Nico de Klerk (Utrecht University) and Andrea Stultiens (Hanze University of Applied Sciences)
Paul Julien: A “Seasonal Worker” in the “Contact Zone”
Notes on our research, screening, and performance that were to have been presented at the Orphan Film Symposium / Eye International Conference in May 2020.
Nico de Klerk:
Our topic is rooted in research that we, unbeknown to either of us until recently, are doing on the photographic and cinematographic legacy of Dutch, unaffiliated anthropologist-cum-filmmaker/photographer Paul Julien. Mine as part of the research project ‘Projecting knowledge’, on the use of the optical lantern in academic teaching and outreach, Andrea’s as archive activation of Julien’s legacy in and through artistic practice.
The current pandemic and the lockdown that came in its wake has interrupted my research, insofar as it concerned archival access, on Julien’s slides and their use in his public illustrated lectures. What I present here instead is a brief introduction to his career and the circumstances under which it took place. For those interested, more information, specifically about Julien’s film footage, can be found in my recent essay, “Paul Julien: An Intensely Public Private Filmmaker,” Film History 31.4 (2019).
Paul Julien was born in 1901 and passed away in 2001, one month shy of his 100th birthday. He completed his higher education as a graduate in mathematics and the sciences at the then State University of Utrecht, in 1930, and received his doctoral degree in chemistry there in 1933; he had also taken a few courses in anthropology. For most of the 1930s he worked as what he vaguely called “an assistant” at his alma mater, a position that allowed him to undertake the research expeditions that would make his a household name in the Netherlands.
Initially, in the early 1930s, these expeditions focused on the Iberian peninsula and Morocco. But from 1932 onwards he had set his sights on various regions in equatorial Africa. Sponsored by organizations, companies, and universities, in money, in kind or in exchange for product endorsement, these trips followed a well-defined program of ethno-serological research to chart the—until then sparsely recorded—distribution of blood types on the continent for possible “anthropological characterization”; at the same time, he also collected his subjects’ fingerprints. Julien’s research particularly targeted (surmised) pygmoid peoples in today’s Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, or Uganda, but also other indigenous populations that were considered to be “unmixed”, in west and east Africa as well as in Angola and today’s Namibia. However, almost as soon as he began this project peer comments on his research results pointed out that the distribution of blood types, given their global spread, was insufficient to function as a racial criterion.[1] But Julien was not a person to be deterred easily and he basically continued the same type of work for the next thirty years.
Despite various forms of support Julien’s research expeditions appear to have been a largely self-initiated mission. In fact, after he left the University of Utrecht, in 1939, to become a high school chemistry teacher, he continued these expeditions during the summer holidays as an unaffiliated researcher during the postwar years until 1962, when he completed the 23rd and last of his African sojourns. From all these trips Julien returned with photographs and film footage. They were input for the slides and reels that illustrated his many public lectures for general audiences (and a small number of semi-public, more scientifically detailed, and unpaid ones that fulfilled stipulations in the agreements to support his work and/or served to keep him in the professional spotlight).
Throughout his lecturing career, from the late 1920s through the mid-1960s he toured with these materials. Some lecture titles were on his ‘repertoire’ for years; one, titled ‘Pygmies in equatorial Africa’ recurred in announcements for approximately 20 years and, judging from their reviews, did not seem to have changed significantly. With respect to the slides, and insofar as far as newspapers cared to mention them, he appeared to have spoken during their projection. This agrees with the so-called academic practice of integrating projected slides and lecture. It was around the turn of the 20th century that this practice had become dominant in public illustrated lectures in France that served as an example to then recently founded Dutch educational and edifying organizations. By the time Julien entered the lecture circuit, in the late 1920s, it seemed to have become standard, a plausible reason why newspaper reports didn’t routinely mention it. After these lectures’ intermissions Julien screened his film reels, sometimes enlivened by sound recordings (albeit not of his own making) played on the phonograph.
Even though Julien regularly appeared on platforms throughout the country, it was his series of radio causeries, intermittently broadcast between 1932 and 1961, that gave him his largest audience and national exposure. They undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of his book Campfires Along the Equator, published in 1940, which sold over 100,000 copies. Moreover, since the early 1930s it was common for newspapers to report on his departure for and, especially, return from an expedition, the latter commonly in the form of an extensive and widely syndicated interview.
Working in Africa, between 1932 and 1962, meant working in colonial territory. As a matter of fact, his changes of terrain in the postwar years roughly held pace with decolonization. For his last expeditions, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Julien chose as his destinations Angola, which officially remained under Portuguese rule until as late as 1975, and today’s Namibia, which only became independent from South Africa in 1990. There he did research among K’ung isolates. It was during the time of these late expeditions that Julien explicitly redefined his work as a form of salvage anthropology (even though he merely preserved records of physical traces: blood specimens and fingerprints). This, he said, was in line with a resolution of the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, in Philadelphia, in September 1956, to “stimulate anthropological research on populations whose culture and languages are threatened with change, disintegration or extinction.”[2]
Nevertheless, this statement was somewhat disingenuous, as liberation conflicts, particularly in the Belgian Congo and British-ruled Kenya, had made further research on pygmoid people impossible. Moreover, his claim that the K’ung isolates were “in many respects unknown” ignored the work of, among others, John Marshall and Robert Gardner, whose film footage had been shown at the selfsame congress.
