Transcultural Montage 9780857459657

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility
PART I Montage as an Analytic
CHAPTER 1 Montage and Time Deleuze, Cinema, and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite
CHAPTER 2 Temporal Aesthetics On Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology
CHAPTER 3 All the Difference in the World Liminality, Montage, and the Reinvention of Comparative Anthropology
CHAPTER 4 Into the Gloaming A Montage of the Senses
PART II Montage in Writing
CHAPTER 5 Being a Montage
CHAPTER 6 Smith’s Tour Favela
CHAPTER 7 Labor Days A Non-Linear Narrative of Development
CHAPTER 8 Mind the Gap
PART III Montage in Film
CHAPTER 9 Women in Cities Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930s
CHAPTER 10 Radioglaz and the Global City Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental Montage
CHAPTER 11 Filming in the Light of Memory
CHAPTER 12 Montage as Analysis in Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking From Hunting for Plots Toward Weaving Baskets of Data
CHAPTER 13 In Defense of Observational Cinema The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic Filmmaking
PART IV Montage in Museum Exhibitions
CHAPTER 14 Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond Correspondence
CHAPTER 15 Assembling Bodies Cuts, Clusters, and Juxtapositions
CHAPTER 16 Project Villa Sovietica Clashing Images, Expectations, and Receptions
AFTERWORD The Traffic In Montage, Then and Now
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Transcultural Montage

Transcultural Montage

Edited by

Christian Suhr and

Rane Willerslev

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2013 Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Transcultural montage / edited by Christian Suhr, Rane Willerslev. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-85745-964-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-965-7 (institutional ebook) 1. Ethnology—Philosophy. 2. Ethnology—Authorship. 3. Motion pictures in ethnology. I. Suhr, Christian. GN345.T73 2013 306—dc23 2013005541

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-0-85745-964-0 hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-965-7 institutional ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction. Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr

1

Part I. Montage as an Analytic

17

Chapter 1. Montage and Time: Deleuze, Cinema, and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite Bruce Kapferer

20

Chapter 2. Temporal Aesthetics: On Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology Morten Nielsen

40

Chapter 3. All the Difference in the World: Liminality, Montage, and the Reinvention of Comparative Anthropology Stuart McLean

58

Chapter 4. Into the Gloaming: A Montage of the Senses Andrew Irving

76

Part II. Montage in Writing

97

Chapter 5. Being a Montage Anne Line Dalsgaard

100

Chapter 6. Smith’s Tour Favela Paul Antick

106

Chapter 7. Labor Days: A Non-Linear Narrative of Development Nina Holm Vohnsen

131

Chapter 8. Mind the Gap Karen Lisa Salamon

145

vi • Contents

Part III. Montage in Film

159

Chapter 9. Women in Cities: Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930s Catherine Russell

163

Chapter 10. Radioglaz and the Global City: Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental Montage Julia T. S. Binter

183

Chapter 11. Filming in the Light of Memory Alyssa Grossman

198

Chapter 12. Montage as Analysis in Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking: From Hunting for Plots Toward Weaving Baskets of Data Jakob Kirstein Høgel

213

Chapter 13. In Defense of Observational Cinema: The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic Filmmaking Anna Grimshaw

226

Part IV. Montage in Museum Exhibitions

241

Chapter 14. Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects: Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond Correspondence Peter Bjerregaard

243

Chapter 15. Assembling Bodies: Cuts, Clusters, and Juxtapositions Rebecca Empson Chapter 16. Project Villa Sovietica: Clashing Images, Expectations, and Receptions Alexandra Schüssler and Willem Mes

262

278

Afterword. The Traffic in Montage, Then and Now George E. Marcus

302

Notes on Contributors

308

Index

312

Illustrations

2.1a–c. The changes to Alberto’s and Gito’s plots

44

2.2. The progression of reciprocal exchanges

47

2.3. The elicitory space between “newcomer” and “buyer.” The triangles indicate the points at which the opposite identity is canceled out

52

3.1. Thingvellir, Iceland, 2009. Photograph by the author

58

4.1. The Artist’s Mother, John Dugdale, 1996

76

4.2. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793

85

4.3. John Dugdale, My Spirit Tried to Leave Me, 1994

87

4.4. Shade of blue as seen in Derek Jarman’s film Blue, 1993

89

4.5. Empire Chair in the Gloaming, John Dugdale, 1994

89

4.6. Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. © The Estate of Francis Bacon

91

6.1–15. Smith’s Tour Favela, photo essay by Paul Antick

107–29

9.1–2. Screenshots from Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

165

9.3. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934)

170

9.4. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934)

171

9.5. Screenshot from from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931) quoted in Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934)

172

9.6. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934)

173

9.7. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

174

9.8. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

174

9.9. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

175

9.10. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

176

9.11. Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse (William Wellman, 1931)

178

9.12. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934)

179

11.1. Screenshot from In the Light of Memory (Alyssa Grossman, 2010)

201

viii  •  Illustrations

11.2–13.  Screenshots from In the Light of Memory (Alyssa Grossman, 2010)

202–203

14.1.  The monographic exhibition. From Hall of African Peoples, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Photograph by the author

245

14.2.  The naturalistic-realistic display. As a historical “snapshot”   (Ferdinand 1974), these kinds of displays aimed at establishing a   direct correspondence to the “real world” that escaped the museum’s   established theoretical dogmas. From the Africa exhibition at  Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Photograph by the author

246

14.3.  Assembling “Benin art.” British troops ready to ship the body of   objects to become known as “Benin art.” Photograph by the author,   from the exhibition Benin—Kings and Rituals, Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna 2007. Original photographs from the Council of the National   Army Museum, London

253

14.4.  Assembling the upper and lower parts of a dignitary plaque.   Photograph by the author, from the exhibition Benin—Kings and Rituals, Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna 2007. Upper part from Ethnologisches   Museum—Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, lower part from Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg

255

15.1a–c.  Atomised, by Jim Bond, 2005. Sensors that pull apart the body and put it together again are triggered when someone stands in front   of the sculpture

263

15.2.  Juxtaposing portraits and genealogies show different ways of   mapping relations between bodies

270

15.3.  Malangan in foreground with visitors and body-maps in background

273

15.4a–b.  Anamorphic Man, by Jim Bond, 2009, seen from side and front

274

16.1–16.14.  Photographs from the exhibition Villa Sovietica, Musée d’ethnographie in Geneva, 2009-10. Photographs by Willem Mes

279–300

Acknowledgments

Our warmest thanks go to Jakob Høgel, Peter Crawford, Ton Otto, Martin Holbraad, David MacDougall, Jesper Laursen, and all the students and employees from the Ethnographic Section at the Moesgaard Museum who made this book possible. A special thank you to our Berghahn editor, Ann Przyzycki DeVita, who has worked with us on this book with great stamina and professionalism. Furthermore we wish to thank Mike Dempsey, Elizabeth Berg, Melissa Spinelli, Patricia Kubala, Bruno Reinhardt, and the three anonymous reviewers from Berghahn for all their careful revisions and suggestions. Finally we thank these institutions and funds for their generous support of this book: Aarhus University Research Foundation, the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus University, the Danish Research School of Anthropology and Ethnography, the Ethnographic Collections at Moesgaard Museum, the Danish Film Institute, and Aarhus Filmby.

INTRODUCTION

Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr

Montage, in its broadest sense, simply implies the joining together of different elements in a variety of combinations, repetitions, and overlaps. It is customarily associated with cinematic editing, but the basic principles of montage play a crucial role in a broad range of artistic, cultural, and academic practices. This volume presents experiments with ethnographic prose, film studies, photo essays, and theoretical arguments by anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and exhibition designers—all of whom employ montage and theorize its significance in their works. But why the need for a book on montage? Cinematic montage has been around for more than a hundred years, experiencing its heydays just around the First World War. Today, having passed into the new millennium, montage may easily be regarded as an obsolete principle, with little capacity to evoke or provoke issues of a social and existential nature. In fact, Theodor Adorno declared the death of montage already back in the 1960s: “The principle of montage was supposed to shock people into realizing just how dubious any organic unity was. Now that the shock has lost its punch, the products of montage revert to being indifferent stuff. . . . The method of montage has therefore been neutralized” (1984: 223). Has the scholarly and artistic vitality of this audacious technique been entirely exhausted? The message of this book is clear: For those ready to look, think, and make new connections, montage retains the power to suggest fresh ways of perceiving relations between artistic expression, scholarly imagination, and social life. Its techniques for troubling commonsense notions of “reality” are as powerful as ever (Phillips 1992: 35). One key contribution of montage to social theory is its capacity to generate analytics and anti-analytics while maintaining a space for the invisible. As the contributors to this volume testify, strange things happen when two elements are brought together in montage. Never is the result simply the sum of the single components. Something extra, a surplus or an excess, is always produced. This “extra” speaks back to the elements and produces a state of generative instability, where each part transforms and takes on new shapes within the wider constellation. We see in the juxtaposition of montage components the opening of a gap or fissure, through which the invisible emerges. Within realist schools of anthropological writing, exhibition making, and filmmaking, montage has traditionally been regarded with a good deal of suspicion as a disruptive principle that potentially could pollute the direct correspondence between scholarly representations and the social world, thereby obstructing our possibilities for understanding human life across the boundaries of culture. How-

2 • Introduction

ever, the assertion of this volume is the opposite: the destabilization and rupture of our common-sense perception is the very condition for transcending cultural boundaries. Montage, we venture to propose, is a means to this end. The book is divided into four sections, each presenting a variety of current experiments with: Montage as an Analytic; Montage in Writing; Montage in Film; and Montage in Museum Exhibitions. Each of the four parts begins with an outline that briefly introduces the theoretical, analytic, and aesthetic questions raised by the contributions. At the end of the book, George Marcus, whose seminal article on “The Cinematic Metaphor of Montage” (1994) sets the antecedent for this book, provides an afterword on the traffic in montage over the past twenty years. This introduction discusses in general terms how the capacity of montage for transcending the boundaries of culture can be used to push social theory beyond the visible and into the uncharted regions of the invisible. First, we consider the role of the invisible in social theory and how classic filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov used montage to address it.

The Visible and the Invisible Clearly, the “invisible,” whether understood in terms of vision or in the form of hidden ideological, economic, psychological, or magico-religious structures, is central to human life. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the invisible, with its various problems, mysteries, and implications, has become both a paradigm and an obsession for much modern intellectual life. This is evident in the Marxist claim that the true significance of social processes often goes on “behind the backs” of individual agents (Eagleton 1990: 198). In psychoanalysis, it has likewise been argued that the real meanings of our actions are quite imperceptible to the watchful mind, but are to be found underground in the unconscious. In anthropology, structuralism further decentered the empirical subject by arguing that myths think themselves through people, rather than vice versa. All of these grand theories have, each in its own way, contested what could be denoted “naïve realism”—that is, the commonsensical attitude which holds that our senses give us a direct and transparent window to reality “as it is,” and that objective truth entails only accurate reportage of its observable detail. Instead, these theories exposed the “shocking” truth that the visible world is not necessarily the real one and that “facts of life” lie beyond our apparent view. Often the ambition of these theories was to provide people with a new enlightened vision that could liberate them from the invisible forces governing their lives, as in the Marxist struggle to expose “false consciousness” or in the attempt of psychoanalysis to uncover the “unconscious.” Within anthropology, as Arnd Schneider (2011: 179) writes, “to make ‘visible the invisible’ is a trope not unfamiliar . . . and is indeed good to think with, if we consider the many phenomena (not only those classed by us or others as supernatural) which are not immediately visible or perceptible to us in ethnographic research.” Too often, however, efforts of this sort appear to cement already well-known ideas of the invisible—effectively eradicating the invisible by substituting it with the visibility of preestablished rationalities (Suhr and Willerslev 2012). Take, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss (2001), who saw the immense heterogeneity of myths as based in certain constant universal structures that could be mapped out and to which any particular myth could be reduced. In a similar

Introduction • 3

way, psychoanalysis perceived dreams as something to be deciphered and made visible as symbolic texts. While these grand theories may have avoided the fallacies of naïve realism, they nevertheless liquidated the invisible as something in its own right and replaced it with other forms of visibility. This volume is based on the overall assumption that montage offers alternative ways of venturing into the realm of the invisible. In particular, our work has been inspired by ideas about the invisible in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. Despite their theoretical differences, both thinkers emphasize not just a notion of the invisible as the necessary precondition for all human perception, but also that this invisibility needs to remain invisible in order to do its work. While Levinas (2002: 43) located the invisible in the irreducible “face of the other,” Merleau-Ponty discussed the invisible in terms of an infinite totality of vision: the impossible but ever-present “view from everywhere” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 79; Kelly 2005: 91). For Levinas, the “invisible face” beneath the forefront of the head conveys an “excess of otherness”—that which cannot be reduced to the “same” (Wyschogrod 2002: 191). This face cannot be directly perceived, visually depicted, or described in words. It is, so to speak, “alterity beyond representation.” The invisible, therefore, is not simply the result of incomplete perception or knowledge. According to Levinas: “Invisibility results . . . from the inaptitude of knowledge as such—from its inadequation—to the infinity of the absolutely other” (1987: 32). It is in this sense that the face “is not seen” and neither can be captured within thought. Rather, the face is the “uncontainable”—it is that which “leads you beyond” (Levinas 1985: 86–87). According to Levinas, the self can neither appear nor sustain itself outside of its differentiation from the other, which is why it is always and indispensably obliged to preserve the other’s alterity (1979: 244–45). Importantly, it is not the case that alterity as such needs protection from being reduced to any order of the same. Rather, the self is conditioned upon its relation to the other and must therefore embrace the other’s irreducible and infinite otherness. The vulnerable and in fact powerless condition of the self in the face of the other is made clear by Levinas in his description of the impossibility of murdering alterity: “The Other, whose exceptional presence is inscribed in the ethical impossibility of killing him in which I stand, marks the end of powers. If I can no longer have power over him it is because he overflows absolutely every idea I can have of him” (1979: 87). Merleau-Ponty (1964: 51; 2002: 79) proposes a parallel claim in theorizing on the nature of human perception. He asserts that an anonymous and infinite web of perspectives resides behind any actual embodied perspective. This infinity of viewpoints provides the invisible ground upon which any object presents itself as visible to us: It adds up to an inaccessible totality, the “view from everywhere,” which is the object as seen from all sides, at all times, all at once (Holbraad and Willerslev 2007: 335). This ideal viewpoint, though unreachable for our human perspective, operates as an invisible “norm” that provides the necessary ground for any perspectival seeing. Take the example of what we commonly denote the color red. We may have seen this color in multiple shades and nuances as it appears in a great variety of lighting conditions. Yet, pure redness is something that we can only imagine, since its full appearance is inaccessible to sense perception. Our eyes may search over the surface of an object and we may move our perspective in order to better determine what color and form it has. But the real color, as Merleau-Ponty points

4 • Introduction

out, “persists beneath appearances as the background persists beneath the figure, that is, not as a seen or thought-of quality, but through a non-sensory presence” (2002: 356). Our “motor-intentional” search for the optimal viewpoint of an object’s color or shape is therefore directed by an ideal or normative world of vision, which perseveres beyond any actual perception (Kelly 2005: 86–91, 100; Holenstein 1999). According to Merleau-Ponty, we do, therefore, not simply “see” by our own power or force, but are dependent on this anonymous or general seeing, which is already in place, waiting to assign us a place within it (Willerslev 2011: 519). The visibility of any object is thus conditioned upon the larger field of anonymous invisibility that surrounds it and provides its supporting context (Kelly 2005). Levinas’s “infinite other” and Merleau-Ponty’s “normative ideal” are a surplus, an excess—a plenitude of perspectives that we cannot do without. It underlies every perspective as the invisible background that allows things to stand out in their visibility. Yet it must hide itself in order for the visible world to appear before our eyes. As Merleau-Ponty expresses it: “the proper essence . . . of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility . . . which it makes present by a certain absence” (2000: 187). As such, the “view from everywhere” and “the other” cannot be an object of our own perspectival seeing except negatively—that is, through its absence. It is our assertion that montage may perform exactly this operation—that is, to make present by a certain absence the invisible ground of the visible world. By no means do we claim that montage can show or make the invisible visible. If the invisible is not simply hidden, masked, or concealed forms of visibility, but is as such invisible, then it follows that the invisible cannot be made visible. Consequently, any attempt of uncovering or fully accessing the invisible and the alterity it entails is impossible. Rather, montage provides a technique for evoking the invisible through the orchestration of different perspectives encroaching upon one another. Montage can break the visual “skin” of the world, but it can never show the invisible in and of itself (Suhr and Willerslev 2012).

Surplus As Eisenstein (1949) made clear, a certain form of surplus is produced when disparate units are brought together in montage. This surplus is not a simple translation of the unknown into the same. In Eisenstein’s conception, “intellectual montage,” as opposed to “mundane montage,” refers to the juxtaposition of dissimilar objects, which when put in confrontation with each other provide the viewer with a reality that is more real than the objects seen in isolation: “if montage is to be compared with something, then a phalanx of montage pieces, of shots, should be compared to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine” (in Jacobs 1979: 130). Such radical montage has the potential—through “shock-effects”—of providing the classic Hegelian-Marxist dialectic of thesis-antithesis leading to synthesis (Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2007: 81). Thus, according to Eisenstein, the building blocks of montage are not to be placed next to each other but rather on top of each other, so that each juxtaposition consists in a qualitative leap (Deleuze 2005: 38). The “extra thing” that is created through montage can, however, also be conceived in terms of a “gap” (see Nielsen, chapter 2, and Salamon, chapter 8)—that is, as the opening up of a kind of incongruence, fuzziness, or vibrating dissonance erupting through the confrontation of unlike elements. Stuart McLean (chapter

Introduction • 5

3) expounds the gap through the dramatic figure of convection currents beneath the crust of the Eurasian and North American plates, giving rise to volcanic activity along the Almannagjá fault line in Iceland. It is from within the depth of such fissures that the invisible may become present, without, however, revealing itself in totality. Something within the gap seems to be taking shape, but the shape remains imperceptible as elusive “dark matter.” Building on Gilles Deleuze’s (2000: 80) theory of cinema, Bruce Kapferer (chapter 1) argues that this is the domain of the “virtual” giving itself to us from beyond the fracturing juxtapositions of montage. Deep beneath the visible crust, the invisible becomes present as the absence of visibility. For what purpose would this emergence of the invisible as absence be useful in the context of anthropology and social theory? The disruptive power of montage is especially in need when a theory’s desire for laying bare and illuminating the invisible has become so dominant that it is driven toward total and unambiguous visibility. As scholars who have undertaken long-term training in making other peoples’ worlds intelligible, anthropologists are perhaps especially disposed to the dangers of such total luminosity. It is not necessarily pleasant or comfortable to allow the invisible and its alterity to play its part in analysis. Often it seems easier to merge the alterity of others into preestablished categories. This tendency to consume the other within already established forms of vision and knowledge rather than allowing alterity to contaminate and transform perception was pointed out by Paul Stoller more than three decades ago: “Although anthropologists, like painters, lend their bodies to the world, we tend to allow our senses to penetrate the Other’s world rather than letting our senses be penetrated by the world of the Other. The result of this tendency is that we represent the Other’s world from the outside in a generally turgid discourse which often bears little resemblance to the worlds we are attempting to describe” (1989: 39). Stoller’s plea for anthropologists to allow themselves to be transformed by the encounters in the field was a milestone. Yet we may need to go even further, namely to abandon the idea of resemblance or correspondence as the goal of analysis altogether (Taylor 1990: 108). More than twenty years after the eruption of the “crisis of representation” (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus 1994) that so profoundly shook anthropology, Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007) observe how anthropologists are continuing business as usual—replacing the infinite otherness they encounter in the field with concepts and theories of their own making. What anthropology should be about, they suggest, is to upturn our own assumptions so as to make room for imagining the possibility of people inhabiting a multiplicity of worlds. This echoes the Levinasian claim that respect for the other’s alterity should not be equated with the mistaken view that all alterity is derived from a shared existential ground. If informants tell us that there is such a thing as a “powerpowder,” the anthropological exercise should not be about translating the idea of a powerpowder into concepts already known to us, but rather, as Holbraad (2007: 204) asserts, about upturning our assumptions so as to make it possible for us to imagine how powder in this world actually is power. To upturn our assumptions is by no means an easy task and it involves more than simply taking “native” concepts for granted and building up a line of theoretical reasoning around the supposition that concepts such as power and powder are the same. As made clear by Merleau-Ponty (2002), concepts and perceptions are inseparably tied into our being-in-the-world and cannot easily be broken apart. If it is not possible in this way to separate a realm of pure conception from our immediate perceptible experiences of the world, a much more thoroughgoing

6 • Introduction

destabilization is in need. What has to be acknowledged is that anthropological thinking is a creative endeavor, which should not be confused with the accurate echoing of the “textures” of authentic social life. A faithful correspondence or fidelity between representation and actuality is not only impossible but also unwanted. Anthropology should express social reality by making it alive again—that is, by tampering with its source material in such way that the invisible ground of the visible is allowed presence (see Høgel, chapter 12, and Schüssler and Mes, chapter 16) (see also Willerslev 2011; Suhr and Willerslev 2012). How could montage perform this destabilizing function that would prevent us from falling into the trap of rendering visible the ethnographic other to any order of the same? And what happens on the other side of the shattering of elements and perspectives performed by the operation of montage? Is there not a risk that the shattering through montage will simply produce and naturalize new constellations of stable order? Let us proceed with these questions by considering cinema, which more than any other art form has taken on and sophisticated the theory and practice of montage while also acting as a powerful stimulus to the artistic production of photography, writing, and exhibition making (Teitelbaum 1992). The key value of cinematic montage derives in our view from its capacity to disrupt the normative space of naturalistic film footage, thus allowing for a sudden burst in the experience of a multifaceted reality. So how has the problem of the invisible been dealt with in traditions of cinematic montage?

The American Montage Tradition In French, montage refers to the technical process of film editing in the strict sense of the word. The cut from one shot to another may convey action and reaction, make an effect of continuity or time passed, visualize a shift of perspective, make a jump from the whole to a part or vice versa, perform a flashback, show parallel simultaneous action, or simply contrast that which was seen in the first shot with that which takes place next. Some forms of film montage deal with the invisible by making the viewer jump between divergent perspectives. This way of editing can be traced back to the early American film director D. W. Griffith, who first and foremost used montage to depict organic “unity in diversity” in which perspectives act and react on each other, threaten each other, and enter into conflict before unity is eventually restored (Deleuze 2005: 31). Griffith’s work rebels against the doctrines of naïve realism mainly by showing that the notion of time passing is inseparable from the experience of the visual. What you see depends upon where you are and when. In his famous scene in The Birth of a Nation (1915), we are shuffled back and forth between the perspectives of a group of black bandits ransacking a house of helpless women and the approaching rescuing team of Confederate soldiers. The scene forcefully reveals that what one sees is relative to one’s position in time and space. It is, therefore, no longer possible to imagine that “everything converges on the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity” (Berger 1972: 16)—an idea inherited from perspectival painting since the Renaissance. Griffith’s extensive use of shot-reverse-shot to couple divergent viewpoints within a scene exposes the fact that looking is much too complex to be reduced to the single eye of the beholder. In Griffith’s montages, we find our seeing tangled with other perspectives, which become part of our vision

Introduction • 7

and therefore part of us. Vision becomes in this sense reciprocal: I am not just doing the looking; vision is also something that happens to me, beyond my control from an external vantage.

The Soviet Montage Tradition Griffith’s films, as with much American cinema, draw our attention to what goes on in the films, but not to the constructed nature of film itself, how the images they contain were selected, what forms of work went into the making of them, and so on. Thus, part of the seductive power of these films lies in their suppression of what can be called their “mode of production” (Eagleton 1983: 171). In this sense, these films—though they defamiliarize commonsensical vision—also share with it a curious resemblance in that both tend to suppress the process of their own making. Early Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, by contrast, sought to remedy this illusion by laying bare the devices of their own production so that viewers would be encouraged to reflect critically on what they saw. Early Soviet cinema experimented with speeding up film footage, slowing it down, making shots overlap so as to repeat actions, or violently shortening the real-time duration of events through jump cutting (Thompson and Bordwell 2003: 131). By employing such helter-skelter effects of montage, they forced the viewer not simply to stare through this obtrusive operation to the things seen but to realize something of the image’s own relative, artificial status as well. When watching the fierce cinematic manipulations of the early Soviet filmmakers, we are forced to recognize the images seen as the product of a specific set of technical and social processes, not a natural or given reality that the camera is simply there to reflect. In the words of Eisenstein: “The spectator is compelled to proceed along that selfsame creative path that the author travelled in creating the image. The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the mergence of the image” (1942: 32). Such was the theory behind the “Intellectual Cinema” proposed by Eisenstein, and its most effective weapon was montage. By way of montage, Eisenstein argued, humankind now possessed a new powerful cognitive instrument for denaturalizing social life by recasting it through unfamiliar eyes—thereby allowing for a clearer and fuller understanding of the world, a means of its decoding (Michelsen 1992: 63). Perhaps the finest example in which the world presents itself differently to the movie camera than to the naked eye is Vertov’s (1929) The Man with the Movie Camera. The film is, among other things, a movie about the making of a movie. Its sequences and the assembly of those sequences are continually made visible to us. The cameraman is shooting; we see the product of his shots. We also see the editor at work; she pulls clips off the shelf that suddenly fill the screen before us. There is a political message to all of this: Vertov is saying film is made by people, and therefore is not magic but labor, the very labor we see on the screen. However, Vertov’s aim extends beyond demystifying filmic representation. He also wants to create a new reality modeled on Soviet industrial utopia, a futuristic reality where man and machine work together in perfect symbiosis. We see this vision of “peace between man and machine” in several scenes, such as when saws are made to dance at a sawmill or when our eyes are made to spin like the propellers of an air-

8 • Introduction

plane. But it is perhaps most powerfully evoked in the film’s recurring logo of the human eye superimposed on the camera lens.

Ethnographic Cinema In both Griffith’s and Eisenstein’s films, but even more so in those of Vertov, the camera and its associated techniques of montage were to be liberated from any demand to reproduce an imitation of life as the human eye saw it. Quite another idea has prevailed within ethnographic filmmaking, which has been dominated by a tradition that goes under the name “observational cinema” (Banks 1992: 124; Kiener 2008: 405). As a movement, observational cinema aims at inquiring into the role played by ordinary lived time and space in the constitution of social life. As such, it operates within an essentially realist cinematic paradigm, using film mainly as a medium of “mimesis” (Taylor 1996: 75; Stam 2000: 72). However, it is clearly misguided to confuse observational cinema with naïve realism. In fact, observational cinema was partly developed as a reaction against the detached “fly on the wall” film approach as seen, for example, in Gregory Bateson’s and Margaret Mead’s Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (1952; see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 539–40). By contrast, observational cinema builds on the epistemological premise that deep insight into social life entails transmission of sufficient material detail of the observable world from the viewpoint of a “normal human participant” (Henley 2004: 114). The mimetic camera is, therefore, used as a kind of “physical extension” of the cameraperson’s body, thus allowing viewers intimate access to the filmmaker’s sensuous engagement with the life portrayed (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 548). The invisible in the context of observational cinema can perhaps best be understood as that which is seen but not usually noticed (Suhr and Willerslev 2012). By focusing on the most apparently “trivial” details of everyday activities, the cameraperson, along with the audience, comes to observe the finest grains of day-today human existence. For this reason, observational films such as David and Judith MacDougall’s To Live with Herds (1972) or Herb Di Gioia and David Hancock’s Peter Murray (1975) are known for their long unobtrusive takes, firmly dwelling on an abundance of observable ethnographic details. By favoring in this way “seeing over assertion, wholeness over parts, matter over symbolic meaning, specificity over abstraction” (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 539), observational cinema proposes that the strangeness of even the most exotic people can be counterbalanced by “a sense of familiarity” (MacDougall 1998: 245)—that is, a sense of how, despite cultural differences, we are ultimately all subject to the same plane of embodied spatial and temporal existence. This is exactly what MacDougall points to when he writes that the image “transcends ‘culture’ . . . by underscoring the commonalities that cut across cultural boundaries” (1998: 252). In observational cinema, the camera is, so to say, “humanized” and submitted to a particular humanist ethics “premised upon humility or respect, expressive of the filmmakers’ sensitivity towards their subjects” (Grimshaw 2001: 129–30, 138). As Grimshaw (chapter 13) points out, such an approach to filmmaking does not entail the rejection of montage. Indeed, this would be impossible since montage is a necessary part of all cinema. Yet, this humanist sensitivity has resulted in an approach to filmmaking where the observational filmmaker tends to be highly cautious with any form of cinematic effect—abnormal framing, grading, extradi-

Introduction • 9

egetic music, commentary, disruptive juxtaposition of shots, etc.—that runs the risk of disturbing the transmission of the cameraperson’s lived experience of the life-world filmed (Henley 2004: 115–16).

Transcultural Montage This book is premised upon the clear assumption that montage by no means stands in opposition to our possibility for transcending cultural boundaries—neither in filmmaking nor in any other mediums of artistic and scholarly expression. Rather montage offers a tool for making “present by a certain absence” (Merleau-Ponty 2000: 187) the invisible ground of social life and human perception. As Michael Taussig puts it, montage is a manner of “interruptedness”—a device for provoking: “sudden and infinite connections between dissimilars in an endless or almost endless process of connection-making and connection-breaking . . . which on account of its awkwardness of fit, cracks, and violent juxtapositionings can actively embody both a presentation and a counterpresentation” (1986: 441–43). For Taussig, a zone of vacuity or imageric possibility—what we call the invisible ground of alterity—arises when self and other, in “ordered disorder” and “continuous discontinuity,” are turned upside down and made strange. As Julia Binter (chapter 10) points out, getting at the transcultural does not necessarily entail the sacrifice of cultural differences in favor of a notion of abstract shared humanity. Quite to the contrary, it requires us to give up our tendency to subsume difference under such totalizing notions of sameness. Andrew Irving eloquently pointed this out in a recent debate: “Shared reality is not . . . pregiven by virtue of being human but is formed through an active process of interaction between self and others—including the anthropologist, informant, and audience— whereby difference is made visible and negotiated. As such, strangeness, diversity, and otherness are not the opposite of mutuality but the conditions that bring it into being” (in Suhr and Willerslev 2012: 296). Even though filmmakers such as Griffith, Eisenstein, and Vertov were caught up in various political ideologies (see Russell, chapter 9), they did succeed in bringing into presence viewpoints that pushed the limits of how we are able to perceive the world. Montage, as understood here, may expand our possibilities for transcultural perception only by shattering commonsense understandings of the constitution of the world, thereby allowing the invisible ground of social life to take presence. As the chapters in this volume testify, there are a wide variety of ways in which the work of montage may appear, ranging from analytic models of bureaucracy of the Danish labor market (Vohnsen, chapter 7) to aesthetic techniques for conveying the paradoxes of Brazilian favela tourism (Antick, chapter 6), or for conveying the inner emotional dynamics of the anthropologist in the field (Dalsgaard, chapter 5). The sweeping breadth of definitions and applications may give rise to the assumption that montage could be everything. Certainly our intention here has not been to find and nail down one irrefutable definition of the concept. Rather, our ambition is to offer a variety of uses and critical perspectives—some of them mutually contradictory. The trickery of montage operates in multiple ways by intentionally or unintentionally spurring fractures between established perceptual orders and the monstrous paradoxical spectacle that we call “reality.” But to freeze montage itself into a single figure or model would be to kill it. Yet, would we not

10 • Introduction

also be murdering montage by conflating the concept to cover almost anything? If it is not productive or possible to limit the concept of montage to any particular definition, we may instead attempt to delineate it in the negative by asking what it is not. Would it be possible to think of something that definitely is not montage? In fact, a variety of figures come to mind. At least, it seems reasonable to say that the operation of montage is different than the progressive linearity that functions as the driving force behind most scholarly arguments. Furthermore, in the context of filmmaking, montage appears to be clearly distinguished from a single camera shot. In general, it seems difficult to disagree with the statement that montage is not just one thing. Montage seems necessarily to be a collection and juxtaposition of at least two things. Let us consider—and complicate—these negative definitions in turn. Surely, montage must take a different form than the standard style of linear and rational argumentation that we have grown accustomed to in academia (see Marcus 1994: 47). In fact, several chapters in this volume, including this introduction, seem to offer pretty straightforward linear arguments. However, a linear argument, while it has the semblance of appearing as a logical straightforward progression, usually still emerges from an ensemble of disparate units—diverse forms of social theory along with empirical material and observations. The argument then crashes into the world of scholarly debate, and here we may observe new constellations of montage taking place. The linear academic argument in its ideal form may not itself be a montage. Perhaps we can even define it as an antonym to montage. Yet, the linear argument can be the outcome of montage and it may well become a component or cell in another montage. Something similar can be said about the long observational camera take hailed by realist ethnographic filmmakers for its way of allowing us glimpses into a pure being-with-others that cuts across the boundaries of culture (Henley 2004: 114; MacDougall 2006: 4). This book may in part be read as an argument against taking any scholarly assumptions of shared humanity for granted. The value of montage lies, as we see it, in its capacity to splinter such totalizing ideas of pan-human commonalities. Difference precedes sameness and disruptive montage provides a powerful tool for recognizing this. But let us take a look at the long observational shot again. Could it be that the long take of observational cinema did not, in fact, show us the commonalities of human existence? Often it is the case that the longer a camera shot is, the more disruptive it becomes. As explored by Alyssa Grossman (chapter 11), the long take then becomes a cell in a montage, not of actual cinematic perspectives, but of the perspectives of the camera along with the imaginary perspectives we as viewers are forced to create in order to compensate for the stubbornly persistent camera shot. Powerful forms of montage may emerge in the oscillation between such imaginary viewpoints that are provoked by a single camera shot. A single camera take is perhaps not in itself a montage. Yet, it may be part of a montage and not necessarily in the conventional sense—that is, by being juxtaposed with other camera takes. It may quite simply be part of the montage created in the mind of the viewer (see Irving, chapter 4). Let us turn to the third negative definition, namely that montage cannot just be one thing—certainly, it must consist in the juxtaposition of at least two things. Several contributors in this volume (Bjerregaard, chapter 14; Empson, chapter 15; Schüssler and Mes, chapter 16) demonstrate how montage is at work in ethnographic exhibitions where various material objects are juxtaposed to each other and in combination produce hues of immaterial “aura” that transform the constel-

Introduction • 11

lation of objects into new appearances and shapes. But sometimes also a single object takes on such aura merely by its insertion into a new environment. As Merleau-Ponty (2002: 78) in his theory of object perception tells us, no object can be seen in isolation. Rather it stands out to us as visible only because of the infinite world of perspectives that makes up its invisible ground. It makes no sense to talk about the perception of an isolated single object. In this broadest understanding, we could locate montage in the very fabric of the world as a place of constantly shifting connections and juxtapositions (Irving, chapter 4). As also Kapferer (chapter 1) points out, we need not limit ourselves to a conception of montage as a method for representing the world. The “cells” of montage as well as montage itself cannot be reduced to a mirroring of realities. Any montage is inescapably an engagement with and thus already part of the ongoing re-creations of the world into new forms and shapes. Hence, we take montage as a heuristic concept that may be applied in a wide variety of ways—as a theoretical and analytical model with which to make sense of the fragmented and fragmentary nature of social reality and as a practical device stirring generative juxtapositions in the anthropological altering of its source material. A final assumption about montage needs to be considered: namely, that the principle of montage somehow by itself carries an intrinsic power of emancipation. Could montage be defined by such an inherently destabilizing, anti-totalitarian function? We do find that the rupturing effects of montage are powerful means for allowing the emergence of the invisible. But on the other hand, new stable visual orders often appear to take form on the other side of such ruptures. Arguably, this happens to some extent in the classic works of montage by Eisenstein and Vertov, but perhaps the most violent example can be found in Leni Riefenstahl’s artistically crafted Triumph of the Will (1935). Here every shot and juxtaposition seems to contribute, not to a shattering of vision, but to a single unified image of a nation joyfully celebrating and submitting itself to its Führer. Hence, montage in Riefenstahl’s film is not applied to create fissures in the actual observational scene. Rather, it removes and hides fissures so as to combine all shots into a spectacular visual display of a single ideal world. As Riefenstahl’s film exposes, montage as a principle does not in itself offer any guarantee for setting free the human spirit and it does not by necessity result in destabilizing the will to power in social, economic, and political life. Rather, montage is a balancing act, which, as Catherine Russell (chapter 9) points out, consists just as much in the construction of connections as in taking things apart.

Amplifying Invisibility In his classic essay on the modernist sensibility in ethnographic writing, Marcus points out how the sacrifice of coherence may be too great in extreme forms of supposedly disruptive montage: “The larger problem becomes how to retain the equivalent of a storytelling coherence while retaining the powerful critical advantages of montage” (1994: 46). Here Marcus points to the fact that the most radical and abstract montage is not by necessity the most subversive—neither politically nor in terms of challenging established anthropological schools of thought. Rather it seems that the subversive capacities of montage depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.

12 • Introduction

In his work on the mimetic faculty, Taussig (1993) draws attention to the montage of ethnographic films such as Jean Rouch’s widely debated Les Maîtres Fous (1955), about a hauka spirit-possession cult in Accra during the last days of British colonial rule. For Taussig, the hauka cult appears as a parodic form of resistance and a subversion of imperial power. This interpretation is evoked by Rouch’s juxtaposition of a shot featuring hauka performers cracking an egg on the head of a statue, presumably representing the British governor, with a shot of the real governor wearing a white plumed helmet (Taussig 1993: 243; see also Russell 1999: 224). From such examples, Taussig comes to the optimistic conclusion that in the paradoxical mimicry made visible through Rouch’s montage, colonial—and by extension anthropological—mastery is no longer possible: “What remains is unsettled and unsettling interpretation in constant movement with itself . . . because the interpreting self is itself grafted into the object of study. The self enters into the alter against which the self is defined and sustained” (1993: 237). The subversive potential of montage lies in its capacity for altering the obvious first sense of an object, image, or perspective by combining two or more elements. As Walter Benjamin argued, montage thereby facilitates a “denaturalization,” which may convey just how deeply questionable that which we tend to take as reality actually is (Buck-Morss 1991: 71, 218). Yet, montage is not only an amplifier of invisibility and instability. As made clear by several contributions to this volume (Salamon, chapter 8; Russell, chapter 9; Grimshaw, chapter 13; Empson, chapter 15), montage is the splintering of preestablished orders of visuality, but it is also the reassembling; and beyond these assemblages, new order may appear. In a thought-provoking article, Paul Henley (2006: 40) reevaluates Jean Rouch’s classic film about the hauka in Accra and points out that what goes on in the actual observational scene cannot be reduced to simply a parodic subversion of colonial mastery. Instead, Henley (2006: 754–56) finds sufficient evidence in the film footage and in ethnographic descriptions on spirit possession in West Africa to argue that, rather than an example of counter-hegemonic resistance, the cultic event is in fact a fertility ritual, modeled on the North African zar cult, where ritual participants attempt to assimilate the power of influential figures for religious purposes. The colonial mockery suggested by Rouch’s montage, which in Taussig’s view worked to pinch alterity right beneath our skin, is in Henley’s reevaluation better understood to be an attempt of making the possession ritual acceptable to the political preferences of anthropologists and African intellectuals in Paris (Henley 2006: 37)—a mimicry, if you like, of taken-for-granted assumptions about counter-politics within the Western academia. We may take this example as a reminder against quick assumptions of montage as being somehow intrinsically emancipative. There simply is no way of determining and validating the effects of montage in the abstract. Just as montage may be applied for multiple purposes, so might the outcome of montage point in a virtually infinite number of directions. Hence, only through close observation of how montage operates and is applied in actual artistic and scholarly orchestrations with particular intensions in mind may we discern the effects that it produces. Perhaps there is some truth to the conservative stance of art critic Rudolf Arnheim (1957: 170), who argued that in order for art to be more than a naïve simulacrum of reality, it must interrupt and challenge our conventional visual logic—but only partially, for “no statement can [ultimately] be understood unless the relations between its elements form an organized whole.” Successful evocation, in Arnheim’s

Introduction • 13

(1971: 30–33) view, rests not with “the pleasures of chaos,” but with the author’s success in counterbalancing disruption with a general compositional order. This might sound somewhat conformist to anthropologists, filmmakers, and museum curators inspired by constructivist and postmodern forms of disruptive montage, but perhaps it points to a need for carving out a position between realism and constructivism, simplicity and complexity, resonance and dissonance. As Eisenstein (1949: 37) argued, montage consists in the conflicts that erupt in the tension between juxtaposed parts. Sometimes the most effective montage sequences are found in films, texts, and exhibitions that insist on faithfully documenting a reality “out there,” yet somehow fail in this endeavor. Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon’s much debated ethnographic film The Ax Fight (1975), about a conflict that broke out among two groups of Yanomamö Indians, is a case in point (see Acciaioli 2004: 141; Nichols 2004). In a discussion of the film, Asch points out how the highly disturbing effects produced through the juxtaposition of no less that five distinct analytic perspectives was not at all the result of a conscious attempt to create a rupturing viewer experience (in Ruby 2000: 129). Rather, the ruptures emerged as a result of the conflictual collaboration between two strong authors, who both were determined on particular yet almost incompatible perspectives on what constitutes the real. The conflicts in the production of the film are revealed through cracks and fissures in the cinematic montage. Here anthropological and cinematic claims start to fall apart and the producers are forced to reconsider previous explanations. The “reality” of the profilmic event quite clearly surpasses any attempt of containing it within a single visible form. Thus, in Asch’s own description, the film achieved the appearance of a “gargoyle at Chartres”—one of these fantastic creatures that stick out and force the beholder into a state of bewilderment and wonder. In the afterword to this volume, Marcus asks why we need to pay so special attention to the techniques of montage. Why not one of its avant-garde cousins like pastiche, collage, or assemblage? For Marcus, as for the early Soviet filmmakers, the power of montage lies in its way of opening up into the very “combustion chamber” of knowledge production and cinematic presentation. Montage can in its broadest definition consist in the juxtaposition of any pair of dissimilar elements. Yet for Marcus, montage importantly also includes the juxtaposition of one’s claims to knowledge along with the traces of the path undertaken to arrive at these claims. Asch and Chagnon’s montage of anthropological perspectives among the Yanomamö, as well as Vertov’s persistent attempt to film the filmmaker while filming and the attempt of the camera to film by its own power are all efforts to evoke the coming into being of the image. In Marcus’s view, none of the cousins of montage shares this insistent focus on auto-ethnographic reflection within the very process of knowledge production. It is precisely from within the cracks of such unfinished, discordant knowledge-in-the-making that the invisible ground of human existence is most forcefully evoked.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1984. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.

14 • Introduction

———. 1971. Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order. Berkeley: University of California Press. Asch, Timothy, and Napoleon Chagnon. 1975. The Ax Fight. 30 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Banks, Marcus. 1992. “Which Films Are the Ethnographic Films?” In Film as Ethnography, ed. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 116–29. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. 1952. Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea. 17 min. New York: Penn State Media. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2000. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. ———. 2005. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum. Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1942. Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Griffith, David W. 1915. The Birth of a Nation. 190 min. USA: David W. Griffith Corp. Grimshaw, Anna. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2009. “Rethinking Observational Cinema.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 538–56. Hancock, David, and Herb Di Gioia. 1975. Peter Murray. 50 min. Sutton, VT: The Vermont Center for Cultural Studies Inc. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell. 2007. “Introduction.” In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, eds. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, 1–31. London: Routledge. Henley, Paul. 2004. “Putting Film to Work: Observational Cinema as Practical Ethnography.” In Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography, ed. Sarah Pink, László Kürti, and Ana Isabel Afonso, 109–30. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. “Spirit Possession, Power, and the Absent Presence of Islam: Re-viewing Les maîtres fous.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 731–61. Holbraad, Martin. 2007. “The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again).” In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, eds. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 189–225. London: Routledge. Holbraad, Martin, and Rane Willerslev. 2007. “Transcendental Perspectivism: Anonymous Viewpoints from Inner Asia.” Inner Asia 9(2): 329–45. Holenstein, Elmar. 1999. “The Zero-Point of Orientation: The Placement of the I in Perceived Space.” In The Body, ed. D. Welton, 57–94. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Jacobs, Lewis. 1979. The Emergence of Film Art: The Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art from 1900 to the Present. New York: Norton. Kelly, Sean D. 2005. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty.” In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, 74–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiener, Wilma. 2008. “The Absent and the Cut.” Visual Anthropology 21: 393–409. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ———. 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1987. Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Introduction • 15

———. 2002. Fænomenologi og Etik, trans. Michael Rasmussen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2001. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge. MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, David and Judith. 1972. To Live with Herds. 70 min. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles / Rice University Media Center. Marcus, George E. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 37–53. New York and London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. “The Film and the New Psychology.” In Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus, 48–59. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2000. “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, 159–90. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge. Michelson, Annette. 1992. “The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval.” In Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum, 61–82. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press and Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art. Phillips, Christopher. 1992. “Introduction.” In Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum, 21–36. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press and Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art. Riefenstahl, Leni. 1935. Triumph of the Will. 114 min. Berlin: NSDAP Reichspropagandaleitung Hauptabt. Rouch, Jean. 1955. Les Maîtres Fous. 24 min. Paris: Films de la Pléiade. Russell, Catherine. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Schneider, Arnd. 2011. “Expanded Visions: Rethinking Anthropological Research and Representation through Experimental Film.” In Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines, ed. Tim Ingold, 177–94. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Suhr, Christian, and Rane Willerslev. 2012. “Can Film Show the Invisible? The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking.” Current Anthropology 53(3): 282–301. Taussig, Michael. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 1990. Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Lucien. 1996. “Iconophobia.” Transition 69: 64–88. Teitelbaum, Matthew. 1992. “Preface.” In Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. Maud Lavin et al., 6–20. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. 2003. Film History: An Introduction. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Vertov, Dziga. 1929. The Man with the Movie Camera. 68 min. Kiev: VUFKU. Willerslev, Rane. 2011. “Frazer Strikes Back from the Armchair: A New Search for the Animist Soul.” The Malinowski Memorial Lecture 2010. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: 504–26. Willerslev, Rane, and Ulturgasheva, Olga. 2007. “The Sable Frontier: The Siberian Fur Trade as Montage.” Cambridge Anthropology 26(2): 79–100.

