The cover photograph of Savage Preservation captures an unusual gathering. Frozen in time, and subsequently consigned to the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian, three visiting representatives of Panama's Cuna people (or tule) pose with the linguist and ethnologist John Peabody Harrington. At the centre of the tableau is a heavy-duty dictaphone. In late 1924 – the date of the photo shoot –sound recording was by no means the stable pursuit we know today, achieved and perfected, but rather one that would continue to evolve as acoustic techniques gave way to a new, electrified system of microphony and amplification. After months of research in the laboratories of Western Electric, and a series of consultations and demos, commercial outfits such as the Victor Talking Machine Company began to cultivate the electrical method, coaxing into its Camden studios the likes of Billy Murray and the saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft, both of whom contributed to Victor's first electrical disc in February 1925. Something revolutionary was afoot, and yet to look back at the cover photograph, with its clunky dictaphone and besuited sound artists, you'd never know that things were about to change. Harrington and his guests look serene and strangely composed in the moment of their collaboration, apparently deaf to the news that their means and very record of interaction – the mouthpiece, wax cylinder, and unwieldy headphones – had already begun to slip even further into the technological past.

Brian Hochman is especially sensitive to ironies of this kind in Savage Preservation, his new study of ethnography and media innovation. He calls it “the ephemerality of permanence, a fundamental paradox of modern media history that has become increasingly conspicuous in the digital age” (186). The privilege of hindsight is put to startling use by Hochman, tracking as he does the many forms, tools, and devices of audiovisual preservation that emerged in parallel with the project of “salvage ethnography” at the turn of the twentieth century. Like all assiduous historians in this expanding field, Hochman engages in a recuperative mission of his own, treading a fine line between nostalgia and the scepticism appropriate to media archaeology. As well as singling out the technologies that are commonly thought to have won the evolutionary struggle – photography, phonography, and cinema – Hochman is not afraid to get his hands dirty, since unearthing the methods of anthropology at the fin de siècle also involves assenting to the “messiness” of inchoate processes and forgotten prototypes such as the “autochrome” or the Cherokee syllabary, which migrated gradually from jottings to lithograph. Hochman also has an ear for a kind of definitional messiness, so there are words and phrases here that never made it into general circulation, but which once seemed precise and serviceable, like Harrington's “sonoscript” (32) and Garrick Mallery's “evanescent air-pictures” (45). In recovering such curiosities, Hochman uncovers a group of quiet but determined innovators, whose contributions to (and in) the field have yet to be fully reckoned. True, the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers surface now and again in the course of discussion, but this is really a book about all the unsung heroes who tried, often problematically, to make the most of media technologies before they had been honed and sold to the wider public. Long before the apparatus could strictly endure the expedition, a cylinder phonograph found its way into Jesse Walter Fewkes's luggage in 1890, thereby enabling the Harvard man to garner a collection of stories, songs, and sayings from two Passamaquoddy elders in Calais, Maine. For Fred Payne Clatworthy, too, whose snapshots of Colorado caught the eye of National Geographic's Gilbert Grosvenor in the 1920s, the possibilities of autochrome far outshone the technology's limitations, numerous as they were. That Clatworthy's experiments in colour often fell short of National Geographic's specifications is proof enough that a documentary-style ethnology, particularly of the kind proposed by John Grierson in 1926, was always a labour of love.

In the spirit of recognizing the method in the madness of these pioneers, Hochman goes to some lengths to achieve a synoptic view of his material, and so to construct a narrative that complicates the orthodoxy of historical parallelism.Footnote ¹ While nodding, then, to the truism that “cultural evolution reinforces media evolution, and vice versa” (71), Hochman is more often inclined to suggest that ethnology actually supplied a formative impetus for media history as we know it. In his first chapter, which centres on John Wesley Powell and the US Bureau of Ethnology, Hochman suggests that Powell's desire to codify a phonetic alphabet for Native American languages had a long-lasting and profound effect on “the future of human communication technology,” such that the bureau should be considered an originating influence, and not merely an ancillary one: “Indian linguistics,” we are told, “might even be said to have inaugurated the field of media studies itself” (5). As tentative as this proposition is made to sound, there is no disguising the shift into a passive voice, or the fact that a lot hangs on that “might.” A similar sleight of hand can be detected in passages like the following one, in which Hochman speculates about those who agreed to participate in Hugh Lenox Scott's motion picture The Indian Sign Language (1930):

Hochman mounts an admirable attempt here to read the body language of persons who seem to revive every time we set the footage rolling, but who nevertheless remain mysterious to us. The doubts I have, such as they are, rest on the dicey effort to get inside the heads of Scott's mime artists, who “appear” to have future audiences in mind, and who “may” have warmed to the idea of becoming cinematic subjects. There is just so much guesswork involved, and at times it would be as well to preserve the grey area that sets these shadowy figures apart, rather than seeking to flesh out their supposed apprehensions and agenda. As Hochman himself confesses, such scenes of mediation “may have resulted from a shared desire for monetary compensation,” but they may also “represent the result of ephemeral motivations and moments of chance that aren't available to history” (174).

That some stories must slip away untold may seem an inconvenient truth, but such ellipses and blind spots tend to enrich books like Savage Preservation. The effect of reaching Hochman's “Postscript” is a feeling that you've gazed for some time down a fragile kaleidoscope, seduced by the illusion that there may be a pattern, but convinced finally that we must go on for the moment, tumbling through our materials and lighting upon details as and when they click into place. Savage Preservation does not always supply the view you're expecting, and its representations of a messy and thoroughly mediated ethnographic history are the finer for it.