Thus, we are "faced with the evidence" of our stay among the Maring and with the question of what is to be said about these photographs now, thirty three years later?

I notice that I still acutely feel the tension between the overwhelming detail and particularity of lived life and the analytic catagories needed to shape any analysis or representation of an ethnographic nature. I was caught in the midst of this disciplinary dilemma (or is it simply an existential given) when I was actually in the field. Caught, drowned, even overwhelmed.

They do not demand response.

They can be packed away in their manila envelopes
and put in a drawer in a way that on-going, surrounding life never can be.

Furthermore, in the intervening years, I have learned a number of things about working with photographs, techniques of looking/thinking which allow me simultaneously to distance myself personally while bringing to awareness observations which, previously, had remained at an unconscious level.

Observations emerge from and into the light of a disciplinary discourse, or, as one might say with today's vocabulary, the observations and the disciplinary discourse are mutually constitutive.