International Forum on Audio-Visual Research - Jahrbuch des Phonogrammarchivs 7, pp. 30-45, 2017/04/10
In this contribution, I will discuss the anthropological surveys of prisoners of war conducted by Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921) during World War I under the premises of contemporary atavistic theory. I will first address how the “remote” peoples of Russia, India or Northern Africa concentrated in the camps promised a “rewarding” research opportunity for the rising discipline of anthropology, and will then show how previous anthropological approaches were challenged by the confrontation with contemporary populations perceived as “racially” highly heterogeneous. Second, I will look into Rudolf Pöch’s attempt at “de-mixing” the internees under anthropological scrutiny into “pure original types” on the basis of a previous Entmischung concept by his teacher Felix von Luschan (1854–1924), and discuss the vital role of anthropological photography in the reconstruction of the evolutionary past from spontaneous “revenants”, producing a visible atavistic body in the first place. Third, I will present a current collaboration with Armenologist Jasmine Dum-Tragut on an exemplary repatriation of Pöch’s photographies of Armenian prisoners of war from the archive of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna to their communities of origin under the postcolonial premise of reframing their abusive production conditions towards “other ways of seeing”.
Keywords: Prisoners of war, anthropology, Rudolf Pöch, Felix von Luschan, revenants, atavistic theory
