I graduated with a major in anthropology and a minor in mathematics in May 2003. I was a Gaines Fellow and Singletary Scholar, who graduated with Honors in Honors, Summa cum Laude, member of Lambda Alpha and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I plan to attend graduate school in cultural anthropology to This paper was written for the Gaines Program, the Anthropology Program, and the Honors Program. Both of my mentors were extremely supportive and excited about the work I was producing, and insisted on me finding different venues in which to present my work. This paper was also presented at the Central States Anthropological Society Conference in Louisville in 2003.

In this innovative piece, Anthropology senior, Courtney Stoll, takes on both the post-modernist critique of traditional ethnography, and the work of Edward Curtis, famous for his turn-of-the-century photographs of Native Americans. Courtney's indignation for the most radical anthropological critics of ethnography shines through in her elegant but methodologically detailed analysis of whether or not there is anything to be salvaged in the salvage ethnography which was the raison d'etre for Curtis's work and photographs.

Stoll argues that if the post-modernist critiques of ethnography were applied to Curtis's work, his photographs would be of no value today as representations of Native American turn-of-the-century lifeways. Subjectively constructed, his portrayals purposefully left out details of Westernization, including Western clothing that Native Americans wore, as well as such Western items as clocks, parosols, etc, which he routinely air-brushed out of the photographs. He also sometimes dressed his subjects from his own stock of Native American costumes, and added atmosphere through soft touches on the negatives. Through meticulous research in the ethnographies of the period, Courtney compares details on dress and ritual costume found there with the clothing worn by some of the Native American individuals in Curtis's portrayals. Concerning Curtis's work, she concludes that such fine-grained analysis reveals what items of apparel were still owned and worn by Native Americans of the time period. This finding demonstrates, in turn, that much can indeed be learned from such early visual anthropology. Ultimately, Stoll's work critiques the post-modern critics for failing to follow up their rhetoric with such in-depth, but time-consuming analyses as her own.