PART I

Montage as an Analytic Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev

Considering the fragmented and fragmentary qualities of montage, it comes as no surprise that its audacious principle of juxtaposition has been adopted as a sort of “talisman” of modernity itself (Teitelbaum 1992: 7). Indeed, for filmmakers of a futuristic bend, such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, montage was not just a technique but the key signifier of an old world shattered and a new industrial age in construction (Phillips 1992: 31). To their minds, the aim of cinematic montage was to “shock” viewers into embracing the new industrial age. However, while there is little doubt that new technological practices such as cinema became effective weapons in the fast and rapid dissemination of industrialization, montage cannot and should not be reduced to cinema, let alone the modern epoch. Much evidence suggests that the key techniques at work in montage predate cinema. Eisenstein, for example, claimed that a crucial inspiration for his theory of montage was the ancient Japanese tradition of haiku poems with their simple juxtapositions of words (1949: 32). Several of this volume’s contributors draw further attention to this insight that a more nuanced cultural history of montage is needed: one that recognizes that montage extends beyond what might be denoted the technologically modern. They do so by describing how the dynamics of montage reflect social and ritual practices in remote and rural areas of India and Africa, among other places. Applying montage as a heuristic model for anthropological analysis, they demonstrate how the concept allows for less subject-centered and more dexterous and flexible insights into social reality. Bruce Kapferer (chapter 1) sets out to reinterpret the phenomena of ritual through the framework of montage as described in Gilles Deleuze’s (2000; 2005) works on cinema. Kapferer effectively reverts the evolution of modern cinema and what Deleuze calls the “time-image” by pointing out how an old anti-sorcery Buddhist ritual in Sri Lanka effectively anticipated the potential of cinematic montage with its way of shuffling the ritual participants through multiple and contradictory viewpoints. As he states: “aside from the obvious differences of cinema and ritual there is an underlying unity.” Kapferer shows that montage as an analytical model of ritual allows for an entirely new view of its transformative potential, which has been lost or at least downplayed in the customary takes on ritual as drama or theater. Ritual, Kapferer argues, is not primarily about subject-centered embodiment and the symbolic performance of mythology as many anthropologists have suggested. As in cinema, what is at stake in ritual is a continuous emerging, shaping, and reshaping of subject positioning that works to collapse any sense of singular bodily unity. Within both ritual and cinema, “perspective is multiple” and “interpretation and meaning are continually open.” Hence, as a Deleuzian montage ma-

18 • Montage as an Analytic

chine, the Sinhala anti-sorcery ritual works by exploding the perspectives of the ritual participants, thereby allowing renewed access into the realm of the virtual. Also drawing on Deleuze’s theory of montage, Morten Nielsen (chapter 2) takes issue with prevalent notions of social change as building on patterned acts of symbolic elicitation (see Wagner 1977: 631; Strathern 1988: 181). Nielsen is puzzled by peculiar forms of rather unpatterned, inconsistent, and heterogeneous cultural inventions that emerge in the pursuit of settling land disputes in Mozambique. To think his way through this, he introduces the “temporal aesthetics” of montage as an alternative approach to the study of elicitory processes. Just as montage is never tied exclusively to the image but rather constitutes a “third thing,” the oscillation of identities between “buyer” and “newcomer” in these land disputes never comes to rest in any one position. Instead, the elicitation of identity is the result of abrupt temporal shifts and cuts. To conquer land in rural Mozambique, then, is to produce oneself through techniques of montage, in shapes and contours which are never strictly given and which do not fit within any linear unfolding of stable identities. From these case studies, it seems clear that montage is not, as some authors have suggested (Teitelbaum 1992; Marcus 1994), entirely synonymous with modernity, but is a formal principle at work in a broad range of artistic, cultural, religious, and political practices. There appears to be a need, therefore, to pluralize the notion of montage beyond cinema and its techniques of editing. In Mozambique and in the Sinhala Buddhist rituals, montage works as a transformer of commonsense perception. As such, montage is not a matter of direct perceptible experience alone but triggers a communicative spark between the concretely experienced and the imaginary or extra-real. This take on montage resonates with Stuart McLean’s (chapter 3) suggestion that montage does not simply refer to visual or, by extension, textual, methods but rather is a mode of engagement with the world more generally. This montage mode of being-in-the-world, McLean identifies through comparisons of almost Frazerian proportions, ranging from volcanic eruptions in the North Atlantic to early twentieth-century poetry to European folk legends about human–animal metamorphosis. McLean’s overall message is that the reality of the “between” is not something to be explained under an already established rubric of social historical context. Instead, it should be the informing principle of anthropological comparativism itself—that is, “an open-ended practice of creating new objects of knowledge and reflection” that did not necessarily exist prior to their juxtaposition. What requires explanation is not the “between,” as much anthropology would have it, but rather the systems of order with which we try to contain the between. Montage as an analytic is one possible way to set things right, McLean argues. It aligns itself not with explanatory recourse to an established order of significations (society, history, context) but with “generative instability that inheres in juxtaposed elements.” Most importantly, this generative instability of montage implies that the world cannot be represented as complete or stable. Indeed, the visible world is never offered to us in its totality but only in fragments (Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2007). Seeing, in other words, is as much about failing to see as it is about transparency. Or to put it as strongly as possible: seeing entails blindness—seeing is also blindness. Andrew Irving (chapter 4) explores this perhaps deepest stratum of vision, namely the complicity between blindness and sight in relation to the AIDS-sick art

Montage as an Analytic • 19

photographer John Dugdale. As Dugdale’s illness gradually makes him blind, he experiences how the apprehension of colors cannot be confined to vision alone; colors take on for him a texture that includes dimensions of tactility, sonority, and smell. Thus, visual sensory information is continuously integrated, transformed, and disintegrated in collision with the other senses. Montage, in Irving’s description, becomes an analytic to capture the fundamentally fractured and fracturing nature of human sense perception. As Merleau-Ponty also argued, we need to be partially blind in order for things to stand out in their visibility. Blindness, in other words, is not just illness but is the actual condition of seeing. This unsettling truth is forcefully evoked through the figure of montage.

References Deleuze, Gilles. 2000. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. ———. 2005. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Marcus, George E. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 37–53. New York and London: Routledge. Phillips, Christopher. 1992. “Introduction.” In Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum, 21–36. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Teitelbaum, Matthew. 1992. “Preface.” In Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum, 6–20. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Wagner, Roy. 1977. “Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example.” American Ethnologist 4(4): 623–42. Willerslev, Rane, and Olga Ulturgasheva. 2007. “The Sable Frontier: The Siberian Fur Trade as Montage.” Cambridge Anthropology 26(2): 79–100.

CHAPTER 1

Montage and Time Deleuze, Cinema, and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite Bruce Kapferer

My broad aim in this chapter is to join cinema to ritual, to make the artistic explorations of a science/technology of the present-future, as Gilles Deleuze might have said, reflect on practices that are past or primordially oriented in an originary sense. What I will argue is that a cinematically informed analytical approach (in which, for example, concepts such as montage and its relation to time consciousness are found) enables new descriptive possibilities for grasping the significance of ritual practice. While not obviating symbolic and performance perspectives—usually developing from dramatic and theater metaphors—another and possibly more powerful approach to ritual and its existential effects is opened. Moreover, a perspective through cinema enables an expansion of how ritual achieves its pragmatic or reconstitutive effects. I will indicate that aside from the obvious differences of cinema and ritual there is an underlying unity. Indeed, I will suggest that ritual is already cinematic in dynamic, in terms of Deleuze’s understanding, and has anticipated some of the potentials that cinema and its continuing innovations (in current digital technology, for example) is realizing through the artistic creators of film. I start with a brief comment on Deleuze’s two volumes on film (1986, 1989). Deleuze’s work on cinema is effectively an ethnography that demonstrates central themes of his post-structuralist philosophy. In my opinion, it is a work as grand in conception as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s magnificent structuralist work, Mythologiques. As Lévi-Strauss uncovers new visions of significance for a general understanding of human being through the myths, rituals, and other practices of Amazonian peoples, so Deleuze through the creative works of film uncovers innovative ways of describing existential processes and the place of human being within them. Through the technologies of the present constantly developing into the future, Deleuze opens new pathways for understanding human action and events. LéviStrauss attempts something similar, but through the imaginal creations of a destroyed or rapidly disappearing humanity that is quickly becoming a lost past. Both Deleuze and Lévi-Strauss attempt to overturn dominant and conventional understandings. However, the latter’s stress on meaning (even if highly suppressed relative to interpretive Geertzian perspectives) and the paradigmatic and structural properties of myth, or narrative and story over the creative potentials of practice, would be challenged by Deleuze.1 Here he would be joined by Victor Turner, who disagrees with Lévi-Strauss in a similar way. Contra to Lévi-Strauss, Turner values ritual over myth and, as with Deleuze, is influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s stress on creativity and the con-

Montage and Time • 21

tinual generation of the new. The influence of Nietzsche’s discourse regarding the Apollonian/Dionysian tensions of Greek drama in The Birth of Tragedy is evident through much of Turner’s work. Turner’s (1967, 1969) stress on process and reflexive dynamics in rite has resonance with certain directions in Deleuze’s cinema works. This is apparent not merely in Deleuze’s focus on creativity, but in the equation that can be made between Turner’s stress on process, symbol, and reflexivity, on the one hand, and Deleuze’s concentration on time, image, and consciousness, on the other. The implication behind the argument to follow is that Deleuze’s approach usefully breaks from what might be referred to as the dominance of meaning in much anthropological analysis, especially of ritual, and which continues in Turner’s work, a major influence on my own. Furthermore, I will suggest that Deleuze’s development through cinema of a perspective on time and consciousness will open up the significance of Turner’s emphasis on process and reflexivity and perhaps offer an opportunity to extend beyond Turner at least in the understanding of ritual. I comment also that with Deleuze in relation to the arts, Turner (1985) was concerned to marry the findings of science/technology to ritual analysis. He did so in a way that used science to confirm his ritual understandings. This, I think, is not the emphasis of Deleuze, which places art and science more in partnership on a course of enquiry in which neither has ultimate authority. I start my discussion with an outline of some of the main themes in Deleuze’s works on Cinema that I then take up through a discussion of a major Sinhala Buddhist anti-sorcery rite known as the Suniyama. This ritual is fully described in Kapferer 1997, and other significant discussions are in 1983, 2005, 2012 [1988], which is one reason for its discussion here as more extensive available published material is accessible to the reader. However, the major reason for presenting the Suniyama materials is that these were primarily influenced by a Husserlian-influenced phenomenological approach combined with a Turnerian symbolic/reflexive orientation. Nevertheless, I note, that in the earlier work I did develop a critical approach to Edmund Husserl and attempted to expand beyond the limitations of his stress on intentionality. The Deleuzian perspective I apply here can be grasped as a further extension upon this critique, and directed toward a different phenomenology that Deleuze explores through his Cinema works and which I consider, may expand both our understanding of a particular rite and possibly ritual more generally. Furthermore, the reanalysis of the Suniyama materials via a Deleuzian perspective that I present here reveals further possibilities of the ethnography that fits with dimensions of the practice I recorded whose significance was insufficiently realized in the earlier analyses. The reconsideration of the Suniyama gives point to the philosophical arguments that Deleuze presents in Cinema and their relevance for forms of practice that may be conceived as outside their sphere of relevance. The point that I underline here is that Deleuze’s Cinema works are not merely about cinema. Cinema is a phenomenon that enables Deleuze to pose major questions concerning the dynamics of creative/constructional human action and the grounds of existential experience, and accordingly develop a potentially valuable conceptual scheme of greater import than the understanding of cinema alone. While Deleuze’s concepts are developed through a consideration of the technological problematics of cinematic creation, they are intended to open the horizons of understanding concerning the processes engaged in the creation of human realities in general. The discussion of ritual here through Deleuze’s conceptual understanding of cinema is in this larger Deleuzian spirit where an approach

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developed in the context of one kind of phenomenon can extend an understanding of another.

Deleuze’s Cinema and a Generative Dynamics of Images Deleuze concentrates his philosophical ethnography of the cinema on the nature of the image and a shift from the movement-image of classical cinema, and its sensory-motor schema, to the modern cinema and its development of the timeimage, the image in itself. Here he comes to focus on what he calls the cinematic crystal image, an image that divides from within itself in an autopoetic dynamic generation. The crystal image is a point of origination par excellence and external to human being. The Cinema works as a whole express vital dimensions of a philosophy, highly influenced by Henri Bergson (1991, 1998), that takes radical issue with human-centered, constructivist, subjectivist, interpretational, reflexive positions—indeed, orientations that are powerful in the anthropology of ritual. Deleuze is critical of subject/object dualisms that are implicated in such positions, emphasizing instead a kind of material holism from which both are emergent. Thus consciousness is a refraction from reality, built from images and their light, the image being part of the matter of the real. Consciousness is already a dimension of the externally real before it becomes integral to subjective being and its reflexivity. Consciousness and its source—the image—is apart from humanity, originally external to human being. Contra to much phenomenology, consciousness is not born in intentional action. It does not start from the directional (intentional) orientation of human beings into the world whereby consciousness lights up reality bringing it into being as an act of consciousness (Schutz’s 1967 concept of consciousness as a cone of light). Reality in its potentiality already exists independent of and prior to any individual human consciousness; human beings become conscious beings from within the motioning of the universe of the real that embraces them. The light of consciousness is the vibrational light of the image that is integral to the matter of the real. It is within this that human being comes to consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre (2004) develops an argument in which the image or the imaginal appears in contexts divorced from the real—in effect, the image is a representation of the real. When reality reappears, the person about whom one has been thinking as real in the imaginary is displaced by the actually real. Deleuze, while extending on an implication already in Sartre, refuses the image/real disjunction. The image is real and what Sartre may conceive as its unreality is that dimension of it that exists as its potential, a notion that Deleuze’s concept of the virtual captures (but which Deleuze asserts is no less real). There is no real/false image or subject/object duality—rather, something in between, neither subject nor object, a differentiating continuous emerging, merging, reemerging, or what Deleuze describes in relation to cinema as a gaseous process. Furthermore, the image is real in the sense that it is not merely an abstract concretization, a figment of the human imaginary, human through and through, beginning and ending with humanity as in Hegel’s famous “night of the world,” but, rather, and following Bergson, is the enduring and generative light of the world. Consciousness is not with human beings alone and is already everywhere a potentiality, immanent in all matter. The image, in Deleuze’s usage extending from Bergson, is the primary material ground of consciousness from which meaning and symbolism are generated and molded. Moreover, and critically, the image (in cinema as elsewhere) is not purely visual

Montage and Time • 23

but is manifest in a plethora of other sensory dimensions.2 Consciousness is not a product of the intentional orientation of human beings toward the world, but is thoroughly integral to the materialities of existence per se. Consciousness already is, and does not wait for human being to produce it. This is realized in cinema in which the screen and its play of images for Deleuze becomes the brain, the plane of immanence for the emergence of consciousness. In cinema, the light of consciousness through the play of images—images as material—on the screen produces consciousness. Those bathed in the light (and its varying intensities) that project from the screen have their consciousness produced and continually shaped and reshaped both through the changing and different relations between the images on the screen and by the shifting subject positioning achieved via the movement of the camera. In this, subjectivity is removed as it were from the anchored subject/individual seated in the cinema and through the action of the camera played from any point across the screen. Subject positioning is located up, down, behind, alongside, and from within images human and non-human. Perspective is multiple. The human viewing subject is decentered, and what was once thought of as natural perception conceived from a fixed position before the world, as it were, is negated, made contingent, and thoroughly relativized. Furthermore, the cinema, rather than extending natural perception, frequently acts against it, shocking or subverting the habits of human perception (a critical property of what Deleuze examines as montage). Subjectivity, which in the motion of the cinematic eye may quickly become an object to itself, is distributed across the screen and appropriated into the cinematic realities of the moving images. The eye is in the motioning of the world, at any point whatever within the world, and in cinema the world is the play of images across the screen. These are not multiple expressions of a singular self or embodied individual, but in Deleuze’s sense changing dimensions of a body without organs, a deterritorialized nomad, a being of pure potential and becoming, a subject that can become anybody or thing. Through such process, the viewing individual may be drawn into the action on the screen and become experientially consubstantial with persons and things via the moving camera eye operating a multitude of perspectives from within and outside human being. In Deleuze’s analytic strategy, storyline or plot are secondary around which there is formed an emergent complexity of experience that is in excess of its narrative thread, opening out to new horizons of potential. Such potential is vital in the genetic dynamics and intensity of the image, the image as virtual, which achieves a diversity of realizations impelled through divisions within images, the play between images, their assemblages, sets, framing, out of framing, angles, close-ups, shadings, etc., facilitated in the technology and techniques of cinematography. For Deleuze, the plot is relatively simple, around which the complexities of the life of the cinema form. Questions of interpretation and meaning are not primary; rather, they depend upon the dynamics of the image through which such aspects are generated. Further, interpretation and meaning are continually open. Deleuze does not privilege a language or lingual approach either as method or metaphor, for these come out of the movements and the intensities of the image. The image is prior to language, which therefore cannot be the tool for its comprehension. The structural inter-relations of the image or the relations in which images materialize are not first and foremost of a linguistic character, as in structuralist orientations or others—for instance, of a performative kind (Austin 1955; Rappaport 1999). The discourse on the image that Deleuze presents in the Cinema

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works—his discussion of various kinds of visual, sound, and other sense images such as affection-images—constitutes an attempt to develop a new phenomenology not just of the image in terms of the dynamics of the image, but of the forces involved in world creation and generation. He argues for an understanding of human being not only through human being but through a dynamics of going outside the human and from perspectives that are not necessarily those from the positionality of the human. This is the potential that cinema offers. For Deleuze, cinema is a manifestation of reality. If it is an imaginary of reality it is an extraction or subtraction from the potential that this reality already is. Deleuze’s approach to cinema is at variance with most approaches to ritual, which are thoroughly human-centric, even though much ritual, as I will suggest, in a manner similar to the cinematic, often attempts a grasping of human being from positions external to human being. All the major approaches to ritual assert its thoroughly human-centric character.3 Thus the stress in most anthropology on ritual is essentially symbolic, involving a primary emphasis on language and meaning. Victor Turner argues that symbols are the building blocks of rite integral to the reflexive processes by means of which ritual largely achieves its effects.4 A Deleuzian approach would challenge, if not completely, this position by arguing that the symbolic, language and meaning, and their constructions are emergent, a concentration on the dynamics of emergence perhaps being critical to the effects and force of rite. The point, while not rejecting symbolic perspectives, asserts that these must be secondary to a primary attention to the dynamics, structures, and processes of image production. That is, a symbolic construction for Deleuze, following Bergson, is not a reality in and for itself—real because it is constructed as real by human beings—but real in a thoroughly material sense independent of its human constructions or symbolic creative realizations. As such, the symbolic is rooted in the processes of the world and extracted or subtracted5 from it and always connected into material reality that exists independently of its construction. This is a vital aspect of how cinema works, symbolic constructions being integral to the play of images, which are continually the source of new symbolic potential that is in some part already a potential of the virtual of the image. For Deleuze, cinema works not because it is a suspension of reality or propels us into a reality that is imaginary—that is an escape from the real—but works because it indeed has (re)discovered dimensions of the processes of how human beings constitute and are constituted by the realities of which they are already part.6 Cinema is an instance of a technology by means of which the dynamics of the real are effectively broken into (art as science, science as art)—a real that has force apart from the human as it is integral to human constitution. Through cinema, discoveries are made concerning the way human beings construct their realities through a capacity to go outside the human and also to penetrate deeply within. Here, I think there is a close affinity between cinema and ritual. Ritual, as with cinema, may be conceived as thoroughly built around the play of the real of the image and a concern with a symbolic extraction or subtraction of potentials that are integral to the virtual of the image. As with cinema, ritual too is often directed to a decentering of human perception and of human being. It goes outside the human and, as with cinema, may be enabled to reveal something of what underpins the creative and generative capacity of human being that may be otherwise obscured in thoroughly human-centered, subjectivist perspectives. Via the path of cinema, an insight may also be gained regarding some of the pragmatic effects of ritual performance that aim to intervene in the realities of human

Montage and Time • 25

experience. However, an implication of what I present is that much ritual can be understood as anticipating what Deleuze uncovers in his work on cinema, and perhaps goes beyond it—the future in the past as the past is in the future.

Time as Movement and Event: The Rite of the Suniyama At this point, I wish to turn to a consideration of some of my own ethnography on ritual performance. I address a Sinhala Buddhist anti-sorcery rite known as the Suniyama. This is considered to be the master rite for a myriad of rituals in Sri Lanka that address a great diversity of illnesses mediated by various kinds of malevolent spirits. Its central theme concerns the problem of time and consciousness and their relation to the order of society and the capacity of human beings to act within it. What is classed as sorcery in Sri Lanka covers all manner of personal misfortune that ultimately has to do with the victim’s positioning in the motioning of the cosmic entirety or existential differentiation in Time. The particular vulnerabilities that victims have to sorcery are broadly conceived as the bad effects of karmic action having to do with the way one’s activities or various life paths intermesh with others—human and non-human—resulting in blockages, conflicts, disruptions, and misfortunes in life’s course, ultimately bringing death. The vulnerability of human beings to such conjunctive eventualities or collisions that can lead to sorcery effects is influenced by a sorcery victim’s birth time. In other words, by the singularity of the positioning of human beings in the motion of Cosmic Time, particular unfortunate conjunctions and eventualities are effected. A Suniyama is directed to cleanse sorcery victims of the effects of sorcery that attach to and enter within the body and disrupt the whole being of the victim as an entity conditioned within time. Sorcery in this sense is a thoroughly radical event upsetting both the victim’s life course through time and very constitution in time. Time is behind and generative of Being, as it were, in the sense that Deleuze builds from Martin Heidegger, but most especially from Bergson, and is the philosophical organizational theme of the Cinema books. The key events of the Suniyama, as I will describe, are organized to deal with sorcery as a phenomenon that has disrupted a specific life course as a movement through time. It must remove the obstacles and entanglements of the victim that have impeded and disrupted past action and will continue to disrupt the victim into the future. In this way, every performance of a Suniyama is different in its details insofar that it is set to the birth positioning, as astrologically determined, of the sorcery victim in Cosmic Time. Adjustments to specific performances will also be made to take advantage of the most auspicious moment in Cosmic Time to make sure that the rite operates with optimum efficacy. The key objective of the Suniyama is to reset the victim along his or her life trajectory, freed from the blockages, obstacles, and impediments that have accrued over the victim’s life, and to also achieve a new beginning for the victim as a being emergent from Cosmic Time—Time as Being. The Suniyama is a magnificent night-long occasion involving splendid events of dance and tragic-comic drama. It gathers into its performance great Buddhist themes and embraces its participants—in the main, ordinary village folk—in their arguments to pragmatic effect. The rite develops around a central building that may be conceived of as the key technical or technological apparatus of the rite, a machine by means of which the forces of the cosmic entirety are brought into play

26 • Montage as an Analytic

and focused on the sorcery victim. Repotentiated within them, the sorcery victim is able to withstand the destruction of sorcery and is drawn back to consciousness and imbued with the capacity to act and to participate in the construction of his or her own life chances. The ritual machine in which the sorcery victim will be situated is known as the Mahasammata Maligawa (Palace) or Suniyam Vidiya (a place of intersection of cosmic forces) and is constructed around the plan of the cosmic mandala of world origination. This central originating point of the mandala (gaba, literally a womb space) is inside the Palace and cannot be seen. Just after midnight, the patient will crawl through a small doorway into the Palace and sit at the central point—a place that in lay conceptualization is the bedroom of King Mahasammata, the first Cosmic ruler who institutes the order of human society and is an incarnation of the Buddha.7 The central chamber of the Palace is where Mahasammata is understood to be engaged in generative erotic play with his Queen Manikpala, the daughter of Lord Vishnu. Their erotic unity is indicative and sustaining of the harmony of Mahasammata’s cosmic and social order. The core myth of the rite, which provides the key storyline for the vital ritual events and which is intoned and sung at various stages of the ritual progress, recounts the occasion of the first act of sorcery of which Manikpala was the victim. The myth tells how Manikpala was raped by the great demon of sorcery, Vasavarti—the World Poisoner—who in various interpretations relating to Buddhist doctrinal texts is the great opponent of the Buddha, indeed his cousin. Vasavarti desires Manikpala and, disguising himself as Mahasammata, enters the cosmic bedchamber and rapes the Queen. The World Poisoner assumes the shape of a fire viper and penetrates to the Queen’s womb. The Queen falls unconscious, her body is covered in sores, and the generative potency of Mahasammata’s cosmic order is lost. Its harmony is shattered. All is decline and suffering. Mahasammata is distraught for his Queen Manikpala and no one can restore her to consciousness until Prince Odissa, himself a terrible sorcerer equipped with all magical knowledge and techniques, comes and invents the ritual—the Suniyama, in fact—by means of which the Queen is cured and the cosmic order regained. The crucial events of the rite begin just before midnight and proceed through to almost midday the following day (a period during which the Sun begins and completes its ascent). The first major sequence of events (the hat adiya, or rite of the Seven Steps) involves the slow progress of some four hours in duration of the victim toward the Mahasammata Palace. This concludes with the victim crawling inside the Palace, which begins the second major sequence of events starting in the early hours of the morning and proceeding through to the conclusion of the rite at midday. These events involve the seating of the sorcery victim in an auspicious place (ata mangala), described among other things as the world mandala, where the victim is turned around to face back down the line of progress or path already taken. In this space, the victim is symbolically released from the coils of sorcery (ideally, 108 bonds of the sorcerer are cut).8 Thereby released, the victim then engages in a series of sacrificial acts (initially with the assistance of the ritual priests, but eventually as an independent sacrificer) that bring the rite to its conclusion. This is marked by the destruction of the Palace in a dramatic act where the great being of sorcery, Vasavarti Maraya (the Death-Bringing World Poisoner), cuts down the Palace, signifying his own destruction. In this act, the victim indeed appears to rise unscathed from the debris that falls all about. The event in fact

Montage and Time • 27

is conceptualized as a rebirth, the victim effectively being repositioned into the world from within Cosmic Time, thoroughly freed from the coils of sorcery. In the discussion to follow, I will concentrate on these critical events—primarily the progress of the hat adiya and the events of sacrifice inside the Palace—largely with reference to Deleuze’s discussion of (a) the movement image and (b) the time-image whereby Deleuze distinguishes classic cinema from modern cinema. While the former continues into the modern (i.e., post–World War II cinema), the latter is the period for the development of the time-image or the expression of time in itself for which the mobile camera is no longer the critical technical instrument. Moreover, the development of the time-image in cinema supplants montage as the vital technique for the expression of the differentiation and intensity of time. It is beyond montage, even though montage is always implicated. Broadly, I will indicate that Deleuze’s concept of the movement image extends an understanding of the events of the hat adiya while his concept of the time-image is thoroughly relevant to sacrifice and other events within the Palace.

Montage and the Motivation of the Image As I have already indicated, the Mahasammata Palace is the central motor of the rite. The facade of the Palace is a montage representing the moving totality of Cosmic Time. It is a juxtaposition of a variety of images of beings and cosmic forces that are in tension. The surface display of images can be grasped as indicating the existential differences and disjunctions that are ultimately ordered through the hierarchical motion of the cosmos overcoming the conflicts, contradictions and fractures that are implicated in the very forms and juxtapositions of the facade montage. The demonic forces that constantly threaten to fragment and throw such order into disarray, the situation of the ensorceled, are located at the base of the facade. Overall the montage embeds the dynamic of the cosmos as integral both to the production of the situation of the ensorceled and also its overcoming—both the disharmonies and the fragile harmony of cosmic motion. The governing images surmounting the edifice are those of the Sun and Moon, the temporal forces whose ascent and descent, waxing and waning, condition the temporal cycle, including those of life in all its forms and their death and regeneration. The timing of ritual events is in accordance with the particular intensities of cosmic forces that are dominant in the temporal flow of solar and lunar interconnection and tension (and too of the planets whose positioning affect the events of the rite and are implicated in the archetechtonics of the Palace). At the central apex of the facade is a painting of Suniyam, the arch sacrificer and ritualist who invented the rite. This, as well as the distribution of images across the panels of the facade, indicates both the dynamic of differentiation in the cosmic unity (that the representation in montage enables) and, indeed, of the rite which expresses a sacrificial dynamic of differentiating creative and regenerative action. The facade or Palace montage is far more than a mere expressive representation of Cosmic Time and its complexity. It is also a vitally active constitutive force demonstrating the potency of the image. The entire Mahasammata building is made from different plant materials, including the images on the facade, and these contain the elements that relate to the life of all matter. The facade materials are expressly filled with life and could be said to radiate it. Indeed, the facade is fes-

28 • Montage as an Analytic

tooned with brightly colored lights and some ritualists say that it shines with the radiant energy of the Buddha and the cosmos. The Palace and the facade are alive as a differentiating and moving totality that gathers those who are focused upon it into the cosmic dynamic it represents. The sorcery victim is ritually encouraged to participate in the life of the image, of the facade, and of the entire ritual structure. Through the participation in the image, the sorcery victim will be restored to consciousness and delivered from the paralyzing effect of sorcery. Deleuze argues that the cinema screen and the images playing across it shine with the quality of the vibrational light of consciousness that already is. Here, developing from a critical appreciation of Bergson, he indicates that cinema in a sense mimics reality. He contests a Husserlian phenomenology that stresses human beings as the source of consciousness and the commitment to intentional subjective consciousness—consciousness as emergent from the individual human subject’s direction towards an object (some thing). In such an orientation, individual consciousness projects like a cone of light illuminating reality, subordinating as well as rendering it entirely relative to individual human construction and interpretation. Deleuze conceives such an orientation as thoroughly bound to the dualism of a subject/object dialectic, which obscures a major dimension of the cinematic effect as well as the nature of the forces engaged in human existential experience within reality, which the invention of cinema has recaptured, if unintentionally. Deleuze is critical of Bergson for his failure to realize this. Deleuze argues that the cinematic operates to subtract or extract from the vibrancy of reality (e.g., the close-up) rather than construct it. That is, the nature of reality is not entirely reducible to the individual subjective act, which is already within reality processes and drawing from them. Cinematic techniques express such a dynamic and, furthermore, are not constrained within the subjectifying/objectifying positioning of the human body. The cinematic, expanding on processes already experimented with in the history of the arts, facilitates the taking of positions (“any-point-whatever”) that are not confined to the human body (or limited to assumptions of natural perception). Moreover, in cinema, perspectives on human beings or situations, for example, can be taken from positions thoroughly external to embodied human being. Thus the cinema screen is like a brain (a center of consciousness, the nerve center of connection) but without a body, cinema potentially and often effectively “reembodying” the audience in the life and experience of the flow of images that it presents. In cinema, human beings can be brought within a reality (within the real of the vibrant image) in which they come to participate in the multiplicities of the cinematic unfolding. As such, the audience is not an “anchored subject” immobilized and necessarily casting its gaze as an act of independent interpretative consciousness upon the screen. Rather, the audience is brought actively within the play of images across the screen and comes to participate from a multiplicity of positions within and among them. The screen and the light of its images shines upon the audience (rather than the light of the audience’s consciousness upon them) and so captures, motivates, and motions the audience in accordance with its processes. Cinema, and I suggest much ritual before it, creates a reality in which its audience becomes variously embodied, shares in the multiplicity of events, things, and their unfolding. This is so, potentially, through the action of “screen consciousness” upon the audience who may, despite a conscious resistance in themselves, become absorbed into the reality processes that envelop them. The potential of

Montage and Time • 29

cinema is that the audience becomes far from being an anchored subject and made mobile within the motional reality of the screen.9 The montage of the Palace facade has an import similar to that Deleuze accords the screen-image—audience relation in cinema which the events of the hat adiya or Seven Steps exemplify.

The Overcoming of Sorcery: The Hat Adiya as a Movement Image The hat adiya is regarded by ritualists as commencing the anti-sorcery work proper. Within its performance, the sorcery victim effectively becomes a movementimage in a slow progress, lasting some four hours, into the Palace. The force of this motion is understood to flow from the Palace into the victim, who is enjoined to focus on the montage facade. It is the facade/Palace that initiates the movement, in the understanding of the ritualists, and not the subjective inner consciousness or intentional consciousness that in Husserl’s phenomenology, for example, might otherwise be grasped as primary in the motioning (see Kapferer 1997). In the course of the journey toward and into the Palace, the victim is progressively cleansed of sorcery.10 The major instrument in this cleansing is the facade/Palace that gathers its potency in the movement of the victim. That is, as the victim is in movement, so is the facade/Palace. Victim and facade are in temporal synchrony, the former being brought into conjunction with the dynamic of the Cosmic Totality that is itself moving in time toward an increasingly ordered unity of its parts. The victim’s progress toward the Palace indicates both the change that is occurring in the Cosmic Whole and simultaneously in the victim. I stress that in the hat adiya the victim becomes a movement-image. This is so in two major senses. First, the victim (regardless of the victim’s gender) is a representation of the first victim of sorcery and must wear the wedding shawl of Manikapala. Thus the victim is made a participant among the cosmic play of images that is the facade and vital within the building. Moreover, the victim, becoming progressively active in movement, has effect in relation to the other images in the real of the ritual. The victim’s progressive movement is linked to a change that is taking place in the Cosmic Totality, a motioning toward a hierarchical ordering of the cosmos that will potentiate the victim in the overcoming of sorcery. Second, the victim is an expression of time as movement approaching in some way the cinematic sense that Deleuze develops. In his discussion of the movement-image in Cinema, Deleuze criticizes Bergson in Creative Evolution for conceiving ancient illusions of movement and those of modern cinema as being essentially the same and founded in the reconstitution of movement from instants or positions, from the building of the flow of movement from discrete poses. Deleuze argues for a distinction in cinema illustrated by reference to cartoons that he describes as thoroughly cinematic. This is clear when one attempts to define the cartoon film; if it belongs fully to the cinema, this is because the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatever of their course. The cartoon film is not related to a Euclidean, but to a Cartesian geometry. It does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure (1986: 5; my italics)

30 • Montage as an Analytic

The motion of the hat adiya, if not the same, bears some similarity. That is, it is not constructed from a series of poses (or what Deleuze [1986:4] discusses as “transcendental elements” that might describe the building of the dances of the gods in the Suniyama presented before the performance of the hat adiya; see Kapferer 199711), but more from what Deleuze describes as sections or “immanent material elements.” Here I note a connection between what I referred to previously concerning the motion of the victim as effecting or being related to a change in the whole, the Cosmic Totality of the dynamic of the rite. In this regard, the hat adiya and cinematic motion bear a relation to Bergson’s concept of duration (duree) or real time as elaborated in Matter and Memory, which Bergson otherwise opposes to cinematic time or movement, for which Deleuze criticizes him (see especially 1986: 8–11). Thus, contra to Bergson, Deleuze argues that the movement-image (and time-image) in cinema (and the moves in the hat adiya) are mobile sections, elements of a continuing process. Further, each movement constitutes a qualitative change in the Whole, in both cinema and the Suniyama, and thus approach what Bergson describes as real time or duree (see especially Deleuze 1986: 10–11). The victim in the hat adiya starts the journey to the Palace from a position seated among the spectators (frequently numbering over two hundred and drawn from extended kin, neighbors, and friends) to the event who are gathered at the edge of the performance area (symbolically at the perimeter of Mahasammata’s City). The body of a snake (the fire viper of sorcery, gini polanga) is drawn on the ground between where the victim is positioned and the small entrance into the Palace.12 The body of the snake is also conceived as the line of the susumna or channel that runs along the spine of the body that carries the life force (prana) that the ritualists understand as traveling from the Palace into the victim, effectively restoring the ensorceled once more to mobility, to a capacity to act that sorcery has blocked and prevented. The ritualists demand that victims focus on the facade and the Palace as a whole. In this way, the ritualists say that the energies emanating from these can flow into the victim, effectively bringing about the motioning of the victims and moving them into the Palace. Seven points are located along the body of the snake that the victim will traverse. These are conceived as seven cakra or lotus points through which cosmic forces from the Palace will enter the victim’s body. The lotuses also mark out the stages of the victim’s movement and ultimately to a liberation from the constraining bonds of sorcery. Each of the seven points is also understood to be a barrier thrown up by sorcery that the victim crosses over after the clearing, negating action of anti-sorcery rites that invoke the potencies of forces in the Cosmic Totality, principally that of the Buddha and the Sinhala Guardian deities. After each crossing, that segment of the snake’s body traversed is cleared away along with the ritual objects employed at each stage.13 Several observations can be made on the material presented. The seven cakra points, as well as energy vortices, can be conceived as sections of movement/ duree/time in Deleuzian/Bergsonian terms. Effectively, they are sections of movement in the cinematic sense discussed by Deleuze: specifically sections, I suggest, in a singular flow of movement in time of the sequence past becoming present moving to a future. One aspect of this is the tracing, or perhaps a retracing, of the time past of the ensorceled victim. By means of this, the ritualists (and the victim) enter via the technology of rite within this time past so as to systematically remove the hindrances and obstacles that have prevented movement and action as well as

Montage and Time • 31

a cleaning from the victim’s body of the ill effects of sorcery, as these have entered or clung to the body. I think that the extreme slowness of the hat adiya events bears on this. Thus the slowness is akin to the slow motion of film (and also the engagement of montage to similar effect) as a cinematic technique indicating the speed of time in its passing duree. I also note that the slowness indicates the vastness of the process of Cosmic Time in which the victim is motioning. Moreover, the ultimate destination of the victim to go within the Palace is, as I will explain, an entry into a machinic ritual replication of the vortex of Time or the Buddhist Void (sunya), the center of creative emergence. In this way, the slowness of the hat adiya expresses the vastness of the cosmic journey that the victim is undertaking. It is simultaneously a motioning forward and backward in Time.14 The movement toward the Palace is also a movement back to the originating moment of existence in the Cosmos (or, rather, a ritual repetition or replication of it)—a movement toward that generative instant of Time (symbolized in the creative action of Mahasammata and of the harmony exemplified in the erotic interplay of Mahasammata with Manikpala). The vastness of this movement is one which also encompasses and is the dynamic of the victims’ own forward and backward motion through their own lifetime, during which they can be conceived as being resituated in their own birthing and creative moment to begin life anew—to trace a new pathway through life’s complexities. The hat adiya is a motioning within time—but not time in itself, rather time within which all is potential. Time in itself is beyond montage and not derivative from movement. Deleuze, with regard to cinema, conceives of time in itself as having to do with what he calls the time-image. Following Bergson, he asserts that the time-image goes “beyond the purely empirical succession of time—pastpresent-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can belong to several levels; the sheets of past co-exist in non-chronological order” (2000: xii).15 The Palace facade/montage is a partition, a screen that separates time as succession, as movement image, from the timeimage that lies behind. This is intimated in the facade itself—which is both a coexisting and juxtapositioning of several levels of duration (planetary demons, gods, etc.) and their motion chronologically timed in terms of the movement of the Sun and Moon. In other words, the facade is a line of radical transition between, on the one hand, time as succession (the hat adiya) and, the other hand, the inner sanctum of the time image that lies behind it, the generative locus of time itself from which all duration and its materializations are emergent. This is where the victim will come to sit which, indeed, as Deleuze writes of the time-image is the place of the seer (see below) for it is the Cosmic Mandala (a center of cosmic conjunction, the ata mangala or auspicious site, the place where the potencies of Brahma, Siva and the Buddha are concentrated).

Into the Crystal of Time: Beyond Montage The final events of the Suniyama, following the hat adiya, begin with the victim crawling through a small doorway at the base of the Palace facade. The victim is turned around facing back in the direction just traveled and seated in the middle of the Cosmic Mandala. Here the victim is bound with the coils or creepers of sorcery, which are then cut, indicating the victim’s liberation. Sorcery victims often

32 • Montage as an Analytic

shake and tremble as they crawl through the entrance into the Palace. This I think is a bodily expression that intimates the extraordinary significance that this event condenses. One obvious understanding is that it is an involuntary physical expression of the release of tensions following the removal of the poisons of sorcery. But it can also be grasped as an involuntary physical awe-provoked anticipation of the approach to or entry within the zone of the Open, in Deleuze’s conception, a place of indeterminate reoriginating intensity of pure potential—a virtual that is yet to be actualized (see Kapferer 1997, 2005). The concept of the Open is appropriate to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which argues for a non-Kantian transcendence that is thoroughly grounded in and oriented to the empirically real.16 It is also relevant to the practical concerns of the Suniyama, whose machinic and highly pragmatic intent is to restore the victim to action but with a capacity to actualize that which is imagined or yet to be imagined. I underline a major point. It is the ritual as a technology over and above any exhortations of an idealist religious kind that it may engage that is crucial. Religious ideals, morals, and values within the rite are techniques for the achievement of practical results and, furthermore, gather their potency not so much in themselves as through the apparatuses and procedures of the rite. The belief—or not—of the victim is secondary to the images of cosmic force, whose vibrant potency are the key instruments in the technology of ritual practice.17 Vital to the Suniyama’s technology is its machinic capacity to separate that which Deleuze distinguishes as the movement-image from the time-image, a distinction that some critics question (Bogue 2003; Ranciere 2006). The practice of the Suniyama is organized in terms of a separation to which Deleuze’s distinction is relevant. Deleuze’s description of the time or crystal image (time in itself) and the progress toward it, even despite Deleuze’s grounding it in the history of cinema, is remarkable in its similarity to the events within the Palace and the efficacy that ritualists attach to them. What he says has bearing especially on major events of comedy and sacrifice as acts of differentiation that are associated with the victim’s repositioning within the Palace. Deleuze discusses the pure time-image of the cinema as a crystal image, an image that divides within itself (and as I discuss below are features of the differentiating and internally refracting dynamic of both comedy and sacrifice). In his discussion, the crystal time-image is a virtualizing of the actual. What is real or imaginary is indistinct. The time-image is set apart from action and the sensory-motor scheme of the movement-image of cinema in which there is an interval and an oscillation between what is real and what is imaginary. The crystal time-image for Deleuze is not associated with an agent or actant, rather with the seer (see Deleuze 2000: 272). Moreover, crystal images do not extend from action situations, but constitute (again for cinema) what he refers to as pure sound and optical situations apart from extensions into reality. The virtual of the crystal image becomes the dynamic source for the creation of a new reality. In Deleuze’s formulation, the movement-image proceeds toward the crystal image, time in itself, from within which new movement in time extending into new potential of action is generated. Deleuze argues that the time or crystal image is constituted and achieves its efficacy by means of a delinking from the movement image, time as succession in space. Such a delinking in the Suniyama is done in the acts of the obliteration of the timeline of the hat adiya and the resituating of victims within the atamagala, their turning around to face back the way they have come and their immobiliza-

Montage and Time • 33

tion. In their immobility, victims are encouraged by the ritualists to adopt a contemplative mood and to “see,” or to perceive inwardly. It is this radical breakdown or interruption in what Deleuze discusses as the sensory motor scheme that in cinema and in the Suniyama especially is vital to the production of the time/crystal image. This breakdown of the sensory motor scheme, integral to the movement image, creates the conditions for a kind of emancipation and intensification of the senses. The victim enclosed and isolated in the Palace is given up to the senses in themselves, to their potentialities relatively freed from their determination and embedding in the interactive engagements and projects of everyday life. The victim cannot see out to the world outside the Palace and the sounds and the smells of the ritual actions of the rite envelop the victim in a heightened intensity of agency.18 In this situation, there is a thorough break, for the victim, with the actual. This involves a further or more intensive move into the virtual that is not yet actual and, most importantly a direct rather than indirect, representational, engagement with time in itself. Within the space of the atamagala, many of the conditions are met for that production of the crystal time image that Deleuze (see 1989: 274–75) describes through reference to cinematic practice in which there is the creation of an indiscernibility between the imaginary and the actual. In the Suniyama, I suggest, this is further facilitated by a major dramatic event of comedy that is performed by the ritualists before the Palace. Among the many features of this event, the Vadiga Patuna (A Comedy of Brahmins; see Kapferer 1997) is a destruction of the reasonings of everyday life, and the dissolving of their actualities, often uproariously so, into the potentialities of the imaginary. The comedy as comedy refuses the logic of succession (the link between succession, causation, and reason) and might be grasped as in effect signaling the process within the atamagala as one which has gone beyond reason and its link to time as progression. The comedy of the Vadiga Patuna has many of the features that might describe the inner machinic of the atamagala as a direct image, a crystal image, of time where not only are distinctions between the real and the imaginary broken, but also those between truth and falsity. The discourse of the Vadiga Patuna sets up one “truth” after another to be smashed or dissolved into that which it might otherwise be conceived as falsifying. In a sense, comedy can be understood as both a dynamic of montage and montage in fragmentation, a breaking down in fact of the whole that the victim has now passed beyond. Moreover, the rhythm and speed of the comedy is to invoke a sense of constant becoming, an almost inexhaustible emergence and momentary actualization of the potential. This, in a very different register, expresses a dynamic of the crystal of time that in Deleuze’s analysis is also the “seed” of origination or reorigination, an idea appropriate to ritualist cultural understandings of some of the potency of the atamagala.19 “What we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor its indirect representation as interval or as whole; it is its direct presentation” (Deleuze 1989: 275). Upon the completion of the comedy, the ritualists and the victim engage in a series of sacrificial acts. I comment here that the juxtaposition of comedy with the events of sacrifice that follow metonymically indicates a similarity and a difference. They are both acts of intense differentiation and share in what Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1956) describe as the key sacrificial dynamic of creation through destruction. Their distinction is that, in this context, the comedy is a discourse of the constant explosion of any whatever reality, its generative dynamic always end-

34 • Montage as an Analytic

ing on a note of destruction, whereas sacrifice is a reversal of such a process—a destruction that ends on a note of creation or reorigination. The sacrificial action in which the victim now participates is consistent with the crystalline dynamic of the time image that the victim is effectively within. The sacrifices perhaps are more accurately described as dynamic acts of division, rather than acts of destruction. That is, whole objects (especially ash pumpkin, or coconuts in the instance of the Suniyama and other healing rites), that in themselves express a totality, are cut by the victim or, in other words, divided. As such, the sacrifice is an initial act of differentiation from within the crucible of time in itself. In Deleuze’s terms a crystalline differentiating act of emergence, a process of reactualization from out of the space of the virtual where all is potential (in contrast to the deactualization of the real that is a major process of the preceding comedy) is occasioned through the sacrifice. The act of cutting is also explicitly a cutting away of the agencies and effects of sorcery—a final or finishing (tindui) cutting away of the past so that the erstwhile victim of sorcery is able to actualize or reoriginate anew. This receives its most complete and intense expression in the final dramatic acts of the Suniyama, when a ritual performer appears in the totalizing form of sorcery, in the guise of the Death-Bringing World Poisoner (Vasavarti Maraya), and destroys the Palace in an act both of self-destruction and of sorcery’s effects (see Kapferer 1997). In this sense, the Suniyama is an effect of sorcery and the destruction of the Palace signifies the end of its effect. A powerful feature of this concluding event is the breaking free of the victim from the dimension of time in itself. As the debris falls all around in this most spectacular of the ritual events, the victim appears to rise out of the chrysalis of time itself. It is a supreme event of actualization from out of the realm of the virtual and the start of a new path through the complexities of social reality. Sorcery is an ordinary expectation in the Sinhalese context that explicitly acknowledges the complexity of social existence (and its cosmic conditionality) to be rooted in the fact that all beings are singular points of origination and trace a multiplicity of different life courses. These, in the Sinhala Buddhist karmic universe, crisscross and intermesh having both negative and positive effects for the beings so engaged. The idea of sorcery captures and expresses such notions and the Suniyama ritual situates much of its efficacy by disentangling victims from the disastrous and ill effects of what could be described as life’s collisions or events where a person’s course through life is blocked or otherwise adversely affected by its intermeshing with that of others (human and extra human). The machinic process of the Suniyama achieves this by taking victims outside the lived karmic actualities of causation and of interconnection. In other words, the matter of time (in the sense of problematic and in the Bergson/Deleuzian usage of the materiality of the image) is central to the Suniyama both in its intimate connection with the issue of causation and in the necessity essentially to reset the ensorceled in time, to establish a new point of singularity whereby victims can trace a path through the complexities of existence.