Besides being armed with letters of recommendation by institutes, governments, and companies, what was most essential for the accomplishment of Julien’s research were the colonial administrative and local missionary infrastructures. Given the time limits set by his regular jobs, obtaining data was greatly enhanced by these networks’ provision of carriers, escorts, and/or research subjects. Julien’s work, then, was not dependent on anthropology’s distinctive type of fieldwork: sustained participant observation. His sojourns commonly lasted no longer than a month or two (confirmed by news reports of departure and return), often shorter. This may be the reason that, for all the storied adventures in books or lectures, his descriptions remained ‘thin’ rather than ‘thick’. Physical anthropology was his absolute core business. This, I venture, is the reason that his attitude overall remained distant and superior. Despite occasional moments of deeply felt sympathy and connection, notably with his “little brown friends” among various pygmoid peoples, at the same time he had no qualms about robbing a skeleton for the Utrecht University Museum. Science came before everything.
In the first chapter of his bestseller Campfires Along the Equator Julien states: “Africa has its mysteries: some are frightening, other ones gruesome, but to us, Westerners, whenever we are given the opportunity to lift the veil of secretiveness, they appear to be merely trivial and insignificant.”[3]
In light of the above and what I have learned about Julien over recent times, I consider this typical of a fundamentally groundless view of, and condescending approach towards, local populations and their societies. In the actions and judgments described in his books, African indigenous populations—unlike colonial officials or missionaries—do not have much of a life of their own, seem not to have thoughts, motives, or behaviors of their own, except those that Julien attributes to them. In other words, whatever they do or say he substitutes with something more ‘rational’. A quote from a fictitious dialog [with a graduate student] in sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Re-assembling the Social (Oxford UP, 2007) could actually be a question that one should pose to Julien and his work, “Why would you be the one doing the intelligent stuff while they would act like a bunch of morons?” (150).
— Nico de Klerk
[1] J.C. Lamster, “Verslag der ethnologen bijeenkomst te Amsterdam,” Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap [Report of the ethnologists meeting in Amsterdam, Journal of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society, no. 51](1934): 466-68.
[2] Typescript, “Conclusions and resolutions of the Congress” (Sep. 9, 1956), [5]. Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam. Paul Julien Documentatie, NFM 054000702, box 25, folder ‘Philadelphia Congress.’
[3] Paul Julien, Kampvuren langs den evenaar: herinneringen aan tien jaar bloedonderzoek in West- en centraal Afrika [Campfires along the equator: memories of ten years of serological research in west and central Africa] (Eindhoven: De Pelgrim, 1943 [1940]), 23.
The Digital Library for Dutch Literature (DBNL) has a downloadable PDF edition (2008) of Paul Julien’s Kampvuren langs den evenaa.
First edition (1940) of the often reprinted book; posted by the website Africa in the Photobook.
Nico de Klerk is the author of Showing and Telling: Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public Accountability (2017). A film historical researcher and archivist, he is currently a postdoctoral researcher for the project “Projecting Knowledge: The Magic Lantern as a tool for Mediated Science Communication in the Netherlands, 1880–1940,” at Utrecht University.
Introduction to the film edit
by Andrea Stultiens
In the film edit to which this text is an introduction I use my artistic practice to intervene in digitized versions of Julien’s ‘orphaned’ film as a way of investigating it while taking Latour’s question into account. I activate parts of Paul Julien’s legacy with members of communities on and from the African continent. Most recently I did this with the material shot by Julien in Sierra Leone in 1934.
In our initial plan this original 16mm film — called in English Between the Nile and the Congo: From Cairo to Ituri Forest and Mount Kilimanjaro (1934) — now in the care of Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, would be projected while I added contemporary responses, both visually and verbally. This is, under the current circumstances, not possible. What you will see [soon] is an edit of digitized film footage with added photographs produced by Julien as well as with recent recordings made in Sierra Leone. The digitization of the film is partly done by Cor Adolfs, who worked with Julien during the 1990s, and partly by Eye. The difference in tone and the partial presence of the Eye logo make the different modes of migration from the material (celluloid) realm to its current state apparent. The insertion of photographs, lantern slides, and recently produced film clips alludes to the ‘migration’ of both observed and mediated realities through time and in different geographical and cultural settings.
Here I report on my findings in a letter, with ‘Paul Julien’ himself as its addressee, that accompanies my edit.
Dear Dr. Julien #9 – Orphan Film Symposium
May 24, 2020
More
Andrea Stultiens, “A Letter to Dr. Paul Julien. Pondering the Photographic Legacy of a Dutch ‘Explorer of Africa,‘” Trigger no. 1 (2020).
Andrea Stultiens, Reframing PJU — Dear Dr. Julien #1, Introduction (2017), video, 4 min. Includes fragments from a documentary by Cor Adolfse with Hans de Bruin.