Towards an anthropological aesthetics of the demonstration. The photographs of the Serge Collet archive

Abstract

THIS paper is a first attempt to gather up and structure the visual material collected in the Serge Collet Archive at the University of Crete, which concerns the photographic documentation of public protest marches in France during the 1970s. After a brief introduction to Collet’s ethnological research and to his early interest in the anthropology of demonstrations, follows a presentation of the archive textual, audio, and visual material, accompanied by a number of remarks on the historical, social, and cultural context of the ’70s in France. The inventory of the archive enables us to raise a number of methodological questions pertaining to cultural anthropology and the use of visual documentation for research purposes. Special focus is given to Collet’s approach of photography and to the theoretical, mostly structuralist, sociological and semiological background that informs it. I argue that the elements that compose this approach converge towards an aesthetics of the demonstration, for which the image is not merely an object of study but a first-hand tool for knowledge production.