Time, Cinema, and Ritual Cinema is an ethnographic phenomenon that in the history of its practice opens a window on many of the crucial questions that have consumed philosophy and

Montage and Time • 35

the arts and sciences. This is so through the evolution of its technological potential driven in the narrative and representational demands or problematics of those involved in its artistic creative use. The questions that Deleuze pursues through the cinematic, as in the concepts that he develops, are in many ways emergent from and organic with the cinematic phenomenon that he addresses. His approach is ethnographic in an anthropological sense. It builds from a particular phenomenon, explored through the multiplicities of its processes, but addressing issues of larger significance (or in his terms of molar import) relevant to the generative situation of human beings in existence. The questions of time and consciousness among numerous others are in Deleuze’s investigation integral to the artistic problematics of cinema, for example, in the efforts to represent events and their unfolding intensities. This is so despite or because of the pragmatic concerns of cinema practice. Unintentionally, as it were, the pragmatism of cinema, the problems provoked by the matter at hand combined with the creative engagement of its technological potential, lead it to break into questions of larger philosophical and existential import and to advance an understanding. In cinema, there is a conjunction of art and science, a theme expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994) Ritual, in the multiplicities of its practice, is obviously distinct from cinema—its metaphysics in much conventional opinion, including that of Deleuze, distances it from what might be described as the technologically modern. In his Cinema work, Deleuze himself says as much with reference to ancient cosmologies of time and in the context of demonstrating the new potential of cinema.20 However, I note that Deleuze can easily be interpreted as indicating that what he refers to as Antiquity (his discussion of dance being of relevance to rite) intimates what is realized through cinema. This is the tenor of my argument here, although I would put it more strongly. Much ritual can be grasped as anticipating that which, in Deleuze’s discussion, is more fully concretized in cinema. In other words, ritual is like the arts and looks forward to what the technologically modern can achieve through a union of the creative insights of art with scientific practice. Alternatively, it might be said science or technology liberates art and overcomes the barriers that ritual and metaphysics presents for enquiry into the nature of existence. What I am suggesting is that there is no necessary opposition between ritual and science/technology. Or if there are clear and obvious contrasts, as there are, they are mutually informative. Without being committed to a dubious linear evolutionist trajectory of the common kind (art emerges from rite, or science replaces rite), an attention to modern technological practice such as that of cinema may extend an understanding of ritual practice. This is because the latter, no less a pragmatic technology if radically distinct from the cinematic, intersects in certain key problematics and serendipitously arrives at similar solutions. More profoundly they may be joined as a function of their practice in contributing to an understanding of questions confronting human being as a whole. Ritual, or at least some ritual—those such as the Suniyama and, I think, a huge diversity of rites that are radically processual (rites of birth and death, of cosmic and existential renewal) in Arnold van Gennep’s sense that Victor Turner so brilliantly expanded from—embraces the kinds of problematic that cinema addresses. The stress on process in van Gennep and in Turner is a fundamental recognition of the centrality of time and movement (transition) in ritual practice and the objective of much ritual to both replicate this and to enter into the dynamics of its production, to intervene within time and its passage, as it were. The stress on process is not the same as an emphasis on practice to which the idea of process has been

36 • Montage as an Analytic

reduced. Ritual and cinema are practices that are mutually informative perhaps as much, if not more so, than the relatively common understanding of ritual through the metaphors and practices of drama and theater. The connection between ritual and cinema, or at least highly significant approaches to these phenomena, indicates that a work such as that of Deleuze is of considerable relevance to the understanding of rite. This is what I mean when I say that ritual anticipates cinema, indicating that the ideas that Deleuze develops may have some relevance in understanding the ritual process and vice versa. There is no doubt that Deleuze’s argument expands my understanding of the Suniyama and perhaps this rite clarifies some of the importance of Deleuze’s own position. In the beginning of this chapter, I equated Deleuze’s Cinema works with LéviStrauss’ magnificent Mythologiques. Both scholars bring together an enormous array of creative materials in the pursuit of opening new pathways into uncovering the nature of the human project within its circumstances of existence. Lévi-Strauss is dominantly concerned with meaning and in large part develops a linguistic or language-based approach. Deleuze generally challenges such an orientation as well as others common in anthropology, such as symbolic and certain phenomenological orientations. He offers a new point of direction perhaps out of the impasse that some of these have encountered and a certain repetition in argument as well as an amassing of more and more empirical evidence without breaking the barriers or the circle of understanding that a commitment to such approaches may effect. A key feature of the Cinema works, one of which some complain, is that Deleuze is not concerned with the plot or narrative of film but rather with the technical dynamics such narratives provoke. His approach opens a particular corridor to understanding that stresses the importance of practice, something with which Turner is concerned—and of course Lévi-Strauss despite the negative comments to this view of Lévi-Strauss passed by Turner and others—but in a direction that opens to new potential.

Notes 1. Lévi-Strauss famously concentrates on myth in preference to ritual, which he sees as largely “noise” and fractionalizing of meaning. I (1983) discussed this orientation critically giving preference to a Turnerian orientation. My main point was to oppose the separation of myth and ritual and to see in ritual the dynamics upon which myth comes to mean. While I take a poststructural Deleuzian approach here, the position should be seen as an extension of this earlier orientation of mine. 2. Here there is much congruence with Turner’s approach to ritual to which Deleuze gives important reference in his other relevant work. I think the stress that Deleuze places on the image over the symbol extends the import of Turner’s perspective. It should be noted that Deleuze is conscious of Turner’s ritual materials and gives due acknowledgement of the relevance to his thought. 3. The exception might be ethological and socio-biological approaches. However, these tend to extend to non–human beings human characteristics and forms of display that are recognized as being ritual because they appear to be like what human beings do. I note that, in many rites performed by human beings and well documented in the ethnographic literature, human beings attempt to imitate animals and by doing so actually strive to leave a human-centric position. 4. Although Turner is concerned mainly with meaning and the dynamics of reflexivity, he can also be read as in many ways anticipating aspects of a Deleuzian approach. As with Deleuze, he is strongly influenced by Nietzsche (especially The Birth of Tragedy) and

Montage and Time • 37

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

stresses the primary forces of the senses. He emphasizes the senses as independent of their categorical value and that it is from the flow of the senses as in many respects anti-structural that new categories of comprehension and understanding can emerge (see Turner 1967, 1968). The concepts of “extraction” and “subtraction” used by Deleuze indicate a direction in his approach beyond human-centric, egocentric positions that are thoroughly constructivist in the sense that reality or the world only come into existence through human being. The terms extraction and subtraction replace the concept of construction and its associated subjectivist premise emphasizing that human beings build within existential actualities that are already active and formational of human consciousness. That is, they draw from existence, in a way that Heidegger had already developed, realizing its potentials rather than constructing them de novo, as it were. Deleuze regards film directors as thoroughly engaged with the pragmatics of converting, for example, the ideas, stories, and themes found in texts into the filmic medium. In the course of overcoming the problematics that they encounter in opening such ideas and themes to the experience of the filmgoer, Deleuze suggests that discoveries are made concerning the ways human beings realize the processes of their existence. The Suniyama ritual can be conceived as a simulacrum of the key cosmic circumstances and events at the beginning of this age (kalpa) when King Mahasammata instituted the order of human beings. The ritual invented by Odissa effectively replicates this event as well as the first attack of sorcery turning its destructive effect back upon itself. This number signifies the totality of sorcery. Deleuze, I think, would argue that sorcery conceived in this way as a totality is what he describes as a virtual. That is, the idea of sorcery encompasses all actual and potential events of sorcery. Indeed, the Suniyama, as the most totalizing anti-sorcery rite, in many ways addresses the past and the future, freed of sorcery, as two distinct kinds of virtuality. In Kapferer 1976, I have written of the audience as a shifting ordering in ritual. Those gathered to a sorcery ritual are in changing and differential relations to the action of rite. In effect they are in varying kinds of movement. This motion has a degree of equivalence to the sensory motor scheme achieved by the mobile camera in Deleuze’s discussion of the movement-image. The nature of the relation and the difference requires a working through that I do not have space for here. This is achieved through a set of purifying acts. They include the drawing of the illnesses caused by sorcery from the victim’s body in a series of “head-to-foot” actions using the potency of Siva’s arrow (igaha). Each of the major gods in the cosmos (Brahma, Vishnu, Skanda) begin their respective dances by striking a set of distinctive poses that then develop into the full movement of the dance or the organization of these poses in motion. As I comment later, these poses could also be understood as elements in a continuous flow and therefore the poses are not static in the way I am indicating here. The head of the snake is oriented to the genitals or base cakra of the victim, and the tail at the Palace entrance. This indicates the cleansing or reversal of sorcery as the victim advances toward the Palace. It is of interest to note that in many performances, the characters of the Sinhala alphabet are drawn on the ground underneath the offering plates (tattuva) that are placed at each cakra point or body plexus. The understanding is that the victim, in the course of the progress, comes back to language. In the situation of the ensorceled, the victim is prior to language and this is to be regained. The ethnography provides support for the Deleuze/Bergson thesis that the understanding of the development of human consciousness should be grasped by an analytical orientation that is not initially driven in language and meaning. Other related dimensions might be noted. The movement forward and back in time underpins the thoroughgoing reversal of the effects of sorcery that the rite is to achieve.

38 • Montage as an Analytic

15. In my opinion, one of the most brilliant cinematic workings through of this idea are the final events in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 involving the descent into Jupiter and the scenes in the hotel room. In many ways, Kubrick’s great film is a thorough explication of many of Deleuze’s insights. I explore this fully in an essay discussing this film in the context of a discussion of the Suniyam rite (Kapferer [in press]). 16. Kant’s concept of the sublime has bearing, as Deleuze recognizes, both on Deleuze’s concept of transcendental empiricism and especially his concept of the virtual. See also Kapferer 2007. 17. I suggest that belief arises in ritual practice. It is in rite that belief is affirmed and renewed. 18. “By raising themselves to the indiscernability of the real and the imaginary, the signs of the crystal go beyond all psychology of the recollection or dream, and all physics of action. What we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor its indirect representation as interval or whole; it is its direct presentation, its constitutive dividing in two into a present which is passing and a past which is preserved, the strict contemporaneity of the present with the past that it will be, of the past with the present that it has been” (Deleuze 2000: 274). 19. Clearly, there are many other aspects to the comedy. In Kapferer 1997, for example, I have discussed it as the objectification of consciousness through the breaking of language rules. But in the context of sorcery, it can be conceived as an explosion of reason in itself or of events as bound in a chain of causation—a dimension of sorcery as karma or as implicit in the comedy sorcery as the absurd paradox of karma. 20. I cite Deleuze (1986: 4) at length in this regard: “For antiquity, movement refers to intelligible elements, Forms or Idea which are themselves eternal or immobile. Of course, in order to reconstitute movement, these forms will be grasped as close as possible to their actualization in matter-flux. These are potentialities which can only be acted out by being embodied in matter. But, conversely, movement merely expresses a ‘dialectic’ of forms, an ideal synthesis which gives it order and measure. Movement, conceived in this way, will thus be the regulated transition from one form to another, that is, an order of poses or privileged instants, as in dance.” This might be seen to apply to the events of dance preliminary to the hat adiya where the major forces of commanding gods of the Cosmic Totality are presented (see Kapferer 1997). The dancers adopt poses that then progressively flow into the motion of dance. But these poses could equally be regarded in the same way that Deleuze conceives of the figures in cartoon film as not static poses but sections through movement in process. This, as I have described, is the idea that is more thoroughly realized in the events of the hat adiya.

References Austin, J. L. 1955. How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. New York: Dover. ———. 1991. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Bogue, Ronald. 2000. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum. ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London, Athlone Press. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 1976. Transaction and meaning: directions in the anthropology of exchange and symbolic behavior. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. ———. 1983. A Celebration of Demons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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———. 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. ———. 2004. “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning.” Social Analysis 48(2): 33–54. ———. 2007. "Anthropology and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Discourse on the Definition and Ideals of a Threatened Discipline." The Australian journal of anthropology 18(1): 72–94. ———. In press. Kubrick and the Cosmology of 2001. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. London: Routledge Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin. Ranciere, Jacques. 2006. Film Fables. Oxford: Berg. Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The Imagination: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. London: Routledge. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Turner, Victor W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process. London: Routledge. ———. 1985. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. Tucson: Arizona University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Temporal Aesthetics On Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology Morten Nielsen

“Cinema is modulation through and through.”—Gilles Deleuze

My aim in this chapter is to consider the analytical mileage of applying a Deleuzian approach to cinematic montage when examining social identities and positions that derive their qualities by being what they are not. Among informal house builders on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique, it is crucial not to be completely identified as either “newcomer” nor “buyer,” as this might potentially disrupt any aspiration of improving one’s housing conditions by revealing the illicit nature of an ongoing transaction in land (“buyer”) or by exposing one’s lacking relational powers (“newcomer”). Paradoxically, it is equally important to not be associated with either of these identificational categories, as this will most likely make secure access to land impossible by concealing one’s aspirations completely, thereby cutting one off from advantageous social networks. According to Deleuze, cinematic montage derives its particular qualities through the juxtaposition of seemingly incommensurable images (1995a, 1995b, 2005a, 2005b). This allows for a particular “cinematic perspective” to emerge in the intervals or gaps between connected images that gives to the montage composition its internal logic. In this chapter, it is consequently argued that the position in-between “buyer” and “newcomer” might fruitfully be considered as a “cinematic perspective,” which derives its potency by being neither “buyer” nor “newcomer” while at the same time not negating the identificational categories completely. During the last four decades, a rich body of work on the aesthetics1 of social forms have produced a range of novel approaches to the study of reciprocal exchanges and social relationships in general (Iteanu 1988; LiPuma 1998; Strathern 1988, 1992, 1998, 2004; Wagner 1977a, 1979, 1981, 1986; Weiner 1993). A crucial insight from these influential studies is that different forms of sociality are not simply given conventional form (i.e., being represented) through quotidian reciprocal interactions. Rather, they are brought forth through patterned acts of elicitation,2 such as ritualized marriage exchanges, which can then be seen as moments of invention where particular forms of social and political relations emerge and take effect (Strathern 1988: 228–32). The significance and potency of social relations thus depend on a particular kind of visibility created by appropriate aesthetic means. Basically, they will only be recognized (as social relations) if they are manifested in specific ways (Leach 2002: 717; Strathern 1999: 259). Indeed, as argued by Wagner, the “shape of reality is very much a consequence of the symbolic terms through which it is conceptualized” (1977b: 396). To be sure, the recent emphasis on elicitory processes has forcefully made the invention of relations a matter of how forms are generated. It points out the

Temporal Aesthetics • 41

intimate ties between sociality and aesthetics of form that give to the inventive sequences of social life a “certain quality of brilliance” (Wagner 1981: 89). One might question, however, whether the imagery of this symbolic concatenation does not conceal an implicit assumption of stability that opposes the overall emphasis on invention through elicitation. The argument seems to be that provided sufficient aesthetic means, the expected social form will automatically follow. As an apt example, we might take Roy Wagner’s discussion of ritual differentiation, or interdiction, among the Daribi of Papua New Guinea (1977a). According to Wagner, the interdict serves to differentiate kinship ties in a universe composed of analogue relationships which are basically alike. It is consequently argued, “all that is necessary is for people to observe the niceties of the interdict and its concomitant exchanges and prerogatives, and the sociality (and its analogies of substantial flow) will take care of itself” (ibid.: 631). Although I concur with the overall assumption of seeing sociality as an outcome of aesthetic processes, I remain skeptical as to whether the social form being elicited will simply “take care of itself.”3 Might we not imagine social forms being elicited that are incapable of conveying the coherence and imagined conventionality indicated by Wagner? Is it not possible to think of social forms that, while being conjured through aesthetic elicitory processes, assert themselves as inconsistent and heterogeneous potentialities? In other words, would it be possible to envisage aesthetic processes having the power to elicit “all sorts of meanings,” thus making the “ambiguity itself, the similarity among various interpretations . . . more important than the specific interpretations” (Wagner 1987: 56)?4 As I shall argue below, in order to account for such differential processes, we need to make a significant analytical leap from an emphasis on the aesthetics of form to an aesthetics of time. In this chapter, I wish to pursue the hypothesis that Gilles Deleuze’s analyses of time in cinematic montage open toward an anthropological understanding of elicitory processes that, although maintaining the importance of form, makes it an effect of variations and differentiations inherent to social life (Deleuze 1995a, 1995b, 2005a, 2005b). Social forms—say, kinship-based identities—may thus be conceived as being inherently unstable. According to Deleuze (2005a), conventional cinematic montage represents time as a structured movement from a beginning to an end where each shot constitutes a step toward the completion of the cinematic journey. In contrast, what might best be described as disruptive montage liberates individual images from a pre-given whole and present them alongside each other without assuming neither implicit order (say, the narrative structure of a film) nor a privileged point of view (say, that of the director). In the latter instance, then, time cannot be understood as a function of linearity where moments are somehow exterior to each other (e.g., moment A as occurring before and thus outside moment B). Rather, disruptive montage allows for a series of volatile connections to be established between incongruous images without committing the cinematic composition to an unequivocal representation.5 In the gaps between the different images, a peculiar nervous energy subsists that continues to produce new constellations of meaning that transcend the content of each individual image. As the influential Russian director Sergei Eisenstein argued, this incessant production of meaning in the intervals between the images constitutes the very essence of the montage composition (Marrati 2003: 44). It reveals a flow of difference within and across the individual images that provokes radical changes in perspectives through the sensation of the momentary “tertium quid” (third thing) that emerges through the correlation of distinct movements (e.g., cinematic sequences). Following Deleuze (1995a), this flow of difference constitutes the workings of time in montage.

42 • Montage as an Analytic

In his article “On the Movement-Image,” Deleuze explains how “time is the Open, is what changes—is constantly changing in nature—each moment” (1995a: 55). Put somewhat differently, time is the power of difference that propels incessant movements in and between the cinematic images. As such, it is the qualitative manner in which transformations occur and so it cannot be reduced to a forward-moving progression along a linear scale. Hence, it is Deleuze’s argument that montage is a unique aesthetic art form through which time as differentiation is elicited. Directors, such as Vertov and Eisenstein, are described as creating cinematic compositions that allow time to operate as ceaseless transformation both within and across individual images. Whereas the above-mentioned anthropological analyses of elicitory processes emphasize the relative stability of social identities (e.g., the opposition between male and female), Deleuze shows how differentiation and variation may constitute the very core of aesthetic forms. Below, I shall consequently attempt to critically engage with current understandings of elicitory processes through an analysis of a Deleuzian approach to montage. I start by unpacking an extended case study from Maputo, Mozambique, dealing with notions of land and personhood among residents in a poor peri-urban neighborhood. As will be argued, it was through a series of reciprocal transactions of land that particular social positions were elicited and made relationally significant (e.g., the distinction between “newcomer” and “buyer”). Although widely acknowledged as the only viable strategy for improving one’s housing conditions, it is formally illegal to buy and sell land in Mozambique. Potential buyers of land therefore cannot make themselves too visible in the eyes of the state, as this will potentially expose them to the maneuvers of local-level officials taking advantage of their exposed positions. At the same time, however, potential buyers must make themselves visible, as they need to make their claims to land known by local administrative authorities in order to acquire access to basic infrastructure, such as water and electricity. Whereas buyers logically cannot apply for formal citizen-based rights, newcomers can easily approach state officials at different levels without fearing unwanted consequences. On the other hand, in contrast to the buyers who might have strong ties to former owners of land, newcomers are considered as being without relational power and are therefore completely dependent on the official governance system. As I shall consequently argue, it is essentially in the interval between buyer and newcomer that residents on the outskirts of Maputo seek to position themselves when engaging in informal transactions over land. After a detailed discussion of the Deleuzian approach to montage, I therefore return to the Mozambican context to show how the case study might be understood as a series of variations and differentiations running through social forms so that actualized positions were in effect always in-between social identities, such as those of newcomer and buyer. I conclude by fleshing out how an aesthetics of time might add to our anthropological understanding of elicitory processes through the emphasis on incommensurabilities and contradictions running both within and across the conceptual line distinguishing different social identities.

Alberto’s Reduced Plot In 2000, Alberto and Fernando both bought plots from old Mphumo, a nativo (native),6 whose extensive lands have gradually been reduced through repeated trans-

Temporal Aesthetics • 43

actions with needy newcomers. Mphumo’s lands were located in Mulwene, a poor residential area on the northern outskirts of Maputo that was officially consolidated as an urban neighborhood in 2000 when victims of the devastating flooding that hit Mozambique in the first three months of the year were resettled in a section of the area (Nielsen 2008: 40–58). Whereas Alberto, a 28-year old newcomer, immediately moved into a one-room annex with his daughter and pregnant wife, Fernando bought the plot as an investment and let his nephew, Gito (who was also a newcomer), live there in a quickly erected reed hut. The area had never been formally parceled out and it therefore lacked precise markers. Still, both plots were relatively well defined, and the two new owners were in agreement as to where the boundary line was. The section of the neighborhood in which Fernando and Alberto bought their plots was located quite near the resettlement zone where flood victims had initially been installed in tents. Given that it was not included in the initial resettlement area, it was not parceled out in the immediate post-flooding process in 2000. With the increasing influx of people into the area this situation soon changed, and in 2003 Samuel, the land chief, commenced parceling out the area in collaboration with Fakhirah Omar, the local quarter chief, and an unidentified land surveyor. Although this initial and downsized parceling process was limited to series of parallel roads going through the entire area without defining individual plots, it had serious repercussions for Fernando and Gito, as the former’s plot lay almost entirely across the newly projected road (see figs. 2.1a–c). Fearing an imminent and forced relocation, Fernando therefore asked Mphumo to persuade Alberto into ceding part of his plot. As Alberto was still several installments short of having paid the full amount for his plot, Mphumo suggested that Alberto’s debt could be reduced if he gave a part of his plot to Fernando and Gito. Given that the remaining plot would still measure approximately 30×30 meter (i.e., equivalent to two conventional plots), Alberto agreed. Later the same year, the situation was seriously aggravated when Samuel initiated a second process of parceling out in collaboration with Omar, the quarter chief and an architect who was apparently contracted informally by the neighborhood administration. Between the recently laid out parallel roads, the remaining tracts of land were parceled out in 15×30 meter plots grouped into blocks each consisting of sixteen plots. Since all the residents had bought their lands from local nativos, their parcels lacked both homogeneity and official markers. Consequently, in order to establish a uniform urban layout similar to those of the surrounding areas, many plots were significantly reduced. Furthermore, those houses overlapping the boundary lines between different plots had to be reconstructed within the new uniform parcels. As most people in this area were living in reed huts, this turned out to be manageable. The situation was somewhat more problematic, however, for those residents who had already built cement houses, such as Alberto. Since the small building he had erected as a temporary annex for his family was located precisely on the boundary line between two plots, it was, to say the least, quite problematic to divide the area into two uniform parcels without demolishing his house. Samuel’s initial solution was therefore to parcel out three irregular parcels in an area intended for two plots with Gito, Alberto, and Carlitos, who had already been allocated the plot on the other side of Alberto’s, as close neighbors. To make matters worse, both Alberto and Gito continued to lose large parts of their plots for a diagonal road on one side and neighboring plots on the other, which between them cut off approximately half of their previously quite extensive pieces of land.

44 • Montage as an Analytic

Figures 2.1a–c. The changes to Alberto’s and Gito’s plots.

Hence, what were initially two large plots (approx. 20×45 meters each) were thus reduced to two significantly smaller parcels (approx. 15×20 meters each). When the second parceling process occurred, Alberto was working out of town during the week as a road constructor in the neighboring region of Gaza. He therefore missed Samuel’s door-to-door interviews at which all plot owners were registered. Given the tendency to perceive men a priori as natural household heads, Alberto’s wife, Graça, was not interviewed. In contrast, Gito, who was unemployed during that period and therefore at home, managed to convince Samuel that he was, in fact, one of the two legitimate plot owners, the other being Carlitos. Although Alberto and his wife had been allocated temporary plot numbers before the first parceling process, they were therefore now defined as illegitimate squatters squeezed in between Gito and Carlitos.

Temporal Aesthetics • 45

It was apparent to all the parties involved that the simultaneous occupation of three households in an area intended for two plots would be untenable in the long run. In what apparently seemed a reasonable resolution, the neighborhood chief therefore told Alberto and Gito to decide among themselves who should remain in the plot. The one who left would then be allocated a plot elsewhere. In the following period, Alberto and Gito repeatedly tried to persuade the other to leave. According to Alberto, Gito even offered him 1.5 million MZM (US$62), although the latter denies ever having made a monetary offer. Recognizing the impossibility of finding an amicable solution, the neighborhood administration then surprisingly decided that “since you do not want to leave, you will both have to stay together in the same plot.”7 As both parties opposed this suggestion, an agreement was made implying that Gito and Alberto were to be transferred to plots in the remotest part of Mulwene. Although Fernando and Alberto agreed to this, Gito strongly refused to be resettled and continued to claim that he was the legitimate occupant of the present plot, something which could be verified, he argued, from the recent registration. After some consideration, Alberto also refused to move unless he was compensated not only for the blocks that had already been used for his house, but also for the 1800 blocks piled up on the plot which he would not be able to take with him to the new parcel. The request for compensation, however, was rejected by the neighborhood chief and Samuel. Recognizing the impossibility of resolving the dispute within the neighborhood, Alberto solicited the district administrator for help,8 arguing that Samuel had failed to allocate plots properly to needy newcomers.9 In response, the district administrator ordered Magalhães and Samuel to inspect the actual plots in order to ascertain who could legitimately be ordered to leave. Without actually making any final decision, Magalhães limited his written response to verifying that Alberto had, in fact, erected a house overlapping two plots and that he was still refusing to be resettled unless he was given significant compensation. During the next year, the already tense relationship between the conflicting neighbors was gradually worsened as both parties repeatedly accused the other of foul play. Alberto insisted several times that Gito had persuaded Mphumo, the seller, into attesting that Gito was the initial and therefore rightful owner of the plot. Gito was equally direct in his accusations. In a letter to the municipal councilor, he argued that “after the parceling process [parcelamento], Mr. Samuel receives a letter from the administrator of the Lhanguene cemetery, who is Sr. Magaia’s [i.e., Alberto’s] father-in-law. With this letter, Mr. Samuel became indifferent to the case, saying only that he did not know who should leave and who should stay in the plot, thereby creating a dispute between me and Mr. Magaia.”10 In 2005, a new district administrator was installed and from the outset he made land conflicts a top priority. As an initial attempt to reduce the number of pending cases, he assigned his previous secretary, Salomão, the important task of mediating in ongoing conflicts. On 17 October 2006, Salomão held a meeting at the district administration in Mulwene with the intention of determining how to finally resolve the case. Apparently, the impetus for holding a meeting at this particular moment was the recent process of registering plot owners in certain parts of Mulwene, which resulted in Alberto also being allocated a plot number. Gito perceived this as a clear indication that his rights were being reduced and thus had Salomão organize a meeting. As he told me before the meeting, Alberto was a simple newcomer without any ties to the community and he should therefore not be registered as official resident. Prior to the meeting, Salomão interviewed Mphumo,

46 • Montage as an Analytic

the previous nativo owner, who admitted that Alberto was, in fact, the first person to buy land, which thus made him the owner of the plot. Although Fernando and Gito both strongly rejected this version, Salomão was convinced by it. A week later, Salomão made his final decision. Irrespective of the prior recognition that Alberto had legitimate rights to the plot, they were both given sixty days to leave on the basis that both Alberto and Gito had already been allocated other plots that were still unoccupied. If they refused to go, Salomão said, the police would be called to remove them by force. Despite the fear of forced resettlement, however, Alberto and Gito continue to be close neighbors in the two small plots, although they both find the situation untenable. Apparently, Salomão assumed that if they were threatened with forced resettlement, the two neighbors would somehow come to an agreement whereby he would also be able to prevent the lack of administrative capacities at both the municipal and state levels from being exposed. However, without viable alternatives, Alberto and Gito have preferred to stay, hoping that they will, eventually, respectively benefit from the prolonged dispute.

The Aesthetics of Social Forms I shall now try to unpack some of the relational complexities in the case study described above in order to clarify how different social identities are being elicited. In southern Mozambique, the source of social agency is generally taken to be outside the acting agent, who merely functions as the effect of other people’s actions (Paulo et al. 2007). In order to, say, realize a house-building project, residents engage in reciprocal encounters with neighbors, local leaders, and state agents in order to exchange what is, in fact, an “everted inside”, i.e., an “interior state turned momentarily outside, subsequently to be folded back and concealed from view” (Strathern 1998: 140; cf. Nielsen 2012). A resident might thus agree to cede some of his hitherto unregistered plot to a quarter chief (who subsequently resells it to another client) in return for an assurance of continued secure occupancy, which is, so to speak, absorbed through the leader. Through these reciprocal encounters, where “inside and outside turn about one another” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 264), the house builder engages with and partially appropriates broader understandings of how to “make a life” (kuzama utomi) in a peri-urban context, e.g., regarding ideas of proper (reciprocal) integration within the local community and, more broadly, Mozambican society (Nielsen 2010). Hence, by clarifying the relational dynamics (or rather, the aesthetics of social forms) in the case study described above, we get a deeper understanding of how and why a series of reciprocal exchanges seem to condition social agency in fundamental social and, indeed, ontological ways. At the outset, it is possible to describe the progression as a series of reciprocal actions and reactions where each person involved acquires social significance through the exchanges. Alberto willingly ceded a significant part of his plot to Gito, an unknown newcomer, in order to be relieved of his debt to Mphumo. To be sure, this was considered to be a beneficial situation for all parties: Mphumo did a favor for Gito, who was subsequently in debt to the old nativo. This relationship, however, “eclipsed” the favor done by Alberto (to Mphumo), without whom the reciprocal relationship (between Gito and Mphumo) could not be established.11 Hence, we have three consecutive reciprocal connections (i.e., Mphumo:Alberto eclipsing Gito:Mphumo eclipsing Alberto:Mphumo) prior to the current dispute between Alberto and Gito. Bearing in mind that prior (eclipsed) sets of relations

Temporal Aesthetics • 47

remain implicit, though latent, in succeeding ones, the former can be understood as origins of the latter (Strathern 2005: 121, 1992: 179). In this eclipsing, we might detect a significant displacement on which the cause of an action is replaced by its assumed origin (Strathern 1992: 179–81, 186).12 Hence, Gito’s success in compelling Mphumo to enter into a debt manifests the extractability of the latter (of land/favor), who is thus configured as donor. This relationship was subsequently eclipsed when Mphumo approached Alberto and persuaded him to cede parts of his plots to Gito. As shown in figure 2.2 below, the relationship between Gito and Alberto therefore essentially found its origin elsewhere; i.e., in the three preceding (and eclipsed) relationships. This reading of the dispute between Alberto and Gito outlines how social identities depend on a particular kind of visibility created by appropriate aesthetic means. Basically, in order to become recognized in the eyes of the other from whom benefits will be extracted, it is of paramount importance to assume the appropriate social form implied by the relation (Strathern 1992: 177). To be sure, all parties involved in the dispute constantly sought to position themselves as either cause or donor in order to benefit from subsequent relationships. The continuous disagreements can consequently be understood as stemming from individual attempts at securing these positions. Gito considered his relationship with Mphumo, whom he took to be the original owner of the land, as basis for his access to the plot and so Alberto’s claims were inevitably considered as being illegitimate. Conversely, by ceding the land to Gito through Mphumo, Alberto eliminated his initial debt to the plot’s former owner and was therefore unwilling to be positioned as donor once again. Thus, given the lack of reciprocal ties between Gito and Alberto, possibilities for resolving the dispute amicably without external mediation were few. In Property, Substance and Effect, Marilyn Strathern argues that “for a body or a mind to be in a position of eliciting an effect from another, to evince power or capability, it must manifest itself in a particular concrete way. . . . One simply has to make or create oneself in a form that can be consumed by others” (1999: 259). It is my argument that the analytical account of the dispute between Alberto and Gito outlined above is very much in line with Strathern’s description of elicitory processes. The legitimacy of individual claims to land was predicated on the social forms through which they were made explicit. In order for the contestants to activate relational ties, they made themselves appear in concrete aesthetic ways that then became the “elicitory trigger” (Strathern 1988: 181) for extracting the desired object (i.e., rights to land) from counterparts. What I wish to suggest now, however, is that we might expand the analysis by bracketing the initial proclivity for identifying aesthetic forms through which social values are elicited. While maintaining the importance of the aesthetics of elicitation, we need to focus also on processes of variation immanent to different social forms. If we analyze the inconsistencies conveyed by the case study above, we may detect a series of incommensurabilities and contradictions both within and across the conceptual line distinguishing

Figure 2.2. The progression of reciprocal exchanges.

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different social identities (e.g., cause vs. donor). Hence, as I shall later argue, each social identity is characterized by an internal slippage, so to speak, which makes it always already what it is not.13 Preempting the ethnographical argument slightly, I believe that each occurrence during the dispute can fruitfully be understood as movements between identities rather than a series of exchanges that had as their basis the stability of the former. Each position was consequently located in the interval between different social identities. In order to explore this intricate process in detail, we need to make an analytical leap, then, from an emphasis on the aesthetics of form to an aesthetics of time (see also Nielsen 2011a). Below, I introduce Deleuze’s analysis of cinematic montage that, I will argue, allows for a reinterpretation of the case study that captures inherent incommensurabilities and flows of variation within and between different social forms.

Montage: Movement, Time, and the Non-Human Eye Classic cinema presents us with a unified drama with a number of central characters and a linear movement that continues from beginning to end (Colebrook 2002: 44). Generally, the narrative development is witnessed from one position (i.e., director/narrator), which provides privileged access to the “true” interpretation of the unfolding cinematic occurrences. For Deleuze, this form of classic cinema is structured by an understanding of time and movement that relies on the construction of a series of causal chains between the actions and reactions of the characters (Restivo 2000: 174). A narrative story is consequently established when the cinematic motion is governed by a “sensory-motor-scheme, if it shows a character reacting to a situation” (Deleuze 1995b: 59). The result is a relatively unproblematic relationship between sensation and movement where characters respond to perceived situations in such a way that the initial conditions are gradually being modified in the progression toward the inevitable end. As Deleuze emphasizes, the narrative form emerges when cinema has as its object the “sensory-motor” scheme of actions and reactions (Colman 2005: 153). We might therefore imagine other ways of using cinematic techniques provided that they are not anchored in the “sensory-motor” scheme. With the montage technique, film directors such as Eisenstein and Vertov did, indeed, break with the narrative form by exploring potentials that were already integral to cinema. Crucially, cinema makes it possible to see movement disengaged from the bodies and objects to which it seems to “belong.” By physically moving the camera around the set while also experimenting with abrupt shifts in framing and speed, the cinematic image itself acquires status of “subject-that-moves” (Lambert 2000: 258). Hence, according to Deleuze, “cinema . . . achieves self-movement, automatic movement; it makes movement the immediate given of the image. This kind of movement no longer depends on a moving body or an object which realizes it. . . . It is the image which itself moves in itself” (2005b: 151). This unique potential clearly distinguishes cinema from all other contemporary art forms. It might be argued that the paintings of, say, Lucien Freud display a certain montage-like quality by juxtaposing different elements and figures in order to suggest new connections and meanings. The difference being, however, that movement is “made” by the viewer who uses his or her perceptive capacities to combine the different elements in the painting to a meaningful assemblage. In contrast, it is the cinematic image that by

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itself generates movement detached from both spectators and the characters in the film. What Deleuze argues, then, is that montage compositions acquire their unique temporal characteristics through the juxtaposition of framed images-in-movement that are cut off from their narrative structure (1995b: 58, 2005b: 33). At the outset, we can imagine each image as a slice of a (narrative) flow of a particular film. The image will consequently have a well-defined temporal context, what Deleuze describes as the “out-of-field” (2005a: 17), structured by the linearity of a plot. However, if the image is cut off from a narrative governed by the “sensory-motor” scheme of actions and reactions and juxtaposed with other seemingly incommensurable images, the relation to its “out-of-field” is radically transformed. As an apt example, we might take the image of spinning bicycle wheels in Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927), a film that was commissioned by the Soviet government to honor the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The scene where the revolution culminates is introduced with the titles “the cycles / are for the Soviets,” which refers to the armed bicycle corps responsible for security around the Winter Palace. Without actually showing soldiers joining with the Bolsheviks, Eisenstein cuts between shots of the revolutionary masses and images of bicycle pedals and wheels turning rapidly. By accelerating the montage, the speed of the movements seems to increase before reaching a crescendo with a shot of the delegates’ hands clapping to applaud the news of the surrendering soldiers. In Eisenstein’s attempt to capture the revolutionary power of the Russian people, he uses the bicycle image to convey how “history . . . reaches a moment of pure dynamism” (Goodwin 1993: 89). From a Deleuzian perspective, we might argue that the image of spinning pedals and bicycle wheels functions as a singular imagein-movement. As spectators, we are presented only with their movement, which makes it impossible to establish a broader narrative structure. Rather, the image can be seen as “one flow of movement” (Colebrook 2002: 44) that crystallizes an “out-of-field” as unbounded differentiation rather than linear progression. In narrative cinema, successive images are held together by a logics of linearity which reveals itself, e.g., when a moving object, say a car, exits the frame and enters again in the next with similar speed and directionality. As such, narrative cinema gives us a sense of continuity between the framed image and the “out-of-field,” which invariably confirms time to operate in a linear manner. Conversely, an image-inmovement indicates a larger frame that exists entirely as modulation or differentiation. In Cinema 1, Deleuze outlines the differences between the two forms of “outof-field”: “In one case, the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist’, a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time” (2005a: 18). Deleuze consequently wants us to imagine a temporal modality operating through images-in-movement, which cannot be distinguished simply by quantifying the individual moments. Rather, we need to focus on how time differentiates itself in an ongoing process of modulation and variation (Deleuze 1988: 39). As I will argue later, this qualitative notion of time can be understood as a particular kind of “temporal aesthetics” that may open toward a different approach to the study of elicitory processes. To be sure, the crucial significance of the montage technique derives from the paradoxical juxtaposition of different images. As we have just established, the

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individual image-in-movement (e.g., the spinning bicycle wheels and pedals), can fruitfully be understood as a “slice” of unbounded differentiation; it gives us a momentary perspective, as it were, of modulation as modulation (cf. Bogue 2003: 48). What happens, then, when these dynamic images are spliced together? According to Deleuze, the linear development cannot be withheld as the connected imagesin-movement refer to contrasting “out-of-fields” and so “we get a circuit in which the two images are constantly chasing one another round a point where real and imaginary become indistinguishable” (1995a: 52). Each image interacts with other images rather than being organized in terms of a central perspective or narrative. In Eisenstein’s dialectical montage (e.g., in “Potemkin” and “October”), an empirical reality is consequently not assembled as a pre-given whole. Rather, by emphasizing the abrupt shifts between incommensurable images-in-movement, he makes the very manner in which a dialectical reality is produced an integral part of the cinematic composition (Deleuze 2005a: 37–38). In these montage compositions, images are juxtaposed through abrupt temporal shifts, false continuities and cuts and what emerges is an expression of time that can be grasped only through the connections established. It is, in other words, the cinematic techniques proper to montage that make it possible to understand time as the power of difference (Marrati 2003: 44). Through the intervals or gaps between seemingly incommensurable images, montage allows for a particular cinematic perspective of time to emerge (Zourabichvili 2000: 147). As Deleuze argues in his analysis of Dziga Vertov’s cinematic experiments (e.g., 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera), the perceiving eye in montage may not be that of the narrator (2005a: 83–85). Vertov’s objective was to create a unique cinematic language of “variation and interaction” based on its own technical conditions. Given that the camera could be positioned in any imaginable location, each point of space became a possible point of view and in his often surreal montage experiments, Vertov connected “any given point in the universe with any other given point” (2005a: 146). This allowed for a decentering of the cinematic perspective which now emerged as an outcome of the ways that different imagesin-movement interrelated and passed into each other. What montage does, then, is to establish a vision of a nonhuman eye in matter rather than of matter. Each image varies as a function of other images and the cinematic vision emerges as an oscillation in-between. Hence, whereas conventional cinema is anchored in a linear sequence divided between actions and reactions, montage finds its internal logic in the intervals between images that are correlated through their incommensurability. In Cinema 1, Deleuze succinctly sums up Vertov’s approach to intervals and time in montage compositions: “The interval is no longer that which separates a reaction from the reaction experienced, which measures the incommensurability and unforeseeability of the reaction but, on the contrary, that which—an action being given in a point of the universe—will find the appropriate reaction in some other point [point quelconque], however distant it is” (2005a: 84). Summing up, Deleuze argues that the unique quality and strength of montage derives from the juxtaposition of seemingly incommensurable images that relate to contrasting “out-of-fields.” Rather than representing time as a linear unfolding of occurrences, montage compositions reveal how different cinematic rhythms and (dis)continuities are correlated to create a vision of incessant temporal variation and differentiation. Film directors such as Eisenstein, Vertov, and, later, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, liberated the cinematic eye from the strictly narrative point of view and allowed for perspectives which were entirely those of the

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montage. Indeed, as Deleuze tells us, “the eye is not the too-immobile human eye; it is the eye of the camera, that is an eye in matter, a perception such as it is in matter” (2005a: 41). Based on this reading of Deleuze’s montage analyses, I return once again to the case study outlined above. I shall argue that the occurrences might fruitfully be understood as a series of variations between incommensurable social identities. In that sense, different actualized positions are always in-between social identities.

Temporal Aesthetics: Correlating the Incommensurable If we take seriously Deleuze’s claim that the aesthetic functioning of images in montage is predicated on the existence of internal incommensurabilities, what consequences might this argument have for our anthropological explorations of social exchanges? Surely, such an approach requires that we begin by exploring the differentiations and variations that run through social forms rather than taking the elicitation of the latter as an initial point of departure. From this perspective, then, social identities emerge as effects of the ways in which seemingly incommensurable elements intertwine and pass into each other. Returning to the dispute between Alberto and Gito, we consequently need to bracket the initial distinction between donor and cause and focus on the flows of differentiation that run within and between their irreconcilable positions. As already discussed, close reciprocal relations with Mphumo, the original nativo owner, were considered as being crucial by both newcomers as they apparently secured legitimate claims to land. In Mozambique, it has been illegal to make transactions in land since Independence in 1975 when the ruling Frelimo party initiated a comprehensive nationalization campaign based on strict socialist ideals (Garvey 1998; Jenkins 1998; cf. Abrahamsson and Nilsson 1995:30).14 Residents who have bought their plots from previous landowners are thus formally considered as illegal squatters and can be forcefully removed on the basis of current land law legislation. Still, with a central administration that completely lack the financial and human capacities to monitor deviations from the law, transactions in peri-urban land plots are informally accepted by state and municipal agencies provided that they do not contradict official planning initiatives (Nielsen 2011b). To complicate matters further, in neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, such as Mulwene, urban planning is often the outcome of informal processes where local administrative personnel contract architects to parcel out land in order to establish some kind of spatial regularity (Nielsen 2007, 2009). In many cases, these plans lack formal approval and are therefore not registered in the municipal cadastre. As a result, the strength of individual claims to land will most frequently be determined by the relational power of the claimant (cf. Lund 1998: 161). Still, as might be apparent by this brief description of urban land politics in Mozambique, the position of potential buyers, such as Alberto and Gito, rests on a fundamental paradox. They cannot make themselves visible as formal buyers as this would make the illegal occupancy too overt. Conversely, they must make themselves visible, as they need to make their claims to land known by the neighborhood administration in order to acquire future access to basic infrastructure, such as water and electricity. In order to understand this peculiar relational aesthetics, it is perhaps useful to clarify the distinction between two identities already mentioned, buyer and newcomer. A newcomer is a priori without relational power and is therefore com-

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pletely dependent on the official urban governance system, which, as we have just seen, functions in a highly irregular manner. At the same time, however, it is the newcomer who may formally apply for rights to a plot without having to rely on relational ties. In contrast, a buyer crystallizes an illegal system and is therefore exposed to the erratic maneuvers of greedy civil servants wanting to benefit from the situation, e.g., by confiscating and later reselling the land. Still, depending on his or her financial capacities, it is likely that the buyer acquires immediate access to land whereas a newcomer is generally required to wait several years before being allocated official use-rights to a plot (or having the initial request rejected) (Nielsen 2008: 59–66). As we saw above, it was crucial for both Alberto and Gito to have their houses registered by the neighborhood administration, as this would hopefully yield sufficient legitimacy to deflect attention from the illegal transactions with Mphumo while also delegitimize the opponent’s claims. Unfortunately, the ongoing conflict only increased overall focus on their previous exchanges, which culminated in old Mphumo being summoned to shed light on the occurrences. The position that both Alberto and Gito considered as being the appropriate in order to claim rights to land was therefore in the “interval,” to paraphrase Deleuze, between buyer and newcomer. Both contestants sought to attain the visibility from these identities without having to assume neither one nor the other. Stated somewhat differently, the positions that Alberto and Gito explicitly avoided were those which ipso facto canceled out internal incommensurabilities—i.e., newcomer without buyer and vice-versa. This analytical account is shown in figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3. The elicitory space between “newcomer” and “buyer.” The triangles indicate the points at which the opposite identity is canceled out.

Strong relations with Mphumo suggested to the neighborhood administration that the newcomer-cum-buyer had a consolidated position in the community. Most often, potential buyers were presented as being related by kin to the former owner, something that could be extremely difficult to refute (although it was apparent to all that the reciprocal relationship was, indeed, anchored in a financial transaction). At the same time, it was important not to make the connection too explicit, as this would potentially threaten not only the current transaction but also the continuous occupancy of residents having previously bought plots of land. When seeking to be registered by the neighborhood administration and thus potentially have access to basic infrastructure, it was consequently a matter of emphasizing the legitimacy acquired through the reciprocal relation to the former owner (but without assuming the status of buyer) while also appearing as having rights to the same benefits as any regular newcomer, which, given the former relation, might be achieved without having to endure the erratic nature of the administrative system (i.e., without assuming the status of newcomer). If we return to Deleuze’s analyses of cinematic montage, we might fruitfully see the opposition between newcomer and buyer as a contrast between seemingly incommensurable images connected to different “out-of-fields.” As already outlined, in montage, the “cinematic perspective” emerges in the gap or interval between different images as they interrelate and pass into each other. The primacy of each individual image is thus canceled out by the “tertium quid” (third thing)

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that emerges in the interval between the former. In a nutshell, the cinematic perspective in montage only exists because it is not exclusively attached to any one of the connected images. It is my argument that the elicitation of social identities on the outskirts of Maputo, Mozambique, may be understood in a strikingly similar manner. As I have tried to describe, images of newcomers and buyers were juxtaposed and displaced through a series of reciprocal exchanges. The elicitation of social identities thus emerged as a function of the variations created through the momentary interrelation of these images. If we accept Deleuze’s understanding of time as the power of differentiation (1995a: 55), the case study can be said to reveal a peculiar temporal aesthetics that make sociality appear in the form of modulation as modulation. Whereas the fixed social positions implied by the terms newcomer and buyer were specifically avoided, the oscillation between them was not. In fact, although social identities emerged through the juxtaposition of these incommensurable images, they were elicited only in the interval between them. We might even argue that Alberto and Gito acquired social significance by not being either newcomer or buyer.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have made two analytical readings of the same ethnographical case study. Focusing on an aesthetics of form, I outlined how a conflict over land in a poor peri-urban neighborhood in Maputo, Mozambique, could be interpreted as a series of exchanges through which the contesting parties sought to position themselves as either donor or cause. Sociality was consequently interpreted as an outcome of the appropriate elicitation of aesthetic forms. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s analyses of cinematic montage, I then proceeded to make a different reading that emphasized the oscillation between social identities. According to Deleuze, time is first and foremost a power of differentiation and in his studies of montage he has outlined how it asserts itself through unstable connections between incommensurable images. In a similar vein, I have argued that sociality may also appear as a temporal aesthetics being elicited in the intervals between different social identities. Indeed, Alberto and Gito, the two contesting parties, sought to position themselves as rightful owners of the disputed plot by being neither newcomer nor buyer, while still asserting the legitimacy implied by both.15 If sociality is revealed through patterned acts of elicitation (cf. Strathern 1988: 181), then we might concur with James Weiner that aesthetics cannot merely be considered as “an attitude of detached contemplation,” but needs to be understood as “an integral part of our life-constituting activities” through which we discover “the lineaments and forms of the world” (1995: 34). Primarily from the work of Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner, we have thus learned how sociality is made (or “invented,” to use Wagner’s term) through elicitory processes where people manifest themselves in order to be properly recognized by others. However, as Weiner also makes clear, what we and others take to be the outcome of elicitory processes might be very different (ibid.). In Melanesia, Strathern tells us, sociality is brought forth through appropriate aesthetic forms; hence, “a clan of men and women only appears as a ‘clan’, or a human child as ‘human’ rather than spirit, if the contours, the shapes are right” (1999: 14). Conversely, in Mozambique, social identities are brought forth through shapes and contours that are not right, so to speak. As we saw in the case study above, social positions emerge in the in-

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terval between seemingly incommensurable images. Whereas in Melanesia, the outcome of elicitory processes is a series of relatively stable social forms, it is their differentiation that characterizes the aesthetic production of Mozambican identities. Rather than an aesthetics of form, it is an aesthetics of time.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for the invaluable comments from James Weiner and Morten A. Pedersen, the editors of this volume, and the two anonymous reviewers on previous drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1. I follow Weiner’s Kantian understanding of aesthetics as “the specification of the forms of perception by which phenomena are made to appear” (1995: 33). 2. Although the dynamics of elicitation will be explored in detail below, it might initially be defined as the process of bringing forth certain effects from significant others through appropriate aesthetic means, e.g. ways of acting, speaking or exchanging valuable items (Leach 2002; Strathern 1988, 2000; Weiner 1995). 3. As will be clear, I take Wagner and Strathern as particularly influential figures giving voice to predominant analytical approaches on the aesthetic of social relationality. Among contemporary scholars being inspired by the seminal studies by Wagner and Strathern, some do of course emphasize how social forms might be negotiated and recalibrated; see for example Reed 2007; 2011; Stasch 2009. 4. Although, as this quotation clearly shows, Wagner is aware of a potential symbolic instability, I will nevertheless argue that this pertains (in Wagner’s work) to the process as such and not its effect, i.e., the social form, which remains relatively stable. 5. Given the analytical argument of this book chapter—and also to ease the reading— montage will subsequently refer to “disruptive montage” unless otherwise indicated. 6. Nativo is the locally used term for a person believed to have been born in the area. 7. Informação á Administração do Distrito Municipal No 5 (26.05.04). Document in municipal archive in Mulwene. 8. Each of Maputo’s seven urban districts is governed by urban administrators. Mulwene is located in Urban District 5. 9. Exposição para Senhora Administradora do Distrito Urbano No 5 (27.04.04). Document in municipal archive at the district administration, urban district 5. 10. Senhor vereador. Assunto: Exposição (31.03.05). Document in municipal archive at the district administration, urban district 5. 11. The principle of eclipsing is based on the idea that the “content of whatever reading is eclipsed is present in the content of whatever is foregrounded. A view of the sun in eclipse is still a view of the sun, not the moon, though it is the moon one sees” (Gell 1999: 62). 12. Following Strathern, I take the cause to be what makes an item detachable, while the origin is the relation that produced it (1992: 179). 13. Strathern argues that potential identities are anticipated in the present one, e.g., when a daughter exchanged between clans is also already a future wife (1992: 186). What I wish to add to this argument, however, is the possibility of the social identity containing its own incommensurability. 14. Although there has been a gradual loosening of land regulations, the only formal way of securing access to land is by acquiring Land Use Rights (DUAT). According to the 1997 Land Law, DUAT can be obtained through customary occupation, occupation in good faith or legal authorization of a request (Art. 12).

