Still bodies in traveling images: anthropological reflections on ambiguous postcards from Argentina

Well before the digital age of today, when images have specific characteristics in terms of intangibility, immediacy, pervasiveness and diffusion, postcards constituted visual messages that portrayed something in the long-distance conversation between people in different parts of the world. This paper critically investigates the ambiguity of postcards depicting indigenous subjects in Argentina, which traveled to Europe and were produced from photographs that show native peoples mostly as ‘docile’ and exotic bodies, immobilized at a time of irreversible transformations in their way of life. In fact, the photographs were taken between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a historical moment when the geographical and identity definition of nation-state was formed through military campaigns, which aimed at the extermination or domination of native groups present on national territories. Paradoxically, photography visibilizes subjects at the moment of their physical or symbolic invisibilization. Photography is an inherently mobile medium: by its very nature it changes context; as it migrates, its meaning changes along with its functions. In this sense, what kind of historical memory do these images evoke and what role do they play within the complex construction of ‘exported’ national identity? What is the role of these ‘traveling' images in the formation of knowledge related to indigenous societies in the permanent tension between the shown and hidden, the near and far? This paper is based on ongoing research that combines archival ethnography with fieldwork and conceives of the digital as a space in which images can be put back into circulation, shared and discussed, also with source communities.