Author:	K. Suolinna, C. a. Hällström and T. Lahtinen
Year:	2000
Title:	Portraying Morocco. Edward Westermarck's Fieldwork and Photographs 1898-1913
Publisher:	Åbo Akademi University Press
City:	Turku, Finland
Number of Volumes:	1
Number of Pages:	78 pages
Price:
ISBN:

Review: The library of Åbo Akademi (the Swedish language university of Åbo, Finland) holds a collection of over a thousand photographs taken by the pioneer sociologist or anthropologist Edward (Edvard) Westermarck who repeatedly visited Morocco, spending several years there in total. The photographs have been restored, copied and digitalized for research and are here presented in selection in the context of interpretative essays by the editors of the volume. Many fascinating insights are revealed into the style of Westermarck's researches in the field and into the Moroccan culture of the time. For the specialist in the study of religions there are two points of particular interest.

First, methodologically, we are presented with a case study of an early use of the camera in field work. Westermarck was apparently not technically ambitious in this respect, and the quality of the photographs is varied.
 For example, people not infrequently lose their heads in horizontal pictures. However it is correctly stressed, by Catherine af Hällström (p.33), that photographically "poor" pictures can be of great importance in identifying a situation or a detail later on. In many delicate situations it is difficult to assess whether and how to photograph at all. In this regard it appears that Westermarck took a cautious, or as Tommy Lahtinen terms it, a "gentlemanly approach" (p. 57). For this reason, rituals in action are hardly recorded, but there are many shots of still situations or portraits of persons. It also appears that he did not really plan to make a photographic record systematically, and was not always prepared for it. Nevertheless, the sheer number of photographs, some of which were used in his publications, but many of which survived only as negatives (now printed in black and white for the first time) means that he has left a record of considerable interest to any who are concerned with Moroccan life and with the religion of Islam in context. The reflections on his way of working contribute to the story of the development of visual documentation both in anthropology and in the study of religions.  

Second, with regard specifically to the study of religions, the photographs reinforce the recognition that this was a major theme in Westermarck's work, as is already clear from the subjects given prominence in his writings. Particularly fascinating is his attention to anything and everything which in Morocco counted as in some sense sacred (baraka). This includes plants, animals, stones, holy wells and other special features of the landscape. It also includes cairns, for example those which mark the spot from where the grave of some particular saint first comes into view. The deceased saints themselves are endowed with baraka, and so too are even some living human beings such as Westermarck's life-long Moroccan travel  companion Abdessalam el-Baqqali. This is because his family was believed to be related by descent to the Prophet himself. For Westermarck the relations between Islam, in a formal sense, and what he regarded as a resilient form of animism were a fascinating subject, as is documented by the highlighting of this photographic motif. At the same time the photographs which illustrate it would not make sense as a group (as presented here on pages 54-55) except in so far as the theoretical Leitgedanke is known.

As a footnote, attention may be drawn to a study of Westermarck and Abdessalam el-Baqqali by one of the editors, Kirsti Suolinna, which was published in Temenos 31 (1995), pp. 223-234 (summary in Science of Religion no. 14453), which does not appear in the bibliography of the work reviewed here, but is also of interest from the point of view of the history of fieldwork methodology.

© Michael Pye (University of Marburg, Germany)