Six Notes: Afterthoughts
STEVEN VAN WOLPUTTE
Introduction
T
hese notes were penned partly as a response to
some of the comments, including suggestions by
anonymous reviewers and the editors of VAR, to
early versions of the graphic novella Six Circles. In part,
they are a postpartum reflection on this experiment in
graphic anthropology. Indeed, it would be a lie to claim
that what precedes was part of a premeditated plan.
Rather, Six Circles came about as an ongoing reflec-
tion sparked off by a long-­forgotten drawing in my
notebook. As Taussig (2011, xii) describes, I was “drawn
along,” and what started off as an evening pastime
soon evolved into something more—an exploration into
the possibilities of narrative ethnography and graphic
anthropology.
Fieldwork
Let me start from the beginning. Six Circles is based
on my ongoing research in Kaoko, in what now is the
northern Kunene Region, northwest Namibia. From
1995 to 1998, I worked mainly in the villages in and
around Omirora, a place some 125 kilometers west of
Opuwo, the region’s principal town that after 2002 be-
came my main research focus.
Kaoko itself is a patchwork of different yet (histor-
ically, culturally, politically, and linguistically) related
groups, as is evident in the streets of the bristling melt-
ing pot that is Opuwo. In Omirora, however, most peo-
ple self-­identify as Himba and eke out a living herding
and trading cattle and small stock (on the region’s his-
tory and inhabitants, see Bollig 1997, 1998; Friedman
2011; Gewald 2011; Rizzo 2012).
It is also there that I met with Hyamakuma, the sto-
ry’s protagonist and the author of the six gawky circles
that make up the novella’s leitmotiv. He was a tall and
often moody man in his sixties, in whose village or cat-
Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 33, Issue 2, pp. 191–194, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2017 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12145.
tle posts we often stayed. Hyamakuma was a central
node in my network, and soon also became a princi-
pal interlocutor. Much of the dialogue is compiled from
interviews and informal conversations we had over the
years, as he was very knowledgeable about ombazu
yOvahimba, usually translated as “Himba tradition.”
Important to note here, however, is that in postcolonial
Namibia, tradition has many different meanings; it may
refer to history, heritage, or culture, sometimes to folk-
lore, but often it is used as an antonym to modernity or
development (see Bollig 1998; Van Wolputte 2016).
The Argument
Six Circles was never set up around a central argument,
nor ever intended to analyze. Enthused by Paul Stoller’s
(2016) recent example of a more narrative anthropology
and by others calling for alternative forms of presenting
and doing ethnography (see Fabian 2014; Fortun 2012;
Marcus 2012), I “just” wanted to tell a story, one that
obviously drew on factual elements, such as interview
fragments or photographs, but still: a story.
What was clear from the beginning, though, was
that I saw these six circles as the sketchy contours of
a moral universe, and that I wanted to paint a more
nuanced—realist—picture of daily life in Kaoko. I wanted
to move beyond the hollow antagonism of “modern”
and “traditional” and illustrate how Hyamakuma’s
sketch also implied a particular understanding of, for
instance, gender, or the body. It also implied a particular
understanding of ancestors and of the future, not as an
idealized essence but as a moral horizon against which
received wisdom and the contemporary challenges
brought about by pervasive social, economic, and eco-
logical change are weighed and acted upon. If there is a
message that underlies this experiment, it is that, para-
phrasing Bruno Latour (1993), Himba have never been
traditional. Instead, as Paul Rabinow (1975, 1) stated:
192    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 33 Number 2 Fall 2017
Tradition is a moving image of the past. When a
culture stops moving, when its structures of belief
no longer offer a means to integrate, create, and
make meaningful new experiences, then a process
of alienation begins. Tradition is opposed not to
modernity but to alienation.