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15. Arguably, the positions in-between could be considered as actualizing a “liminal” state of transition (Turner 1967, 1974). Still, in contrast to the “interstructural situations” examined by Turner, which is characterized by an essentially unstructured becoming, the position in-between buyer and newcomer derives its potency by not assuming precisely these two identificational categories. It is consequently a much more narrowly defined space of modulation that a liminal state.

References Abrahamsson, Hans and Anders Nilsson. 1995. Mozambique: The troubled transition. London: Zed Press. Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Cinema. London: Routledge. Colebrook, Claire. 2002. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Colman, Felicity J. 2005. “Cinema.” In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. C. J. Stivale, 141–56. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books. ———. 1995a. “On the Movement-Image.” In Negotiations: 1972–1990, 46–56. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995b. “On the Time-Image” In Negotiations: 1972–1990, 57–61. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005a. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum. ———. 2005b. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Garvey, Jennifer. 1998. The Nature of Rights in Land Under Mozambique’s Reform Land Law: An Analysis. Unpublished manuscript. Maputo. Gell, Alfred. 1999. “Strathernograms, or, the Semiotics of Mixed Metaphors.” In The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, 29–75. London: Athlone. Goodwin, James. 1993. Eisenstein, Cinema, and History. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Iteanu, André. 1988. “The Concept of the Person and the Ritual System: An Orokaiva View.” Man 25(1): 35–53. Jenkins, Paul. 1998. “National and International Shelter Policy Initiatives in Mozambique: Housing the Urban Poor at the Periphery.” Centre for Environment and Human Settlements, School of Planning and Housing. Edinburgh: Heriot Watt University. Lambert, Gregg. 2000. “Cinema and the Outside.” In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. G. Flaxman, 253–92. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leach, James. 2002. “Drum and Voice: Aesthetics and Social Process on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 713–34. LiPuma, Edward. 1998. “Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia.” In Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, eds. M. Lambek and A. Strathern, 53–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lund, Christian. 1998. Law, Power and Politics in Niger—Land Struggles and the Rural Code. Hamburg: LIT Forlag. Marrati, Paola. 2003. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nielsen, Morten. 2007. “Shifting Registers of Leadership: An Ethnographic Critique of the Unequivocal Legitimization of Commmunity Authorities.” In State Recognition of Local Authorities and Public Participation: Experiences, Obstacles and Possibilities in Mozambique, eds. L. Buur, H. Kyed, and T. C. d. Silva, 159–76. Maputo: Ministério da Justica/ Centro de Formacão Juridica e Judiciária.

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———. 2008. “In the Vicinity of the State. House Construction, Personhood, and the State in Maputo, Mozambique.” PhD dissertation. Department of Antropology. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. ———. 2009. Regulating Reciprocal Distances: House Construction Projects as Inverse Governmentality in Maputo, Mozambique. DIIS Working Paper 2009:33. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). ———. 2010. “Contrapuntal Cosmopolitanism: Distantiation as Social Relatedness among House-Builders in Maputo, Mozambique.” Social Anthropology 18(4): 396–402. ———. 2011a. “Futures Within: Reversible Time and House-building in Maputo, Mozambique.” Anthropological Theory 11(4): 397–423. ———. 2011b. “Inverse Governmentality: The Paradoxical Production of Peri-Urban Planning in Maputo, Mozambique.” Critique of Anthropology 31(4): 329–58. ———. 2012. “Interior Swelling: On the Expansive Effects of Ancestral Interventions in Maputo, Mozambique.” Common Knowledge 18(3): 433–450. Paulo, Margarida, et al. 2007. “Xiculungo”—Social Relations of Urban Poverty in Maputo, Mozambique. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute. Reed, Adam. 2007. “‘Smuk is King’: The Actions of Cigarettes in a Papua New Guinea Prison.” In Thinking Through Things, eds. A. Henare, M. Holbraad, and S. Wastell, 32–46. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. “Hope on Remand.” Journal of the Royal Anthroplogical Institute 17(3): 527–44. República de Mocambique. 2004. Land Law Legislation. Maputo: MozLegal. Restivo, A. 2000. “Into the Breach: Between The Movement-Image and The Time-Image.” In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. G. Flaxman, 171–92. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stasch, Rupert. 2009. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1992. “Qualified Value: The Perspective of Gift Exchange.” In Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach, eds. C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones, 169–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. “Social Relations and the Idea of Externality.” In Cognition and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, eds. C. Renfrew and C. Scarre, 135–47. Oxford: Oxbow Books. ———. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays and Persons and Things. London: The Athlone Press. ———. 2000. “Environments Within: An Ethnographic Commentary on Scale.” In Culture, Landscape, and the Environment: The Linacre Lectures 1997, eds. K. Flint and H. Morphy, 44–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. “The Whole Person and Its Artifacts.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 1–19. ———. 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wagner, Roy. 1977a. “Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example.” American Ethnologist 4(4): 623–42. ———. 1977b. “Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptualisations of the Innate: A Semiotic Critique of the Ecological Perspective.” In Subsistence and Survival, eds. T. Bayliss-Smith and R. Feacham, 385–411. London: Academic Press. ———. 1979. Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth As Symbolic Obviation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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———. 1986. Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. “Figure-Ground Reversal Among the Barok.” In Assemblage of Spirits: Idea and Image in New Ireland, ed. L. Lincoln, 56–62. New York: George Braziller. Weiner, James F. 1993. “Anthropology contra Heidegger Part II: The Limit of Relationship.” Critique of Anthropology 13(3): 285–301. ———. 1995. “Technology and Techne in Trobriand and Yolngu Art.” Social Analysis special issue 38: 32–46. Zourabichvili, François. 2000. “The Eye of Montage: Dziga Vertov and Bergsonian Materialism.” In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. G. Flaxman, 141–49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 3

All the Difference in the World Liminality, Montage, and the Reinvention of Comparative Anthropology Stuart McLean

Figure 3.1. Thingvellir, Iceland, 2009. Photograph by author.

I want to begin with a photograph taken in July 2009 in the course of a holiday in Iceland. The photograph was taken in Thingvellir National Park, lying 23 km east of Reykjavik. Iceland’s first national park and, since 2004, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is known both on account of its spectacular physical geography—lakes, lava fields, hot springs, waterfalls—and because it served as the setting for the world’s first democratic Parliament, the Althing, convened by Iceland’s Norse settlers in 930 and continuing to meet annually as a legislative body until 1271, when governance was surrendered to the Crown of Norway. The photograph shows the flag of the present-day Icelandic republic flying atop the “Law Rock,” where, prior to the introduction of a version of the Latin alphabet some time after 1000 AD, the “Lawspeaker” would recite annually from memory all of the laws currently in force in Iceland (Karlsson 2000: 20–27, 83–86). That much you can learn from the guidebooks. The Althing, however, has lately reentered the discourse of contemporary social theory, thanks in large part to Bruno Latour, who invokes it to alert his readers to the etymology of the word thing, which referred originally, he notes, to a gathering or assembly, serving as a reminder, too, that the more commonly understood “things” that are our everyday objects of knowledge and concern are, similarly, constituted by sometimes fractious combinations of unlike elements (2005: 23). In fact (as Latour also notes), Thingvellir marks not only the coming together of Iceland’s first human inhabitants, but also a prior and still ongoing scene of encounter—namely, the meeting point of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, which form a fault line running through the center of Iceland and continuing beneath the Atlantic ocean. It was a series of underwater volcanic eruptions along this joint or

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fissure that produced the island of Iceland between 17 and 20 million years ago, making it Europe’s most recently formed and volatile landmass, where the earth’s crust is only a third of its normal thickness and where, to the present, magma, or molten rock, continues to force its way from the depths, pushing the two plates (and thus the two continents) further apart. The traces of these upheavals are scattered throughout Iceland’s recorded history in the form of volcanic eruptions, floods, and earthquakes and are visible today in the vicinity of Thingvellir in the great rift Almannagjá, which continues to broaden by around 1 mm each year (Scherman 1976: 129–30). For Latour, the coincidence of geological fault line and political assembly serves principally as a reminder of the perennial inter-implication of politics and nature. I have chosen to begin with Thingvellir rather as a figure of montage—a spectacular image of juxtaposition, in the guise both of the politically massed bodies of the first Icelanders and of the boundary between two of the tectonic plates comprising the earth’s crust. It is the latter scene—simultaneously one of meeting and of separation—that draws attention to another of my central concerns in this essay: that of the space and time of the between, of the fluid indeterminacy that subsists and underlies the seeming stability of solid forms and out of which new configurations are continuously born, not least the geophysical, political, and cultural entity that is present-day Iceland. I wish to call attention at the outset to the open-ended character of this process as a simultaneous emergence and dissolution of forms, without cessation or resolution, a movement captured so powerfully by the Greek pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus, in his image of the universe as a child at play, perpetually making and unmaking with no end or purpose other than the game itself (Heraclitus 1984: 37).1 In appealing to geophysical processes and temporalities, as well as cultural and historical ones, I intend also to extend and pluralize the notion of montage itself, a notion that has been much discussed in recent anthropological writing—whether as an analytic for understanding the complex cultural forms elaborated in the wake of colonial encounters and burgeoning global interconnection (e.g., Taussig 1987), or with reference to emergent multi-sited and trans-disciplinary research imaginaries, many of them drawing inspiration directly from the practices of literary and artistic avant-gardes (Marcus 1994, 2008).2 Montage as used here refers not specifically to an audio-visual or (by extension) a textual method, but to a sensibility and mode of engagement with the world—one seeking to align itself not with explanatory recourse to an established order of significations (society, history, context) but with a generative instability that inheres in juxtaposed elements and the spatiotemporal intervals that both conjoin and differentiate them.

Liminality: A Familiar Story? Anthropology, in the course of its brief history as a discipline, has had much to say about the notion of betweenness, especially in relation to culturally demarcated zones of transition, ambiguity and classificatory uncertainty. Mary Douglas’s influential account of the concepts of pollution and taboo, for example, argues that these have a particular affinity with whatever is deemed to be unclear or ambiguous and that they arose as an attempt to safeguard society’s most cherished principles and categories against the threat of contradiction (Douglas 1966). Another focus of attention has been what Arnold van Gennep and others have identified

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as the transitional or “liminal” phases of rites of passage, the latter encompassing a range of culturally recognized transitions, from those, such as puberty rites, focusing on an individual’s life course to society-wide celebrations concerned with war, fertility, or the investiture of a new ruler (van Gennep 1960). In this respect, perhaps the most widely cited anthropological theorist of the liminal has been Victor Turner.3 Turner famously defines liminality as an “interstructural situation” characterized by flux and becoming, whereas society is defined as a “structure of positions,” comprising more or less fixed and stable identities and relations. What rites of passage accomplish, according to Turner, is a transition between such stable, culturally accredited states, for example, youth to adulthood, a transition that proceeds by way of a phase of structural “invisibility,” when the initiate is beyond or outside of classification, but which culminates in his or her reintegration into a new, socially recognized status. Such a transition, Turner notes, may result either in the reproduction of existing structures or, on occasion, in the emergence of new ones (1967: 93–94). Of the phase of liminality itself, Turner writes: “Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (1967: 97). He notes that the condition of neophytes during rites of initiation is frequently understood in terms of death or physical dissolution. What is at stake, however, is more than a symbolic identification with death. Neophytes may be forced to lie motionless for extended periods in a posture associated with burial; they may be forbidden from washing, painted black or smeared with earth; they may be required to live in the company of masked and monstrous figures representing the dead or the undead. What these ordeals accomplish, for Turner, is a rendering down of the neophyte into a kind of amorphous, primordial “stuff ”—as he puts it, “particular form becomes general matter”—out of which new identities and, indeed, new realities can be fashioned (1967: 96). The passage in question (from Turner’s 1967 book The Forest of Symbols) is a revealing one not only because it attests to Turner’s insistence on the productivity of the liminal, but also because of the potential challenges it poses to the familiar lexicon of social scientific explanation, raising as it does the unsettling possibility that the liminal or the between might be understood both as a material presence and as ontologically prior to the various differentiations it helps to organize. The latter suggestion, however, is one that Turner appears to back away from in many of his substantive descriptions of rites of passage, where appeals to social context and functionality are given precedence. Take, for instance, Turner’s discussion of the masks, costumes, and figurines that are a feature of the liminal phase of many initiation rites. Turner notes that such objects are often characterized by grotesque distortions or exaggerations—disproportionate limbs, an implausibly enlarged phallus or breasts—or else by the juxtaposition of human and animal features. Turner rejects the view that the hybridization of human and animal characteristics that is a feature of many initiation masks (including those of the Ndembu of Zambia, who form the subject of his own ethnographic research) are indicative of the fact that their makers regard such categories as porous or interchangeable. Instead, he argues that their function is a pedagogical one, aimed at teaching neophytes the importance of certain fundamental classificatory distinctions. This is achieved by abstracting what Turner calls the “factors” of culture—certain key themes or motifs pertaining to the organization of society, the cosmos and the powers animating it—and thus forcing the neophytes to reflect upon them and re-

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late them to the new status they themselves will assume on their return to society. Turner writes: “Put a human head on a lion’s body and you think about the human head in the abstract” (1967: 106). The juxtaposition of human head and leonine body might, he suggests, lead the observer to think about the head as the emblem of chieftainship, or as representing the claims of the soul against those of the body. Alternatively, it might prompt reflection on lions, their habits and properties, their metaphorical significances, or on the relationship between lions and humans. But what about the man-lion itself? Doesn’t the mask or costume also amount to a physical reshaping of reality, endowed with its own material density and specificity—and consequently—its own capacity to generate perhaps unpredictable affects? In Turner’s account, it is precisely the obtrusive materiality of the juxtaposition that is apt to disappear from view, to be replaced by an analysis of its possible social significances. In other words, it is society as an assumed structure of relationships and classifications that is prioritized as providing an explanatory framework for understanding the liminal, as we are led away from the elusiveness of the liminal itself and back to the (allegedly) more stable and knowable terrain of social relationships and cultural significations. Indeed, at moments such as these it becomes hard to distinguish between Turner’s approach and that of Douglas, for whom the condition of betweenness is to be understood, quite explicitly, with reference to what is assumed to be an already extant grid of socially instituted symbolic categories. The ambivalence that often marks Turner’s account is indicative, I would suggest, of a longstanding disinclination on anthropology’s part to approach the between on its own terms rather than by way of what is assumed to lie on either side of it.4 In the words of Brian Massumi, what seems to be at issue here is the possibility of conceiving of a “being of the middle” rather than simply a “middling being” (2002: 70). Indeed, to inquire into the between in itself, on its own terms, would, necessarily, be to confront the limits of social explanation by acknowledging the ontological primacy of the between and thus the impossibility of grasping or representing it through recourse to a notionally preestablished social context. Could it be argued then that it is the between or the liminal that simultaneously grounds and exceeds the explanatory logic of social relationality? What kind of anthropology would it be that attempted not to appropriate and master this “being of the middle” as a packaged and labeled object of academic scrutiny, but to acknowledge it rather as an elusive and wayward—but nonetheless constitutive—presence within its own discourse? Vincent Crapanzano has recently criticized Turner for flattening the liminal by reducing it to a binary and sequential logic of before and after, structure, and anti-structure.5 Crapanzano’s own interest in the between takes the form of an exploration, itself organized as a montage of sorts, of what he terms “imaginative horizons”—moments of transition or transformation that resist articulation through familiar categories. Of such moments he writes, “They unwittingly call attention to the artifice of our social and cultural understanding by exposing those intractable moments which step out of—and risk destroying—that understanding and its demand for cohesion and continuity” (2004: 64). While I recognize a strong affinity between Crapanzano’s and my own efforts to reconceptualize liminality, I feel obliged, nonetheless, to draw attention to what I consider to be two key differences of emphasis. First, while I share Crapanzano’s concern with the ineffability of the between as it resists sociological or historical explanation, I would suggest that the between can be understood not only as a void or absence but also as

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a superabundant plenitude, overflowing our received explanatory categories, not unlike the molten rock welling up from the earth’s core at Thingvellir. Indeed, the simultaneous plausibility of these seemingly antithetical characterizations may itself be a distinguishing feature of the between. Second, the principal focus of Crapanzano’s study is self-consciously individual and subjectival, a corrective to what he sees as the over-simplifying tendencies of much collectively oriented social portraiture. Much of his account is concerned with the emotions and subjective states—anxiety, anticipation, desire, fear, hope—aroused by inarticulable moments of transition. My own concern in what follows will be with the between less as a component of experience—albeit a fugitive and hard-to-grasp one—than as the possible basis for a speculative ontology, one that might prompt us to rethink not only our analytic vocabularies and methods of inquiry, but also the nature of our presumed object of study and our relationship to it.

On the Beach And there, on the sand, glimmering, were men and women—strangers—dancing! And the rocks were strewn with seal skins!—George Mackay Brown, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994)

I began with the image of a fracture line on the earth’s surface, where molten rock wells up and solidifies to form (and reform) the features of the present-day physical landscape. Let me turn now to another threshold between states of matter—the beach or shoreline as a fluctuating space of separation and interchange between the dry land most of us call home and the sea covering some seven tenths of the globe (Hamilton-Patterson 2007). The beach I have in mind is in the Orkney Islands, lying off the northernmost tip of Scotland and at one time a familiar port of call for Norse settlers making their way across the north Atlantic to Iceland (Morris 1985). Who are the strangers dancing on the beach? And why are the rocks strewn with seal skins? The folklore of Scotland’s northern and western islands abounds in stories of “selkies” or seal-people, beings who dwell in the sea in the form of fur-clad marine mammals, but who, at intervals, come ashore, casting off their seal skins to assume human form and dance naked on the shore (Puhvel 1963; Marwick 2000: 27–29; Williamson 1998). The quotation given above is from a retelling of a widely recorded selkie story by the poet and novelist George Mackay Brown (1921–1996), perhaps Orkney’s best-known twentieth-century writer.6 A young man sits daydreaming among the dunes on the beach at twilight (another transitional moment) when the seal people appear, circling and interweaving on the sand to the accompaniment of music only they can hear. His gaze is captivated by a seal-girl who sits apart from the dance on the adjacent rocks. He finds her skin and hides it, forcing her to retain her human form and to return home with him and become his wife. She lives with him in his croft for several years and bears him children. Although she adapts to life on land, she continues to prefer food from the sea—herring, crab, haddock, and skate, the whelks and mussels from rock-pools. She learns human language but her speech carries the traces of her former home—“something of the music of breakers in a cave mouth, or far-off horizon bell-notes, or dolphins in the flood tide” (Brown 2005: 164). When not occupied with her children or the running of the croft, much of her time is spent at the water’s edge, gazing westward. Then,

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one day, when her husband and children are away at the annual Lammas Fair (1 August), she finds her skin, puts it on, and resumes her former life in the sea.7 Her husband returns from the fair to find the skin gone from its hiding place. He runs to the sea, in time to catch sight of the dark shadows of seals drifting out onto the open ocean. One of them calls to him, “a strange terrible cry, of love and loss, joy and longing,” before disappearing beneath the waves (172–75). In other versions of the story, the seal-woman returns at intervals to observe her children, but is careful henceforward always to keep a safe distance from the shore. Like other accounts of animal-human metamorphosis, stories of selkies appear to play havoc not merely with classificatory distinctions between humans and animals, but also, more profoundly, with some of the most cherished of our modern, Western, landlubberly epistemological orientations—inner and outer, surface and depth, appearance and reality. Are the seal-people seals, or people, or both, or neither? Their skins can be removed, suggesting that their underlying, human form is their “true” one, yet it is to their seal-forms that they invariably return—unless, of course, they are thwarted by the theft of their skins. So does their authentic being reside in the skin itself? Why then the impetus to discard it temporarily to participate in these crepuscular dances on the sand? I like to think of the selkies, their transformations and their shoreline dances, as playing with liminality for its own sake, dancing its possibilities, delighting in the capacity to move freely between sea and land, between seal and human form. The seal people are quintessentially creatures of the between. It is in the doubly liminal setting of the beach at twilight that their interstitial being is able to reveal itself most fully. Their seemingly gratuitous shoreline revels have less to do with symbolization, classificatory ambiguity, or social utility, however conceived, than with a manifest delight in the plasticity and creativity of the “stuff,” the material substance of the world. What is at stake here, I suggest, is not metaphor but an affirmation of metamorphosis as both a material power and a quintessentially liminal phenomenon, the dynamics of which are irreducible to explanation in terms of context or functionality.8 If Turner’s descriptions of what he terms the “fruitful darkness” of liminal states seem on occasion to express some intimation of this, how much more evocative is the dance of the seal people, accompanied by its secret music, with the sea breaking on the sand and rocks as day darkens imperceptibly into night (1967: 110).

Between the Times The seal people’s predilection for showing themselves at twilight serves as a reminder that, while liminality has often been figured in spatial terms, it is possessed too of an inescapably temporal dimension. Just as the beach on which the seal people dance is a fluctuating boundary between dry land and water, solid and liquid, so twilight too is a zone of transition, neither day nor night, neither fully light nor fully dark. Hans Peter Duerr, in his study Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, first published in German in 1978, argues that apparitions of hybrid or metamorphic beings, sometimes associated with spirits of the returning dead, are a feature of what he terms “times between the times.” These are culturally demarcated interludes when the marking of time, including linear chronology, is suspended, allowing for a variety of transformations and reversals of the everyday order (Duerr 1984). Among the numerous and varied ex-

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amples discussed by Duerr are the festivities once associated, throughout much of Europe, with the so-called Twelve Days, between Christmas and Epiphany, a period marked by the overlay of a Christian festival on an older tradition of pagan midwinter celebrations (Hole 1958: 8–12; Simpson and Roud 2000: 61–63). The Twelve Days were characterized by performances and dances involving a variety of animal masks and costumes, including goats, bulls, horses, and birds with large clapping beaks pulled by string. In the words of the English folklorist Violet Alford, who complied a comprehensive inventory of such animal masking practices, the dancers seemed to make their appearance “as from another world” (1968: 122). The identification of animal masks as a survival of paganism is to be found not only in the writings of modern folklorists but also in those of the early Church Fathers, which abound in condemnations of such practices on the part of their recently and imperfectly Christianized congregations and at least one leader of the early Church, Bishop Timothy of Ephesus, earned the crown of martyrdom in the first century of the Christian era for attempting to intervene to stop these seasonal masquerades (Lawson 1910: 222). The identification of the masked dancers with the dead, meanwhile, is to be found both in contemporary sources and in the writings of latter-day commentators like the French comparative mythographer Georges Dumézil, who argued that the dancers represented spirits of the dead, who were permitted to return and mingle with the living during the suspension of the normal spatiotemporal order (1929: 170–72).9 In addition to masked performers, European folklore abounds in stories of fantastical, composite beings whose appearances were, similarly, believed to be confined to the period between Christmas and Epiphany. Among these were the Callicantzari—creatures combining a variety of human and animal attributes and copiously documented in the folklore of Greece and Macedonia (Beza 1928; Lawson 1910). According to the Cambridge classicist John Cuthbert Lawson, who conducted field research on Greek popular customs between 1898 and 1900, Callicantzari were believed to be of two kinds—a smaller one considered to be “frolicsome and harmless” and a larger one, malevolent and often deadly, given to breaking into houses, stealing food, and kidnapping and ravishing women. Here is Lawson’s description of the larger kind: [They] vary from the size of a man to that of a gigantic monster whose loins are on a level with the chimney pots. They are usually black in color, and covered with a coat of shaggy hair, but a bald variety is also sometimes mentioned. Their heads and also their sexual organs are out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. Their faces are black; their eyes glare red; they have the ears of goats or asses; from their huge mouths blood red tongues roll out, flanked by ferocious tusks. Their bodies are in general very lean, so that in some districts the term Callicantzaros is applied metaphorically to a very lean man; but a shorter and thickset variety also occurs. They have the arms and hands of monkeys, and their tails are as long again as their fingers and curved like the talons of a vulture. They are sometimes furnished with long thin tails. They have the legs of a goat or an ass, or sometimes one human leg and one of bestial form; or again both legs are of human shape, but the foot so distorted that the toes come where the heel should be. Hence it is not surprising they are often lame, but even so they are swift of foot and terrible in strength. (1910: 191–92)

Sometimes black and hairy, sometimes bald; sometimes lean, sometimes thickset; with vultures’ talons, the legs of a goat or an ass, or a human, or one human and one animal leg, lame but swift of foot: more extravagantly eclectic than the

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initiation masks and figurines discussed by Turner, the Callicantzari as Lawson describes them seem not so much a combination of specific human and animal characteristics as a riotous affront to the very notion of species identity, not so much formless as over-endowed with a superabundance of possible forms. Indeed, Lawson adds that the Callicantzari were believed at one time to have possessed unlimited powers of metamorphosis and to have been capable either of adopting a fully human form or of transforming themselves into any animal shape of their choosing. Lawson notes that, according to many of his sources, the Callicantzari were permitted to show themselves above ground only during the Twelve Days, being confined during the remainder of the year to the Underworld.10 He explains this seasonal restriction by tracing the genealogy of the Callicantzari, or at least one strand of it, to the human-animal (or animal-skin-clad) followers who comprise the retinue of Dionysus in ancient Greek art and literature. Dionysus, he notes, was not only a divinity frequently associated with transformation, including states of religious ecstasy and altered consciousness, but also one whose worship was concentrated in the winter months. Among the festivals of Dionysus celebrated in ancient Athens was the Anthesteria, held over three days at the end of January. Moreover, the Anthesteria, as many later commentators have noted, was not only a celebration of Dionysus, including a ritual “marriage” between the god and the wife of the city’s chief magistrate (the archon basileus), but also a festival of souls, in which spirits of the dead were thought to return and move among the living. On the third day of the festival, offerings, in the form of a dish of grain and seeds, were made to these spirits, who were then, at the close of the day, bidden to depart (Harrison 1991: 32–76; Parker 2007: 290–327). Scholars have disagreed as to whether these offerings to the dead form the more ancient component of the festival, onto which the celebration of Dionysus was subsequently grafted. More telling perhaps, however, as Walter Burkert has argued, is the way in which these elements were combined, the return of the dead being thus explicitly associated with a divinity whose range of attributes characteristically included wine, theatricality, transformation, ecstatic celebration, and the temporary suspension of everyday norms and temporalities (1987: 237–42). It is perhaps unsurprising then that for many of his modern interpreters (including, most famously, Friedrich Nietzsche) Dionysus should have been the member of the Olympian pantheon most intimately connected with the power of metamorphosis. Dionysus, in Nietzsche’s reading, is a divinity whose manifestations are linked specifically to interstitial occasions when the transformative flux underlying apparently stable forms was rendered momentarily visible and when a fugitive glimpse might be caught of “all nature’s artistic power” (Nietzsche 1999: 17–19).11 Duerr too associates “times between the times” both with physical transformation and with a return to a prior state of undifferentiation, involving the dissolution of familiar boundaries between entities of different kinds, with the implied recognition that such boundaries have never been more than flimsy and provisional constructs. Citing a prodigious range of ethnographic and historical examples, he writes: No matter how great the differences between these groups of people, they were all united by the common theme that “outside of time” they lost their, normal, everyday aspect and became beings of the “other” reality, of the beyond, whether they turned into animals or hybrid creatures or whether they reversed their social roles. They might roam bodily through the land or only “in spirit,” in ecstasy, with or without hallucinogenic drugs.

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“Between the times” indicated a crisis in the ordinary course of things. Normality was rescinded, or rather, order and chaos ceased to be opposites. In such times of crisis, when nature regenerated itself by dying first, humans “died” also, and as ghostly beings ranged over the land in order to contribute their share to the rebirth of nature. (1985: 35)

For me, what recommends Duerr’s account of times between the times above Turner’s account of the liminal is, firstly, Duerr’s lesser willingness to subordinate consideration of such between-times to an analysis of the social contexts of their materialization and, secondly, his greater insistence on attempting to think this putative return to origins as a material process of unmaking and remaking rather than simply a suspension of symbolic classifications. Indeed, part of what is at stake for Duerr in such collective descents into the flux of becoming is, precisely, the very possibility of social knowledge and explanation, his argument being that the reality of the between is at once the condition of our collective existence and self-understanding and that which we must repress in order to convince ourselves that the world is definitively knowable and explicable.

Reclaiming Comparativism Duerr’s account of times between the times (as distinct from linear, chronologically marked time) points to time itself as a force at once creative and destructive, a power both of differentiation and de-differentiation, which simultaneously gives rise to and exceeds humanly contrived classificatory orderings of the world, including culturally calibrated systems of time reckoning. Modern Western philosophy has, of course, given a variety of names to such a generative and dissipative time—Nietzsche’s (2006) “eternal recurrence,” Henri Bergson’s (1991) “duration,” Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) “pure form of time.” I want to linger here, however, on Duerr’s account because its evocation of time as a power of difference draws upon such an eclectic and heterogeneous range of sources. Indeed, Duerr’s book is apt to disconcert some contemporary (Anglophone) readers precisely on account of its unabashedly, extravagantly comparative scope. Duerr does not set out to describe the beliefs about or representations of time current among a particular community. Instead, discussion ranges over ancient Near Eastern archaeology, classical and Norse mythology, medieval and early modern European witchcraft, Siberian shamanism, native American peyote cults, Australian aboriginal storytelling, Zulu divination ceremonies, Zen Buddhism and Bushman hunting practices, along with the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Feyerabend, Lewis Carroll and—more alarming still—Carlos Castañeda! For anyone schooled in the more recent turns taken by the discipline of anthropology, the temptation is to take Duerr to task for his bundling together of historically and geographically disparate materials and his insufficient attention to the specificities of the multiple contexts that his account traverses. This, however, is not the line I wish to pursue here. Instead (and more controversially, perhaps), I want to propose that the scale and approach of Duerr’s study stands as a salutary challenge to the ethnographically oriented particularism that has become not only the default setting for much current anthropological research and writing, including many self-described multi-sited projects, but also the basis for many arguments concerning the discipline’s continued relevance to the understanding of contemporary social processes.

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Why do I find myself increasingly suspicious of this now almost ubiquitously shared vision of anthropology? Certainly not because I doubt the value of ethnography as a method of inquiry, nor because I question the need for anthropology to engage with the contemporary world. My quarrel is not with ethnography as such, but rather with what I take to be anthropology’s increasing tendency to define its identity and distinctiveness principally on the basis of its deployment of ethnographic methods. Such a move has often resulted, not least, in a distorted view of the discipline’s own history, foreclosing many of the intellectual and writerly possibilities that its comparative heritage in particular might offer to the present. More seriously perhaps, this has led not only, as Anna Tsing (2004) has famously noted, to a disinclination on anthropology’s part to engage with putative universals, but also, as I would add, in a pronounced squeamishness in the face, specifically, of questions of ontology, which anthropology has often tended to deal with by downsizing them to questions of ethnographic or historical description, a gesture frequently implying a concomitant reification of “society” and “history” as often unexamined horizons of explanation. In other words, the claim that anthropology equals ethnography risks enshrining a normative empiricism that absolutizes existing actualities as the unchallengeable horizon of what might “count” as reality and that holds that, for example, armed conflicts, genomics, international banking, and the mass media are more “real” and consequently more worthy of investigation than, say, spirits of the dead, shamanic flights or magical metamorphoses.12 Surely, one way to counter this is through a reengagement with anthropology’s latterly much-neglected comparative legacy. Large-scale comparative scholarship, of the kind engaged in by nineteenth-century practitioners like Edward Burnett Tylor, has, of course, long been criticized for its subordination of data to theory—one thinks, for example, of Franz Boas’s essay of 1896, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.” Nonetheless, a comparative perspective, in its most basic sense, serves too as a reminder that human beings in diverse times and places have produced multiple and divergent answers to the question of what exactly reality is and of what kinds of entities it is composed.13 I raise this point not in the name of cultural relativism, but rather in the hope of unsettling and reopening the very question of the real. The comparativism I wish to advocate here does not involve the unification of diverse particulars under an overarching conceptual scheme—such as the stadial theory of cultural evolution adhered to by Tylor and others of his contemporaries— but is, rather, exploratory and open-ended in character.14 It is a comparativism that juxtaposes diverse scenes not in order to explain them under an already established rubric or with reference to a notional social-historical context, but to manifest a set of associations and connections that need not be assumed to have existed at all prior to the act of comparison itself. I take montage, in other words, to be the informing principle of comparativism in an active mode, that is, as a creative practice oriented less toward the naturalistic depiction of existing realities than toward the production of new objects of knowledge and reflection. In this respect, ethnography and comparativism are not, in fact, alternatives to one another, in so far as ethnography is itself a mode of comparativism, that is, a practice of montage. Ethnographic knowledge is produced through the transformative juxtaposition of bodies, languages, sensibilities, and life-worlds, just as ethnographic writing, filmmaking or other modes of presentation are a product and a record of such vectors of intersectionality.15 Both ethnography and comparativism (which amount to the

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same thing) are arts of the between that involve not only the staging of encounters across difference but also the evocation of the limitless potentiality of difference itself. Comparison is a creative act to the extent that, rather than accepting the actual as given, it seeks to add to it an intangible (but for all that no less real) dimension of unpredictability and incalculability. It affirms that reality is not exhaustively expressed in the actual but includes within itself the possibility of being otherwise. Such an affirmation, however, cannot, by definition, proceed from any description of the actual alone but depends rather upon an artful solicitation of the “being of the middle” of the between as a power to differ from itself immanent to the very substance of reality.16 Duerr’s Dreamtime is, for this reader at least, one possible and hugely suggestive example of what a latter-day, large-scale anthropological comparativism might look like. It is perhaps significant that Duerr’s study, which began life as a doctoral dissertation at Oxford University under the supervision of E. E. EvansPritchard, was originally conceived as an ethnography of the ceremonial dances of Pueblo Indians, but mutated into its present form via a series of comparative tangents encountered in the course of secondary library research. Drawing on his one-time teacher’s celebrated account of Nuer political institutions, Duerr, in his preface to the first (German) edition of the book, describes the state of his own “soul” in the latter stages of composition as one of “ordered anarchy”—a phrase that seems equally applicable to the organization of the text itself (Duerr 1985: xi; Evans-Pritchard 1969: 6). Duerr’s account does not assume an enframing context of social relationships within which stories of magical transformations and otherworld journeys can be seen to “make sense.” Instead, he accords priority to his various sources’ intuitions of a reality antecedent to the organizational logics of the familiar social world. Duerr thus asks us to examine and question just what it is that we take for granted when we appeal to a social or historical context. He does not seek to provide contextual explanations for his informants’ pronouncements, but attempts rather to take them seriously by allowing them to challenge his own received understandings of what reality is. He offers, in effect, an alternative account of reality in which the between is not something to be explained and known, but is itself a potential source of knowledge and explanation. It is not social relationships that provide the point of reference for understanding liminality and metamorphosis, but vice versa. Duerr’s investigation of the between as a project of comparative philosophical anthropology is able to proceed in this way to a large degree because of its comparative scope, which eschews any prior commitment to the elucidation of a particular social context into which the materials he discusses must be fitted. Indeed, Duerr can be said to avoid doing explanatory violence to his sources to the extent that he does not seek, for the most part, to explain them at all, allowing his own reflections to take their cue from the resonances established among these juxtaposed elements. It is, in other words, the open-ended and combinatorial organization of his study, its montage character, along with its explicitly trans-cultural scope of reference that allows for a thinking and a poetics of the between.

What Difference Does it Make? I have argued in the preceding pages for the need for anthropology to reembrace both an experimental version of its comparative heritage and the montage charac-

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ter of its own knowledge production, not least as correctives to the hypostatizing of context and social relationality that has sometimes been the correlate of a too narrowly ethnographically based conception of disciplinary identity. In concluding, however, I want to return to the vexed question of the between and to try to suggest why, for me at least, there is so much at stake here. What can be said about a notion that can be personified, variously, by a geological rift, by the dances of the seal people, by the seasonal ribaldries of the Callicantzari, by the retinue of Dionysus and by an out-of-print work of comparative anthropological scholarship? Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps everything. Nothing in the sense that the between, by its very nature, eludes the grasp of our analytic lexicon. Try to categorize, define, or explain it and, inevitably, it slips away as we find ourselves, like Turner and many of his successors, back on the more familiar terrain of social relations and classifications. It is this aspect of the between—its ineffable and ungraspable character—that is so powerfully evoked in Crapanzano’s discussion of “imaginative horizons” with reference, among other things, to the elliptical “speaking with names” practiced by the Western Apache and to the ma, or interval between forms, of classical Chinese and Japanese aesthetics (2004: 39–46, 51–56). Yet there is another aspect to the between that strikes me as equally deserving of consideration—namely, its fecundity, its inexhaustible capacity to dissolve existing forms and generate new ones. If the variegated cast of human and otherthan-human characters with whom I have populated this essay are intended, in part, to provide a ludic and anarchic alternative to the constitutionalist and social democratic inflections of Latour’s Dingpolitik, they are meant also to manifest and embody something of this multifarious generativity. In other words, I have tried not only to call attention to the gaps and indeterminacies that mark the limits of our academic knowledge, but also to evoke an unpredictability lodged at the very heart of the real. Bergson, and later Deleuze, would refer to this as the “virtual,” an inexhaustible and non-determined power of becoming-other forming a no-lessreal counterpart to the actual, which is continuously produced out of it through an ongoing and open-ended movement of self-differentiation, a movement constitutive of the creativity of being itself and as such demanding to be thought as antecedent to any possible distinction between, for example, nature and culture, structure and anti-structure, or between reality and its cultural-linguistic representations (Bergson 1975; Deleuze 1991; McLean 2009; Pearson 2002).17 It is part of the wager of this essay that comparative anthropology, understood specifically as an art of montage, might be particularly suited to evoke such a sense of the real as perennially in process and unfinished and that this in turn might nurture a variety of artistic, political, and other projects aimed at creatively transforming presently existing realities. The diverse scenes of encounter and metamorphosis grouped together here should be understood less as case studies or illustrative examples, than as conjurations of and with this prodigious yet finally unrepresentable power of world making. As such, they mark the point at which historical and contextual explanation must acknowledge its own limits, where cultural difference encounters an ontologically prior differential of time and matter. What they invite, I suggest, is not further explanation, but a mode of engagement—whether textual, audio-visual, or performative—that is willing to measure itself against them. The articulations born of such encounters demand to be thought in terms, not of contextual specificities, but of intersectional imaginaries that are willing to engage in the Heraclitean game of becoming by spanning and conjoining disparate times and places to participate

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in the shaping of new and emergent realities. A flag flutters in the breeze of an Icelandic summer’s afternoon; magma rises from the earth’s depths; continents draw apart; seal people cast off their skins to dance on a beach at twilight; masked and monstrous figures throng the nights of midwinter; and a hypothetical reader (age, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation unspecified) scans the pages of an edited volume entitled Transcultural Montage. What difference does it make? Perhaps, quite literally, all the difference in the world.

Notes 1. Heraclitus lived during the period spanning the end of the sixth and the beginning of the fifth century BCE. His surviving works are in the form of cross-referring, aphoristic fragments (Hornblower and Spawforth 2003: 687). 2. On montage as a cinematic technique, see Rohdie 2007. For a discussion of montage’s relation to social scientific accounts of modernity (with specific reference to Sweden), see Pred 1995. 3. In a recent essay on anthropological approaches to the (notoriously hard-to-define) phenomenon of ritual, Bruce Kapferer argues that the significance of Turner’s contribution lies in his emphasis on the transformative dynamics of ritual practice (what Turner himself termed the “ritual process”) in its capacity to generate new psychological and social realities (Kapferer 2005; Turner 1977). Turner’s accounts of liminality are thus seen as moving beyond, on the one hand, van Gennep’s more narrowly conceived view of ritual as a sequence of actions and, on the other, the static orientation toward symbols and collective representations characteristic of self-identified neo-Durkheimians like Douglas (Kapferer 2005: 37). Douglas’s allegiance to Durkheim is evident in her discussion of the influence of William Roberston Smith on subsequent developments in the study of comparative religion, where Durkeim’s use of Roberston Smith’s work is compared favorably with that of James Frazer: “The influence which Robertson Smith exerted divides into two streams according to the uses to which Durkheim and Frazer put his work. Durkheim took up his central thesis [that gods and the observances and beliefs associated with them are an integral part of social life] and set comparative religion on fruitful lines. Frazer took up his incidental minor thesis [his evolutionist assumptions] and sent comparative religion into a blind alley” (Douglas 1966: 19). 4. Two recent exceptions are Vigh 2009 and Pedersen 2011. 5. Crapanzano argues that the between itself needs to be understood as internally differentiated, comprising a series of lesser transitions culminating in a moment of radical undecidability, “a moment in which one is neither on one side nor the other, neither what one was nor what one will be.” It is these disjunctions and gradations within the liminal state, according to Crapanzano, that Turner does not fully acknowledge or appreciate (Crapanzano 2004: 61). 6. On George Mackay Brown’s life and work, see Fergusson 2007 and Ferguson 2011. 7. The first of August, or “Lammas Day,” marked the festival of the wheat harvest in Britain. The name “Lammas” derives from the Old English hlæf mæsse (loaf mass), referring to the custom of bringing to church on that day a loaf made from the new crop (Banks 1941: 45). 8. Deleuze and Félix Gauttari draw a distinction between metaphor, which they see as founded upon resemblance and thus upon a logic of identity, and metamorphosis, which partakes rather of becoming and freedom of movement. In their study of the writings of Franz Kafka, they go so far as to claim that: “Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor” (1986: 22). 9. A possible explanation for this complex of associations is suggested by James Frazer in the sixth volume of his magnum opus, The Golden Bough, first published in 1913. Here Frazer argues that the Twelve Days and the pre-Christian observances on which

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

they were overlaid, originated, long prior to the advent of Christianity, as a so-called intercalary period, inserted into the regular calendar to bridge the discrepancy between the solar year and the cycle of lunar months. As such, he suggests, they were widely regarded as existing outside the normal course of time, forming part neither of the lunar nor of the solar system. They thus represented, as he puts it: “an excrescence, inevitable but unaccountable, which breaks the smooth surface of ordinary existence, an eddy which interrupts the even flow of months and years.” The result, Frazer argues, was that intercalary days came to be viewed as periods of license, when ordinary rules of conduct did not apply and when customary authorities might be replaced temporarily by a capricious mock ruler, like the Lords of Misrule or Boy Bishops who presided over the medieval and early modern European Festivals of Fools that were, sometimes, a feature of the Christmas season (Frazer 1980: 328–29). In Macedonia, a group of beings known as the Karkantzari or Shatsantzari are, similarly, associated with the Twelve Days. These, however, are not thought to be denizens of the Underworld, but rather human beings, especially those who have a “light” guardian angel, who are transformed by night into monsters: “Their nails suddenly grow to an abnormal length, they turn red in the face, their eyes become bloodshot and wild, their noses and mouths excrete.” In this hideous guise they roam each night from house to house, knocking on doors and demanding admittance. If they are refused, they climb down through chimneys and torment the inhabitants by pinching or otherwise harassing them in their sleep. At daybreak they resume their human form until nightfall (Abbott 1969: 73–74). More recent classical scholarship has often been critical of the interpretations of Dionysus proposed by Nietzsche and some of his successors. Recent commentators have questioned not only the identification of Dionysus with suffering, violence, and loss of self, but also his association, in the writings of Nietzsche and others, with the origins of tragedy (e.g., Henrichs 1984; Scullion 2002). An interpretation of the god more in keeping with that of Nietzsche is provided, however, by Detienne 1979. For a summary of debates surrounding the figure of Dionysus and his cult, see Parker 2007: 138–39. For an all-too-rare challenge to this now dominant vision of anthropology as ethnography, see Tim Ingold, who insists that anthropology be more expansively defined as “an inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world,” and inquiry that, as he further notes, is itself necessarily carried forward in the world (2011: 242). One of the most suggestive recent attempts to engage this issue has been the notion of “perspectivism” or “perspective ontology” formulated by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) and elaborated by Rane Willerslev (2007). According to Viveiros de Castro, perspectivism refers to the conception “according to which the world is inhabited by different kinds of persons, human and non-human, which perceive reality from different points of view” (1998: 469). Willerslev extends Viveiros de Castro’s arguments by suggesting that perspectivism need not be regarded simply as an abstract conception of the world but can be understood rather as grounded in particular contexts of practical activity such as (in the case of his own research) the complex human-animal interactions that characterize the experiences of Siberian Yukaghir hunters (2007: 94). On nineteenth-century social evolutionist thought, see Burrow 1966 and Stocking 1987. The view that ethnography and ethnographic research are most fruitfully understood in terms of uncertain and often unpredictable encounters has, of course, been widely articulated in recent decades (e.g., Clifford 1988; Faubion and Marcus 2009; McLean and Liebling 2007; Stewart 2007; Tsing 2004). It is striking, however, that the contemporary situation of ethnography has rarely (if ever) been discussed in relation to anthropology’s other, comparative heritage. It is, of course, possible too to engage existing works of comparative anthropological scholarship on these terms and thus to find in them potential models for a more experimental and open-ended version of the comparative method. By way of illustration, let

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me turn to a (more or less) randomly chosen paragraph from the second volume of Tylor’s Primitive Culture (first published in 1871). The author is discussing the widespread use of fire by human beings in different times and places to protect themselves against harmful and malevolent spirits, especially those believed to manifest themselves at night (as Tylor writes: “In the dark, especially, harmful spirits swarm”). The paragraph begins with a description (taken from the writings of the English explorer and colonial administrator George Grey) of the fire-sticks carried at night by aboriginal Australian women to ward off evil spirits. In the following sentence, the scene shifts to South America and the burning brands or torches carried for similar purposes by Indian groups. The next sentence carries us to the Malay Peninsula, where protective fires are lit near a mother at the time of childbirth. A little later in the paragraph a single sentence transports us from Southern India to a wedding in China. We travel onward and backward in time to medieval Iceland, where the early Norse settlers carried fire around the lands they intended to occupy, again to expel in-dwelling malevolent spirits. Moving forward again into the author’s present, we find ourselves in the Hebrides and, a sentence later, in Bulgaria, where, on the Feast of Saint Demetrius, lighted candles are placed in the stables and wood shed, this time to prevent evil spirits from entering into the domestic animals (Tylor 1903: 194–96). What provides the occasion for this whistle-stop tour of continents and centuries is, for Tylor, as for many of his contemporaries, a stadial theory of social evolution, asserting that human societies everywhere can be seen to change and progress in accordance with a uniform and predictable sequence of stages. The particular focus of Tylor’s study, of course, is on the development of religious conceptions, from animism via polytheism to monotheism, combined with Tylor’s signature doctrine of “primitive survivals,” which allowed the practices of contemporary Scottish crofters and central European peasants to be understood as vestigial remnants of an otherwise now vanished animistic sensibility. It is arguable, however, that the reader’s attention is captured less by the ordering theoretical framework than by the proliferation of examples and the leaps and juxtapositions to which it gave rise and that seem to threaten constantly to subvert its unifying and totalizing logic, swarming uncontainably like malevolent spirits in the nighttime. In such passages, we are engaged less perhaps by the progressivist assumptions of social evolutionism than by the teeming vistas of human variousness and the attendant flouting of spatial and temporal distances that those assumptions seem at once to repudiate and to call forth. For all the apparent rigidity of its intellectual premises, Tylor’s prose remains capable of affording a space for strange and surprising encounters between people, times, and places, making it possible, for example, for my own Hebridean ancestors to rub shoulders with aboriginal Australians, Chinese wedding guests, and early Norse settlers in Iceland. 17. Kapferer, too, has recourse to the concept of the virtual, which he derives both from the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and those of Suzanne Langer (1942, 1953) in order to extend Turner’s theorizations of liminality and ritual. For Kapferer, the virtual becomes a key term for understanding the transformative power of ritual dynamics without subordinating them to a logic of social causation: “The phantasmagoric space of ritual virtuality may be conceived not only as a space whose dynamic interrupts prior determining processes but also as a space in which participants can reimagine (and redirect or reorient themselves) into the everyday circumstances of life” (2005: 47). The liminal thus becomes “a descent into the ground of reality rather than a making and a marking of a stage in a linear progression” (2005: 50).

