Kien Ket Lim writes: “Soon all the mimicry talk will get
churned out, to be supported by the illusion that “the colonizer’s gaze” can be
thwarted by the “reverse gaze” qua the “mimicry” the natives allegedly put on.”
(p. 53) Here, Lim points not only the duality of interaction, but further at
the degree to which seemingly “objective” observation may affect the dynamic of
the observed culture; that is, we have discussed so far, a common theme, how
enthographic observation can inherently not be invisible, can be the genesis of
distortion in the affect of the observed, yet this conclusion might not be
totally brought to its terminus – that is, how is history itself
effected/distorted? Given that the observed are captured seemingly out of time
– that is, in a sense memorialized in some way, made to be immutable – how does
that affect the transience of action/ritual and of cultural history itself, of
the “original sin” of the group? Does one sole image substitute the whole host
of others which constitute the affect of the group in its entirely in the gaze
of the observer? Is possible for the gaze of the observed and the gaze of the
observer to be synergistic/mutualistic in some sense, as opposed to an inherent
degree of distance in the relationship of subject and author? Essentially, how
would/does the notion of impermanence attached to ethnographic media and
thereby ethnographic observation affect the observed culture’s own sense of
cultural history and permanence?
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