Photography
These meandering thoughts cross-­ cut with other con-
cerns, including my own struggle with photography. I
soon realized that pictures have particular meanings in
the villages and towns of Kaoko, and even when consid-
ering that local visuality is changing, many Kaokolanders
are rather suspicious of photography. This contributed to
my own discomfort in taking and showing photographs
for various reasons, including a lack of talent. At the
same time, I realized that what and how I photographed
had changed. One of my unfinished projects, then, was to
document how this shift reflected a changing theoretical
horizon and research interest. This shift, this journey, is
the travelogue the title of this piece is referring to.
What also contributed to my discomfort was, as a
Namibian colleague expressed it, “I always get a little
nervous when people bring up the Ovahimba.”1 In the
public imagination, Himba women and men are often
exoticized as the inhabitants of a timeless niche carved
out in the African landscape, idealized as the perfect
noble savage or demonized as outdated and primitive.
These representations go back a long way and are them-
selves the product of racism and colonialism (for criti-
cal appraisals, see Bollig and Heinemann-­Bollig 2002;
Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes 1999; Henrichsen 2000;
Rizzo 2005). Women in particular are being objectified
as a tourism commodity or, conversely, by Namibia’s
urban elites, as an object of intervention to emanci-
pate, convert, or develop. One returning question then
is how, despite one’s intentions perhaps, one can avoid
that photographs will be interpreted along the lines of
the established canon, as “othering”? These questions
are obviously nothing new. It remains, however, a con-
tinuing source of frustration that these insights fail
to percolate into the public imagination. How do you
avoid, to borrow the words of Alma Gottlieb (1997, 1),
that findings are “dumbed down” when trying to reach
Steven Van Wolputte is professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Anthropological Research
in Africa (IARA), KU Leuven. His research concentrates on northern Namibia, and he has published in the fields of
material and popular culture, political anthropology, and the anthropology of the body. His most recent project on
the “Politics of Love” hones in on how urban development affects expectations of the future and intimate relation-
ships in a context of uncertainty.
a wider audience? Could a more narrative ethnography
contribute to the dissemination of scholarly insights?
Drawing a Narrative
Hyamakuma’s drawing underlined the collaborative
character of ethnography, and also forced me to look
at my photographs, field drawings, and notes in dif-
ferent ways (see Causey 2016; Ingold 2011). In that
sense, drawing also started to function as a heuristic
device. For instance, I started to wonder how I could
represent the ancestors in a way that does justice to
this ageing man’s worldview. After all, Hyamakuma’s
drawing visualized a form of knowing: the ancestors
are real, and are as much a part of society as are the
living. But how do you communicate this? Taking this
idea one step further: can drawing—as an ethnographic
genre—contribute to knowledge?2 Undoubtedly, it can
lead to understanding, but would this be sufficient for
it to rank alongside more traditional scientific outputs?
Building on Didier Fassin’s (2014, 41) reading of Proust:
can drawing be truer than more conventional—more
realist—depictions, such as photographs or statistics?
For Fassin, reality and truth are concepts in permanent
tension. The former refers to facts; the latter, however,
refers to the experience of life. So, can line drawings be
closer to experience than photorealism (see Bray 2015)?
Drawing forces you to more consciously frame, add,
delete, arrange, and combine visual elements (which I
tried to emphasize by using heavy, black frames rather
than the more traditional white spacing—the “gutter”—
between panels). Compared with, for instance, photog-
raphy, it is less detached (Bray 2015, 120) and allows
you to bring in semantic relief (Causey 2016, 8), to
highlight specific details or manipulate the background.
But is this not rather a difference of degree than one of
kind? After all, when photographing or filming you also
frame and compose, zoom and create (an excellent and
confronting example of this in the context of Kaoko is
the film Authenticized, Kraak 2013). Likewise, when you
insert direct speech or a diary excerpt in your text, you
also select, translate, and edit. Is the latter then funda-
mentally different from composing a fictional dialogue
based on interviews and conversations you had?