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Bergson, Henri. 1975 [1907]. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 1991 [1908]. Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Beza, Marcu. 1928. Paganism in Romanian Folklore. London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. Boas, Franz. 1896. “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.” Science 4: 901–8. Brown, George Mackay. 2005 [1994]. Beside the Ocean of Time. Edinburgh: Polygon. Burkert, Walter. 1985 [1977]. Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, trans. John Raffan. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Burrow, J. W. 1966. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. London: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, 117–51 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 2004. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbera Hammerjam. New York: Zone Books. ———. 1995. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986 [1975]. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Detienne, Marcel. 1979 [1977]. Dionysos Slain, trans. Mireille Mueller and Leonard Mueller. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Duerr, Hans Peter. 1985 [1978]. Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, trans. Felicitas Goodman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dumézil, Georges. 1929. Le problème des centaures: étude de mythologie comparée indoeuropéenne. Paris: P. Geuthner. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1969 [1940]. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. New York: Oxford University Press. Faubion, James D., and George E. Marcus, eds. 2009. Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ferguson, Ron. 2011. George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift. Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press. Fergusson, Maggie. 2007. George Mackay Brown: The Life. London: John Murray. Frazer, James George. 1980 [1913]. The Golden Bough. 3rd ed. Part VI: The Scapegoat. London: Macmillan Hamilton-Paterson, James. 2007. Seven Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds. London: Faber and Faber. Harrison, Jane. 1991 [1922]. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Henrichs, Albert. 1984. “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88: 205–40. Heraclitus. 1974. Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary by T. M. Robinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hole, Christina. 1958. Christmas and its Customs. London: Richard Bell. Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth. 2003. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Revised 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge.

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Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning.” In Ritual in its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation, eds. Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist, 35–54. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Karlsson, Gunnar. 2000. Iceland’s 1100 Years: The History of a Marginal Society. London: C. Hurst. Langer, Susanne. 1942. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1951. Feeling and Form. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, Latour, Bruno. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: How to Make Things Public.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 4–30. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lawson, John Cuthbert. 1910. Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLean, Athena, and Annette Liebling, eds. 2007. The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders Between Ethnography and Life. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. McLean, Stuart. 2009. “Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativity Beyond ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture.’” Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 213–45. Marcus, George E. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualising Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 37–53. London: Routledge. ———. 2008. “The Ends of Ethnography: Anthropology’s Signature Producing Knowledge in Transition.” Cultural Anthropology 24(1): 1–14. Marwick, Ernest. 2000 [1975]. The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morris, Christopher. 1985. “Viking Orkney: A Survey.” In The Prehistory of Orkney: BC 4000– 1000 AD, ed. Colin Renfrew, 210–42. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Robert. 2007. Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pearson, Keith Ansell. 2002. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London: Routledge. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pred, Allan. 1995. Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present. London: Routledge. Puhvel, Martin. 1963. “The Seal in the Folklore of Northern Europe.” Folklore 74(1): 326–33. Rohdie, Sam. 2007. Montage: Cinema Aesthetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scherman, Katharine. 1976. Iceland: Daughter of Fire. London: Gollancz. Scullion, Scott. 2002. “Nothing to Do With Dionysus: Tragedy Misconceived As Ritual.” Classical Quarterly 52: 102–37. Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. 2000. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stocking, George W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Asects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1903 [1871]. Primitive Culture: Researches Into The Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language Art and Custom. 2 vols. London: John Murray. van Gennep, Arnold. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Garbrielle L. Caffee. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vigh, Henrik. 2009. “Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline.” Ethnos 73(1): 5–24. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4: 469–88. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williamson, Duncan. 1998. Tales of the Seal People: Scottish Folk Tales. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing.

CHAPTER 4

Into the Gloaming A Montage of the Senses Andrew Irving

Figure 4.1. The Artist’s Mother, John Dugdale, 1996.

“The reduction of the sensorium into five senses was first determined by Aristotle, perhaps for neat numerological reasons rather than physiological ones; but Galen said there were six, Erasmus Darwin thought there were twelve, and Von Frey reduced them down to eight. Zen Buddhists say there is a sixth sense, as we have seen, but a different one from the western notion of the sixth sense as extrasensory perception. Recent authorities calculate there are seventeen senses.” —Anthony Synott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society, 1993

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This chapter explores the phenomenology of vision and the senses, as well as their combination and disintegration, in relation to such things as truth, imagination, viruses, illness, and artistic practice, and as determined by the physiological possibilities and constraints of the human eye and body. By documenting certain sensory and corporeal transformations that take place in response to different qualities of light or during episodes of illness and crisis, the chapter discusses how visual and sensory information is assembled, experienced, and interpreted. It then uses this to offer an understanding of montage, not as a property of cinema but as a continuous sensory exchange between body and world that encompasses different kinds of stabilizing and destabilizing effects. In doing so, the chapter pays special attention to the interaction between the different sense organs and changes in the visible environment, including how the particular quality of light that emerges after sunset but before night has descended—known as the gloaming—introduces phenomenological uncertainties into the nervous system that transform the relationship between body and world and recasts people’s capacities for experience and expression. The chapter begins with an outline of how people’s actions in the world produce a form of living montage that creates continuous juxtapositions of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. It then goes on to provide an ethnographic account of the bodily and sensory transformations that take place during the gloaming hour, including the ways in which diminishing amounts of available light and visible impairment shape people’s possibilities for practical action and ekphrastic expression.

Explorations in Sensory Montage To a certain extent, montage is already prefigured in lived experience. When a person walks, as has often been noted, they are like a film director who strolls the streets, perceives images, and mentally records their visual experiences, creating a movie in their head by way of the images they encounter, including all the various cinematic techniques of looking, editing, close-ups, long shots, flashbacks, fleeting or lingering gazes, cutting away, and the use of the different kinds of optical effects, incidental music, ambient sounds, and narrative voices that are encountered in the street. Here, movement is a creative act of poesis that continuously generates complex juxtapositions of sound, image, texture, taste, and aroma within the flow of everyday life. By deciding to walk down one street rather than another, by visiting a particular neighborhood, taking a short cut down a congested, traffic-filled road, or by choosing to go to a coffee shop, supermarket, or park, people actively create their lived and sensory experience of the present (Irving 2007, 2010, 2011a, 2011b). The types of emotion, mood, and memory that are brought to life through such everyday movements shape the content and character of people’s sensorial experience and generate different possibilities for being and expression. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1992) highlights how, in ordinary life, the lived body weaves together the different senses so as to create a unity of experience that informs our perceived reality by way of a preconscious synthesis of information. Thus a particular object, say a book, is not experienced as two different objects— i.e., as a book that exists in sight and another in touch—but is instead experienced as a single object that possesses different sensory dimensions. Likewise, an environment, say the café in which the book is being read, is not experienced as mul-

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tiple places according to its visual, haptic, acoustic, and aromatic properties, but as a single environment that is brought into alignment through the body’s capacity to process and integrate different kinds of sensory information. However, closer ethnographic attention to the way experiences are actually formed in everyday life reveals the uncertain grounds for making holistic or overarching claims about sensory knowledge—be that visual or otherwise—because of the way different sensory interpretations are generated through people’s intentions and actions (see Howes 2004, 2006). On the trivial end of the scale this might be the different realities that are generated by a bottle of milk, in that when we take the bottle from the fridge it may look fine, but when we smell it we realize the milk is bad. In this case, the truth of the nose gains precedence over the truth of the eye, but this might be immediately reconfigured in the following action when a piece of fruit smells good but is disappointing when bitten into, thereby illustrating the situational character of truth and perception. Moreover, given that a typical day might encompass tens or even hundreds of different sensory interactions it is highly problematical to accord a particular sense a privileged relationship to truth, say in relation to a particular culture or historical era, without grounding these claims across the range of people’s lived experiences and practices. On a less trivial level, a house or building might be infused with the smell of a person who once lived there but has recently died. The conflicting realities that are experienced when entering a room in which someone’s smell is tangibly present and alive but the person can no longer be seen, heard, or touched creates a disorientating and morbid montage of dissonant sensory information. The person still exists and seems so alive to consciousness within some sensory registers but is not present in others. Also common is when a dead body is present to the eye and simply appears to be sleeping but is cold to the touch and betrays a different truth from that which is suggested by vision. Such experiences of milk, fruit, and bodies suggest that while the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell often work in combination to confirm a single “whole-body” reality, as suggested by Merleau-Ponty, we must be aware that the senses can also oppose, destabilize and juxtapose conflicting realities, creating complex montages of sensory information whose consequences need to be addressed when attempting to understand how the senses establish the basis for perception, action, and interpretation. As such the simultaneous copresence of different kinds of sensory information within a given moment has a number of important repercussions for claims about different social contexts and historical periods. 1. It demonstrates how each sense possesses a specific ontological relationship to truth and reality. Moreover, because sensory realities are situational, it is problematical to accord a status of truth to any particular sense outside of specific actions, purposes, and situations. 2. It suggests that the sensory organization of the body is in a continuous process of formation and dissolution. Accordingly, while certain senses are better for particular tasks and purposes in particular moments, any hierarchical structures that are established between the senses are provisional, contextual, and time bound. 3. It calls into question attempts to define any particular culture or historical era in terms of a dominant visual or sensory hierarchy, given how different senses are used for different situations and purposes in people’s daily lives.

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4. It highlights how theoretical assertions of bodily unity or holism need to be understood as only applying to certain sensory contexts and as such need to be ethnographically grounded and justified rather than merely asserted. The manner in which sensory data is encountered within the flow of daily life was extensively considered by Erwin Straus (1963, 1966), who documented how the body’s sense organs generate different kinds of phenomenological knowledge about the world. For example, whereas the visual world consists of the 180 degrees in front of the eyes and locates objects precisely in space, the world of sound and smell is less localized and can encompass the person; this is illustrated by the way it is easy to avert one’s eyes or look away from something, but less easy to escape an unwelcome sound or smell by moving the head. For Straus, the evolution of the upright posture in human beings led to a fundamental reorganization of the senses, in which the importance of smell was reduced in favor of the eye. Vertical posture not only freed vision from the ground, but no longer being on all four limbs released the hands to offer new possibilities for hand–eye coordination, communicative gestures, movement, and technology. The combination of perpendicularity and bipedal movement thus created a distinctly human way of sensing, experiencing, and interpreting the world, whose legacy we still live with today. When lying on the analyst’s couch, Straus observes, the body loses its upright posture and is rendered more passive, while in the cinema a person’s body also plays a less active role in defining the content and character of its sensory environment insofar as the world comes to the person rather than vice-versa. When watching a film, the body’s nerve cells register ever-changing combinations of sound and image, which sometimes leap across whole centuries or entire oceans in a few seconds, but are nevertheless rendered meaningful within the flow of the film by the cognitive capacity to tie information together in consciousness. Here, the construction of complex montages of time and space within film are not restricted to editing and cinematic technique insofar as they are predicated upon everyday experience and activity, thus displacing the distinction between art and life. Regardless of whether sensory information is encountered through people’s everyday practices or within the cinema, its interpretation still depends upon the nervous system’s ability to rapidly coordinate complex juxtapositions of sensory information in a manner whereby meaning is not closed off but left open for further revision and evaluation. As such, the human nervous system’s capacity for processing and interpreting different modes of sensory data further destabilizes boundaries of art and life, as indicated in Gilles Deleuze’s summary of “seeing” Francis Bacon’s paintings: The levels of sensation would really be domains of sensation that refer to the different sense organs; but precisely each level, each domain would have a way of referring to the others, independently of the represented object they have in common. Between a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an existential communication that would constitute the “pathic” (nonrepresentative) moment of the sensation. In Bacon’s bullfights, for example, we hear the noise of the beast’s hooves. (2005: 30)

Here, Deleuze’s model of sensation returns us to earlier understandings of aesthetics and aesthesis that were not so much concerned with art or disinterested contemplation, but life and reality as constituted through the interplay between

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the different sense organs; or as Terry Eagleton observes, complex assemblages of perception and feeling whose territory was: “Nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together—the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world” (1990: 13). An ongoing consequence of being a body in the world is the formation and juxtapositions of sensate experience—sometimes complementing and seamlessly intertwining, on other occasions discordant or jarring—that are continuously generated through the body’s sense organs and nervous activity. Simply walking down a street creates many different cross cuttings and juxtapositions of subject matter, tone, scale, rhythm, motion, sound, volume, contrast, and association, akin to the classic techniques of montage from Sergei Eisenstein to Luis Buñuel. The lived montage of the street is generated within all the different sensory registers, including those that go beyond or challenge those that can be effectively represented in film. The raw meat in the butcher’s shop contrasts with the human flesh on the billboard next door or the funeral home opposite; the betting shop full of hope and tension that sits next to the abandoned church; the commotion in the pub contrasts with the quiet of the graveyard. The street provides endless material day and night: from the crowd that encompasses many different kinds of person to the surrounding textures of plastic, wood, glass, metal, skin, leather, nylon, stone, and concrete. While enormous wealth and dire poverty are often simultaneously on display in many of the world’s cities, generating conflicting, exacerbated images of difference with a simple flick of the head or minimal eye movement. While lived montage precedes cinematic montage, cinema has now become fundamental to perception and experience. Prior to the advent of film and sound recording it would have been nonsensical to define a stage play, circus, musical concert, or sports match as a “live” performance or event because it is only through the subsequent development of cinema and television that such insights have become thinkable or possible. The contemporary understanding and appreciation of “liveness” is thus partially a consequence of modern technology, illustrating how the invention of film, and its associated techniques, have produced new ways of thinking not just in relation to cinematic representation, but also non-cinematic experience. As such, analyzing cinematic techniques—such as montage—provides both theoretical and practical ways of thinking about how people’s lived experiences and sensory realities of the world are shaped in movement and action.

Into the Gloaming I now want to attempt a shift in focus by offering an ethnographic exploration of perception in order to consider the role of light, vision, and the senses in the constitution of lived experience. When a person encounters the disappearing light of the gloaming, a subtle but significant reconfiguration of their sensory organs and nerve cells takes place, which alters the way the external world is interpreted and affects the basis upon which many actions and responses are carried out, including haptic sensitivity, hand–eye coordination, proprioception, movement, and the sound and range of the human voice. The gloaming does not wholly belong to the visibility of day or the invisibility of night, but mediates the two by retaining traces of daylight and a presentiment of the darkness to come or vice versa. Con-

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sequently, when a person enters the gloaming the sensory organization of their body is shaped by a past already gone and a future yet to arrive. The largest and heaviest sense organ of all, the human skin, becomes much more sensitive as light diminishes and the diurnal arrangement of the senses becomes realigned in accordance with the human organism’s anticipation of nighttime. The skin is generally less than 2 mm thick (Jablonski 2004) and connects directly to a network of underlying nerve terminals that continuously relay information about the external environment to the brain. Insofar as the skin is sensitive to light it can be said “to see,” but unlike the eye and other sense organs, such as ears, eyes, nose, and tongue, the sensitivity of the skin is distributed across the whole body surface rather than being localized in one part, with nerves being particularly concentrated in areas such as the face and fingertips. At the same time as the sensitivity of the skin is increasing, smell and hearing also become more acute, while the eye becomes less effective. The eye’s retina, which can be understood as an important extension of the brain, plays a key role in configuring spatial knowledge and establishing the body’s relationship to its surroundings through what is termed retriocentric perception, i.e., the coordination of the position of eye and body relative to other objects in the environment so as to enable movement and allow objects to be acted upon effectively (Ward 2006). During the gloaming, retriocentric and other forms of visual perception become less precise: objects, materials, and shapes take on uncertain forms, people’s distinguishing features and expressions become less clear, making their intentions and actions more difficult to discern. Even familiar rooms, streets, and buildings can become ambiguous spaces of reverie and possibility, demonstrating the frequency with which physiology and imagination meet within people’s interpretation and appreciation of their surroundings. Such shifts in sensory perception, receptivity, and activity are part of the body’s wider capacity to reorganize its intentional and attentional abilities when encountering different qualities of stimuli, including the intensity of available light and other kinds of visual information. The brain continually selects, fills in, and edits information about the external environment to the extent that for every nerve pathway that conveys information for visual processing there are many others going the other way (Gregory 2005). This demonstrates how neither the external reality nor the perceiving body are stable insofar as they are both in a continuous process of transformation throughout the day. Thereby reinforcing how people’s perceptions are not direct reflections of reality but are instead hypotheses about the world, formulated by brain and body and open to imaginative intervention. I would argue that there is an interesting and effective metaphorical correlation between the physiological and imaginative reconfigurations that occur during the gloaming hour and those experienced by persons during the onset of blindness. In fact, the metaphor of the gloaming was first suggested to me by John Dugdale, a photographer from New York who I began working with in the 1990s, to describe his descent into blindness. John was a successful fashion and design photographer whose clients included Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart and who gradually began losing his ability to see in his early thirties as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. Although John’s commercial work was extremely well paid, his long-standing ambition was to earn a living making fine art. Even as a child, his greatest aspiration was to have a photograph exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this was largely relinquished once he started down the commercial path. John’s success in the fashion and design industry meant he was able to live in a farmhouse

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in the country and also run a studio in the city. One morning in 1993 he woke up, had some tea and toast for breakfast, and then left for the city where he had an appointment for a photo shoot. After reaching the city, John began feeling disorientated, lost consciousness, and collapsed onto the pavement. He was found and taken into hospital where it was discovered he had undergone an HIV/AIDS related stroke. Consequently, John never arrived at his appointment and instead spent the following months in hospital. From now on John would never see, touch, or move amid the world’s surfaces and textures in the same way again. While in the hospital, John’s condition rapidly deteriorated and over the following weeks and months he suffered six more strokes and also contracted viral meningitis and pneumonia. Aside from the intense pain, John was too weak to get out of bed and so he also experienced the severe fatigue that takes over when lying down for days on end: of having one’s habitual perpendicularity removed and having one’s flesh continually press down on a bed without being able to get up or move around, together with all the associations of infantilization that accompany being in such a state. To return to Straus’s observations on upright posture, it is not just that John’s sensory experience of the world was transformed due to his horizontal confinement but also the wider moral associations of being an upright and independent human being. Moreover, John had by now lost control over many of his body functions and had to wear baby’s diapers, which his mother, brother, and sister would come in to change, as he was too weak to change them himself. Here was a man who had just turned thirty-three, the age of Christ’s death, a man supposedly in the prime of life who was too weak to stand or get out of bed and was almost wholly dependent upon nursing staff and his family for his most basic needs. Spending extended periods in bed constitutes part of the apprenticeship to illness. Nevertheless, a bed-ridden person is not a passive entity but continues to make their daily experience by way of their thoughts, movements, and actions: whether to spend the hours gazing out the window listening to the radio, entering into the world of a novel, or closing one’s eyes and imagining oneself elsewhere. During extended periods of illness, people can often be found dwelling in times and places far beyond the confines of the bed, assembling life’s material into complex montages of memory and emotion that move from regret to hope to melancholy (see Irving 2009). Illness is radically differentiated through action—for example, a person who turns away from social contact and spends their day looking at a wall is also closing down their sensory nervous system by reducing external stimulation, while another person may attempt to retain a sense social and existential continuity amid the disruption of illness by making conversation and forming relationships. For a person such as John, whose profession made him so attentive to his visible surroundings, being confined to the limited visual world of a hospital bed was a distressing experience, and his pain-filled imagination would journey afar in time and space, juxtaposing the man and the boy, repeatedly returning to his childhood and creating montages of his life, his past deeds, his choices, as well as venturing forward in time to his impending demise and constructing stark contrasts between sickness and health, life and death. After a while, John began noticing that parts of his visual field had begun to disappear. Where he once saw the world, he now saw nothing but blackness while other parts seemed to be covered by a mottled veil. As time passed, more and more of his visual field diminished and, most disconcertingly, the center of vision began to disappear. Our bifocal eyes placed on the front of the head take

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in a panorama of nearly 180 degrees that encompasses almost everything in front of the shoulders, however less than 1/1000 of the visual field is actually in focus while the vast majority remains vague and blurry (McCrone 1999). This is why our eyes are in constant motion, by way of saccadic movements that occur, on average, three to five times per second and ensure that dramatic variations in focus and acuity are not noticed (Gregory 2005). Furthermore, completely undetected by the person (and much like an unnoticed edit), visual information is switched off between eye movements so as to avoid the potential disorienting and nauseous effects that are also found when watching unsteady or frenzied camera movement. John, who had learnt to see through his culture and profession, now had to use the increasingly weak awareness on the periphery of his visual field because he no longer had sight in the center. He’d move his head and eyeballs in an attempt to “look around” the blackness, but the blackness would follow and smother the object of his attention. Slowly, John had to learn a new way of coordinating eyes, head, and world in order to see and interact within his environment. By now, tests had revealed that John had cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis. CMV is a common DNA virus that is part of the herpes family and infects the majority of the adult population. Whereas healthy immune systems keep CMV at bay, for persons with HIV/AIDS whose immune systems are compromised, the virus can cause substantial cell death across the body. Unfortunately for John, CMV had entered his eye and had begun eating away the light receptor cells in the retina. After a few months, John had already lost 50 percent of his sight, although other aspects of his health had begun to stabilize and he was able to sit, walk slowly, and perform some basic functions unaided. On one occasion, a close friend was visiting John in the hospital. They were sitting and talking in the hospital corridor when she went to get them a coffee. When she returned she noticed John was bent over, sobbing, and her first reaction was to drape herself over him. While she was getting the coffee, John had been informed that neither surgery nor medication would be able to stop his sight from deteriorating and that most likely it would continue to deteriorate until he was blind. The months that followed were akin to a slow and extended gloaming, and like a craftsman desperately trying to work at the end of day John tried to make the most of the remaining light. Should he look at his dog, at an encyclopedia of the world’s great paintings, at his own work? He actively scrutinized the world more intensely than he ever had as a photographer, drinking up colors, faces, patterns, textures, flowers, and storing them up for when blind. John studied the face of his mother, her hairline, every slight discoloration and wrinkle, her mannerisms and expressions, her face while smiling, while talking, and when at rest. He looked at his brother, his sister, at the woodiness of wood, at red and blue, the transparency of glass, and the reflection light makes on ceramic surfaces. John’s actions reinforced the notion that memory is not simply a property of the past but also of the future insofar as our actions in the present create the memories and knowledge we will have access to in our forthcoming life. In choosing where to look, John undertook an active creation of his memory, scrutinizing the present to create what he would remember in a blind future. Most of all, John wanted to remember what he himself looked like, wanted to create an image of himself at thirty-three years old that he could hold on to but also update in the future years as he aged. It was not, however, a photographic image that he strived for but a cinematic one couched in movement.

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By the time he left hospital, John had lost all his sight in one eye, while in the other eye he was almost completely blind save for a tiny, heavily obscured crescent through which he could vaguely discern certain shapes and a degree of light and dark. John’s brother took him to the farmhouse and away from the speed, chaos, traffic, and intolerant pedestrians of New York’s crowded streets. This was where John was going to learn to reinhabit his body and renegotiate the world. It was now several months since he awoke that fateful morning to leave for the city; and as he felt and made his way around the farmhouse, he found the empty tea cup that he had drunk from that day and next to it his fingers found the plate and the remainder of the toast which had hardened over the intervening months. Little could John have imagined while eating his breakfast that morning that he would not return until many months later—almost completely blind—his life undermined and career as a photographer in ruins. Unsurprisingly, John found the once familiar creaks and noises in the farmhouse disconcerting, especially after months of hospital noise in which machinery, footsteps, conversation, and the sound of work dominated. In the hospital, John’s senses existed in an environment where the human body meets biomedical technology; a complex montage of anti-septic aromas, metal trolleys, commodes, whirring sounds, overcooked food, plastic sheets, and staff banter. Now in the farmhouse, he was confronted with the absence of such sounds and smells, and was also set the task of reacquainting himself with the sensory properties of his once familiar house. Most immediately, John had to learn how to orientate himself in the house by touch, texture, sound, and smell; had to learn how to create new associations between sense and space. He kept banging into things, grazing his shins, falling over, and hitting his head. He went outside where there was no furniture, doors, or walls to act as obstacles but lost his balance on uneven ground, slopes, and ditches, bashed his face, got black eyes, and stumbled into a thorny, unforgiving hedge. Scratched, bruised, bloody, covered in mud, he went back inside and headed to bed. As he could no longer read, he decided to put a book over his face and lay there crying while smelling the warm paper pages, which were now mixed with his tears: a book whose very purpose was to be looked at, but now experienced through scent, the texture of paper on one’s face, and the memory of what words look like. As a photographer, John had not just lost the vast majority of his sight, but also his livelihood and capacity for work. As a human being, he was facing further illness and most likely an early and painful death. Consequently, John saw few possibilities for the future and very little purpose in living. He began planning his own death, in fact many deaths, but there was one death in particular that he kept returning to: namely, the idea of committing suicide in the bath clutching a letter with his arm hung over the side. More specifically, it was Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the radical journalist and medical physician, Marat, lying murdered in the bath, which haunted John’s imagination (figure 4.2). Marat would frequently spend long hours in the bath and would work and even receive friends, colleagues, and visitors while bathing. It was one of these visitors, a young French woman called Charlotte Corday, who asked to meet him to discuss political affairs, that ended up murdering Marat in his bath with a knife she had bought earlier that day and hidden under her clothes. David portrays Marat laying slain in the bath, arm draped over the side, clutching his assassin’s letter. In envisioning his suicide, John planned for his body to be found in his bath in the same position as Marat, his arm dangling, by whoever entered and found

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Figure 4.2. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793.

him. It is a scene that immediately juxtaposes two images: the first of John laying lifeless in the bath in an instantly recognizable iconic pose; the second image then cuts to a close-up of the face and reaction of person who found him, no doubt a close friend or family member—most likely his mother. The intensity and vividness of the expression that John imagined on the face of his mother—a face that he had actively studied during his personal gloaming and remembered so well—as she found her son dead in the bath, was matched in scale and volume by the realization that even though John was now nearly completely blind, he still possessed an aesthetic imagination and therefore could still create images of the world in his mind’s eye. Soon after, John began earnestly creating new images in his mind and imagination. These were often informed by the painful and degrading experiences of

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illness in hospital—only recast as a series of dramatic and beautiful enactments—or else they depicted quotidian acts and pleasures that are informed by the simple fact of being alive when one should be dead. So, for example, the moment when John was told in the hospital corridor that he was going to lose his sight and his friend draped herself over him was transformed into an image in John’s mind in which the moment is reenacted with John naked and his friend draped over him (see figure 4.3, My Spirit Tried to Leave Me). While the experience of being emaciated and unable to get out of bed to urinate in the hospital—and instead having to use an overflowing plastic container—was recast as a highly stylized recreation of a man at the height of his physical health about to urinate into an antique porcelain chamber pot. If in these examples we can discern not a continuous film take but a constant back and forth between images of disease, degradation, incapacity, and their opposites, then we are also reminded that human beings are only intermittently “able bodied.” John now employs an assistant, Dan Levin, who operates John’s antique nineteenth-century camera. John creates images in his mind and describes what he sees to his assistant, who looks through the camera and describes back to John what he can see. Through a process of descriptive negotiation, the two images come closer together and when the images are more or less the same, the picture is taken. In order to understand this process better, John suggested he photograph me and create a series of images that not only allowed me to observe the working process from the outside but also as the subject of the photograph. The images John formed in his mind’s eye were an attempt to represent the ongoing dialogue we shared over the summer of 1999, where we would meet, ostensibly, to discuss the relationship between terminal illness and perception, but would end up spending hours talking about many varied subjects from Walt Whitman to Fox Talbot. John explained how the image he constructed of me in his imagination had formed gradually in response to the ideas we discussed, the expressions I used, and the tone of my English accent. This then informed the series of tableaus he created, which began with me sitting naked and in profile on a wooden chair facing John across a wooden table. The process relies heavily on the ekphrastic dialogue that is created between John and his assistant, Dan. Ekphrasis, coming from the Greek Ek (out) and phrasis (to speak), relies upon the translation of one form into another, which in our case can be understood as the verbal representation of a visual phenomenon. In constructing an artwork, John is required to translate the image he forms in his mind’s eye into language, which he describes to Dan, who then constructs an image out of John’s words. Dan then looks through the camera and puts into words what he can see through the lens, at which point John translates Dan’s words back into a visual image and compares it to the image he already has in his imagination. And so the process continues until the image of the world in John’s mind and the image Dan sees through the camera lens are more or less equal. John would continually ask Dan about certain distinguishing features, such as what my face was communicating, what I looked like in profile, from the front and so forth, and would adjust the image in his own mind, while Dan would move and manipulate the camera in order to represent John’s inner vision. The ekphrastic dialogue created by John and Dan brings into being a series of images, first by rendering into language what John sees in his mind’s eye and then by making this manifest in the visible and material world. Here language forms a bridge between inner vision and the external world, in which information travels back and forth, so as to create

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a series of associative montages that seek to strengthen and stabilize the relationship between mind and world rather than destabilize it. Because of the difficulty in translating visual images into written or verbal language, the images John creates are necessarily, even radically, simplified. For while a quick glance can take in a vast amount of visual information about the world— say a crowded street (Casey 2007)—to accurately describe everything one sees in that street in language would be an enormous, even impossible task. John is thus required to reduce the image held in his mind down into its essential lines and materials, and as a consequence his photographs are characterized by an elegant simplicity that has emerged as a consequence of the damage to his retinas. Here John is in good company, for in later life Cezanne too began to wonder whether the distinctiveness of his landscape paintings was wholly or in part a product of his Figure 4.3. John Dugdale, My Spirit Tried to Leave Me, 1994.

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“trouble with his eyes,” leading Merleau-Ponty to conclude: “Although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called for that life” (1994: 70, italics in original). Likewise, it is probable that none of John’s current artworks would exist without his HIV diagnosis and subsequent contraction of CMV retinitis insofar as they too called for him to live the life he has. Would he have abandoned his career as a successful fashion photographer in order to create a body of photographic work whose enforced simplicity and very existence is a direct consequence of living with a retrovirus and its effects on his eyesight? At the very least, this suggests an intimate correlation between John’s art and his experience of living with an unstable, immune-compromised body. Of course we must also acknowledge the historical, cultural, political, economic, and discursive influences on John’s art as these also shape the way he constructs images in his mind’s eye. However, given that it is not always possible to establish how these influences are realized within each piece, I would argue that we need to begin with the ontological certainty of the artwork itself. That is to say, the fact of its production under conditions of severe visual impairment and at a specific point during John’s illness trajectory. This shift in emphasis, from understanding art through discourse and signification, to understanding it through its bodily production—including the challenge of making art amid the radical disruption of illness or with an unstable body—opens a space for an aesthetic appreciation of art in which it is possible to think about how sensory perception and experience become incorporated into the material existence of the artwork itself. When asked to describe his art, John said, I realized that my vision has remained intact and how this has little to do with the fact that I can no longer see through my eyes. When people come to sit for the nude portraits, I also take my clothes off regardless of whether I am also going to pose in the shot or not, partly because clothing now seems so ridiculous after spending so much time in the hospital. In many of my photographs, people are naked because to me it seems like you’re closer to each other, to God, to the cosmos or even to the ground.

Perhaps it is also God’s work, or simply an uncanny coincidence, that an ocean apart, the British filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman—who was also HIV-positive and also lost his sight to CMV retinitis—made his very last, and to many best, film Blue during the very same year of 1993 that John started going blind. Blue consists of a simple blue screen (figure 4.4) juxtaposed with a complex narrative describing the effects of going blind. Moreover, it is perhaps yet another coincidence that Jarman uses a similar quality of blue in his film that John uses in his photographs (figure 4.5). Here Jarman recounts the relationship between his condition and the color blue in an excerpt from his film’s narration: My sight seems to have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart—a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air here but we are not talking about it. But I know the silence might be broken by distraught visitors screaming, “Help, Sister! Help Nurse!” followed by the sound of feet rushing along the corridor. Then silence: Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it Blue is darkness made visible

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Blue protects white from innocence Blue drags black with it Blue is darkness made visible

In witnessing a simple montage of the different qualities of blue found in Jarman’s film and John’s photographs—or indeed between the two artists’ experiences of CMV retinitis—we have no way of knowing whether there is a more elemental correlation between the blue they encounter in their mind’s eye, and so instead must rely upon their images and accounts of what they see and experience during blindness. One of the most insightful and detailed accounts of what blind people see is to be found in the diaries John Hull kept throughout the 1980s. Hull, who was a professor of religion and theology at the University of Birmingham, kept a daily record of his descent into blindness. It is interesting to read through Hull’s diaries in order to trace the decline of his visual perception and journey into blindness. During the initial phases of his blindness he describes experiencing intense, random, and often extreme montage-like sequences in the form of vivid visions and hallucinations that are caused because the brain’s visual pathways are no longer getting visual information from external sources and so the brain starts producing its own images. Hull (1992) then documents his descent into what he calls “deep blindness”—which is different in quality from the type of blindness that John Dugdale describes—in that his mind’s eye has also become blind, leaving no visual stimulation at all: How long do you have to be blind before your dreams begin to lose color? Do you go on dreaming in pictures forever? I have been a registered blind person for nearly three years. In the past few months, the final traces of light sensation have faded. Now I am totally blind. I cannot tell day from night. I can stare into the sun without seeing the faintest flicker of sunshine. During this time, my dreams have continued to be pictorial. Indeed, dreams have become particularly enjoyable because of the colorful freedom which I experience when dreaming. (diary entry, 1 June 1983) Figure 4.4. Shade of blue as seen in Derek Jarman’s film Blue, 1993.

Figure 4.5. Empire Chair in the Gloaming, John Dugdale, 1994.

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It distressed me considerably when I realised that I was beginning to forget what Marilyn and Imogen looked like. I had wanted to defy blindness. I had sworn to myself that I would always carry their faces hidden in my heart, even if everything else in the gallery was stolen. I am beginning to lose the category itself. I am finding it more and more difficult to realize that people look like anything, to put any meaning into the idea that they have an appearance. (diary entry, 21 June 1983) What Do I Look Like? I find that I am trying to recall old photographs of myself, just to remember what I look like. I discover with a shock that I cannot remember. Must I become a blank on the wall of my own gallery? To what extent is loss of the image of the face connected with loss of the image of the self? (diary entry, 25 June 1983)

Whereas, John Hull lost all traces of his sight, including that of his mind’s eye, John Dugdale continues to see and construct the world though his imagination. It is uncertain as to whether John Dugdale’s being a trained visual artist who actively continues to work in the visual realm despite being blind plays any role in him retaining his inner vision while John Hull lost his. In 1978, the French painter Hugues de Montalembert was staying in New York City when he was attacked after returning home one night and interrupting two men robbing his apartment. In the ensuing struggle, one of the men threw paint remover into his face, which burnt into his eyeballs and by the next day had rendered him blind. De Montalembert relates the experience of blindness in his autobiography, Eclipse, which was recently made into an outstanding film, Black Sun, by Gary Tarn. Tarn places random as well as intentional images against de Montalembert’s voiceover, thereby producing a series of chance juxtapositions, associations, and tangential montages to astounding effect. In describing his initial days of blindness (in his book), de Montalembert writes: I am afraid that the memory I have of the visible world is disappearing little by little, to be replaced by an abstract universe of sound, smell, and touch. I force myself to visualize the bedroom with its metal furniture, its window, the curtains. I bring to mind paintings, Rembrandt’s Polish cavalier, Francis Bacon’s portraits of Innocent X [figure 4.6]. My ability to create images absolutely must not atrophy. I must remain capable of bringing back the world I looked at intensely for thirty-five years. By contemplating in my memory the volcano of Lombok or the perfect harmony of a building designed by Michelangelo, I continue to receive instruction and knowledge from them. (1982: 32–33)

In Black Sun, de Montalembert describes how he developed an ability to sense objects in space by way of what is termed “face-vision”: a phenomenon that is a widely reported ability in blind people (see Kells 2001 for a comprehensive survey of object detection by face-vision in medical studies). When de Montalembert was undergoing rehabilitation, he had to learn to walk in a straight line, at first under controlled conditions, and then outside on the street under guidance. He was then shown how to orientate himself through the sound and airwaves that traffic produces, as this forms a “sonic edge” that allows people without sight to orientate themselves and navigate in a straight line. Later on, unbeknown to de Montalembert, a blackboard was placed halfway along a corridor he was asked to walk down. He stopped abruptly inches from the blackboard, and when the instructor asked why he stopped, de Montalembert said that he could sense that there was an object in his way: he tells the instructor that he can go round it, over

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Figure 4.6. Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. © The Estate of Francis Bacon.

it, or under it, after which the instructor confirms and informs him that the object is a blackboard on an easel placed there to test his face-vision. Hull, too, developed a sophisticated face-vision to the extent that he could accurately navigate across a park while walking to work, and could even detect specific individual trees through the tactile air currents that registered on his face, illustrating how the loss of one way of sensing and relating to the environment generates new forms of body–world interaction. I first noticed that walking home over the campus in the quiet of the evening I had a sense of presence, which was the realisation of an obstacle. I discovered that if

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I stopped when I had this sense, and waved my white cane around, I would make contact with a tree trunk. This would be no more than three, four or five feet from me. The awareness, whatever it was, did not seem to extend beyond this range, and sometimes the tree would be as close as two feet. It was through sensing these trees, and verifying their exact location with my stick, that I gradually realised that I was developing some strange kind of perception. I learned that I could actually count the number of these trees which I would pass along the road leading down to the University gate. The sense did not seem to work on thin objects like lampposts. It had to be something about as bulky as a tree trunk or a human body before I sensed it. As the months go past, sensitivity seems to be increasing. Not only have I become sensitive to thinner objects, but the range seems to have increased. When walking home, I used only to be able to detect parked cars by making contact with my cane. These days I almost never make contact with a parked car unexpectedly. The experience itself is quite extraordinary, and I cannot compare it with anything else I have ever known. It is like a sense of physical pressure. One wants to put up a hand to protect oneself, so intense is the awareness. One shrinks from whatever it is. It seems to be characterised by a certain stillness in the atmosphere. On one of my walks, I pass beside a five-foot-high fence made of vertical metal bars. This gives way, at a certain point, to a solid brick wall. I find that if I pay attention I can tell when I have left the fence and am going along the wall. There is, somehow, a sense of a more massive presence. I gather from conversations that this experience is essentially acoustic and is based upon awareness of echoes. (diary entry, 14 July 1983)

By Way of a Conclusion: Ostranenie in Action This chapter has tried to demonstrate how lived experience can be thought of as comprising ongoing assemblages of sensory information and feedback (Bateson 1972; Howes 2004; Clark 2008) that flow back and forth across the boundaries of brain, body, and world and create complex montages of sound, sense, and image. The human body and nervous system are never in the same state twice but are continuously adapting to different environmental conditions and corporeal circumstances. As such, the physiological and sensory reorganization of the body amid the gloaming hour and during the onset of blindness reinforces how “truth” and “reality” are not fixed to any particular sense organ but are ever-changing properties of our being-in-the-world. As Oliver Sacks (2004) observes, it is not possible to establish, from a neurological perspective, why some persons, such as John Hull, enter into the realm of “deep blindness” and cease the ability to produce images in the mind’s eye, whereas others, such as John Dugdale and Hugues de Montalembert, continue to dwell in a visual world and create intricate and powerful visual montages. But even if the neurological evidence is currently unclear, it is still possible to consider how viruses, degenerative conditions, and acts of random violence that result in the loss of sight have the potential to effect radical transformations in sensory being that find their expression in words and image. Accordingly, the experiences of John Dugdale, Derek Jarman, John Hull, and Hugues de Montalembert provide an empirical basis from which to consider the role of montage in ordinary and extraordinary life, including how the disintegration of people’s sensory lifeworlds generate new ways of visualizing, sensing, and acting in the world.

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When immersed in ordinary action—for example, when carrying out habitual practical activities and familiar routines—people are not always fully cognizant of their movements and actions or how these are embedded within the world. For example, when walking, for the most part people are not consciously thinking about lifting one foot off the ground, coordinating the thigh, flexing the knee, moving the leg forward, placing the sole back on the ground, and so forth. Likewise, when talking a person is not explicitly concentrating on making the relevant facial and labial movements or coordinating their accompanying body postures and hand actions, but are instead focused on the conversation they are having. In such moments the body “disappears” from conscious awareness, sometimes for quite extended periods, insofar as the human body has evolved to give attention where it is most needed—i.e., to the world—rather than itself, in what is known as the body’s primary “from-to orientation” (Leder 1990). However, during the onset of blindness, the modes for giving attention to the world are recast as part of people’s wider adaptation to the new conditions of sensory perception. For example, John Dugdale’s body is present to consciousness when talking, in that he actively practices and deliberately performs a sighted person’s head movements and facial expressions when responding to other people’s words so as to ensure he does not lose the facial and gestural expressions that signify sociality, hearing, and comprehension. Likewise, Hull and de Montalembert’s development of “facevision” demonstrates another way in which the relationship between body and world becomes present to consciousness through such things as the sensing of air currents, the sonic edges formed by traffic, subtle variations in temperature, the echoes of different substances or materials, and other forms of sensory information that allow persons to establish the relative position of objects in space and facilitate movement. Blindness, as a mode of being-in-the-world, reveals how taken-for-granted activities have a syntactic, narrative quality that can be likened to the way film scenes are assembled, sequenced, and edited. This is not to say the performance of these practices possesses a formal grammatical structure, rather it is to use the narrative characteristics of language and film to understand the procedural and disruptive possibilities of familiar everyday activities. To give a simple example, the fact that something as commonplace as drinking tea involves walking, navigation, and eyesight is not normally recognized. However, whenever John Dugdale would offer me some tea it soon became apparent that it involved an entire chain of action based in movement, strategic planning, and recollection, from establishing the precise angle to traverse the living room, reaching out for the entrance to the kitchen, locating the whereabouts of the tea, milk, kettle, cups, teapot, and tray, then walking back by way of deliberate, cautious steps rooted in his proprioceptive memory of the room. Negotiating blindness necessitates becoming conscious of the various constituent parts of many previously routine practices that were hidden in embodied memory and naturalized through habit. Even ordinary actions, such as walking, talking, or making tea, become transformed through a kind of ostranenie-in-action in which the normal becomes disrupted and defamiliarized, akin to the way common words and images are taken from ordinary life are “made strange” through techniques such as poetry and montage. Dugdale, Jarman, Hull, and de Montalembert each describe how they experienced themselves, their bodies, and their surroundings as different, obstructive, disjointed, and alien and how interactions with

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familiar persons, places, or objects demand new kinds of attention. Rather than a seamless flow of thought, body, and world conjoined in action, objects that once barely registered in conscious awareness take one unawares in unexpected places. Surfaces and textures take on new practical and aesthetic meanings, and the world is made present to consciousness through disruption and ongoing modes of ostranenie-in-action. Nevertheless, as the experiences of Dugdale, Jarman, Hull, and de Montalembert illustrate, once the world is taken apart it is remade anew and the constitutive elements of everyday life are recombined and reassembled into new sequential chains of action.

Acknowledgments First and foremost, my thanks must be extended to John Dugdale, Dan Levin, and Jenn Morse, without whose time and generosity this chapter could never have been written, and to the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Wenner Gren Foundation (U.S.) for funding this research. My thanks also goes to Lisa Cazzato-Vieyra, Jeanette Edwards, David Howes, Michael Jackson, Gary Tarn, and everyone at Visual Aids for the insights, information, and comments concerning the material that is contained within this chapter.

References Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press Casey, Edward. 2007. The World at a Glance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Clark. Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Montalembert, Hugues. 1987. Eclipse: An Autobiography. London: Sceptre. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, Richard L. 2005. Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howes, David, ed. 2004. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. ———. 2006. “Charting the Sensorial Revolution.” Senses and Society 1(1): 113–28. Hull, John M. 1992. Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. London: Vintage. Irving, Andrew. 2007. “Ethnography, Art and Death.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 185–208. ———. 2009. “The Color of Pain.” Public Culture 21(2): 293–319. ———. 2010. “Dangerous Substances and Visible Evidence: Tears, Blood, Alcohol, Pills.” Visual Studies 25(1): 24–35. ———. 2011a. “Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(1): 22–44. ———. 2011b. “I Gave My Child Life but I Also Gave Her Death.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 22(3): 332–50. Jablonksi, Nina. 2004. “The Evolution of Human Skin and Skin Color.” The Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 585–623. Jarman, Derek. 1993. Blue. 79 min. London: Basilisk Communications. Kells, Karolyn. 2001. “Ability of Blind People to Detect Obstacles in Unfamiliar Environments.” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 33(2): 153–57. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Marx, Karl. 1988. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. McCrone, J. 1999. Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness. London: Faber and Faber. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1992 The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. ———. 1994 The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press. Sacks, Oliver. 2004. “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See.” In Empire of the Senses, ed. D. Howes. Oxford and New York: Berg. Straus, Erwin. 1963. The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. ———. 1966. Phenomenological Psychology. The Selected Papers of Erwin W. Straus. New York: Basic Books. Synott, Anthony. 1993. The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society. London: Routledge. Tarn, Gary. 2006. Black Sun. 70 min. New York: Indiepix Films. Ward, Jamie. 2006. The Student’s Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

PART II

Montage in Writing Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr

Taking their lead from the “writing culture” debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986), four contributors in this volume apply montage as a key principle in anthropological writing. Their ambition is to challenge the classical realist principle of correspondence in which a text “is to be judged according to how faithfully it corresponds to things and events in the real world” (Morris 2003: 5). Instead they aim at opening up new constellations in which figures of thought clash against lived experience. Anthropological fieldwork itself, as George Marcus points out in the afterword of this volume, may often be experienced as a montage between the multiple selves of the researcher and the different settings in which research is carried out. Thus, montage as both method and presentational form can be used to keep the paradoxes of the fieldwork experience alive in the subsequent production of academic text. Anne Line Dalsgaard (chapter 5) presents such an autobiographical montage experiment of fieldwork. Her chapter consists of an inner dialogue between herself as fieldworker, her informant Kelly, Sergei Eisenstein (1972), and social theoretician Katherine Ewing (1990)—a cacophony of voices accompanied by the sound of a defective fan in the damp heat of northeastern Brazil. Voices and thoughts drift through her consciousness as she shifts from experiences of stillness and motion, passive being and targeted active doing. The peculiar constellation of diverse identities that crop up within her body exposes more than anything that maintaining a unified, autonomous identity is impossible. “Montage,” she concludes, “is an existential condition. I am montage. What a joy to know!” Also located in Brazil, Paul Antick (chapter 6) gives form to “Smith’s Tour Favela,” a guided tour through the favela tourism business in Rio de Janeiro. Antick develops a complex mosaic compiled of snippets of conversations, photographs, and excerpts from Smith’s notebook. At times, Antick’s montage takes us toward theoretical debates in tourism studies and then lets us ponder personal experiences from Smith’s interaction with the favela tour guides or seemingly mundane photographic details such as a throat, a bag, or some flowers. At other times, we are presented with extraordinary objects, such as handheld rocket launchers or narcotics, but they are reproduced in photographs that are entirely out of focus. Any verification of what the images represent is, in consequence, impossible. This constant gliding in and out of focus is key to Antick’s photographic montage of the tour favela. No definitive conclusions are offered regarding the relationship between guides, inhabitants of the favelas, and tourists. In a note, it is revealed that Smith is interested in the integrity of the “favela tourist’s exalted self image . . . arbitrarily premised as it is . . . on the symbolic distance that obtains between the ‘authentic-

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ity’ of the ‘serious’ reality tourist and their ‘inauthentic other.’” But throughout the text it becomes increasingly difficult to decipher a consistent intellectual identity for Smith. Like the favela tour itself, Smith takes on a schizoid character. This is further underlined by the structure of the text, which, chameleon-like, shifts its style and shape between private diary citations, artistically crafted photo collages, and a meticulous, almost grotesque, scholarly note taking system. Nina Holm Vohnsen (chapter 7) invites us into a Kafkaesque horror regime, illustrated by the Danish welfare system. Her text consists in juxtapositions of fieldwork experiences among bureaucrats of the Danish Labour Market Authority, local social workers, and clients in need of sickness benefits. Vohnsen is continually shocked by the monstrous way that the system as a whole reproduces and expands itself. For her, montage becomes a way to levitate herself out of the internal rationalities at work at each level of the system. By moving in and out of diverse fragments of conversations, bureaucratic policy papers, and news articles, along with her own attempts at making sense of the whole thing as an anthropological observer, she leaves the montage open-ended. The reader is forced to fill in the gaps. Meaning is in this way multiplied rather than reduced to a unified, coherent line of argument. The ambition of using the principle of montage to build up forms of textual analysis that do not reduce or fix experiential reality into coherent arguments is further discussed by Karen Lisa Salamon (chapter 8). Drawing on Marc-Alain Ouaknin (1995) and Emmanuel Levinas’s (1987) work on ethics, Salamon argues that anthropologists need to abandon any ambition of grasping the other ethnographically. Instead she proposes an anthropological ideal of truth-as-opening. To develop forms of anthropological knowledge that do not seek to “colonize” the other is, however, not only an ethical imperative. In Salamon’s research, which deals with managerial consultancy work, the task is often to destabilize both her own inclination and that of her collaborators to develop fixed forms of knowledge that effectively obstruct any possibility of finding new solutions to the problems dealt with. Montage, according to Salamon, is one possible way of letting people speak for themselves, whilst also allowing for the ethnographer’s voice. Thus montage is a modality of leaping between incongruent fragments that remain divided as half-open boxes. This does not necessarily negate the possibility of meaning or completeness. Montage may, as Walter Benjamin phrased it, be a means of making us aware of “the crystal of the total event” (quoted in Richter 2004: 234). Yet it does so in a form that remains open and incomplete. Truth or knowledge in this sense is not at all about developing a distinctive argument or perspective. To the contrary, it involves finding the unstable zone of continuous becoming where fragments of lived experience and analytical perspectives are allowed to stand out and vibrate in jagged dissonant juxtapositions.

References Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1972. Udvalgte skrifter [Selected Writings]. Holstebro: Odin Teatret. Ewing, Katherine P. 1990. “The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency.” Ethos 18(3): 251–78.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Morris, Pam. 2003. Realism: The New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge. Richter, Gerhard. 2004. “Acts of Self-portraiture: Benjamin’s Confessional and Literary Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, 221–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. 1995 [1986]. The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Being a Montage Anne Line Dalsgaard

Silence. Just the sound of a slightly defective fan and a dripping tap. No movement at all, except for the sweat running down my body. Sweat. No movement. Sweat. No movement. Sweat. Just the constant returning to the room I am in. My presence called forth by the sounds and sensations it produces. Breathing. Restless.

Identification The next moment I hear Kelly’s voice. Shouting from the street, she leans against the low wall between the street and the house, in which I am staying. Some houses just have fences made of branches, cardboard, and plastic. But a wall is important; it is said to provide security. So often have I seen people doing like Kelly: a particular way of approaching a house, where by leaning toward the street side of the wall you show intimacy as well as discretion. The neighborhood we are in is a so-called bairro popular, a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of one of Brazil’s major cities, Recife, in the northeastern region of the country. Most people living in the neighborhood are, as some of them call themselves, a classe fraca (the weak class). It is a neighborhood like many other Brazilian popular neighborhoods. Here, youth is a period of extreme uncertainty as jobs, formal training, and higher education are not immediately accessible paths to adulthood, and crime and early motherhood provide emergency exits. I have known the place since 1997, and seen many youngsters grow up and struggle with the harsh realities of life. The sound of Kelly’s voice wakes me up; I am here to do fieldwork. Doing is the word that matters. I get up from the chair, walk the distance across the front yard toward the wall, open the old, rusty metal gate and stand there for a while with Kelly. I am somebody now. I see her and she sees me. I am identified. We laugh, and make plans about a trip to the center of Recife tomorrow, where I want to search for some old photos of the city and have asked Kelly if she can help me find the city museum. For me it is a way of sharing a whole day with Kelly and seeing her in other circumstances; for Kelly, I presume, it is a day away from routines and problems without solutions. I have already planned what I will talk with her about, and how I will use the material in my work on youth in Recife. I am an anthropologist. I write academic texts. I write about young people’s sense of futurity and Kelly is going to be one of my main informants. She is twenty and a mother of a one-year-old girl called Gabriela. Unmarried, not provided for, with no direction in life. In my research on youth I wish to understand how futures emerge from everyday situations, but also why some persons more than others manage to withstand

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the negative influences of life around them. I have been interested in the question for a long time, since I met Fábio, who is the son of one of my former informants. Fábio has passed through all the disappointments, dangers, and sorrows that life in the neighborhood offers its young men. He has been involved in hard drug abuse and crime; he once lost a brother who was shot while they were out stealing together; and yet, despite of Fábio today being sought by the police, he still seems to believe that he has a future as an honest working person. People like him and help him because this is what he projects. He stands in a stream of social events that threatens to sweep him along, and I have asked myself how it is possible that he is still there, and what it means to all our theories about human subjectivity and agency. Does it mean that, contrary to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1984), subjective hopes are actually not determined by objective chances? Does it mean that subjectivity is something in itself? Perennial, perceptible, originating in something we might even call a self? Subjectivity is a crucial question to anthropology, and in my eagerness to answer it, I am already deeply involved in a study of Kelly’s life. I am far away from the experience of silence just a moment before, far away from the experienced presence of my body and the looming boredom of inactivity. Drawn into my projects and plans, trying to figure out how to write about Fábio, Kelly, and subjectivity, and excited about the interesting argument it will make. I am dreaming about the good day tomorrow, when Kelly and I will go to town. I have almost already passed that day in my imagination of what it will bring. I am somebody. I am doing.

Awakening We stand at the wall. The painting is peeling from the upper bricks. The trash in the bag standing on the ground is putrid. The bag has been left outside since yesterday. Why did I not smell it before? Sweat runs down my body and I become aware of the distance to Kelly.

Distance She talks, but I do not listen any longer. I do not see her eyes, only her sunglasses. I talk with her as if she is the same as yesterday and the day before, but I realize that I do not know. When I pause for a minute I see how often she has contradicted my idea of her being the same. I step back and look at her. When I first met her, she was fourteen and liked to go to school. She said she was used to it. She was one of five siblings, among whom only the son did not have responsibilities at home. Kelly made breakfast and took her younger sister to school; she prepared lunch for her mother, brother, and younger sister, did the dishes and the laundry. She then went to school and in the evenings and on Sundays she went to church. She liked to play then, and her mother said, “Tell Kelly to look after her sister, so that she does not fall into the water tank, and you will soon see both Kelly and her sister playing in the tank. She is just a child!” Kelly was timid, smiling, and calmly doing what she was told to do by her mother. I remember the overalls she used to wear, her timid smile, and the way she would twist her body when she did not want to answer my questions.

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When she was between sixteen and eighteen, what a fresh apple she was! The last time I left her, I said: “Do not get pregnant, Kelly!” And she smiled. I have returned to that moment many times since. Did she know that she was already pregnant? I have seen her frustration and pain, laughter and tenderness. She says she was a fool when she had sex without protection. The family says that Kelly mistreats her baby, and blames her for having let the girl fall onto the floor. Kelly hates the girl’s father and finds him terribly irresistible. She quarrels with her grandmother with whom she stays, and knows that grandma is the only one who can and will help her. Grandma has a small pension and needs company. When Kelly walks the narrow streets of the bairro in the evening, she tries to look smart. Just as now: sunglasses, short blouse, and tight jeans. She drank a lot while she was pregnant, people say. She is extremely thin and her skin is not healthy. You can tell from her appearance that she is not eating well. She has lost her appetite and at the same time she is breastfeeding. She told me yesterday that she has a bad soul; that some people really are black inside. I look at Kelly and realize that I do not know, who she is. And in a moment of vertigo I look at myself. The well-remembered feeling of having entered the corridor of my home, realizing that “this is me,” that I have been somebody not me during the day, a caricature, a marionette, or actually many different people—and then it is forgotten and I am played by life again. A mother, a wife, bound up in habits and expectations, already turned toward the next moment, the next action that I most often perform without question. Who am I in that short moment in between?

Analysis In her article “The Illusion of Wholeness” (1990), Katherine Ewing raises the question, why are we not all psychotic? How is it possible that our many shifting and often contradictory self-representations pass unnoticed? Why is the self generally experienced as an entirety despite of the fact that one “self” is quickly displaced by another, quite different “self,” which again is based on a very different definition of the situation? Ewing argues that the experienced wholeness is constantly shifting without our noticing it—with each emerging self a new wholeness, so to speak. The wholeness consists of a string of selected memories that suits the present definition of the situation (and the self); memories that can actually be remembered and hence are felt as “really me,” incorporated as they are in the body here and now. The embodiment of memory, the re-membering, implies that the experience of selfcontinuity and wholeness is not only cognitive but also or maybe primarily an affective state. The unity of feeling rests on images or symbols, which cannot simply be reduced to verbal articulations of experience (Ewing 1990: 268). In other words, when I feel that I am a coherent, bounded self, susceptible to the expectations of others but still in control, I am thus forgetting all the impressions that would contradict this idea of myself. According to Ewing, the same unity of feeling applies to our perception of others. But this is exactly what no longer works for me in the moment when I look into Kelly’s sunglasses. A moment of estrangement, when I know that meaning lies not in a continuous story but in the contradiction between the separate elements. In that moment my question is not “Why do we experience wholeness?”

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but “When we experience fragmentation, who or what is experiencing it?” I cannot answer my own question. It disturbs me.

Explanation I reach out for the concept of montage. The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein writes on overtone montage that the different vibrations or tones in film may, by way of montage, create a real physiological result, made up of all the stimuli that play together at the same time. It may create a sense of the seen as a whole, which is much more complete and yet disturbing, than the dominant tone itself, precisely because it conveys the simultaneity of contradictions (1972: 106–7). But Eisenstein also writes that this completeness can only be experienced when time is introduced: “In the three-dimensional space it is not spatially possible to represent it, only in the four-dimensional space (three plus time) does it emerge and exist” (ibid.: 109, my translation). In other words: the introduction of time and motion hinders the identification with that which is in front of us just now. Be it film images or impressions of ourselves. The art of film, Eisenstein writes (1972: 89), is first and foremost montage, but montage is not first and foremost film. He himself takes his notion of montage from the Japanese written language on which he observes that the characters began as hieroglyphs, each portraying a concrete object (ibid.: 89–92). As the language developed, characters were combined, but these compounded wholes were not the sum of their parts. They were figures of a different order. Each part signified a specific object, but together they constituted a concept. For instance, water and eye became “crying”; ear at a door, “listening”; and knife and heart, “sorrow”. As Eisenstein states: “The relation between two ‘depictable’ objects leads to the depiction of something graphically not ‘depictable’” (ibid.: 90, my translation). An eye. A nose. A mouth. A tear. A smile. Anger. Fear. Laughter. Despair. Lust. Lie. My being is fragmented, as I am shifting between different versions of me in a continual identification with social roles and expectations. And yet, at intervals, something is seen. Montage, I see, is an existential condition. I am a montage. What a joy to know! Knife and heart is sorrow, and I am a montage. What a relief to be able to wrap up that question! Nothing is more disturbing than not knowing what one is. It is like a written story: It cannot but proceed to the next. The sentences are read one after the other, the words one after the other. The paper resists the experience of lack of boundaries. The words resist the experience of ambiguity. The direction has taken over.

Bodies Sweaty bodies on the bus. Arms touching each other in the cramped space. The proximity of other people. A breeze wafts through the window in the roof, as long as we are in motion. Smiles, muffled irritation, a common effort to go with the flow of the bus as it moves from side to side while driving toward the city center at far too high a speed between obstacles on the road. No one needs to get involved with each other, just to go with the flow. Kelly is at my side. We are on our way. We just have to keep our balance in the movement we are part of. Hands holding on. Children on laps, bags for groceries, bags with books, bags with lunch

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boxes, ladies’ purses, sports bags, school bags. Freshly ironed clothes. The smell of soap and perfumes, all are clean and neat, making their progress. Later on, the trip back home, the fatigue, the sweat, the smells, the fullness, yet another day spent working. No one has asked what you yourself want to do. “Everyone tends to their own,” as people in the neighborhood say. The women work as domestics, or in shops, maybe in offices; the men in shops, restaurants, maybe as security guards in one of the multi-storied buildings where the middle classes reside. The city is subdivided into neighborhoods with different kinds of people. Some parts are for the poor who ride buses. Some parts are for the well to do who drive cars from work to home, from home to the shopping mall, all replete with air condition and guards. People move in separate spaces and yet within the same city. In the bus it is hard to ignore the closeness of other bodies. No air condition, just the breeze from the window generated by the motion. A moment’s desire to touch, to slide into one another and forget the direction. “Desire comprehends blindly by linking body with body,” writes Maurice MerleauPonty (1968: 157). It may be directed forward toward something as yet non-existing; but this “something” is merely the satisfaction of desire and thus its absence (Karlsson 2010: 135). Beside that, no intention but the invitation to the unknown, to the fusion of bodies and release of pressure through a force you do not control yourself. A force that stands in powerful contrast to the normal perception of body and reality (ibid.: 137). A force that sets aside usual ideas of agency as willful and calls for an unreserved response. The warmth of bodies near me is solid. I think of Kelly. About how she had sex without protection and became pregnant. Maybe for a moment she forgot her direction? That she was on her way to become an adult, earning her own money, taking charge of her own life. She knew that early motherhood is an obstacle to young women’s education and social independence. She saw her older sister suffer humiliation, because she depended on others for her own and her child’s survival. But maybe for an instant Kelly surrendered. To what? Desire. Rebellion. Or the child. Kelly’s older sister once told me that she herself got pregnant, because she wanted to be loved unconditionally and experience, if she had the capacity to love unconditionally in return. Kelly never expresses herself in such words. But in her predicament I see how the relationships that matter to us are not identities to be understood alone in terms of social construction, or ultimately, choice. A woman, a mother, a daughter. A wife. A lover. These identities are what we are, because we emerge by giving ourselves to them. A child makes the woman a mother (Guenther 2006: 3), and from now on, Kelly’s life will be like other mothers’: tied to the child as long as she lives, bearing its joyful and distressing manifestations, fearing its death. Many mothers around her have suffered the loss of children. The grandmothers lost theirs because of diarrhea and starvation. Today, it is mainly the young men who die. Shot by other young men who have too little to do and need money badly. Who use drugs and are armed. The young women, in turn, may incite their male partners, lose them or be misused by them, if they do not take care. “It is easy to give birth, but difficult to bring up a child,” the experienced women use to say. I look at Kelly and know that she is in trouble. She does not know how to proceed. I remember my questions on subjectivity and hope and Fábio’s capacity to stand still in the flood of events. I wonder where are we all heading. The move-

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ments of the bus subside into the background; the bodies disappear out of focus. The eyes no longer see. An inner landscape, a longing for relating. I do not know if others around me experience it as I do. I do not know their inner worlds. All I know is that I am standing on a bus among other people. It tinkers along toward the neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Before long I will be back in the house in which I stay, while I am here.

Return A worn table with a faded oilcloth. A cupboard with spaghetti, bags of sugar, plastic cups covered with dust, a dented aluminum pot. The sound of a slightly defective fan. Kelly and I. Bits and pieces. Parts of which whole? The question is almost tangible. Sweat. No movement in the room, just my perspiring body and a tap, dripping. Moments of silence between the drops hitting the zinc. My attention is captured by their unpredictable duration. Drk, drk . . . drk, drk, drk . . . drk. My feet on the cool floor. Reality is an experience of fragmentation, frail and mute. A seeing encompassing it all.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. Eisenstein, Sergej. 1972. Udvalgte skrifter. Holstebro: Odin Teatret. Ewing, Katherine P. 1990. “The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency.” Ethos 18(3): 251–78. Guenther, Lisa. 2006. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany: State University of New York Press. Karlsson, Gunnar. 2010. Psychoanalysis in a New Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Smith’s Tour Favela Paul Antick

Ms. Y, Z and Smith were joined by two Swiss gentlemen, Mr. E and Mr. F. They had recently returned from a pleasure trip to Costa Rica. Smith writes: Mr. E (to Smith): “Are you a journalist?” Smith: “No.”1 (Figure 6.1.)

1. Smith 2008: 4. Finding Smith face down in a Rio side street, I rifled through his belongings and stole his notebook. I then spent four days in a hotel room behind Ipanema (figure 6.1), during which time I selected various sentences, paragraphs, and random words that I juxtaposed with photographs Smith had taken before, during, and immediately after the eight organized tours of Rocinha that we attended together between July and August 2008.

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Figure 6.1.

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Smith believes that, despite being charmed by him and others like him, Tour Guide D despised him. Not because he is a gringo, but because his footprints are deformed.2 Smith wonders if she really thinks that, by showing the favela in a favorable light, if only to foreigners like himself, the middle class will cease to disapprove and that government will invest in decent sanitation and healthcare.3 Smith wonders why she cares so much. He writes: Guide D: “Please don’t photograph the drains.”4 (Figure 6.2.)

2. Smith often refers to Monica Vitti’s performance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert (1964). I am disturbed at Smith’s preoccupation with Vitti’s interest in things that are “not properly formed” (Smith 2008: 6). 3. Marcello Armstrong Tours are, by their own admission, organized and conducted by individuals who do not come from—or live in—any of Rio’s favelas. Tour Guide A: “I come from a middle class background. I was brought up in Ipanema” (Smith 2008: 12). In contrast, Exotic Tours has “a sustainable program inside the favelas where (it) trains local people how to be guides, since 1988 [sic]. In this tourism workshop they learn English, Spanish, tourism and get to know the touristic points of Rio. The guides, that guides you on this tour [sic], were able to improve with Exotic Tours’ help to become professionals, working also outside of the favela. You are welcome to bring your camera! This is not a voyeuristic tour” (Exotic Tours 2008). 4. Smith 2008: 17. Although not unfriendly, D meticulously avoids Smith’s gaze.

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Figure 6.2. (a)

a

drains

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Z invited Smith and Ms. Y to join him in his Swedish-style, open plan dining room-cum-kitchen. Standing on the veranda that peeps out imperiously across the bay, Smith thinks, “It’s true, the view is breathtaking.” (Figures 6.3 and 6.4.) Smith is impressed by a recently installed plate glass window that affords visitors a panoramic view of the favela’s only communal area and also proves that, despite the charming medieval quality of the surrounding district, Z’s posada remains modern in spirit, if not in design.

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Smith: Tour Guide A (female): “Remember that you are an exception. Middle-class Brazilians never went into favelas, they are too scared. The hotels where you are staying (in Leblon, Ipanema, Copacabana), most people working from favela. Domestics, maids, things like that.”5 Guide A: “Now, take a look at the nice cars; look at the bullet proof cars.”6 Most of us were inclined to photograph it; we were guests, after all. But the Sugar Loaf wasn’t what we went there for and, frankly, I’m annoyed that Guide A had to mention it at all.7 (Figures 6.5 and 6.6.)

5. Ibid., 20. 6. Ibid., 21. 7. Ibid., 22. Much of the writing in Smith’s notebook is concerned with the subject of tourism. Smith oscillates wildly between various, often antithetical, theoretical positions, some of which he refers to in detail. For example, Smith identifies with: (a) Daniel Boorstin’s approach (1961: 77–117) wherein the mass tourist is treated with contempt, bordering on hatred. Smith writes, The tourist’s inauthentic, leisurely preoccupations and pursuits represent a sometimes shameless, albeit uneven articulation of that which is anathema to me: the spectacle of mass tourism and its subjugation of reality to the flow of capital” (2008: 5); and (b) the writings of Dean MacCannell (1976) that, in apparently eschewing Boorstin’s “value judgements,” foregrounds instead what MacCannell considers to be mass tourism’s implicit preoccupation with the quest for “authenticity” (Cohen 2004; Frow 1991; Huyssens 1995). Smith is in agreement with MacCannell’s thesis that the phenomenon of mass tourism is an especially productive and provocative metaphor for the condition of modernity itself.

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Figure 6.3.

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Figure 6.4.

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Figure 6.5. (a–h)

a b c d e f g h

beer bicep mudslide groin rumour thigh throat anthropologist

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Figure 6.6.

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Smith and Ms. Y spoke at length with X who informed them that Z arrived in Rio from Europe during the late 1980s, and that immediately after his arrival he appropriated a young female for love purposes. (Figure 6.7.) I noticed that X was not in full possession of his faculties. His speech was jarring and he was slurring his words.8 (Figures 6.8 and 6.9.)

8. Ibid., 22. Smith is interested in the coherency of the favela tourist’s exalted self-image, “arbitrarily premised as it is,” according to Smith, “on the symbolic distance that obtains between the ‘authenticity’ of the ‘serious’ reality tourist and their ‘inauthentic other’; Boorstin’s ‘superficial’, ‘thrill-seeking’ ‘pseudo-traveller’” (2008: 38). It is worth noting that at one point Smith suggests that although discursively and ideologically antithetical, these two identities—reality tourist and mass tourist—are not mutually exclusive. Which is to say that participants on favela tours, according to (and including) Smith, are capable of enacting both roles almost simultaneously without necessarily experiencing an existential crisis (ibid.: 39). In occupying each of the positions described above (with a greater or lesser emphasis and/or clarity) it becomes difficult to ascribe anything like a consistent identity to Smith. Smith’s position—or point of view—is, like the favela tour itself, perfectly “schizoid.” Austin Zeiderman (2006: 19–20) comments on the back-and-forth movement that takes place on some favela tours between images of “threat” and “reassurance.” Tour Guide A: “No matter what you seen or heard in the movies, favelas are not all about violence and poverty. They are full of architects and builders and electricians and doctors and businessmen and mothers and grandmothers and children, but our government leaves these people to fight for themselves. The favelas are friendly and safe places. We show you this. . . . On the other side of the road, here are some soldiers [sic]. I ask you not to make pictures”. Although such a swing potentially creates an extremely unstable emotional environment for the tourist, according to Smith, “We have no use for safety without the imminent threat of violence. Likewise, we have no use for violence without the threat of safety” (Smith 2008: 12).

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Figure 6.7. (a)

a

mauve rocket launcher – hand held

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Figure 6.8. (a–h)

a b c d e f g h

awning child mortar fortitude rock weight scale ring

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Figure 6.9. (a)

a

cocaethylene

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Smith: Their wares were designed to meet our needs and wants. They were artisanal, and ‘unique.’ There were faux-naïve, figurative paintings of favela-scapes, independently produced CD recordings made by ‘local street musicians’, handbags made out of ring pulls, recovered from the streets and beaches, and crudely embroidered tea towels.9 It is not unlikely that we might have admired these objects had we stumbled upon them whilst out one day in Leblon. As it is, we viewed their knick-knacks with polite disinterest, bordering on revulsion.10 (Figure 6.10.) The sincerity of Smith’s embrace—its violence—is indicated by his enthusiasm for the task at hand. Smith buys a tea towel. I’ll put it in a drawer.11

9. Smith 2008: 41. 10. Ibid., 43. 11. Ibid., 44.

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Figure 6.10.

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Smith: Tour Guide C doesn’t make any attempt to regulate my experience beyond occasionally pointing at glass cases filled with Carnival related objects (flamboyant dresses, exotic accessories, flyers etc.).12 Smith: “Did you learn English in the tourism workshops?” Tour Guide C (male): “No. I listen to Queen records, AC/DC . . . stuff like this.”13 During our journey we stopped at a workshop where young men were repairing surfboards; a church; some yellow flowers (figure 6.11); writing.”14 (Figures 6.12 and 6.13.) He said: “We think Europeans are intelligent and thin.”15

12. “There is only one unsolicited speech act on his part. ‘She’, says C, pointing at the image of an imposing and obscenely curvaceous woman in full carnival dress, ‘is Adriani Gallistio, the Mother of Carnival’” (ibid., 21). 13. Smith treats any questions I put to him as an opportunity to respond to similar questions, asked years ago by someone else. 14. Ibid., 18. Smith writes: “Whatever (Exotic Tour) Guides C and D refer to—the labyrinthine geography of the favela or its myriad social problems—their frequent use of the possessive pronoun reinforces the idea that whatever they are talking about is always a part of their space, their home. They are never just guides and although at the beginning I am not wholly conscious of the expectations I have of them I do know that I must have expectations and that I will be demanding” (ibid., 7). 15. Ibid., 19.

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Figure 6.11.

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Figure 6.12.

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Figure 6.13.

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Smith: Tour Guide D: “They say, ‘Why do we wear black? Because we’re going to your funeral.’” Guide D is quoting from a speech given by a member of the BOPE to unnamed residents of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro (pop. 160,000). It is unclear if this quote (‘we wear black . . .’) is apocryphal or not. It became clear to me during the course of my visit that the BOPE is held in contempt and feared by most favelados. The BOPE is a military police unit specializing in law enforcement in the favelas. I believe that members of the BOPE always wear black.16 When they noticed how nervous we were, they started beating on their pots and pans.17 Favelado (male): “Listen . . . they practice killing us.”18 Then, when we realized what was happening, some of us began to laugh.”19 Tourist F (female): “At the beginning, they say there’s more to it than just savage narco-violence.”20 Tourist F: “But in the end we are crucified by their gags and our enlightenment—for which we have paid good money—is eclipsed.”21 (Figure 6.14.)

16. Unlike A and B, C and D do not appear to be under any obligation to tell a ‘good favela’ story. The hospitality ritual that they enact—and with which we are complicit—is, for sound ideological reasons, “good story” enough. 17. Ibid., 40. Toward the end of each of the Marcello Armstrong Tours, visitors are invited to leave the bus and walk through a crowded street market. The distance between the start of the walk and the favela’s exit is approximately 150 m. On one occasion tourists are visibly disturbed by the sound of a backfiring moped. Many visitors misrecognize the sound of the moped for a gunshot. 18. Ibid., 40. Comment on the sound of gunfire in nearby forest. 19. F (America female, twenty-four), quoted in Smith 2008: 41. 20. Ibid., 41. 21. Ibid., 41.

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Figure 6.14. (a)

a

illinois

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Smith doesn’t take his eyes off the American couple drinking coconut juice through long straws at one of the many shacks that dot the concrete parade. He has no idea if they are Americans or not. The man is wearing shiny shorts and one of those cheap yellow football jerseys they sell on the beach. Slung over the woman’s bare shoulder is a pink and green bag. Soon they will be joined by another man (figure 6.15). Neither of them notice when she stands up, adjusts her hair, and slips away. As she walks into the bar, he immediately realizes that, despite her makeup, which is expertly applied, she’s not as old as she looks, and probably not American either. There’s a commotion outside. Somebody saw a whale.

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Figure 6.15. (a)

a

bag

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References Antonioni, Michelangelo. 1964. Red Desert. 120 min. Italy: Rizzoli. Boorstin, Daniel. 1964. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper. Cohen, Erik. 2004. Contemporary Tourism: Diversity and Change. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Exotic Tours. 2008. Available online at www.exotictours.com.br (accessed 13 July 2010). Favela Tour, Marcello Armstrong. 2008. Available online at www.favelatour.com.br (accessed 13 July 2010). Frow, John. 1991. “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia.” October 57: 123–51. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twighlight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken. Smith. 2008. Notebook. London: Guinea Point Library. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: SAGE. Zeiderman, Austin. 2006. “Schizophrenia and the Slum: Notes on Touring Favelas in Rio de Janeiro.” Anthropology News 47(6): 19–20.

CHAPTER 7

Labor Days A Non-Linear Narrative of Development Nina Holm Vohnsen

Hard Work On the last day of May, when the sun beats down on a central street in the city and burns my hand that, as it reaches for my lukewarm iced coffee, is still semi-sedated by sleep (it could, for instance, easily have knocked something over had the table not been empty except for the sticky substance—perhaps dried-up beer—that reflects the sun back from the rough wooden table), on such a day, the air is stagnant, and the street has a distinctive smell. I noticed it as soon as I stepped out of my front door in the middle of the afternoon, the sun having long worked on the multiple dried puddles of juices, whose creation and death this street witness every night. Resuscitated, they now appear sticky, sparkling, glittering, and release odors that mix with lotions and perfumes, car exhaust and evaporating asphalt: the sweet and spicy concentrate of human, sun, and city.

Much Obliged On the Danish National Labour Market Authority’s (Arbejdsmarkedsstyrelsen) webpage, you can read the following under the heading “Sickness Absence” (sygefravær): If you are absent from work due to illness for a longer period of time, you can get support from your municipality to help regain your ability to work and return to the labor market as soon as possible. You are also eligible for economic compensation in case of absence due to illness in the form of sickness benefit [sygedagpenge]. . . . If you are absent due to illness for more than eight weeks, the municipality will send you an information form that you must return within eight days. Subsequently, the municipality will summon you to a follow-up conversation or call you up no later than eight weeks after your first day of sickness absence. The purpose of the conversation with the municipality is to assist you in keeping your job and your connection to the labor market. . . . It is your obligation to participate in the municipal follow-up. (Arbejdsmarkedsstyrelsen 2010, my translation)

Since the summer of 2009, municipal caseworkers in Denmark have had the option of referring citizens who receive sickness benefit to other organizations who specialize in programs aimed at shortening the period of sickness absence by keeping the citizens “active” while they are unable to work. In the spring of 2009, before these new rules were included into the law on sickness benefit, a controlled

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trial (Active—Back Sooner) was carried out in order to test central elements of the amendments to the law. During the trial period, citizens who received sickness benefit and who had certain birth dates were randomly drafted for an obligatory offer of a program of activity for ten or more hours a week. These offers of activity could be, and were in several cases, outsourced to private employment agencies. The activity could consist of physical exercise or classroom teaching by psychologists, social workers, or medical doctors with the aim of reorienting the sick citizens’ understanding of their current situation and making them go back to work more quickly than they otherwise would have done.

Your Own Words In the municipal office where citizens’ right to sickness benefit is evaluated, citizens who are called in for the initial meeting often have only the vaguest idea about the meeting’s purpose. What they do understand is that they are going to be checked out. This is why you frequently see citizens arrive with special handbags or briefcases where they have collected all the different pieces of information they envisage might be needed to prove their illness to the caseworker. For the same reason, when they rummage around in their bags for some specific piece of paper, it often happens that medical journals, prescriptions, official letters, and little cards with scribbled appointments with physical therapists or psychologists spill onto the floor or out on the caseworker’s desk. The caseworker will then try to stop this presentation of evidence: “Just tell me in your own words why you are not at work.” If this is requested of a person of non-Danish nationality, the following almost invariably occurs: the citizen says (for instance in Polish, Russian or in broken Danish), “Why, because I am sick!” upon which he or she resumes the rummaging for evidence to confirm this circumstance. Perhaps a sick note or alternatively a direct phone number to the doctor is brought to light and offered to the caseworker. Then the caseworker might say something along the lines of “Yes, I know you are sick, that’s why you are here today, but explain to me what it is about your illness that makes you unable to go to work.” If, on the other hand, the citizen guesses what the caseworker is driving at, the conversation might move forward more smoothly.

The Privilege If you are ill and you get referred to a private employment agency that specializes in “sickness benefit package solutions [sygedagpengepakker]” the goal of your referral might be to train for stable attendance. If you have been away from “the ordinary labor market” for a long period, the mere task of showing up every day at 9 AM can prove challenging. It certainly poses a challenge for the researcher, and few are the days on which she makes it on time. While this has no immediate consequences for the researcher, this is not so in the case of Irene. Irene is not there voluntarily and might lose her right to sickness benefit if she does not show up. These are the main differences between the researcher and Irene: in the fall of 2009, the researcher is twenty-eight years old and fit as a fiddle; Irene is fiftynine and suffers from diffuse pain, a metabolic disorder, and a case of diabetes

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that has recently taken a turn for the worse. With the exception of three years, the researcher has been enrolled in different sorts of education since she was five; Irene has been working full-time in restaurants and shops since she left primary school. The researcher is paid a salary; Irene receives sickness benefit. That is why it is the privilege of the researcher to stroll down to her local coffee bar, Nosewise, on a given Wednesday at 10:15 AM to have a coffee and a late breakfast while Irene, for the nth week in a row, must sit in the private employment agency’s computer room and work at her curriculum vitae or play Minesweeper until her pain gets so severe she might be allowed to go home.

Piss and Coffee In a different street in the city, a man is sitting in a particular spot in the ground. He is embracing his knees while his entire slovenly being trembles. He is sitting in the exact spot where a public urinal stood until recently. The penetrating and nauseating smell of decades of pissing has impregnated the surroundings to the extent that I have to hold my breath when I pass on my bicycle even half a year after its removal. Sitting in this specific spot is this young man—junky, thief, or whatever else might explain the presence of the equally young but, in contrast, sparkling, clean policemen who stand in a circle around him. A sorry excuse for a citizen sitting in the middle of a puddle of piss that spreads around him between the cobblestones and forms channels that run toward the doorway of the local pub, forced by the slight tilt of the street. Not far away, if you turn right just after the National Bank, on the other side of the bridge separating the former military bastion at Christian’s Harbour from the Royal Dockyard and Copenhagen’s commercial center, sits a big square building. Above the building’s entrance is a large stone section into which the word Overformynderiet was chiseled decades ago, the popular meaning of which is akin to “super-paternalism.” The fact that the National Labour Market Authority resides here seems especially appealing to the Danish sense of self-irony and causes many knowing looks to be exchanged by visitors and employees alike. To the extent that this building can be said to possess a smell, it must be the vague scent of a civil servant’s perfume, or maybe the bitter odor of filtered coffee or the particular smell of large quantities of paper gathered in one place. The sound of a pair of well-dressed and determined medium heels and a discreet but rhetorical knock on a door. This is where the most recent version of the law on sickness benefit was drafted.

Gap Intellectual montage is, according to Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1994), the juxtaposition of (in the case of film making) shots that elicit a specific intellectual meaning. A classic example of intellectual montage is Eisenstein’s Strike, in which he cross-clips between shots of a crowd of people being beaten by the military and shots of a cow being slaughtered. Here the interpretation of the violent event is explicitly locked down as “system treats people like cattle.” Had the crossclip been from the birth of a child or from a ballet, the suggested interpretations would have been different: the bloodshed involved in transitions and new begin-

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nings, or the careful and aesthetic orchestration of a State intervention. In this form of narration, one line of shots constitutes the main story line while other shots are placed at key moments to suggest parallelisms intended to lead the spectator to consider specific interpretations of the events portrayed. However, in the attempt to write about the complexities of labor-market politics it would be misleading to present the field as having, to quote American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, “leading characters, minor characters, significant details, that it has lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end” (1973: 209). By dispensing with a narrative based on a leading argument and an explicit storyline, the resulting intellectual montage has as its aim the multiplication of meaning rather than its reduction, it aims on interpretations that are more open than they are closed.

Not Your Average Citizen In the summer of 2009, a taller-than-average woman sits in her garden and offers the researcher a cup of coffee. The taller-than-average woman would be forced to bend down further than average were she to console, say, a one year old in a daycare institution, as she used to do. And she has been doing a lot of bending, so now she sits in her garden five months after her back pain stopped feeling like your average back pain, and she is still waiting for the scanning that will indicate if the physical rehabilitation she has been on the wait list for since she got ill will be sufficient, or whether an operation is warranted. She does not know whether she has been waiting longer than average.

Fitting It is best if none of the randomly chosen recipients of sickness benefit get exempted from the controlled trial (even if what the caseworker can offer is not likely to get them back to work sooner) because that would compromise the project design. This consideration can be voiced in several ways. Listen: A municipal caseworker: “We would really like it if you would participate in the project. If we only include the people it is sure to help then we will not be able to show when it does not help, okay? It is in order to ensure the best results possible that we want you to participate. So if you can, you must.” An employee from the National Labour Market Authority: “What a controlled trial like this can do is to debunk some myths. Make us wiser. If we think this approach makes sense then we must also dare test it and see if it perhaps does not.” Another municipal caseworker: “We cannot give you any treatment that will shorten your period of absence from work, but we have to find a way to plan your illness period so that it fits with the project’s demand for activity.” A citizen: “It is fine that you make such a project, you know, I just do not think I fit into your box, okay? I mean, what do you want to talk about? If you do not know that, I cannot be bothered with it. Or ‘bothered’—it sounds a bit harsh perhaps—but I am not doing it just for the fun of it, okay? It is a waste of your time and mine.”

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36 My adult working life began on 15 October 2007. A recent graduate with a degree in social anthropology, I applied for and got a job as an internal consultant in a municipality in Northern Zealand. My first task was to report numbers to Statistics Denmark and to the National Board of Social Services. I remember coming to work the first day and being left alone in a small and naked office. On the table before me some manager had placed eight sheets of paper filled with little boxes and paragraphs from the Law on Social Services (serviceloven). On each sheet I was required to report the frequency, amount, and/or size of the municipality’s offers in the service areas they inquired into. The most simple of the questions addressed the use of so-called day centers. I was to report the “daily average number of visits” in a given week six months ago. I stared at the sheet. “What is a day center?” I thought to myself. I got up and began to ask around, getting a different answer from each person I asked. Three weeks and many phone calls later, I knew there were three such “day centers”; that primarily elderly people came there during the day to be kept active; and that nobody knew how many people used them. I nevertheless had to fill in the form, since returning it incomplete to Statistics Denmark was not an option. I do not remember what I wrote, perhaps “36.” In any case, the number was the sum of the added guesses of the day center staff I happened to get hold of. “Well,” one staff member cautioned me, “it’s just a guess because we don’t jot it down every time someone comes in, okay?”

Clash According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of consciousness (1955: 28), we are inclined toward the establishment of thought habits in our intellectual life. A thought habit consists of our adaptation of a specific interpretation of causation or our settling on a fixed belief about the true state of things that we subsequently will be likely to subscribe to without further reflection or critical examination. Eisenstein’s classic application of the intellectual montage, as in Strike, is associated with this type of conditioning, so that having watched this sequence in Strike, it becomes more likely that, the next time we watch a State intervention, we will accept the proposal that “the people” are being treated like mere cattle. With Peirce we see that these interpretations might be random, even false. He proposes that the potential for specific interpretations already resides as qualities in the individual phenomena we relate to (ibid.: 98ff.). Since qualities are multiple, any interpretation will omit a number of qualities that in any moment might be actualized in alternative interpretations. In the intellectual montage, we might use this insight to work against conclusion and fixed interpretation by continuing to juxtapose our “shots” in numerous ways.

Overdose Today in the Municipal Jobcentre, caseworker Ida has just decided that she wants to get a motorcycle driver’s license. In her office, a woman pulls down her blouse and points with her right index finger toward the place on her left chest where, instead of a breast, we now see a topography of scarred skin. In another office,

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caseworker Marie, who at this moment in time still does not know whether she is finally pregnant, just manages to prevent a man from pulling down his trousers. Instead he now inches the tight jeans leg up over his knee in order to prove the existence of a scar from a wound from the knife he intended for something completely different and work related, but which cut a 10 cm line from his knee up along his inner thigh when large sacks fell on him as he unloaded a lorry. At the fifth office down to your left, a woman cries furious and humiliated tears in Ian’s office as she understands there is no way around it: she will have to tell this young, unfamiliar man why she, who has been able to take care of herself for sixty years, now suddenly cannot. Ian himself just buried a friend. Overdose.

What Kate Did Not Do Kate, an employee at the private employment agency ENGA, says, “I might as well say right away that those feedback charts on the participants in the controlled trial—I have not completed them. And I feel bad about it but I do not know where to begin. I just did not do it.” The researcher now watches Marie—who by now knows she is pregnant—tell Kate how she herself would have approached the job had it been hers, while Kate’s team manager says, “of course we will solve that task. That is part of the agreement.” Kate is responsible for one of the citizens Marie has referred to the private employment agency as part of the controlled trial, but she has no idea what the woman in question has been doing during the four weeks she has been involuntarily participating in the controlled trial. Except that she has seen her psychologist but—by the way—that had nothing to do with the project, and then she has been on the internet searching for something Kate does not know about. “We only know them from the group sessions, so we will have to pass on the specific questions,” says the team manager. Apparently nobody knows anything about the people who are participating in the controlled trial, to Marie’s irritation and the researcher’s amazement. In the end, Marie asks if they can be certain that they have been informed about cases in which the citizens have not showed up for the controlled trial? Kate says she is pretty sure the municipality has not been informed about that, no.

Barriers When the municipal caseworkers refer a citizen to a private employment agency, they need to fill out an electronic form that serves as the contract with the private employment agency. On this form, the municipal caseworkers must indicate what the purpose of the referral is. This is what a “purpose of referral” might look like when the private employment agency receives such a contract from the municipal caseworker: “The barriers need to be broken down.” This is how a conversation between the researcher and the privately employed social worker might then sound: Researcher: “Is that all you know when the citizen is referred here?” Social worker: “Yes, that is a typical contract. And then you might wonder why they want to pay for a thirteen-week program without specifying which barriers they intend us to ‘break down.’”

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Shrubberies At ENGA, the team leader, Marianne, found herself overwhelmed by the absurdity of the fact that they had for a moment seriously discussed among the colleagues whether to lay out shrubberies in their yard in the hope that the homeless people and vagabonds whose work ability they were sometimes commissioned to assess would remain at their property. The discussion had been a response to the fact that that the employees had noted that these people repeatedly got their applications for early retirement pension rejected on the grounds that the applicant had participated too little in the work ability testing for the caseworkers to have sufficient grounds for assessing their ability to work. The employees at ENGA felt compelled to react to the circumstance that those worst off who were not even able to attend the work ability testing, those who in their professional opinion lived up to the criteria for early retirement pension the most were by the same token cut off from receiving it. It seemed that whatever they did, it would lead to an absurd condition—a continuation of the present practice if they did nothing, an equally absurd condition if they build flowerbeds for the vagabonds to sleep in while they documented it.

A Helping Hand During those first months of my employment in the municipality, I struggled continuously with the numbers I had to report to Statistics Denmark. The report on the delivery of “personal care and practical assistance” proved to be a particularly tough one. The data system could not extract the numbers we needed and nobody had mastered spreadsheets beyond the simplest commands and sorting. Apart from that, dead citizens had still to be removed from the files and we knew that people who no longer received any kind of help continued to figure in the system as well. What lent an additional touch of fiction to the exercise was that Statistics Denmark required that we indicate the total amount of time for which each citizen received such services. Unlike most other municipalities where services were granted in minutes (for example, forty-five minutes of cleaning a week), in this municipality people were granted specific services (cleaning the floor, watering the plants) regardless of the time it might take to complete them. I called up Statistics Denmark and explained the situation on more than one occasion but it was not an option to hand in an incomplete form. Furthermore, some boss further up the municipal system had been to a meeting at which our municipality had been singled out as one out of only three that had still not reported our numbers, and the pressure to make sure our numbers were in before his next meeting had traveled down the system from manager to manager until, finally, I was the one presented with the task of getting it done. I also received emails from employees in Statistics Denmark who were themselves under pressure to get the statistics out before the end of the year. Finally, one of my managers took me aside and told me to make up some numbers that were not too far off those we had reported the previous year.

What Kate Does Not Get Kate has just had a discussion with one of the municipal caseworkers about the case of a woman who has been referred to the private employment agency for

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twenty-five hours of activity each week. The woman has repeatedly left early or has not shown up at all because she is in pain. Since Kate is contractually obliged to inform the municipality of the total number of hours the woman has been present, this situation has resulted in a stream of formal letters from the municipality to the woman inquiring into the existence of “valid reasons” for her non-attendance. Kate: “So I phoned the caseworker to ask what the purpose of this referral was. I asked her if these twenty-five hours a week is the key issue or if we can accommodate the attendance to the woman’s pain. But without answering me the caseworker starts talking about booking another three months of the program for the woman. Then I asked her, in a straightforward manner, what the purpose of that would be. And if she had said ‘to work on a stable attendance’ or ‘to handle the health-related issues’ which this woman finds so disturbing then the situation would have been different. But no! The caseworker was only interested in whether or not she could be here twenty-five hours. This is where this turns into a discussion about whether it is my job to place myself in the doorway and say ‘No, you cannot leave.’ Where would that take us? This is where I begin to think that this whole system is extremely odd.”

19% Wednesday, 10 June 2009: On the front page of Politiken, one of the largest Danish national newspapers, you can read that Danish social workers break the law on a daily basis. The subheading clarifies that one out of two social workers is unable to live up to the legal requirements on a regular basis. The question posed by the Danish Social Worker’s Union to its members on behalf of Politiken was as follows: “Have you been able to live up to the guidelines for your social work as defined by the law within the past three years?” A pie chart shows that 49 percent responded that they did, 32 percent responded that they did not, and 19 percent did not know. In the text you are served the additional information that most of the social workers indicate that these breaches of the law happen on a daily or weekly basis. The journalistic angle on the story is the increasing workload in the public sector and the unfortunate incidents that happen due to a general lack of time for processing cases.

