#ethnographer

Ansky was, by all accounts, an alchemist, interested in the extension of life beyond death. With good reason, he felt: the steel horses come! They come, and they take the bodies of the Jews too early. Too early for what, some felt? And he was a worldly man, not a pious one—this, at least, they knew. Wasn't he playing God with the Jews? What business does a freethinker have over the soul of a pious man? Judgment was better left to the Baal, and obedience to the man. We'd learned this lesson before. 

So the Jews of the Pale went, day after day, husbands to their schools to teach  the young men, and women to work in the homes or away. They were like little bedouin tents that had been allowed to think their canvas had become wood, that there was permanence in their situation. Ansky knew that the forces that had blown the Jews from Jerusalem were winds now, and that the winds were always blowing—and would come again. If it should be, it will be, they thought, and until then, they prayed, and their lives seemed built for the very act of traveling (being pushed around, Ansky thought; wandering, said they): the Jews were much like a turtle, and they could, if needed, carry their homes upon their back, for what was their home besides their ark, the torah within? Each community needed only that, and that alone would do. Sure, they could bring along some candles and clothes, but to keep going they needed nothing more than the Israelites who cleaved from Egypt had needed; and perhaps they could need nothing less. Wandering. Would they wander again? Wander, like breadcrumbs thrown on the Day of Atonement—sins cast away into moving waters by believers in the hope of being inscribed in the Book of Life in the coming year? Wander, like Moses had when he was placed in the tide of that Egyptian river—wandering, to be taken into the hands of some unwitting gentile, some benevolent gentile, some brittle gentile—were any hands the hands of God? Wander like the Baal himself had said: “You shall be as numerous as the stars;” perhaps we should have known what the Holy Diasporist meant... When was the last time you touched a star? Yet they are always there; you know them but you leave them, and you hope they'll leave you alone—and they are numerous, but they are rare, and they are infinite, omnipresent but visible only sometimes. And I have heard that all stars are falling, and what we see is simply each star's tail as it makes its way towards The World to Come. Stars like sand—stars so many you see them for what they aren't—stars so many, so small, so fragile, so—Jewish. Such stars, were there one whisper, they would all be blown away.

S. Ansky stood atop the Tower of Paris and he knew what must be done. He would do it as he had been taught as a child, taking the crayon and rubbing it against the paper that rests on the bark. He wanted more than anything to simply reach out his hand with a vial large enough to scoop up all the sand, but stars burn too bright, even in exile. Even in diaspora; and you mustn't look a star straight in its face; rather, like crayon against paper against a coin, you etch what it gives off, standing lightyears away but letting the light make marks, letting the light take time, letting the mark be made, letting the making make. 

"Ethnography (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures.[1] Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study.[2] Ethnography is also a type of social research involving the examination of the behaviour of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behaviour.[3]

As a form of inquiry, ethnography relies heavily on participant observation—on the researcher participating in the setting or with the people being studied, at least in some marginal role, and seeking to document, in detail, patterns of social interaction and the perspectives of participants, and to understand these in their local contexts. It had its origin in social and cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century, but spread to other social science disciplines, notably sociology, during the course of that century."

Unidentified room of curios and merchandise. 1908

This collection contains approximately 10,000 photographs, negatives, and ephemera created or compiled by Grace Nicholson (1877-1948), a collector and dealer of Native American and Asian arts and crafts in Pasadena, California. The bulk of the collection dates from 1903 to the 1920s and includes photograph albums and individual photographs with views of Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, California, and the Southwest of North America; pictures documenting Nicholson's basket-collecting trips, primarily between 1902 and 1912; images of Nicholson's stores and residences in Pasadena, including the building of the "Grace Nicholson Treasure House of Oriental Art" in the mid-1920s; and personal photographs of Nicholson, her family, friends, and associates.