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The Making of an Ethnographic Film of the Hopi Snake Dance in August 1898: A Reconstruction from the Photographic and Textual Record

This article was prompted by a plate published in the foundational text, Principles of Visual Anthropology, which purports to show a film being made by Thomas Edison of the Snake Dance as performed in the Hopi village of Orayvi, Arizona, in August 1898. This footage is now lost but could still have been one of the first ethnographic films ever made—depending on how one defines “ethnographic.” Here, contesting its attribution to Edison, we seek to reconstruct the content of this footage, drawing on the extensive photographic record made at the event, along with textual accounts by eyewitnesses and contemporary newspaper reports of subsequent screenings of the film material. We conclude by discussing the ethnographic status of the film footage, which also included sequences of a Navajo “tournament,” shot in the course of the filmmakers’ return journey, which foreshadows the tropes of the travelog and the Western movie. We hope that, if this material still exists, by correctly identifying the filmmakers and by describing the content of the footage, this article will help in locating it, particularly given the recent great improvements in the cataloging of and access to early film archives made possible by digital technology.