A Guiding Principle The montage principle is not new to anthropological attempts to address and unfold perspectives on themes or objects of research. Examples include Michael Taussig’s attempt to capture some of the characteristics of the State in The Nervous System (1992); Marilyn Strathern’s Partial Connections (2004), in which she revives comparison as an anthropological core project after the relativistic turn of the 1980s; and Nigel Rapport’s insistence on the heterogeneous nature of individual social lives as discussed in Transcendent Individual (1997; also 1992, 1994). Despite differing agendas, the basic principle shared by these accounts is that the portrayal of any situation might lend us a perspective through which to look at and wonder about other situations. Approached this way, writing anthropology is not merely a question of presenting a convincing argument or juxtaposing dif-

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ferent perspectives on the same reality—of different viewpoints adding up to the reality—but of addressing separate realities that might intersect and overlap, while remaining distinct. In contrast to the intellectual montage as applied by Eisenstein in Strike, this approach requires that we accept and cultivate ambiguity: from one perspective, Kate is a nuisance who has not understood the first thing about the task she has been given by the municipal caseworker, but she could also be seen as the only sensible person in the system. Both perspectives might be considered situated truths about Kate and her work, but they will not add up to a Truth or a coherent picture.

Something Extra Do not hold it against a civil servant that the following thought occurs to her at 4 PM after she has been observed by an anthropologist for an entire day: Civil servant: “We are 200 people who are just sitting here, writing . . . making paper. We just sit here and write about what ought to be done . . . without doing. I sit here and when I look out of my window over at the Ministry of Social Affairs, I think . . . ‘I wonder what they are writing over there.’”

Such a thought might occur on an afternoon in the fall of 2009. But, she adds, she knows that even if she is not directly involved in the implementation of programs and plans themselves, her work sets the framework for how political agendas might be put into practice elsewhere. One of her colleagues, for instance, has written the framework for the controlled trial in which citizens on sickness benefit were subjected to obligatory offers of “activity” intended to help them return to work as soon as possible. In such a case, policy stops being merely paper and can acquire life, as in the following interaction between a citizen, John, and our municipal caseworker, Marie: John: “You had me confused there for a moment because I thought you said it was an offer. So it is something I am forced to?” Marie: “Well, you are actually . . . perhaps I should have mentioned that. But you have to look at it as if we are giving you something extra.” John: “But then maybe I should not join the fitness center anyway . . . or start swimming as I had planned. . . . If I have to participate in your activity. I mean, I would not want to overburden myself either, right?” Marie: “No, that would not be smart.”

Upsetting One evening in the spring of 2009, a group of top government officials from a range of different ministries are gathered to discuss the current conditions for policy making. They are concerned about their respective ministers’ tendency toward “response politics”: politics that directly answer criticism raised in the media. The following exchange about an important piece of legislation that has just been adopted in the Parliament takes place:

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A [in a polite, careful tone of voice]: “You can get the impression that parts of the act were not wholly thought through?” B [who has written large parts of the legislation in question]: “Not thought through!!! Jesus, no! It is a shoddy job! But what would you expect? We had two weeks to come up with it.”

In another office in another building a group of project workers are being told by an official from a ministry that in their investigation of the current state of their front-desk services they are being too critical. They would not want to upset the staff too much.

Beside the Point Nineteen percent of the social workers do not know whether they have broken the law or not.

Rule of Law After a meeting between a group of developers from across the different sections of the municipality, a tired senior public servant addresses the researcher: You know what? . . . I’ve been on the municipal committee for social benefits for quite a while and I have said time and again that we need to have some rules that the citizens understand . . . or at least some that the caseworkers understand. . . . As a minimum we will have to demand that those who adopted them understand them. Apart from that, you know what? I have really been wondering about this tender we are discussing now. As you know, we are sitting here at the municipal level trying to draft some sensible tender documents and to describe the content of some courses for sick people. And this is before the law has even been passed by Parliament—before we know any of the results from the controlled trial. But if we do not do it now we will not make it in time. And if we do not make it in time we will not be able to collect the reimbursement from the state. As a municipality we cannot afford that.”

The Business of Writing It is a challenge to write about the complexity of my empirical field and about the multitude of connections and intersecting realities without reducing the overall impressions of messiness and absurdity to coherence and clarity. The dilemma Glenn Goodwin (1971) raised in his article “On Transcending the Absurd” stands at the heart of this challenge: being “expert at constructing explanations,” he asks, how does one write a readable text that has not, by the same token, lost its “sensitivity to the absurdity of things” (ibid.: 842)? I am convinced that Kurt Vonnegut’s break (1973) with the skewed attention paid to main and minor characters in fiction is relevant in the context of writing about the drafting of politics and the development of the Danish labor market system. By placing side by side in writing

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what in the physical world is separate, I want to contrast and link a number of situations where people do their best, and generate not only a labor market system, but a society.

Puzzling In March 2009, a journalist from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s Program 1 casts his inquiring eyes on the legal foundation of the controlled trial, and he is on to something. Actually he is not a journalist, but who would have guessed? With a self-image as the constitutional watchdog and his thoroughness and fierce mannerisms, the only thing lacking to complete the stereotypical picture of the classic journalist is a cigarette wedged behind his ear. He prefers black coffee from the machine to the freshly ground French press, also available, as he makes himself comfortable in an editing room deep inside the colossus that constitutes the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. While the researcher marvels at the technology, the reporter brings in the sound directly from Parliament, where an interpellation caused by his in-depth journalism has just begun. At the National Labour Market Authority, where his reports have caused significant overtime work, he is suspected of “politicizing.” Is it political scheming that drives him? Or is it his sense for logic and dislike of flawed reasoning that in his childhood drove him to solve every mathematical puzzle on the back page of the journal The Engineer?

Front Line On the radio, they argue that the controlled trial targeting recipients of sickness benefits is illegal. A professor of social law says there is no doubt about its illegality. The National Labour Market Authority says there is no doubt about its legality. Ida from the Municipal Jobcentre thinks it is uncomfortable: “It makes me feel rather like a foot soldier, the orders come down from above and you just toe the line. Luckily I do not think we have cut off anybody’s sickness benefits. But we have told people we will, so I am sure they have felt the pressure.”

Questions for Carl How did you feel when you were sitting at home on your couch, alone, your health deteriorated, job gone? Did you want to give up? Did you suspect that getting back on your feet would be an uphill task? Did you feel dizzy?

Failure Carl felt as if his life had ended. As if, at age fifty-one, life had nothing left in store for him. Carl just sat there on the couch every day. We might imagine him staring into space or at the television screen. An outdoorsman now sitting in his apartment, a strong man reduced to passivity. He grew grumpy; his friend told him he was not like himself anymore.

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Carl: “The first two or three days, I really did not want to be here at the private employment agency. I had already accepted that it was all over. But now I know that there is more in life for me. And my friends tell me that I am a much happier person. This group of people I have met here . . . it is like having good colleagues, it makes me want to get up in the morning and go ‘to work.’”

In the statistics Carl’s case will appear as a failure; the municipality has invested in a “sickness benefit package” to get him back on track; in other words, back to full-time employment. The private employment agency had four weeks available. They were paid around 1000 Danish kroner (or €134) a week for twenty-five hours in which he—the citizen—was to be brought closer to the labor market through an approach centered on his needs. Carl was not, however, ready for full-time employment after four weeks.

Success Eventually, when I handed in the last sheet to Statistics Denmark, it felt like a victory. It mattered less that the calculations should have been based on a specific week in March and that it had been necessary for me to base my calculations on a random week in December. It mattered less that it was fictional, as we did not grant people a “time slot” but a service—meaning that I eventually had to make up numbers based on assumptions such as: “It probably takes ten minutes a week to water plants twice a week.” It mattered less that I had spent two months, off and on, plus my colleague’s time, to create this fiction. It mattered less that both he and I knew that the files were incomplete. What did matter was that I was finally able to conclude the task that had been haunting our unit and that had caused problems for our management and Statistics Denmark. I received much praise for my handling of the task and from then on all kinds of statistical charts landed on my desk.

Motivating One Monday afternoon in the fall of 2009, a man has been summoned to a meeting at the private employment agency. He does not know why. He has already been through two programs at the employment agency before and extensive files have been written on his case. He has a letter in his hand telling him to report this Monday at this hour to this agency, but the letter does not tell him why he has to do so. Therefore, he called his former municipal caseworker before the meeting and asked her why he has been referred without previous agreement? He is left none the wiser, since his caseworker can only inform him that she is no longer working on his case and she cannot tell him who is. “Do you know who my caseworker is?” he asks Sofie, the privately employed social worker who has been commissioned by the municipality to “motivate” him to a third program in the private employment agency. Sofie looks through her considerable pile of papers. She cannot find the information. The man presses on: “But I have been through the work ability testing twice already. How can they just keep referring me here?” He explains to Sofie that he has lodged an appeal against the municipality’s decision to deny him an early retirement pension. It is Sofie’s job to explain to the man that he must participate in the program in order to maintain his right to social security

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until the appeal has been processed. Also, he has to go through the work ability test again because the last one has just expired due to the lengthy processing of his case. “But how can you do this to a human being? It is meaningless,” the man pleads with Sofie. “Meaning,” he insists, “is a conversation between two humans. Not just sending me out here without explanation. I do not want to be here. I have been here twice. You have your file on me already.” Sofie tells him it cannot be any other way. It is the law.

Anthropological Critique In applying juxtaposition as my guiding principle, my approach is heir to what George Marcus and Michael Fischer in 1986 called “anthropology as cultural critique”: “Anthropology”, they wrote, “is the use of cultural richness for self-reflection and self-growth” (1986: ix). They took cultural critique to be an exploration, one “which plays off other cultural realities against our own in order to gain a more adequate knowledge of them all” (ibid.: x). This is achieved exactly, they argued, by seeking to disrupt “common sense and make us re-examine our taken for granted assumptions” (ibid.: 1). Following this tradition, the business of writing anthropology is the business of writing against conclusion. It is the destabilization of conclusion in order to enrich it; it is the refusal to direct conclusion and the attempt to stall it for a bit by embracing contradiction and multiplicity. In the spirit of this tradition my intension as a writer can never be to deliver a critique but rather to provide the reader with the means for critical thinking.

Beginning, Middle, and End Kate does a shoddy job. A focal point for a municipal caseworker is to comply with the law. Kate struggles to fill in the gaps in an opaque system. According to the news, 19 percent of the social workers do not know if they break the law. A focal point for a municipal caseworker is to comply with the project design. A focal point for the citizen is to get well. A reporter has noted a logical flaw. A policy maker has two weeks to draft an important piece of legislation. A “sickness benefit package” has given Carl back his hope for the future. An authority says there is no logical flaw. It is a focal point for the National Labour Market Authority to ensure that the citizens get the help they need to get back to work as soon as possible. Carl’s case was a failure: “I won’t do it just for the fun of it.” Statistics are essential for estimating the success or failure of the employment effort. A citizen sits in a puddle of piss surrounded by policemen. A citizen sits in a garden waiting for treatment. All kinds of statistics land on my desk. A policy maker drinks her coffee surrounded by reports, laws, and drafts. A caseworker handles her pile of cardboard case files that grows higher by the hour. It is the law. On a street in Denmark citizens have sex, sell drugs, get pissed, fall in love, and drink iced coffee. “But what would you expect?”

References Arbejdsmarkedsstyrelsen. 2010. Available online at ams.dk/Ams/Vejviser-for-borgere/Syge fravaer.aspx (accessed 8 May 2010).

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Eisenstein, Sergei. 1994. Towards a Theory of Montage v. 2: Selected Works, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor. London: British Film Institute. Goodwin, Glenn. 1971. “On Transcending the Absurd: An Inquiry in the Sociology of Meaning.” The American Journal of Sociology 76(5): 831–46. Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1955 [1940]. Philosophical Writing of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Rapport, Nigel. 1992. “Connexions With and Within a Text: From Forster’s Howards End to the Anthropology of Comparison.” Bulletin of John Rylands University Library of Manchester 73(3) (Special Issue, Voice, Genre, Text: Anthropological Essays in Africa and Beyond, eds. Paul Baxter and Richard Fardon): 161–80. Rapport, Nigel 1994. “Busted for Hash: Common Catchwords and Individual Identities in a Canadian City.” In Urban Lives: Fragmentation and Resistance, eds. Vered Amit-Talai and Henri Lustiger-Thaler, 129–57. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Rapport, Nigel. 1997. Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 2004 [1991]. Partial Connections. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Taussig, Michael. 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1973. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell Publishing.

CHAPTER 8

Mind the Gap Karen Lisa Salamon

This chapter engages with the lack of continuity existing between different people’s experiences, and how it may be acknowledged in ethnographic forms of representation involving montage. My discussion was triggered by a concern, which author Daniel Mendelsohn has encapsulated thus: “It has become a cliché in modern culture that you can recreate other people’s experience. I’m very suspicious of that kind of simulacra” (Tetzlaff 2012: 8).1 Mendelsohn’s suspicion resonates with historian James Clifford’s discussions about “ethnographic authority,” in which he noted that “it becomes necessary to conceive of ethnography not as the experience and interpretation of a circumscribed ‘other’ reality, but rather as a constructive negotiation involving at least two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects. Paradigms of experience and interpretation are yielding to discursive paradigms of dialogue and polyphony” (1988: 41). In my discussion, I infer that a certain use of montage may fit into such polyphonic discursive paradigms. Montage has been described as “the insertion of material that has been left unchanged by the artist [where . . . ] the parts ‘emancipate’ themselves from a superordinate whole; they are no longer its essential elements . . . some could be missing, yet the text would not be significantly affected” (Bürger 1984: 77, 80). The directly speaking voices recorded and arranged by the ethnographic fieldworker into a body of text, where quotes from the field are left unchanged but reorganized and woven into a cacophony of sound bites may also build a montage, rather similar to the musical sampling produced by contemporary digital DJs, which I will discuss further below. Such an approach may be employed to avoid construing metanarratives and to maintain the sense of ethnographic negotiation and dialogue between conscious, politically significant voices. “Montage allows fragments and fractures to connect without having to supply a narrative of causality; it allows micro-descriptions to sit suggestively and awkwardly on a stage of an ill-disciplined totality” (Highmore 2009: 81). Such an employment of ethnographic montage may facilitate the acknowledgement of those gaps that exist between your, my, and other people’s experience.

An Open Reading–Writing of the Other Ethnography is often explained as the description and interpretation of cultural otherness. In this simple definition lies the implication that ethnography bridges and crosses distances and gaps between distinct and incongruent lifeworlds and perceptions. Since at least the postcolonial 1970s, this descriptive and interpretive practice has been the object of epistemological, ethical, and literary debates

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among self-reflexive ethnographic scholars.2 These debates have contributed to an increasing skepticism in relation to cultural metanarrative and a sense of awkwardness toward classic ethnographic authority, associated with empiricist positivism. The discussions have been reflected in textual experiments and new forms of narrative, drawing upon high-modern (or postmodern)3 styles of writing with dislodged subject positions,4 subjective first-person “gonzo” narrative, and distanced, clinical, or ironic “making-strange” effects.5 Even with meta-textual self-reflection and a high sensitivity to the ethical and epistemological implications of ethnographic authority, an ideally non-colonial ethnography would remain challenged with the constant paradox of wanting to comprehend and describe the Other, while avoiding imperious claims of having determined and identified the Other. Such an ethnography would strive to avoid objectifications of the Other, and would not speak on behalf of the Other with a postulated, multiple subjectivity (i.e., claiming to be “you” while also being “me,” while also being the intermediary between us). Such a non-usurping, dialogical ethnography would ideally avoid any claim to having “grasped” the Other. With these considerations in mind, I would in this article like to draw on a philosophy of “not knowing” to further explore the gaps that exist between different people’s experiences. In my own ethnographic work, I have employed montage to approach and fragmentarily represent the Other, without “grasping” her or his identity. I have used textual montage in the representation of change and conceptual distance in time, by letting voices from different epochs speak about the same phenomena, thus establishing a sense of dialogue across time, without claiming synthesis. For example, in an anthology about a national frontier region, I presented a montage about the experience of national borders, by mounting the rapidly jotted text notes of a refugee of war from 1943 together with later texts and images from internet diaries and personal notes by business and holiday commuters across the same border (Salamon 2010). I did not bind the individual elements together with explanations, but limited my own authorial voice to explanatory footnotes as well as a short introduction and a short conclusion framing the otherwise polyphonic and fragmented presentation of the border experience. Even though, as the author, I selected and sequenced the different voices, their fragmentary presentation also left considerable gaps and blanks, creating a certain sense of dialogue between these voices. At the same time, the gaps and fragmentary nature of the montage also pointed to the estrangement between these mutually unknown voices of different times, as well as to the phenomena of border, when each voice spoke in its own terms, highlighting the absence of a single, graspable border experience. While montage is often described as facilitating a sense of estrangement (something I will discuss further below), in my work I have also found that it allows for the establishment of a certain intimacy, when layers of indirect citation and representation may be avoided, and each intact voice is allowed to speak directly for itself, with the relative preservation of its own time and space, situation and perspective. The resulting cacophony of fragmented clips of speech or text extracted from longer pieces of material is clearly the manipulated work of an author, in a manner parallel to the manipulation of sound bites in musical forms involving digital sampling (which I discuss below). However, while involving ethically challenging manipulation and recontextualization in its selective use of other people’s utterances, this form of montage also maintains voices and positions relatively intact, preserving their separate identities, as is also known from musical sampling.

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It is my argument that this form of montage may be employed to preserve gaps and expose incongruences in life, which are otherwise often smoothed out for the sake of a consistent narrative and convincing argument. If gaps and fragments are left registrable in a montage, this may facilitate an open reading– writing, which neither claims full knowledge nor tries to seize hold of the Other.

Grasping or “Not Knowing” the Other Phenomenologist philosopher and rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin distinguishes in a discussion of interpretation and text between “grasping” and “caressing.” Where the former takes hold of and possesses, the latter acknowledges that the meaning of the text touched will always remain inaccessible, ambiguous, enigmatic, and always “yet to come,” and will not seek to attain or control it (1995: 63). The “grasping” of a text is, according to Ouaknin, a “closed reading,” which may lead to dogma or absolute sense, whereas the “caress” of a text is an “open reading,” which may lead to continuous discovery and new possibilities. “In short, the caress is research. In this research the caress does not know what it is seeking” (ibid.). Ouaknin suggests that the intention of “grasping” a full meaning should be replaced by the caress or subtle touch (which I suggest described as “being touched by”). He speaks of a de-signification defined as “the very possibility of life because it refuses the lie of a truth which imposes itself in terms of an absolute sense” (1992: 226, my translation).6 Ouaknin’s “open reading” draws on the philosophy of ethical phenomenologist and Talmudic7 commentator Emmanuel Lévinas, who not only discusses text, but also the meeting between different people: The caress is a mode of the subject’s being, where the subject who is in contact with another goes beyond this contact. . . . But what is caressed is not literally touched. The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks. This “not knowing,” this fundamental disorder, is the essence. It is like a game with something slipping away, a game without project or plan, not with what can become ours or us, but with something other, always inaccessible, and always still to come. (1979: 82–83 translated in Ellenberg 2005)

In other—and reductive—words, the readings of Lévinas and Ouaknin replace “grasping” (and wanting to make the Other “become ours or us”) with “caressing,” which does not know what it seeks, but allows for a relative nearness, while also preserving and respecting a radical otherness.

Gestures of Opening Marc-Alain Ouaknin claims that when something or someone risks closing in on itself to cement a position that will institute a system, de-signification may work to refuse this “lie of a truth” (1992: 226). In ancient Israelite ritual, which is Ouaknin’s main field of interest, de-signification took the form of gestures or objects of “opening.”8 These could be ritual gestures such as an offering, a sacrifice, or liturgy (ibid.: 224) that would create a break or shock and insert a difference that would refute a given sense or meaningfulness (ibid.).9 Montage may in similar terms be regarded as a form of “de-signification” and a gesture of shock or opening. It may be employed as a modality, where incongruent fragments remain divided and par-

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tial, never forming or presupposing a whole, but still leaving the reader or spectator with a sense that nothing is missing.10 In this perspective, the gaps or seams between these fragments may be elements of “opening” and de-signification, refusing a given sense or cemented structure of meaning. You do not—and cannot—“grasp” the full meaning of the fragments and gaps of such a montage. You rather “get touched” and “moved” by them. As such, montage is a “flirtatious” (as opposed to “consumptive”) mode of interaction and discovery: “Is not the most erotic part of the body the part where the clothing gapes? It is intermittency that is erotic, that of the skin which sparkles between two items, between two edges. It is this very sparkling that seduces or else the staging of an appearing-disappearing” (Barthes 1973 quoted in Ouaknin 1995: 218). The flirtatious reading permitted by montage teases out ambiguous reactions and leaves new possibilities for open reading rather than closure; for caressing rather than grasping. Ideally in montage, “the process of constructing outweighs the final product—a disruption in means-ends rationality—and thought moves to a modality of inference by causing a leap between incongruent pieces” (McHenry 2005).

Absences and Traces The “erotic intermittency” of Roland Barthes’s “gaping” cloth involves the concept of a “gap,” which means chasm, and often relates to matters of space or surface. The English word derives its meaning from a hole in the wall—an old Norse gape, whereas the word interval, which is often used in relation to speech or other sound, derives its meaning from the Latin “space between palisades or ramparts.” The metaphoric sense of interval as “gap in time” was also known in Latin (Harper 2001). Both interval and gap designate a distance in time or space, but not necessarily in essence or identity. Interval implies that something has come before it and something will come after it, whereas gap implies a lack and emptiness, surrounded by material or identity. The intervals and gaps are essential to any kind of montage work: Separate fragments of sound, visual material, or text deriving from different contexts are placed in a common framework, but retain their distinctness. The seams between the different patches, so to say, remain—explicitly or by implication. The gaps or intervals between each of the fragments persevere as traces and history, even if the fragments are put together so closely or in such a homogenizing manner as to make their difference in origin almost invisible. The traces of gaps and intervals thus represent history and former identity formations, but they also make up the productive space of the montage. The retention of diachronic traces in montage addresses issues of loss and absence, which otherwise have no language of expression in a contemporary (high-modern) discursive regime, where pathos and sentimentality are regarded with great suspicion. These factors were at play in my own textual montage about the experience of crossing the frontier, where I strove to retain diachronic traces and to address issues of absence at play in the quotes from those crossing the border (Salamon 2010). I worked partly with my own diary notes, and placed them in dialogue with other people’s blogged experiences and notes taken by my late father shortly after he barely survived a traumatic border crossing as an illegal refugee during the Second World War. The employment of montage involving gaps and absences

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rather than congruent and completed narrative facilitated an estrangement, which helped me resist the temptation of pathos and sentimentality. Cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who is often mentioned as a progenitor of modern, textual montage, wrote that montage produces “new, epic possibilities” (Goldman 2009: 234). He is also known for associating language with absence; writing with loss or mourning (Richter 2004: 234). In his fragmentary childhood autobiography, he bids a “long, perhaps lasting farewell” to Berlin, but avoids pathos by the use of displaced subjectivity and montage-like, abrupt, and fragmentary techniques. O, brown-baked column of victory, with winter sugar of childhood days (Benjamin 1950: epigraph)

Montage may in this sense be a way of acknowledging incompleteness and lack. It may present individually meaningful fragments in a neither uniform, nor totalizing manner, but does not necessarily negate the possibility of consistent meaning. The fragmentary structure of a montage may imply the absence of structure, or it may indicate that structure is a potentiality, but remains open and incomplete. Montage is described as a combination of fragments without implying any a priori causality or hierarchy of the elements.11 This lack of systemic structure might seem ill-fitted with a textual reading deriving partly from theologically infused reading strategies, as found in Emmanuel Lévinas and Marc-Alain Ouaknin. However, Ouaknin’s textual approach assumes ontological meaningfulness, but acknowledges its transience, ambiguity, and inaccessibility. His textual approach may be defined in terms of multiplicity rather than totality, and openness rather than closure. As such it would be relevant to the discussion of structure in montage: Is it really montage, when I create a texture of diverse fragments of voices and gaps between voices, but still relate them all to a common, ethnographic research question rooted in methodological structure? Is it on the other hand possible to envisage the complete absence of such unity or syntactics,12 and still have “text”? Literary critic Peter Bürger, whose quote on montage I presented above, wrote that some parts could be missing, “yet the text would not be significantly affected” (1984: 80). After Dadaism and Surrealism, the absence of unity, syntax, and “meaning” has been important in the pursuit of a distanciation and estrangement, “where any idea of ‘naturalness’ is defamiliarized and rendered available for political critique and practice” (Wilde: 2009). By combining and juxtaposing very different text bites relating to the frontier experience in my border montage, I strove to achieve such an effect of defamiliarization in relation to the concept and reality of border.

Sampling Depending on definitions and perspectives on the nature of text, semiotics, and semantics, there may be a difference between textual montage and sampling concerning the relationship between text and meaning; part and totality; fragment and narrative. Whereas in my understanding, textual montage is characterized by the retention of obvious gaps or traces left from the patching together of different autho-

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rial voices and styles of writing, sampling may be defined as morphing or splicing pieces of material together in ways that erase gaps or traces left from the interlacing of formerly separate elements. The term sampling stems from sample, which again is derived from Latin exemplum (a sample). Since the early fifteenth century, sample meant a “small quantity (of something) from which the general quality (of the whole) may be inferred” (Harper 2001). “Sampling” in the sense of a form of testing is known since the late eighteenth century, later—in the late nineteenth century—to become the collection of data from a representative sample. On the music scene, sampling is known as a kind of montage in sound, taken from different soundtracks and brought together in a new framework to make up a united body of sound. In the predigital era, disc jockeys would mesh fragments of different analogue LP recordings in live performances, to create new pieces of music or unique flows of sound. For analogue recordings, recording engineers have been “overdubbing”—adding one or several recorded soundtracks to an already recorded performance—probably since the introduction of the electric microphone in the 1920s (Klapholz 1986). “And here we were adding voices, a big tuba, and a piccolo trumpet playing the melody over a previously recorded Nashville steel guitar to make it a very interesting sound. And here’s that church sound, it’s not in stereo, we had to do it in mono because we had a track problem. Then we go out and overdub Paul and Artie doing ‘lie la lie, lie la lie,’” as recording engineer Roy Halee has described his work on recording Simon and Garfunkel (Fremer 2005). The analogue dubbing, meshing, or sampling of sound might be described as an act of montage, but the listener would not necessarily be able to hear the traces of intervals between each of the fragments. Depending on the style of DJs and the audiences’ abilities to recognize and distinguish individual fragments of sound, the sampled pieces might be recognized as montage—or be perceived as a piece of music in its own right. In the beginning of this chapter I allowed myself to make an analogy between the DJ’s sampling and the ethnographic fieldworker’s interlacing of speaking voices into a body of text, where readers might recognize and distinguish individual speaking subjects or may perceive the text as the expression of a culturally generalized collectivity. In music, the advent of digital techniques for sound recording took sampling to new lengths. The duplicate quality of digital soundmastering (where no “master copy” exists), with its possibility of totally morphing voices as well as of creating purely synthetic sound, have further complicated the philosophical issues pertaining to sampling as a possible form of montage. Sampling as a form of sound montage may thus be regarded as operating differently from textual montage, where gaps or “scars” left from the patching together of different authorial voices and styles of writing may be more directly visible. In the context of my discussion here, musical sampling is interesting because it exposes distinctions between totality, multiplicity, and fragmentation, and thus questions the status of montage, gaps, and “open reading.”

Break as Opening Shock Since the late 1980s, digital musical sampling has involved a recontextualization and reconfiguration of musical beats as so-called breakbeats—specific rhythmic patterns.13 A famous breakbeat is the six-seconds long drum beat from The Winstons’ song “Amen Brother” (1969), which has become known as the “Amen Break,”

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and has been sampled and syncopated in thousands of ways: “The original song is by The Winstons, who hold the copyright. However, a company named Zero G released a ‘jungle construction kit’ containing an exact copy of the Amen break, slightly sped up, to which Zero G claims copyright. The Winstons have not received any royalties for use of the Amen break” (Anonymous Wiki 2010). Musical sampling and breakbeats raise issues of identity, enunciative authority, and ownership relevant to the discussion of montage in ethnographic texts. Creating something new out of something old is a strategy for innovation. In digital sound sampling, it is possible to simultaneously keep the old and endlessly duplicate it, while also condensing it into breakbeats, syncopating and morphing it into something new. In other words, as with any digital process, it is not necessary to break up, change, or destroy the original to create a sample. Still, the original’s identity and status are influenced and changed by the sampling, as the story of the “Amen break” illustrates. Some of these elements may also be considered as existing in text, and to have become more important with digital technology. The copy–paste functions of digital text editing and word processing allow for some of the same sampling strategies—but not all of them. Formal genres fusing sound, rhythm, and text, such as rap poetry and an array of liturgical traditions, may also be regarded as involving (verbal) breakbeats and sampling, and could be considered in light of Ouaknin’s “de-signifying” shocks and “openings.” Ethnographic montage clearly differs from these genres, as consistency in argument rather than in rhythm or alliteration tends to be stressed. Still, “the ethnographer, like the surrealist, is licensed to shock” (Clifford 1988: 133).

Polyphony and Citation Without Quotation Marks It is tempting to consider the ethnographer’s recontextualizing and juxtaposing rearrangements of sign and sound bites as a pursuit to eliminate overt commentary and thus avoid settling on any one given sense. “The form of Benjamin’s Arcades Project was to develop the highest degree of citing without quotation marks. It was intended to eliminate overt commentary. Meanings were meant to emerge solely through the shocking juxtaposition of material, which of course is the essence of montage” (Wilde 2009). Citing without quotation marks today, which in academic contexts is regarded as overt plagiarism, is still known as an even desirable form (of riffs, phrases, and samples) in several musical genres, such as improvisational jazz. But even in music, legal issues of ownership make the practice of sampling and montage increasingly problematic: “A British vegan and YouTube user . . . uploaded a video about foraging and making a wild salad from mustard leaves and dandelions. The video contained no music, but the recording’s background noise featured . . . birds chirping. YouTube sent the user a notice that it had identified the video as containing a copyrighted musical composition belonging to Rumblefish” (Brewer 2012). The British vegan was presented with a copyright infringement claim, as the fully automated system had identified musical content in the video and associated it with copyrighted content belonging to a commercial partnership. Afterward, YouTube and Rumblefish were hesitant to accept responsibility for the incorrect accusations of copyright infringement (ibid.). Ethnographic debates over cultural ownership, representation, and rights of expression resonate with the politically intense debates about copyright, cultural

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imperialism, possession—and “grasping.” Musical samplers are quite conscious of this double significance and paradox, here expressed in the classic 1988 rap by Public Enemy, “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?”14 Caught, now in court ‘cause I stole a beat This is a sampling sport But I’m giving it a new name What you hear is mine I found this mineral that I call a beat I paid zero I packed my load ‘cause it’s better than gold People don’t ask the price, but it’s sold They say that I sample, but they should Sample this my bit bull We ain’t goin’ for this They say that I stole this Can I get a witness?

An additional point here is that Public Enemy talks about stealing a “beat” (rather than for example a sound “bite” or textual fragment). What they have stolen in their “sampling sport” is a beat and rhythm; a pattern and interval in sound, including its breaks and silences. When fragments of sound are put together, the blanks or stops between the fragments will be perceived as intervals in the flow of sound or music. When fragments of physical material or text are put next to or intersect each other in a montage, the openings existing between fragments are perceived as gaps or seams. The gaps between sound bites of sampled beats may correspond to the gaps between fragments of montaged text, refusing a given and stable sense or cemented structure. Is it possible to “grasp” and possess the gaps of a montage? Or the breaks and intervals in a sample of sound? In intellectual property terms it is, especially with the aid of digital technologies, as seen in the example of the bird chirping on YouTube. However, in Lévinas’s and Ouaknin’s terms it probably is not possible to possess the gaps of a montage or sample, and this may be why Public Enemy could challenge and play with the paradoxical theft of a beat—and why montage seems an appealing strategy for postcolonial or high-modern ethnography. Sampling and montage interact with the utterances or rhythms of the Other in a teasing or flirting manner; touching material and letting themselves be touched by it, but without grasping or consuming it. This may be why representational strategies inspired from sampling and montage appeal to ethnographers, wanting to visit, touch, interact, and represent, but not to possess or consume the Other and the strange.

Estrangement Cultural and ideological critique is an original driver of contemporary montagelike strategies. This was also the case for Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists eighty

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years ago, when they used montage to create tension and achieve shock effects to trigger estrangement (or defamiliarization) and distance from what might otherwise seem natural and normal. These techniques were intended to facilitate self-reflection and a new critical consciousness to be followed by an ideal social transformation. By estrangement—through decontextualization and recontextualization—contradictions of everyday life can be exposed, and “bring the seemingly extraordinary or highly valued into the realm of the ordinary” (Highmore 2009: 81). Thus, according to Walter Benjamin and those inspired by his use of montage, an aspect of this strategy entails a move of focus, from the central to the peripheral; from monumental artifacts to everyday, inconspicuous scraps, as “it is only that which lies unused or already discarded that is free of the ideological contamination of the ruling formation” (Jennings 2004: 30). Aspects of this radical take on montage and its implied ideological critique resonate with the techniques of estrangement used by ethnographers studying our “own” societies, and presenting our analyses to audiences from our “own” cultures. The defamiliarization works to alert us to our own blind spots of common sense assumptions, but also functions as poetics to create tension and shock effects furthering a reflexive distance with the reading audience. The aim is thereby to facilitate a deconstruction of selfevidence and presuppositions about the evidently normal and natural. An explicitly Surrealist example of ethnographic estrangement is the iconic portrait of North American middle-class living in 1956, delivered in Horace Miner’s humorous essay “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”: “Mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large.” In my own ethnographic work, I have used strategies of “making strange” combined with textual montage in analyzing aspects of my “own” society, and aimed at general audiences in that same society (e.g., Salamon 2009). These strategies of estrangement often entail elements of satire and humor, as is also the case in the quote by Horace Miner above. A similar effect is associated with Charlie Chaplin’s movies, where incongruence and gaps between, on the one hand, fragments of “modern times” (technique, efficiency, capitalist consumption) and, on the other, fragments of human frailty (the “tramp”) create an estranging effect: “This discordance elicits a comic effect without condemning or transcending the everyday. Chaplin’s comedy, then, is defamiliarizing, distancing us from what might otherwise seem natural, or at least normal, reactions to the situations and contexts of Chaplin’s mishaps” (Davis 2009: 72). The discordance creates a tension—as known in ethnographic analyses of “matter out of place”15—which might produce a comic effect; a shock effect; an “aha” effect of sudden enlightenment—or all of these. For the Surrealists, “the shock effect of decontextualised and recontextualised material objects [did not] . . . depend upon the construction of an image from out of the assembled fragments; rather . . . [it arose] from the tension inherent in the relationship of the mounted fragments to one another” (Pensky 2004: 186). Again, the subject matter is not “grasped,” possessed, or fit into a total, consistent image. Rather, the reader or audience is touched and moved by the effect.

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Caress By using montage elements in some of my own ethnographic studies, I have however come to see this technique not only as a way of achieving estrangement, but rather to achieve the very opposite—intimacy. This double effect is also recognizable in Chaplin’s tramp. When the reader encounters speaking voices in a textual montage, quoted straight out of their very situated, commonsensical context, and “speaking to each other” in the “presence” of the reader, a sense of intimacy may be achieved. In an applied ethnographic study of cultural centers as civic institutions in my own society, I used quotes from interviews, fieldwork conversations, and archived material. Out of these, I created a montage of contextualized voices speaking about the role of each of their local cultural centers. The material was to function as documentation and inspiration for further debate, involving also the interviewees themselves. In a rather disenfranchised quarter of Copenhagen, a volunteering social worker and cultural activist explained his dream for the local grassroots cultural center, which was placed in a formerly squatted house, where he himself had once been among the squatting activists. “We have an ambition of competing with people’s televisions, so people will come in here and regard this as their own living room—or at least their second living room” (Salamon 2009: 12, my translation). In a more affluent area, the salaried curator and head of a municipally governed cultural center explained how the center must be as professional and formally regulated as possible, as “we must compete with fitness centers, cinemas and computer games. We are in a competitive situation and need innovation” (ibid.:17). Together with many other voices and sound bites, I placed these quotes next to each other, after a short contextualizing and analytic introduction. I organized the quotes under various thematic headlines, partly raised by the speakers themselves, and partly developed in my analysis. The original plan for the project had been to write up a condensed ethnographic presentation of the centers and their users, concluding with a list of recommendations. As I encountered the many different voices and organizational lives of the houses, I did not wish to bridge the variations, contradictions, disagreements, and gaps, which in themselves drew the punctuated outline of an unresolved and contradictory reality.

Closing Walter Benjamin wrote about a broad variety of seemingly marginal issues, “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Benjamin quoted in Richter 2004: 234). This hologramic reading may imply an assumed preexistence of structured meaning (e.g., a metaphysically predetermined system of meaning). It may refer to a kind of inductive reading in search of consistent structure, which can be detected by some form of symptomatic reading.16 But the “total event” of which the crystal is just an individual moment, may also be created by the reader through the reading itself, thus remaining changeable, incomplete and open for further readings. A hologrammic or crystallic reading may thus be a “closed reading” looking for the one correct interpretation. But it may also be an “open reading” or a “caress,” which does not know what it is seeking, but might encounter a radical alterity in the text. “Through a strategic montage, in which the neglected debris of history is put into a new grammatical constellation, a true rev-

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olutionary image emerges . . . what we could call the literary voice’s non-mimetic relation to what is external to it—its irreducible alterity” (Richter 2004: 233). As a provider of scientific results and inputs for policymaking, ethnographic research is often expected to authoritatively objectify (for example, “translate”) the Other, and recreate the Other’s experience for instrumental purposes. Ethnography may also be expected to facilitate an insight into other identities and bring a certain “closure” by delivering set definitions and firm recommendations. In these situations, the closing of gaps becomes an ethnographic endeavor, fitting well with the exercise of authority and power. These are instances when it takes some courage to advocate a “philosophy of not knowing” and to mind the gap that exists between different people’s experiences. This challenge must be faced within the constant paradox of wanting to comprehend and describe the Other, while avoiding imperious claims of having determined the Other. Textual montage offers one way of struggling with this paradox.

Notes 1. Daniel Mendelsohn quoted in an interview with Marie Tetzlaff (2012). My translation from the Danish back into the original English (after consultation with the interviewer). 2. Some of the more influential contributions to this debate have been those of Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fischer (1986). A sizeable list of other early contributions to the debate can be found in a 1989 article on “the postmodernist turn in anthropology” (Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen: 7–8n). Here Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen discussed “this profoundly self-reflexive moment in anthropology” from a feminist perspective and in terms of what they called a “new ethnography.” 3. It is debatable whether this self-reflexive turn in ethnography should be regarded as “postmodern”—or rather “high-modern,” as ethnographer Robert Pool (1991) has argued. 4. For example, irony, which, particularly in postmodern semantics, may be associated with a “multivocal instability” at the expense of univocal social commitments (Hutcheon 1995:28). “The semantic or evaluative happening called irony” (ibid.: 152) is also associated with the postmodern writings of Jacques Derrida (Cixous 2005). 5. For example, Michael Taussig (1987, 1997) may be considered thus. 6. “La possibilité meme de la vie parce que refusant le mensonge d’une vérité qui s’imposerait comme sens absolu.” 7. The compilation of Jewish orally transmitted law relating mainly to Temple rituals and ritual law, which was written down from around 200 CE. Cf. Rubenstein 2003. 8. Cf. Victor Turner’s concept of “anti-structure” (1969). 9. “La situation d’un sens donné une fois pour toutes.” 10. This latter formulation is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of Marcel Proust (1964), but also draws upon Anne Harrington’s work on Holism as “reenchanted science” (1996) and my own ethnographic research in Holistic cultural movements (Salamon 2000). 11. However, there may be several exceptions to this, for example Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of montage as an aesthetic system, deriving from a seemingly metaphysical understanding of art as mediator between body and cosmos (Bulgakowa 2001: 45). 12. From Greek syntaxis—putting together in order; from syntassein—to put in order (synmeans together) (Harper 2001). 13. “A term used to describe a collection of sub-genres of electronic music, usually characterized by the use of a non-straightened 4/4 drum pattern (as opposed to the steady beat of house or trance). These rhythms may be characterized by their intensive use of syncopation and polyrhythms” (Anonymous Wiki 2010). 14. The connection between sampling and Public Enemy’s 1988 text has already been made by Gitlestad 2005, in a discussion (in Norwegian) of intellectual property and “culture jamming.” Gitlestad does not mention montage in his discussion.

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15. In ethnographic context the expression “matter out of place” was coined by Mary Douglas: “If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. . . . Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system” (2002: 44). 16. The term symptomatic reading is derived from Althusser, who quoted Spinoza’s proposition for “a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate” (Assiter 1984: 287), referring to a form of interpretation where the text’s true meaning, determining structures, and clues must be searched in what it does not explicate—so to say between the lines: in its gaps, exclusions, and disruptions. This opacity of the immediate also resonates with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic readings.

References Anonymous Wiki. 2010. “Breakbeat.” Available online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakbeat (accessed 10 March 2010). Assiter, Alison. 1984. “Althusser and Structuralism.” The British Journal of Sociology 35(2): 272–96. Barthes, Roland. 1973. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil. Benjamin, Walter. 1950. Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Fassung letzer Hand). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Brewer, Jonathan. 2012. “Copyright Controversy over Bird Songs Highlights Flaws of Automated Content ID Systems.” The IPLJ Blog, The Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal (March 14). Available online at iplj.net/blog/archives/4482 (accessed 28 March 2012). Bulgakowa, Oksana. 2001. “The Evolving Eisenstein: Three Theoretical Constructs of Sergei Eisenstein.” In Eisenstein at 100: A Reconsideration, eds. Al Lavalley Al and B. P. Scherr, 38–51. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2005. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. New York: Columbia University Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Thomas S. 2009. “What True Project has been Lost? Modern Art and Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life.” In Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross, 65-79. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1964. Marcel Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Douglas, Mary. 2002 [1966]. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. Ellenberg, Eytan. 2005. “The Ethical Approach to the Caress at the End of Life.” European Journal of Palliative Care 12(4): 160–62. Fremer, Michael. 2005. “Veteran Recording Engineer Roy Halee On Recording Simon and Garfunkel and Others—Part I.” Michael Fremer’s MusicAngle (July 1). Available online at www.musicangle.com/feat.php?id=96 (accessed 26 March 2012). Gitlestad, Geir. 2005. “Kunst/tyveri: Sampling.” In Jam. Oslo: Adbusters & Riksutstillinger. Goldman, Jane. 2009. “Avant-garde.” In Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross. London: Routledge. Harper, Douglas. 2001. Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at etymonline.com (accessed 16 August 2009). Harrington, Anne. 1996. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Highmore, Ben. 2009. “Disdained everyday fields—response to Thomas S. Davis.” In Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross, 80–86. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 1995. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge.

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Jennings, Michael. 2004. “Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-garde.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, 18–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klapholz, Jesse. 1986. “The History and Development of Microphones,” Sound & Communications Magazine (September), republished with permission by Vintage Broadcast Microphones. Available online at k-bay106.com/history.htm (accessed 26 March 2012). Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Le temps et l’autre. Paris: Fata Morgana. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer, eds. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mascia-Lees, Frances E., Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen. 1989. “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15(1): 7–33. McHenry, Patrick J. 2005. “Vanguard Assemblages: New Media and the Enthymeme.” Kritikos: an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image 2 (September) ISSN 1552-5112. Available online at intertheory.org/mchenry .htm# (accessed 12 March 2012). Miner, Horace. 1956. “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58: 503–7. Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. 1992. Lire aux éclats: Éloge de la caresse. Paris: Quai Voltaire/EDIMA. ———. 1995 [1986]. The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pensky, Max. 2004. “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, 177–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pool, Robert. 1991. “Postmodern Ethnography?” Critique of Anthropology 11(4): 309–31. Public Enemy. 1988. It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. New York: Def Jam/ Columbia. Lyrics available online at publicenemy.com/index.php?page=page5&item=9 &num=47 (accessed 16 July 2009). Richter, Gerhard. 2004. “Acts of Self-Portraiture: Benjamin’s Confessional and Literary Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, 221-237. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubenstein, Jeffrey L. 2003. The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Salamon, Karen Lisa. 2000. “No Borders in Business: The Management Discourse of Organisational Holism.” In Cultural Capitalism: Politics after New Labour, eds. Timothy Bewes and J. Gilbert. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 2009. “En etnografisk montage om huses lokale kultur og forankring.” Copenhagen: Huse i Danmark, ISSN nr. 1 399-9479. ———. 2010. “Bro over tid og grænse: En montage.” In Regionauterna: Öresundsregionen från vision till vardag, eds. Orvar Löfgren and Fredrik Nilsson, 199–213. Stockholm: Makadam Förlag. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge. Tetzlaff, Marie. 2012. “Daniel Mendelsohns fornemmelse for tab.” Politiken, section 4, 31 March, 8–9. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Co. Wilde, Holland. 2009. “Cultural Farming and Montage.” Cultural Farming blog (June). Available online at culturalfarming.com/home/Montage.html (accessed 27 March 2012).

