days of its existence was to capture traditional societies in time, a sort of salvage ethnography. In creating his silent masterpiece, Flaherty used actors of Inuit extraction, who still knew the traditional ways, and who could reproduce their culture for posterity through film. "Nanook" remains a warm account of traditional Inuit/Eskimo life, despite their frigid setting.

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In The Silent Enemy, director H. P. Carver employed an all-native cast to tell the tale of an Ojibway warrior (Baluk). The film begins with Chief Chetoga in a complete Indian costume, confronting the camera directly to inform audiences, "This is the story of my people...Everything that you will see here is real... When you look at the picture, therefore, look not upon us as actors. We are Indians living once more our old life." Through this we can see that Carver tried to be as authentic and bias-free as possible, but the whole project was more of a motion picture than a documentary about the lives of these Native Americans. Again we are shown the apparently 'savage' Indian (Dagwan) whom is depicted as the antagonist. The fact that Carver attempted to include characteristics such as jealousy. revenge and love shows us that their lives were not too dissimilar to ours, where we have some similar traits in our society.

Carver and Flaherty both used the traditional lives of the hunter-gatherers of North America as screens upon which to project the conservative European values they cherished: self-reliance, independence, the instinct to protect and sacrifice oneself for the family or tribal group. Both dramatized their lives, installing a survival narrative within an epic structure and shooting for continuity. It can be said that both productions attempted to change the depiction of Native Americans to a more objective view.

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