For the record: I do think there are significant dif-
ferences between fiction and nonfiction, and that these

come with important ethical and epistemological impli-
cations. When writing an ethnography, for instance,
you create a persona, but you cannot invent a partici-
pant; you may edit an interview, but you cannot make
it up. One of the motives behind some of the aesthetic
choices in Six Circles, such as opting for stylized draw-
ings instead of a more realist style, was then precisely to
underline the fictional character of the narrative: even
though perhaps I am fascinated by the “chimeras and
monsters” (Pyne 2009, 33) born from the cross-­breeding
of fiction and nonfiction, they also frighten me.
Masking
This fear of creating just such a chimera was also one
of the reasons to opt for making the actors in the no-
vella wear masks, even though people in Kaoko have no
tradition in that sense. Neither do tourists nor filmmak-
ers. I drew inspiration not only from a long-­standing
tradition of “masking” in comics (Spider-­Man, or Will
Eisner’s Spirit) and graphic novels (such as Sokal’s Ca-
nardo), but also from the work by Sammy Baloji (who
photographed his subjects wearing African masks) or by
the Nigerian artist Laolu Senbanjo (who body-­paints his
models with white line drawings).3
But the masks I drew also serve a purpose beyond
a mere aesthetic choice. First, some of my older inter-
locutors expressed their reservations about being por-
trayed (see Six Circles, page 2), so I needed to find a
way of picturing them that would take their objec-
tions into account. At the same time, I also wanted
the drawings to be somewhat realistic and not too
cartoonish, because African characters—as quite a few
comics on my shelf illustrate, including a few titles
set in Kaoko—are all too often presented in a rather
caricatured way. Scott McCloud (1993) points out that
what he refers to as “masking”—the iconic abstraction
of figures and especially faces so common in graphic
novels and (early) mangas—is a crucial feature of
graphic story-­telling. Abstracting facial features, espe-
cially when set against more realistic backgrounds,
allows the audience to get involved in the story and
to identify with the characters, to “mask themselves
in a character” (McCloud 1993, 43). In his words, “by
de-­emphasizing the appearance of the physical world
in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in
the world of concepts” (McCloud 1993, 41). So as part
of my graphic experiment, I decided to interpret this
concept rather literally. By using masks rather than
faces, I wanted to invite the reader to get involved
in—get drawn into—the dialogue and visual narrative.
Six Notes Van Wolputte   193
Masking, then, fulfills much of the same function as
when ethnographers recall an anecdote to introduce a
persona (Narayan 2007, 134) or character (Pyne 2009,
156) in their accounts.
Augmented Reality
A final thought relates to the way I worked. First, I
made rough sketches based on the pictures I took over
the years. These sketches were scanned and printed on
drawing paper to be inked, which often took several at-
tempts. While inking, I added (or left out) particular de-
tails such as the masks discussed above. The ink draw-
ings were again scanned and imported into Photoshop
as different layers. With these layers, I then assembled
the page, adding lettering and other graphic elements
such as frames or video stills.
This process, especially then the adding of details
while inking, or the montage of visual and textual ele-
ments, reminded me of the term augmented reality, usu-
ally understood as adding an additional layer of infor-
mation onto a preexisting image, in real time, with the
aid of technological means such as artificial intelligence
and computer imaging, in order to enhance representa-
tions by making them more interactive.
This idea of augmented reality struck me as an apt
working metaphor to describe what I was doing. By, as
it were, overlaying—or enhancing—more or less realist
representations such as photographs and early sketches
with additional layers of interpretation and representa-
tion, such as masks and horns, I wanted to break open
the walls around the assemblage of meanings (see Jef-
fery 2016, 57) surrounding more common, stereotypical
representations of Africa and Himba. I wanted to make
the reader step into the moral universe Hyamakuma had
laid out when he drew his six circles.
Notes
1 artha Bannikov, personal communication, March 26, 2017.
M
2It goes without saying that drawing also is an established
methodological tool (see Causey 2016; Johnson et al. 2012).
3A similar technique is commonplace in graphic work that
flies under the banner of Afro-­futurism and African specula-
tive fiction. Nubiamancy, for instance, is an online collection
of artwork by African artists curated by Assante Massawe; it
can be found on Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr. For a back-
ground, see https://squidmag.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/
nubiamancy-black-magic-art-asante/#more-1713 [accessed
June 26, 2017].
