Undergraduate Research: An Archive - 2021 Program
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Lindsay Emi ’21<br />
ENGLISH<br />
Certificate in Environmental Studies<br />
ENVIRONMENTAL<br />
HUMANITIES AND CULTURE<br />
THESIS TITLE<br />
Commodities and Curios<br />
in the American West:<br />
Postcard Photography<br />
and the <strong>An</strong>ti-Civilizing<br />
Activism of George<br />
Wharton James<br />
(1858-1923)<br />
ADVISER<br />
Michael Dickman,<br />
Lecturer in Creative<br />
Writing and the Lewis<br />
Center for the Arts<br />
I conducted original research on George Wharton<br />
James (1858-1923), an itinerant preacher,<br />
writer, photographer and anthropologist. My<br />
particular focus was his photography archived<br />
in Princeton’s Special Collections, of which<br />
I used his work with the Luiseño Indians in<br />
Southern California as a case study. James<br />
visited the Soboba Reservation in 1910 intending<br />
to collect the Luiseño Indians’ mythologies,<br />
artisanal knowledge and accounts of how they<br />
were affected by the federal government’s<br />
“civilizing” projects consisting of compulsory<br />
education and commercial agriculture. James<br />
had a unique perspective as an environmentalist.<br />
Unlike John Muir and other conservationists,<br />
he admired and romanticized Native Americans<br />
for their “primitive” lifestyles. His artistic and<br />
anthropological practices served as a form of<br />
public activism, but also were built upon fraught<br />
cultural fantasies of the “noble savage,” the<br />
commodification of Indigenous individuals’<br />
photographs as postcards, and his intrusive and<br />
sometimes unwelcome presence as a visitor on<br />
reservations.<br />
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