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Cameron Jamie's art has been described as a form of 'backyard anthropology'.1 His attraction to quirky pageants, ceremonies, contests and other commemorative or group activities is transformed into multi-media performances, films, drawings and object installations that are fascinating visual records of what makes a givenculture tick. Favouring certain aspects of lowbrow and popular culture, such as amateur and professional wrestling on the American West Coast or European Christmas traditions, he actively cultivates peculiar situations that are indicative of deeply rooted beliefs or the hierarchies and meanings of collective behaviour. Jamie, however, is no amateur social scientist doing fieldwork with the required clinical objectivity; nor does he mock or judge with any sense of superiority. In fact, one has the impression that he often identifies, or at least sympathises, with his subjects, willingly acting as a witness to and sometime instigator of the strange pantomimes that are as revealing about his own predilections as they are about the society from which they come.
The notions of 'distancing', exoticism, representation of
the other, and difference are inflected, reworked, readjusted as a
function of criteria no longer geographical or cultural but
methodological and even epistemological in nature: to make foreign
what appears familiar; to study the rituals and sacred sites of
contemporary institutions with the minute attention of an 'exotic'
ethnographer, and using his methods, to become observers observing
those others who are ourselves - and at the limit, this other who
is oneself...
Jean Jamin2
As an American living in France, Jamie already wears the mantle of outsider, one who is able to observe cultural specificities while remaining at a comfortable distance. His expatriate status also