194    VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 33 Number 2 Fall 2017
References
Bollig, Michael. 1997. When War Came the Cattle Slept: Him-
ba Oral Traditions. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Bollig, Michael. 1998. “The Colonial Encapsulation of the North-­
Western Namibian Pastoral Economy.” Africa 68: 506–36.
Bollig, Michael, and Heike Heinemann-Bollig. 2002. “Nomadic
Savages, Ochre People and Heroic Herders: Visual Presenta-
tions of the Himba of Namibia’s Kaokoland.” Visual Anthro-
pology 15: 267–312.
Bray, Zoe. 2015. “Anthropology with a Paintbrush: Naturalist-­
Realist Painting as ‘Thick Description’.” Visual Anthropology
Review 31: 119–33.
Causey, Andrew. 2016. Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethno-
graphic Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Fabian, Johannes. 2014. “Ethnography and Intersubjectivi-
ty: Loose Ends.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4:
199–209.
Fassin, Didier. 2014. “True Life, Real Lives: Revisiting the
Boundaries between Ethnography and Fiction.” American
Ethnologist 41: 40–55.
Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cul-
tural Anthropology 27: 446–64.
Friedman, John T. 2011. Imagining the Post-apartheid State:
An Ethnographic Account of Namibia. New York: Berghahn.
Gewald, Jan-Bart. 2011. “On Becoming a Chief in the Kaok-
oveld, Colonial Namibia, 1916–25.” Journal of African His-
tory 52: 23–42.
Gottlieb, Anna. 1997. “The Perils of Popularizing Anthropolo-
gy.” Anthropology Today 13: 1–2.
Hartmann, Wolfram, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes, eds.
1999. The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of
Namibian History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Henrichsen, Dag. 2000. “Pilgrimages into Kaoko: Herrensa-
faris, 4x4s and Settler Illusions.” In New Notes on Kaoko,
edited by G. Miescher and D. Henrichsen, 159–85. Basel:
Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
Ingold, Tim, ed. 2011. Redrawing Anthropology: Materials,
Movements, Lines. London: Routledge.
Jeffery, Scott. 2016. The Posthuman Body in Superhero Com-
ics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Johnson, Ginger A., Anne E. Pfister, and Cecilia Vindro-
la-Padros. 2012. “Drawings, Photos, and Performances:
Using Visual Methods with Children.” Visual Anthropology
Review 28: 164–78.
Kraak, Marijn, dir. 2013. Authenticized. Amsterdam: Zuis Pro-
ductions. DVD.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Marcus, George E. 2012. “The Legacies of Writing Culture and
the Near Future of the Ethnographic Form: A Sketch.” Cul-
tural Anthropology 27: 427–45.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible
Art. New York: HarperCollins.
Narayan, Kirin. 2007. “Tools to Shape Texts: What Creative
Nonfiction Can Offer Ethnography.” Anthropology and Hu-
manism 32: 130–44.
Pyne, Stephen J. 2009. Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing
History and Other Serious Nonfiction. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Rabinow, Paul. 1975. Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form
and Historical Change in Morocco. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Rizzo, Lorena. 2005. “A Glance into the Camera: Gen-
dered Visions of Historical Photography in Kaoko
(North-­Western Namibia).” Gender and History 17:
682–713.
Rizzo, Lorena. 2012. Gender and Colonialism: A History of
Kaoko in North-Western Namibia, 1870s–1950s. Basel:
Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
Stoller, Paul. 2016. The Sorcerer’s Burden: The Ethnographic
Saga of a Global Family. Cham, Switzerland: Springer In-
ternational.
Taussig, Michael. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Field-
work Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Van Wolputte, Steven. 2016. “Sex in Troubled Times: Mor-
al Panic, Polyamory and Freedom in North-­West Namibia.”
Anthropology Southern Africa 39: 31–45.