PART III

Montage in Film Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev

In his article from 1994, George Marcus addresses the paradox that whereas ethnographic writers since the 1980s have been experimenting with various forms of montage (see especially Taussig 1986), ethnographic filmmakers seem mainly to regard montage techniques as something to be avoided or at least kept at a minimum. The consequence of this is, in Marcus’s view, that most ethnographic films simply end up as case studies “messier and truer than writing,” which at their best can “confirm an insight, argument, or ethnographic commonsense that has been established through writing” (1994: 38). As Catherine Russell (chapter 10) shows, the caution observed by many ethnographic filmmakers appears paradoxical, since montage is a necessary and inseparable part of any form of cinema. Taking a comparative historical view on early Soviet, Japanese, and American filmmaking, Russell reveals how montage techniques from the very advent of cinema have been of key importance in the formation of modern, urban life. We find perhaps the most evocative example of cinematic industrial euphoria in a series of manifestos by early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, in which he seeks to eliminate the divisions between man and machine by means of montage. He names the end product the “new electric man,” an amalgam of man and new technology: “I am kino-eye. From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head—and through montage I create a new, perfect man” (1984: 17). In this environment of novel physical structures and modes of expression, “new electric men” and perhaps most significantly “new electric women” were born and shaped. If the city was seen as the primal site of montage, the female consumer and producer emerged, as Russell points out, as the prime embodiment of the city. Montage, therefore, is not an innocent practice. As she argues, “The New Woman invented within the phantasmagoria of the cinematic city in Japan and Hollywood—and indeed the Soviet Union—was a production of the contradictions and social tensions of the era.” Montage (and the multiple perspectives it afforded) was a key vehicle for the production of these novel subjectivities. Montage, in other words, is never just about representing the world, but about recreating it in hitherto unseen forms and shapes. While cinematic montage played a crucial role in the formation of contemporary urban life worlds, it may also provide key tools for the anthropological analysis of these same worlds. Thus, Marcus (1994) points to our present-day entanglement in global cultural processes as a kind of invisibility that is difficult to represent via the long unobtrusive takes of observational cinema. Parallel editing, he suggests, may be a method of “setting the scene objectively” so as to reflect the reality

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of the contemporary global world (1994: 48). More recently, Wilma Kiener (2008: 394) has echoed this argument by pointing out how “editing solves the problem of showing what—while being absent—is a necessary part of the whole.” Montage, she argues, “make[s] visible [the] social and psychological effects of the globalizing and the postcolonial world” (2006: 3). Thus, for these scholars, the simultaneity of global cultural processes is a form of invisibility that can be addressed through the use of montage. Julia Binter (chapter 10) takes a comparative look at two recent applications of montage that both draw on the heritage of Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein to expose our embeddedness in global cultural processes. The films discussed are Michael Glawogger’s experimental documentary Megacities (1998) and Timo Novotny’s Life in Loops (2006), a subsequent remix of Glawogger’s original film footage. Even though both films utilize the same footage, they do so in highly different ways. Glawogger’s original montage starts with a series of portraits of people living in diverse cultural and social contexts around the globe. However, in the end, the apparent differences serve, through filmic comparison, to show Glawogger’s ideals about a shared humanity. Novotny starts his film where Glawogger ends, namely by merging all cultural and social differences into a paste of transcultural human likeness. Yet contrary to the pan-human ethical framework of Glawogger’s film, Novotny’s technique of blurring geographical borders and blending them into undifferentiated sameness ends up highlighting radical cultural difference. Binter’s key issue about how access to the significant Other of anthropology can be obtained is a recurrent theme throughout this book. Contrary to the claim of observational cinema that the undisturbed image offers privileged access to human commonalities (MacDougall 1998: 252), Binter points to the fact that experimental films, drawing heavily on disruptive montage, can also offer views into human life beyond cultural differences. Importantly, however, this is done at a price, namely the downplaying of the other’s difference that could just as easily have been highlighted even using the same footage. To evoke experiences of transcultural sameness or radical impermeable otherness seems to rely heavily on authorial choice. Binter’s comparison of the two films illustrates how montage in all forms of filmmaking is never value free, but is inseparable from political agendas and ideology. Alyssa Grossman’s Lumina Amintirii (2011) is a film about Romanians’ fragmented and multilayered memories of the communist past. In chapter 11, Grossman discusses her approach to ethnographic film montage, which combines an observational sensibility with powerful rupturing effects. Memory, as the invisible, is for Grossman understood as a perceptual impossibility: although densely filled with visuality and other sense impressions, memory as such is impossible to grasp directly. Hence, Grossman employs montage techniques to prevent the viewer from being absorbed into the limited actuality of each film shot. In this pursuit, Grossman raises a critique against the subject-centered approach of observational cinema. Rather than “letting viewers see for themselves” (Loizos 1992: 54) as has been the continued slogan in visual anthropology, Grossman systematically attempts to decenter the viewer from the actual observational scene. This does not, however, imply any advanced or fast-paced montage technique. Quite to the contrary, she lets the viewers be absorbed into each film shot, only then to take it away, so that the actuality felt is replaced by a sense of the ephemeral nature of memory. Approaching memory for Grossman thus involves giving up any hope of

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representing it directly. Only through visual absence can its elusive texture expand in our imagination. Jakob Kirstein Høgel (chapter 12) also launches a critique of current documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. Trained as a visual anthropologist but working in the film industry, he is puzzled by the way realist ethnographic filmmakers use narrative structures from mainstream documentary as the key analytic principle in their films. According to Høgel, this approach is highly limiting in that it puts disproportionate emphasis on the consequent actions of individual characters at the expense of broader perspectives on the social structures in which actions are embedded. This obsession with individual agency is for Høgel no less reductive and manipulative than the most disruptive forms of montage. Rather than trying to do what film professionals do better, ethnographic filmmakers should develop new forms of intellectual filmmaking by returning to the traditional classificatory exercise of anthropology. Høgel does not find that radical montage as proposed by the early Russian filmmakers is a viable alternative to realist storytelling. Instead he points to the possibilities in databasing for developing multiple and open-ended systems of cinematic classification that allow for a greater proximity between theoretical elaboration and representational structure. Several authors in this volume show considerable dissatisfaction with the prevalent realism in visual anthropology. Since ethnographic filmmakers seldom describe themselves as realists, it is often unclear what exactly their realism consists in. To their defense, Anna Grimshaw (chapter 13) points out that critics often conflate what has come to be known as the observational approach with a one-eyed, naïve realism that simply takes as its truth whatever can be recorded by a camera. If observational cinema can be said to be realist, it is rather in the ethical sense of “showing respect for, complying with, or having humility toward the real.” The fact that observational filmmakers tend to be cautious with manipulative cinematic devices does not imply that they reject montage altogether. “Evaluating observational for what it is rather than what it is not” is for Grimshaw a necessary starting point for a discussion “that moves beyond the predictable equation—‘montage/good,’ ‘realism/bad.’” Here she points to the fact that the subtle forms of montage in observational cinema at times produce effects that are much more powerful than films that rely on fast-paced, deconstructive montage. Among other films, Grimshaw highlights To Live with Herds (MacDougall 1972) and Sheep Rushes (Barbash and Castaing-Taylor 2008), which are marked by subtle yet very effective forms of montage.

References Barbash, Ilisa, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. 2008. Sheep Rushes. Video installation. New York: The Amie and Tony James Gallery, City University of New York. Glawogger, Michael. 1998. Megacities. 90 min. Wien: Lotus Film, Fama Film. Grossman, Alyssa. 2010. Lumina Amintirii. 40 min. Manchester: Granada Center for Visual Anthropology. Kiener, Wilma. 2006. “Traveling Images: Towards an Ethnographic Cinema of Montage.” Paper presented at Colloque du Cinéma Ethnographique à l’Anthropologie Visuelle, Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Available online at www.comitedufilmethnographique.com/wpcontent/uploads/2012/07/kiener.pdf (accessed 15 September 2009). Kiener, Wilma. 2008. “The Absent and the Cut.” Visual Anthropology 21: 393–409.

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Loizos, Peter. 1992. “Admissible Evidence? Film in Anthropology.” In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 50–65. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, David and Judith. 1972. To Live with Herds. 70 min. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles / Rice University Media Center. Marcus, George E. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 37–53. New York and London: Routledge. Novotny, Timo. 2006. Life in Loops: A Megacities RMX. 97 min. Wien: Ulrich Gehmacher, Orbrock Filmproduktion GmbH, Timo Novotny inLoops. Taussig, Michael. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vertov, Dziga. 1984. “Kinoks: A Revolution.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, 11–20. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 9

Women in Cities Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930s Catherine Russell

The role of montage in cinema is in many ways inseparable from the role of the archive. The assembly of shots in a film—or in any audio-visual work—is the result of a selection of shots, rushes, found footage, photography, and sounds by the filmmaker who works from their own collection of “rushes” or digital files, and also from the vast history of cinema that digital media is rendering more and more accessible and available for reproduction. My work in film history is cued by Walter Benjamin’s invitation to “carry over the principle of montage into history” (1999: 461) by bringing together disparate images and films from the archive into what he would call a “constellation.” The utopian thrust of montage was most prevalent in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the surrealists, the Soviet filmmakers, and directors in Hollywood and Japan embraced the exciting potential of new technologies and newfound energies of juxtaposition, contradiction, and dynamic shifts in perspective. At the same time, these techniques of montage enabled new means of depicting the increasing visual presence of women in cities, but they did so in culturally specific ways. Through a critical juxtaposition of examples from the Soviet, American, and Japanese cinemas of the period, it should become clear how “montage” was couched in the terms of everyday life and urban experience. Its utopian potential was predicated on its coextensive role in the consolidation of mass culture, the implementation of social controls, and the gendered forms of visual culture. Benjamin developed his most extensive thinking on montage in his terminally incomplete Arcades Project, assembled as a montage of quotations, fragments, and thoughts culled from the labyrinthine archive of the Bibliotheque Nationale. His ostensible subject, Paris of the nineteenth century, became the template for his own cross-referenced, multilayered, multilingual methodology. Indeed, it is the city itself that arguably inspired Benjamin, along with his modernist contemporaries in literature, art photography, and film, to realize the potential of montage to unsettle conventions of realist representation, historiography, and anthropology. In James Clifford’s critical analysis of the “art-culture system” of collecting, collections, and collectors, his discussion turns to New York as experienced by Claude Levi-Strauss in 1941. Levi-Strauss found the collage-like mix of cultural forms and histories to be at once provocative and inspiring, but also symptomatic of the increasing cultural homogeneity of urban modernity. Clifford argues that “the chronotope of New York supports a global allegory of fragmentation and ruin” (1988: 244).

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The city is thus the primal site of montage, the assembly of views in which the old and the new coexist. If Levi-Strauss was preoccupied with the losses and ruins of modernity exemplified by the metropolis and its museological entombment of the past, Benjamin embraced the spark of the new alongside the transience of decay on display in the modern city. For feminist film scholars, the woman in the city in the first decades of the twentieth century was a global novelty. The phantasmagoria of fashion and visual style produced a culture of mobility and shifting identities in which the New Woman was integrated, implemented, and even produced within the montage of views that was (and is) the urban environment. Film and photography, along with magazines and display windows, framed and objectified women within the visual language of modernity, but also addressed women as consumers. This chapter is an investigation into the cinematic archive, a retrieval and juxtaposition of several different views of modernity. New Women appeared in a variety of modernities in international cinema. Film traveled around the world as part of the creation of cosmopolitan global modernities, even while it was configured very differently in Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. New Women were media constructions, and endemic to the rise of mass media. The fashions, behaviors, moralities, and lifestyles associated with them are part of the phantasmagoria of modernity, constructed from the anxieties and desires of both men and women in these different locales. The global circulation of cinema entailed a shared discourse on gender across cultural divides; at the same time, different film languages were developed out of different social formations. In the Soviet Union, theories and practices of montage were developed in the 1920s in conjunction with the Utopian aspirations of the revolution. In the United States, the late 1920s and early 1930s saw the consolidation of a film industry built around a restricted use of montage designed to make itself invisible. In Japan, however, filmmakers during this period drew from both the Hollywood and Soviet models, as well as indigenous cultural forms. Avant-gardist elements were integrated into genre-based stories drawn from popular culture and appealing to local urban audiences. The modernist oppositions between narrative realism and Brechtian reflexivity did not have the same significance in Japan, due to the different construction of modernity in Japan. The example of montage in Japan is therefore important because it challenges the cultural and aesthetic values attributed to the film technique that can be too easily taken for granted.

Vertov, Gender, and the Modern Phantasmagoria By now I think we can agree that the woman in the city figured within a global spectrum of film practice in the early 1930s, and she was intimately linked to a new way of perceiving space as the cinema became implanted in cities over the first three decades of the twentieth century (Friedberg 1993; Russell 2002). Miriam Hansen’s introduction of the concept of “vernacular modernism” to film studies has provided an important discursive frame for the rethinking of the role of cinema in the construction of global modernity. By recognizing popular narrative cinema as a medium of sensual, novel experiences and aesthetic vocabularies, she points to the way that “new subjectivities” emerged in interwar cinema. Hansen discusses the heroines of Shanghai cinema of the 1930s (2000: 16), and several other scholars have elaborated on the construction of the New Woman in Asian cinemas of the

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1930s (Bao 2005; Kinoshita 2005; Wada Marciano 2008; Zhang 2005). In my own recent work, I argue that the modernity of the Japanese director Naruse Mikio is not only a question of formal innovation, but also pertains to the novelty of his female protagonists and their stories, which are consistently tied to urban space, commodity culture and the phantasmagoria of fashion and visual style (Russell 2008). The comparative method of this chapter is part of a larger project of theorizing twentieth-century narrative cinema as a mode of cultural anthropology. The role of montage in this exploration is threefold. First of all, the shifting perspectives afforded by urban transportation and architecture were appropriated by cinema stylists in many ways in the early 1930s. As a cinematic technique, montage enabled documentarians, Hollywood productions, and the avant-garde to reconfigure relations of time and space. Secondly, montage can also refer to the techniques and practices of censorship through the addition and removal of visual imagery. The period in question, the early 1930s, was a time when institutional authorities, alongside artists and filmmakers, mastered the art of montage as a mode of social control. Thirdly, the techniques of cutting and pasting, or visual editing, enable critical juxtapositions of coeval modernities. Such techniques played a key role in the 1930s, and they are readily available to us now in the form of digital media. Montage in this sense becomes a function of the archive and its ongoing reconfiguration of the phantasmagoria of modernity. Perhaps the best-known utopian version of the interwar city film is Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which was made under the sign of a new and improved technological form of perception. Vertov insisted that the kino-eye could see better than the human eye, and by that he meant his entire apparatus of shooting and editing. Montage in Man with a Movie Camera is a means of seeing what Vertov describes in one of his manifestos as “a new world unknown to you” (1984: 18). The city in this case is a collage of three different Soviet cities collapsed into one vertiginous urban metropolis. Despite his utopian manifestos, Vertov’s mechanical eye in the film itself remains attached to some familiar cultural patterns of representation. The opening sequence of the film, for example, features a woman waking and dressing. Shots of her body—her arm, finger, neckline, top of her head, arms, back, and eye—are intercut with various other, unrelated images (see figures 9.1 and 9.2).

Figures 9.1–2. Screenshots from Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).

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As she wakes up and dresses, Michael Kauffman, the cameraman, risks his life for a stunning shot of a railway train passing over his head. Meanwhile, the woman’s body serves as an allegory for the rising city. The fastening of bra and stockings are synecdochically linked to the machine of the new city. Her blinking eye is cut with the opening and closing of shutters, and finally, with the camera shutter itself. As Patrice Petro has argued about representations of Berlin during the Weimar period, the female figure serves as a metaphor for the seductive thrill of the modern city for many male writers and artists (1989: 41). Thus, even in his revolutionary modality, Vertov underscores a fundamental trope of the late silent city film. Other sequences throughout the film feature women exercising, showering, and bathing in various stages of undress, providing a titillating image for the heroic cameraman who collects a dizzying assortment of views of the city. However, my point is not to take Vertov to task for sexual exploitation, but simply to recognize this canonical sequence in this canonical film as emblematic of the role of the female body in the new structures of perception at work in the city film of the late silent cinema. The woman who is voyeuristically viewed waking and dressing is clearly a working woman in keeping with the gender politics of Vertov’s social utopianism. Vertov’s wife Svilova appears in the film later on working at her viewing machine, cutting, freezing, and speeding up the strips of film that compose the film she herself is in. And yet the role of the waking woman within the industrialized city and the film’s celebration of cinematic technology is as image and spectacle, a symbolic image of the waking city, before she is subject of vision. Vertov’s method has become a model of sorts for the theorization of experimental ethnography. David Tomas, for example, says that “Vertov’s unusual model of collective observation and cinematic manufacture remain, to this day, one of the few coordinated attempts to design a ‘social technology of observation’ that could account for an expanding media culture while retaining a tactical political and social ‘situational reflexivity’” (1994: 272). Vertov’s theory and practice draws attention to film as a mode of production. Not only were they reflexive challenges to the norms of continuity editing, Vertov’s techniques were designed to find a truth value in the cinematic interval between shots. Trinh T. Minh-ha has recognized Vertov’s theory of the interval as a valuable tool of visual anthropology, noting that “such a mode of filmmaking” relies “for its meaning and emotional impact, on each distinct image—not in itself in isolation, but in its full interaction with all the other images selected” (1999: xii). Trinh herself develops the Vertovian principle of montage into a theory of the interval, drawing on music theory to explore the potential for a poststructural, postcolonial, mode of ethnographic representation. Man with a Movie Camera combines documentary and experimental techniques for a feature designed to jettison all the trappings of theater—without scenario, sets, or actors. But Vertov was not able to overcome an element that Walter Benjamin recognized as key to the cinematic effect: that of performance (2008: 30). Kauffman, the cameraman, no less than the woman waking and dressing, may not be an actor, but that doesn’t mean he is not performing. For Benjamin, film performance constituted an emblematic ongoing encounter between man and machine, the assertion of humanity against the apparatus. Like Vertov, he understood montage as the best technique to allow the rags, the refuse, the material of the everyday, to “come into their own” (1999: 460). In film performance, montage denotes the fragmentation of gesture by which the actor triumphs over the machine (2008: 31).

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From our perspective, Vertov’s distinction between fictional and observational cinemas cannot be sustained, and it is equally true that the fiction films of the period lend themselves to documentary analysis. The global cycle of women-inthe-city films, including Hollywood alongside Japanese genre films, constructed a visible space through which “new women” emerged in the late silent / early sound years of the early 1930s. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, the analysis of this cycle of films points to the construction of a shared terrain of modernity. The cinematic phantasmagoria constituted an international dreamscape that was at once liberating and threatening, inspiring censorship along with imitation. In my view, an anthropology of mass media must acknowledge the role of cinema in the dream life of modernity, or as Benjamin put it, in the potential for awakening from the long sleep of capitalist ideology. It is Benjamin’s surrealist methodology that I want to invoke in the following comparative study of American and Japanese modernities. Vertov’s experimental use of montage was deemed by the Soviet authorities to be inaccessible to the general public, and so his revolutionary practice remained outside the domain of popular culture and was screened only to the cinephiliac elite—in the USSR and internationally. We need to turn to the more commercially viable forms of cinema for a better understanding of the role of montage for the production of the New Woman. The revolutionary and Utopian potential that Vertov and his Soviet contemporaries saw in cinematic montage was played out rather differently in the United States and Japan, but in all three national cinemas we find the woman inscribed in urban space through various narrative and technical means. The interval becomes a space for the emergence of female subjectivity when montage effects are used in melodramatic and popular-cultural texts. Narrative cinema of this period was often also a language of the city, set within its architectures, social networks, and intersections. The woman in Tokyo and the woman in New York are both cinematic, mediated women, productions of film culture even while—following Vertov’s methodology—they are also actors who are “bits of real energy . . . joined through intervals into a techtonic whole by the great craft of montage” (1984: 20). Drawing on Benjamin’s methodology of dialectical optics, in which the present constitutes the foreground for a reconfigured historical perspective on modernity, I want to compare the different modernities that coexisted in 1933 pre-code Hollywood cinema and the late silent cinema of early 1930s Japan. I take my cue from a scene in Naruse Mikio’s 1934 film, Street Without End, in which the characters go to the movies and see The Smiling Lieutenant by Ernst Lubtisch, from 1931, starring Maurice Chevalier and Miriam Hopkins.1 The inclusion of an American sound film within a Japanese silent film is indicative of the unevenness of modernity. Lubitsch was a very popular director in Japan and many directors were arguably influenced by his light romantic comedies. The clip that Naruse appropriates from The Smiling Lieutenant is a severely cut up version of the original, in which he retains the gestures of romantic game playing but leaves out any and all suggestions of sexuality. In 1933 Japan, some but not all theaters were equipped for sound, and even fewer studios, so the talkie was by and large still associated with foreign films, the vehicles of a host of new behaviors, styles, and activities. It is important to recognize that Naruse’s own film practice, and the material culture and more immaterial negotiation of values and desires that it portrays, is itself a production of Japanese modernity. This cultural formation—Japanese Modernity—is a hybrid of local and global forms (Sakai 1997; Miyoshi 1991; Wada-

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Marciano 2008), and I am interested in setting it side by side with a canonical American film from the period to see whether the latter can be illuminated by the former. Through montage, can we disrupt the dominant cultural flow of modernity from West to East and think about it as a more cosmopolitan, coeval, global phantasmagoria? The early 1930s in Hollywood is a period known as “pre-code.” The American studios between 1930 and 1934 exploited the sensational and titillating effects of sex and violence with little to no regulation. The wildly eccentric films of the era constitute an anomaly in the history of Hollywood morality and for many years were pulled from distribution. Their “rediscovery” was stimulated with the 1999 publication of Thomas Doherty’s book Precode Hollywood and with the growing body of work available on DVD. Baby Face (Alfred E. Green) is a 1933 pre-code potboiler in which Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way up the corporate ladder. It may seem an odd choice to compare with Japanese cinema of this era, which was still more than twenty years from its first kiss. The parameters of the New Woman in the United States and Japan certainly differed greatly, but despite the unevenness of modernity, I would like to compare the use of visual style in the construction of these New Women to show how new modes of the feminine, or “new subjectivities,” are produced within cinematic space. In both Tokyo and Hollywood, the female figure moves through a complex pattern of urban space, architectural kitsch, and cinematic technique. It is a “familiar” cinematic construct, even if it is a fantastic and otherworldly space, a transformative version of the everyday. It is precisely in its status as phantasmagoria that I want to explore this space and its relation to narrative. The phantasmagoria was Benjamin’s term for the dreamworld of commodity capitalism as he saw it manifest in the display culture of the Paris Arcades. The term is drawn from a proto-cinematic entertainment device of projected images, but Benjamin used it to refer more broadly to the production of illusion that contained its own key to demystification. The phantasmagoria is at once a utopian dreamworld and the recognition of its impossibility and even its danger. While there is certainly some critical debate around this concept, I find the term to be a particularly useful way of referring to narrative cinema that tends toward self-critique.2 If we look at the cinema of the early 1930s as a mode of phantasmagoria, we can begin to see its kitschiness and triviality as a mode of instability and potential critique. In both Japan and Hollywood, the economic depression spawned a nascent form of social criticism and class consciousness. Miriam Hansen has argued that we need to rethink film classicism as a mode of modernity (2000: 335), and nowhere is this more true than in the convergence of the modern and the classical that is found on both sides of the Pacific during this period. If on the Hollywood side this takes Baroque forms of excess, sensationalism, and critique, in Japan it takes the form of an uneasy embrace of American forms. Thomas Doherty describes pre-code Hollywood as being “on the cusp” of the classical (1999: 1), and I would say much the same thing about the Japanese cinema of this period, as it was in the process of being consolidated into a coherent industrial style. My comparison of Japanese and Hollywood films will necessarily confirm the unevenness of modernity; but in their points of contact, the comparison should also suggest how modernity theory can help us rethink film history as a synchronic and global practice. In film studies, the Japanese cinema of the early 1930s has been positioned as a radical alternative to the institutional style of seamless narrativity that had been

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consolidated in Hollywood by this time. In addition to some use of continuity editing, Japanese directors such as Ozu and Naruse used montage as a more dynamic visual device, punctuating narrative with discontinuous inserts and editing dialogue with surprising angles and camera movements. And yet, while their stylistic use of film technique is reminiscent of the European avant-garde, their films adhered in many ways to the genre and narrative conventions of the American cinema, as these directors developed a popular national cinema. As I have argued elsewhere, their radicalism was not in countering Hollywood, but in adapting its modern values, aesthetic vocabulary, and technical proficiency to the depiction of everyday life in Japan (Russell 2008). They borrowed from both the avant-garde and from Hollywood to create texts that are often evocative of surrealist aesthetics precisely in their embrace of kitsch alongside art cinema. In a groundbreaking study of Japanese cinema published in 1979, Noel Burch analyzed the idiosyncratic editing patterns of pre-war Japanese cinema in terms of a “refusal of certain norms of Western cinema, [and] a budding sense of formalization based in the Western manner, on a transgression of norms” (1979: 191). He demonstrated how the “presentational” style of Japanese cinema related to traditional arts and theatre practices. He also admitted, “what was a mass cultural attitude in Japan was a deeply subversive vanguard practice in the Occident” (1979: 115), but he nevertheless insisted on the Brechtian, anti-bourgeois reading of Japanese montage as a critique of the normative transparency (“representational” style) of the dominant American editing patterns. Subsequent film historians have pointed out that the cinema in question was not produced or consumed as transgressive or revolutionary in Japan. Its modernity encompassed a conservative ideology that, over the course of the 1930s, entailed the exclusion of traces of “Western” culture in the service of a pan-Asian imperialism—with of course devastating results for Japan and its colonial enterprise. Burch relied on abstract cultural oppositions between West and East, and overlooked actual historical relations of production and reception. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, for example, writes: “Even though the subject of his study is Japanese cinema, Burch does not show any specific interest in the ideological effect of Japanese and other cinemas in the context of Japanese society. . . . Burch’s study never considers the specificity of the institutional site of discourse” (2000: 21). The unusual use of montage and editing techniques in films by directors such as Ozu and Naruse needs to be positioned more closely to the construction of Japanese modernity. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano argues, Japanese cinema “needs to be articulated as a coherent aesthetic mode with practices of its own” (2008: 3). And it is not only in formal terms, but in terms of “the performative and experiential aspects of modernity’s transformations” (2008: 6). Montage in this sense is not only a technique of representation, but a sensual and experiential expression of the shocks and fragmentation of urban modernity. The critical shift from formalist modernist aesthetics to cultural modernity is most explicitly articulated—in both theory and practice—around the intersection of gender and the city.

Street without End: The Tokyo Café Waitress It is difficult to ascertain just how typical Naruse’s 1934 film Street without End is, given the paucity of surviving films from this period of Japanese cinema. I believe it shares certain features with many other Japanese and Chinese films of the early

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1930s, at least in terms of its use of public space as a key narrative locale and in its use of women’s melodrama. Sugiko, played by Setsuko Shinobu, is a café waitress in Ginza, which was at this time already a cosmopolitan high-fashion shopping and entertainment district in Tokyo (figure 9.3). In the film’s main storyline, Sugiko is hit by a car, and the rich man driving it marries her and takes her home to live with his wife and sister. While the story of the suffering daughter-in-law is a familiar Japanese narrative, in this film Sugiko takes the very unlikely and surprising turn of leaving the rich man and his family. She accuses her husband of being weak and refuses to stay by his side when he dies in hospital (from injuries sustained in another car accident). She finally walks out of her marriage and returns to the café. The multi-character narrative of Street without End is based on a popular newspaper serial by Kitamura Komatsu. What Naruse’s adaptation lacks in terms of character development and literary depth, it more than makes up for in its ethnographic depiction of the Ginza district. Naruse’s pacing is quick and vigorously punctuated with rapid camera movements and surprising cutaways, and includes a kind of documentary depiction of the street life of the city. After a montage of shots of different neighborhoods, the opening sequence moves through the Ginza streets, leading up to the café where Sugiko works. The camera appears to be mounted at first on a streetcar, filming the passing storefronts and buildings. The sequence continues with a montage of images of pedestrians and shop windows displaying jewelry, pastries, and other foreign goods for sale. The people include young and old, rich and poor, dressed in Japanese and Western clothing, most of whom are “extras” or non-characters who are never seen again in the film (figure 9.4). The sequence concludes with the street artist and his display of caricatures of people on the street in a grid-like pattern on an easel. One of the remarkable things about this opening sequence is how it evokes the intellectual project of Japanese modernity contemporaneous with the film. Miriam Silverberg describes this project as an “ongoing construction of a new culture shared by all but at the same time differentiated by gender and class” (1992: Figure 9.3. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934).

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Figure 9.4. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934).

31). She notes the influence of the Soviet avant-garde on Japanese graphics, and stresses the aspect of “construction” in the Japanese meaning of modernity. One of the principle ethnographic projects of the period was Kon Wajiro’s phenomenology of everyday life, in which he attempted to identify the elements that went into the construction of Japanese modernity, including the gender codes associated with modern Japanese men and women. In elaborately illustrated essays published in magazines such as Fujin koron and Modernologio, Kon detailed the items of dress, food, work, and play favored by people in different social sites, including the street, the home, and the workplace.3 Kon’s practice was devoted to “recording and composing continuously the manifestation of Tokyo as it is being made anew.” His method was to draw collage-like compositions of fragmentary details of everyday life. One of the emblematic figures of the period was the moga or “modern girl.” She was a complex figure, as much a media creation as anything else, who served as a kind of emblem of the transformative, feminizing effects of imported American culture. As H. D. Harootunian notes, the moga was an “overdetermined” figure: “The new roles assumed by women signaled, as nothing else, the changes beginning to take place in the world of modern experience… Overdetermination, which dominated the discourse on everydayness, was the sign of its historicity.” (2000: 117).4 However, the uniformed waitress of Street without End is neither a moga nor an old-fashioned homebound woman. As Silverberg has argued, the café waitress belonged to the new economy of the spectacle, and had a potential mobility within it (1991). As the opening montage of Street without End indicates with its shots of pastries and English signs, the film is set within a transformation of the everyday. Urban space is depicted laterally with camera movements aligned with the motion of streetcars, but also through the fragmentation of space according to the

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logic of shop windows and street portraiture. The intrinsic linking of the cinema and the city is thematized in the film through the narrative of a retiring movie star who needs to be replaced. The scene in which Sugiko and her rich fiancé go to the movies makes the link between the moga, the movies, and American culture, explicit. The scene opens with a blonde woman in a sequined evening gown (Miriam Hopkins) arguing with a man in an officer’s suit (Maurice Chevalier) (figure 9.5). They flirtatiously argue over a chessboard, and then the camera pulls back to show the film (The Smiling Lieutenant) being screened in a movie theater. A pan over the Japanese audience is followed by a quick exterior shot of the theater. Its modernist design is echoed in the subsequent shots in the lobby where Sugiko (dressed in kimono) and her husband Hiroshi meet a young woman in western dress who snobbishly accuses Hiroshi of marrying beneath his class (figure 9.6). This woman, accompanied by a friend in similar fashionable attire, is the film’s emblematic moga figure, Hiroshi’s former fiancé. She is clearly Sugiko’s nemesis, rendering her a traditional passive Japanese wife in comparison. By the end of the film, Sugiko demonstrates that modern attitudes of independence and self-willed agency are not necessarily tied to modern fashions. The Lubtisch film that Naruse quotes in this sequence has been severely edited, and has also been muted, with Japanese subtitles inscribed on the (sound) film within the (silent) film. In the original, the woman played by Miriam Hopkins kisses the man rather forwardly on the lips, saying “That’s me!” and “That’s me again!” In the Japanese version, the kissing is redacted entirely. Lubitsch’s scene ends with the chessboard being thrown onto a bed, with the couple following behind it. Naruse’s self-censorship omits the bed entirely, in keeping with Japanese moral codes of proper on-screen behavior. Techniques of montage enable a cultural juxtaposition that, in 1930s Japan, would have been astonishingly modern. Figure 9.5. Screenshot from The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931) quoted in Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934).

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Figure 9.6. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934).

And yet this “modernity” is also constructed through montage as the coextensive technique of cutting out. The New Woman invented within the phantasmagoria of the cinematic city in Japan and Hollywood—and indeed the Soviet Union—was a production of the contradictions and social tensions of the era. The multiple perspectives afforded by cinematic montage become a key vehicle for this production. Woman as spectacle confronted herself over and over again as agent and active subject. Narrative thematics of marriage and romance provide the framework for containment; and yet the dialectical optics of historical montage enable a historical awakening from such genre conventions. We can recognize them for what they are. In some cases, we can even see the mechanisms of censorship at work and re-view the films of the past within their larger institutional contexts of repression and recutting.

Baby Face: The New York Gold Digger The politics of containment are exemplified by the production history and censorship of Baby Face. The film is notorious for its depiction of a hardnosed gold digger who manages to seduce the entire male hierarchy of a New York trust company, one floor at a time. She finally ends up with the handsome young owner of the whole company. In the original version, the film ends with Stanwyck and her banker husband kissing in an ambulance (figure 9.7). He has just attempted suicide after the bank’s collapse, and she has rushed home to save him, choosing love, finally, over money in a somewhat abrupt change of heart. In the coda added by the Hays office before the film was released in 1933, the couple is banished to Erie, Pennsylvania, as they have given all their money to save the bank from collapse. This coda, however, includes no image of

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Figure 9.7. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933).

Stanwyck, who was unavailable for retakes, and thus escapes the added-on punishment (figure 9.8). Despite the changes made by the Hays office, Baby Face was pulled from distribution quite quickly, and did not resurface until the 1990s when the Hollywood vaults began to circulate on video. The uncut version was found in the Library of Congress in 2004 and Turner Classic Movies has repackaged the film in its two versions for contemporary viewers on DVD. We now have the opportunity to see the Stanwyck character motivated by a Nietzsche-quoting mentor urging her to use all her seductive charms to achieve power over men. We can also see her sans Nietzsche, simply doing it in a crafty manipulative way. The threat posed by Figure 9.8. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933).

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a woman infiltrating the corporate world through sex appeal is of course highly contradictory—and symptomatic of depression-era America. As Richard Maltby argues, Baby Face blames the permissiveness of the jazz age for the collapse of the economy (1998: 169); at the same time, the Hollywood industry of the period exploited the image of fetishized sexuality to the fullest extent, and so we see in the two versions the woman both being punished and getting away with it. The arbitrary tacked-on punishment becomes a transparent and ineffective narrative solution to a deeply contradictory text. The story of Baby Face is on one level a kind of parody of the upward mobility narrative that so many Hollywood films engage with. The film was shot entirely in studio sets that construct a fantasy version of New York dominated by art-deco skyscrapers. The Gotham Trust Co. is depicted as an ersatz Rockefeller Center with signs in the windows tracking Lily’s (Stanwyck) vertical movement through the business, from personnel department, to filing, to mortgages (figure 9.9). The camera movements up the building’s facade culminate toward the end of the film in an elegant crane shot from street level to the penthouse apartment where Lily is comfortably ensconced within the art-deco glamour of fashion, architecture, and interior design. The seamlessness of Hollywood continuity editing enables a penetration of the window, not unlike Vertov’s kino-eye transcending the limits of human vision. Among other things, Baby Face illustrates the playfulness of cinematic style in Hollywood that is often overlooked by theorists of its heterogeneity. The vertical camera movements incorporate the montage-like structure of urban architecture, in which each window opens onto another level of class hierarchy commensurate with an idealized corporate structure. The sequence of men that Lily seduces represents, in turn, a movement from working-class accents and style to the aris-

Figure 9.9. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933).

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tocratic summit of the penthouse. The parody of the gold digger is thus a parody of capitalism as an erotic pyramid scheme (figure 9.10). Barbara Stanwyck’s performance is key to the film’s production of the New Woman. Baby Face was inspired by the success of MGM’s Red-Headed Woman of 1932, which made comedy out of the melodramatic kept-woman cycle (Maltby 1998: 172; Doherty 1999: 134). Jean Harlow sleeps her way to the top in that film, and ends up living in luxury in Paris. Her performance, however, is brash and exaggerated, and her character is a hard-hearted home wrecker. Stanwyck’s character, on the other hand, is more hard working and subtle in her conniving manipulation of men. She not only sleeps her way to the top, she also works her way up, learning how to read mortgages and speak French as she moves up from one office to another. The “problem” the film created for the Hays office was not completely solved by the cutting-out and cutting-in of shots by the censors. Techniques of continuity editing enabled audiences to identify with the dynamic heroine through reversefield cutting, among other devices. No tacked-on punishment could completely erase the vision of Stanwyck’s seductive performance. In its multiple versions, Baby Face seems to finally resist ideological readings, and provides more of an illustration of the construction of female subjectivity in the language of early 1930s cinematic technique. It is really as an archival film, viewed from our own present, that Baby Face can be compared to its contemporary Japanese films, as I am not making any claims about it having a direct influence on Japanese cinema. I very much doubt that it would have been released there, given its dubious morality. The American pre-code films of the 1930s clearly influenced each other, producing cycles of films with repeated motifs, themes, and settings that cannot quite be accounted for by genre theory. Moreover, these cycles seem to belong specifically to a certain period in modern history when the market collapse, the rapid expansion of mass media, and the emergence of new forms of government converged into an uneven and unpredictable social formation on both sides of the Pacific. The big city–small town division, along with the pervasive imagery of the Figure 9.10. Screenshot from Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933).

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corporate boardroom, the boxcar, and the fur fashions are all familiar motifs of the era, along with the narrative situations of shopgirls, kept women, and fallen women. These are as familiar in Japanese as in American cinema of the early 1930s. The pervasive misogyny and racism that informs both the Japanese and the American cinemas of the era cannot be redeemed, but these ideologies can always be better understood as elements of a dynamic and contradictory phantasmagoria.

Conclusion The comparison of Japanese and Hollywood cinemas of the 1930s is not meant to determine any scope of influence, which undoubtedly flowed in only one direction. Naruse’s 1935 film Wife! Be Like a Rose! was one of only two Japanese features to be screened in the United States before Rashomon in 1951 (Smith 2002). On the other hand, Japanese audiences saw many American movies during the interwar period, until they were banned in 1937. Naruse was arguably influenced on many levels by American cinema, which is one of the reasons why film scholars looking for more pure forms of Japanese-ness neglected his cinema for so long. And yet, as part of a global cycle of women-in-the-city films, Baby Face is indicative of the American vernacular modernity that remained in the United States, strictly American. If a Japanese film such as Street without End is seen as part of a global cycle of films featuring women in cities in the early 1930s, it enables a productive reading of comparative modernities. This cycle includes films made elsewhere as well, as similar patterns are found in Chinese and European films of the period. Following from Benjamin’s remarks on film as a form of kitsch, I would specifically include the most neglected films in this cycle, hitherto excluded from the canon, and only recently resurfacing in the digital archive. For Benjamin, kitsch has sensory, sensual properties with explosive potential because of its proximity to the masses; film is necessarily dialectical as a form of phantasmagoria (1999: 395). For Benjamin, the abstractions of art cinema are dangerous, whereas the cinematic kitsch of the 1930s, precisely when he is writing the Arcades Project, is utopian, if also somewhat illegible to him. In the Convolute labeled “Dream City and Dream House” he poses a curious question about film: “what manner of nature” is produced by technology?—which is another way of interrogating the phantasmagoria of modernity (1999: 396). The dreamworld of commodity capitalism must, eventually, yield an awakening. While the twenty-first century is so far as lost in its dreamworld as were the last two, I think we can use Benjamin’s perspective for a critical methodology appropriate to certain periods and styles of film practice that tend to construct “new forms of nature.” In the cycle of women-in-the-city films, we can see how the instability of the phantasmagoria provides a stage for the performativity of the New Woman. For example, in both The Smiling Lieutenant and Baby Face, the female protagonists study and learn the codes and behaviors of the New Woman. In the Lubitsch film, the princess effectively lowers herself from aristocratic privilege to become a jazzy flapper; in Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck moves up the corporate ladder by learning to perm her hair. The urge to copy the latest fashion is demonized, however, in Street without End. The virtuous heroine refuses the luxurious excesses of Westerninfluenced modernity, finding a middle road by donning the uniform of the café waitress. Public space in these films is an extension of the film screen, a venue for

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women to seek new identities within the montage-like construction and perspectives of urban space. The public space of streets, stores, offices, and transportation is frequently linked to effects of camera movement and montage that inscribe technology into the visual field in the cycle of women-in-the-city films. Narratives of social climbing and falling, usually through romance, constitute a mythic fairytale fabric for the phantasmagorias of fashion, architecture, and cinematic space. The real world of everyday life is indeed eclipsed, and while we can perhaps imagine the experience of the films’ original spectators, of which we have only the most fragmentary traces, we cannot know it. We can, however, think about our own experience of these films as a dialectical awakening. In film-critical debates about this period, the recurring question is whether narrative closure is subverted by stylistic and aesthetic excess. I find this question ultimately fruitless, and more about critical desire and priorities than about the films themselves.5 If we approach them in terms of the phantasmagoria, we can ask what is really modern about them? What is really new? And the answer has to be, over and over again, New Women. These New Women are personified, to be sure, in the personas of actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, and in her Japanese contemporaries such as Chiba Sachiko, Isuzu Yamada, Irie Takako, and Tanaka Kinuyo. The star of Street without End, Setsuko Shinobu, did not have a stellar career in sound film, and even here, the camera work and cutting is much more expressive than she is. Nevertheless, it is precisely this inscription within cinematic space that is important, pointing to a tendency that is arguably pervasive during the period, but frequently overshadowed by performance style (figures 9.11 and 9.12). The New Woman was a construction of the larger media and fashion industries in which magazines played as important a role as cinema in the United States, Japan, and globally. The New Woman was at once demonized as a personification of everything dangerous about modernity, and the new erotic manifestation of its utopian promise. The New Women who emerge from these studio films are in Figure 9.11. Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse (William Wellman, 1931).

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Figure 9.12. Screenshot from Street without End (Naruse Mikio, 1934).

fact extremely diverse characters, and I am interested above all in their emergence within the more routine and industrial production of phantasmagorias. They seem to be produced not only by the cinema, but by the city itself, and above all, by the intersection of the city and the cinema. The reflexive identities of the actress as New Woman, who is always doubling herself in a performative modality, provides an intertextual inscription of the historical real, even if it often remains within the cloak of celebrity. In the coevalness of different modernities, available as an archival phantasmagoria, we can furthermore begin to understand how the cinema constructed a cosmopolitan, metropolitan community of women in the city. Through the operations of dialectical optics we can turn the doubleness of Japanese modernity into a renewed perspective on the Hollywood phantasmagoria as a site where Benjamin’s “new nature” is produced (1999: 396). The spaces traversed by these women are very specifically constituted through the dynamics of modern architecture. As Beatriz Colomina describes the emergent built culture of this period, spaces were produced that systematically blurred the realms of public and private; spaces were created and predicated on unfixed points of view, as mobile as the camera and the train; and spaces, she says, were constructed from images rather than walls (1994: 6). It is precisely in this fusion of filmic and architectural space that the New Women of the twentieth century began to speak. And in the films I am interested in here, embedded in popular culture rather than the arts, the women are not simply emoting; they are working through and across the many networks of the social formation that was in a state of constant flux, becoming increasingly limitless and multilayered. Women in both the Japanese and American cinemas of the 1930s learned to trade in on their value as a commodity in the phantasmagoria. The New Women are working women, appearing in melodramas of social climbing and social collapse. In Japan, the everyday was much closer and the spectacle of wealth was more transparent, as the virtues of the old world were still very much in play. But

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maybe we can learn something about American modernity from the example of Japan, where the new is always in dialogue with the old. In a film like Baby Face, the melodramatic recognition of virtue implicit in Lily’s self-redemption points to a reality unseen, outside the phantasmagoria, beyond the image-sphere. In the censored version of the film, Lily’s trajectory begins and ends in a small town that is not rural, but the industrial wasteland of Erie, Pennsylvania—suggesting that there is no “otherness” to American modernity. The “old world” is very specifically located in France with its “old-world plumbing,” as Lily so caustically describes it. In the feminization of the city, these films present us with a privileged view of how the doubleness of modernity produces new subjects. As a formal principle of film practice, montage is a principle of connection as well as juxtaposition. Its invisibility in the codes of continuity editing is as powerful discursively as its effect as a technique of collision, comparison, and association. In the women-in-the-city films of the late silent and early sound cinemas, montage is one of several techniques that inscribe the female figure into the aesthetics and politics of modernity. In both Japan and Hollywood, the woman is a threat that has to be contained ideologically and narratively. The example of Vertov indicates just how deeply the codes of gender are inscribed into the technologies of “mechanical reproduction,” or simply “seeing,” in the metropolis. New digital technologies enable us to see films side by side and, reassembled, they reveal the techniques of containment alongside techniques of utopian expressivity. Both Dziga Vertov and Walter Benjamin understood montage to have a dynamic, utopian, potential to blast apart received wisdom and conventions of bourgeois representation. Both men saw this potential horribly lost to the industrial and authoritarian modes of representation that came to dominate the cinema in America, Europe, and Japan by the late 1930s. The digital archive, however, enables a recovery of the dialectical impulse of montage for new ways of thinking about film history. Archival montage as I have used it here includes techniques of juxtaposition, shifting perspectives, and the ability to access the multiple versions of censored texts. Archival montage offers historians and cultural anthropologists—and ethnographers as well—valuable tools of analysis. The recovery of lost texts and their recirculation in newly accessible forms provides insight into what we might call the optical unconscious of the twentieth century. The comparative method of this chapter illustrates the dream images through which women entered the public sphere during the interwar period on three different continents. While women’s bodies were fundamental to the global spectacle of cinema, women were also inscribed within the montage of shifting views that linked the cinema so closely to urban space. The methodology I have employed here is inspired not only by Walter Benjamin’s surrealist critical cultural theory, but equally by the work of “found-footage” filmmakers and the great variety of archival film practices. George Marcus uses the example of cinematic montage as a model for ethnographic writing that can articulate “an effect of simultaneity” (1994: 40). Filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Craig Baldwin, Su Friedrich, and many, many others, have mined the film archive to create dynamic and instructive effects of cultural spacio-temporal juxtapositions. Visual anthropology can and should include the representation of mediated culture, such as transnational film cultures, among its objects of study in order to better apprehend the ways that cinematic montage is more than a formal device, more than a metaphor, but an unstable cultural form in itself. The art and practice of finding and assembling images in montage-based constructions dates

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back precisely to the period under discussion here, the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the avant-garde and popular culture collided on the screens and streets of the world.

Notes 1. In my book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, I incorrectly identified this film as The White Woman (1933), starring Carole Lombard, which is featured on a poster in this scene of Street without End (Russell 2008: 78). In fact, it is unquestionably The Smiling Lieutenant. 2. Margaret Cohen has argued that the phantasmagoria can take on the liberating potential of the dream-image while at the same time serve as a critique of the false consciousness which it also reproduces (1993: 256). However, we need to add that such an auto-critique is not necessarily or systematically available, but is a subjective, critical effect. 3. Silverberg’s article includes reproductions of some of Kon’s illustrations (1992: 40, 41, 43). 4. One of the arguments of my book on Naruse is that his cinema constitutes a remarkable depiction of the transformation of everyday life, through the thorough penetration of experience with technologies of modernity. 5. Historical work such as Mary Beth Haralovich’s on the proletarian women’s film of the 1930s that can account for a film’s address, its production of meaning, its conditions of studio production, and the terms of censorship, will inevitably find a given film to be “complex and contradictory” (1998: 83).

References Bao, Weihong. 2005. “From Pearl White to White Rose Woo: Tracing the Vernacular Body of Nüxia in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1927–1931.” Camera Obscura 60, vol. 30(3): 193–231. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19–55. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burch, Noel. 1979. To the Distant Observer: From and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. London: Scolar Press. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Literature, Ethnography, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Margaret. 1993. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Colomina, Beatriz. 1994. Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Doherty, Thomas. 1999. Precode Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press. Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hansen, Miriam. 2000. “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism.” Film Quarterly 54(1): 10–22. Haralovich, Mary Beth. 1998. “The Proletarian Woman’s Film of the 1930s: Contending with Censorship and Entertainment.” In Screen Histories: An Introduction, ed. Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey, 81–95. New York: Oxford University Press. Harootunian, Harry. 2000. Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Kinoshita, Chika. 2005. “In the Twilight of Modernity and the Silent Film: Irie Takako in The Water Magician.” Camera Obscura 60, vol. 30(3): 91–127. Maltby, Richard. 1998. “Baby Face, or how Joe Breen made Barbara Stanwyck atone for causing the Wall Street Crash.” In Screen Histories: An Introduction, ed. Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey, 164–183. New York: Oxford University Press. Marcus, George. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 37–53. New York: Routledge. Miyoshi Masao. 1991. Off-Centre: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Russell, Catherine. 2002. “Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfeminist.” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, eds. Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, 552–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2008. Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Petro, Patrice. 1989. Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sakai Naoki. 1997. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Silverberg, Miriam. 1992. “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity.” Journal of Asian Studies 51(1): 30–54. ———. 1991. “The Modern Girl as Militant.” In Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein, 239–66. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Greg M. 2002. “Critical Reception of Rashomon in the West.” Asian Cinema 13(2): 115–28. Tomas, David. 1994. “Manufacturing Vision: Kino-Eye, The Man with the Movie Camera, and the Perceptual Reconstruction of Social Identity.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 271–86. New York: Routledge. Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1999. Cinema Interval. London: Routledge. Vertov, Dziga. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wada Marciano, Mitsuyo. 2008. Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. 2000. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zhang, Zhen. 2005. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Radioglaz and the Global City Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental Montage Julia T. S. Binter

This chapter is about the tightrope between sociocritical commitment and the authority of authorship that has been walked in a controversial way by Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger and video artist Timo Novotny. Glawogger’s documentary essay Megacities (1998) and its subsequent remix, Life in Loops (Novotny 2006), tried to audiovisually translate subaltern living and working experiences in global cities to the silver screen and thereby tested the limits of prevalent notions of documentary film by means of an exigent use of montage. In the era of globalization,1 questions about traditional generic patterns of documentary blend with ethical problems and creative opportunities of transcultural settings, thus, posing new challenges for documentary filmmaking. Glawogger and Novotny may share a “willingness to enter into a sympathetic contract with others” (MacDougall 1998: 272–73), but they differ significantly in the way they address alterity and human commonalities in their respective films. That is to say, they both seek ways of engaging with transcultural aspects of cinema beyond what David MacDougall (1998: 258) called the “pre-anthropological” quality of film, where images favor intersubjective human recognition over the perception of cultural differences. Social, economic, and psychological factors all seem equally or even more important than cultural ones in affiliating or differentiating people (and their audiences) in Megacities and Life in Loops. However, Glawogger and Novotny inter/disconnect their protagonists (and their audiences) in considerably diverging ways. Ultimately, their unsettling use of Dziga Vertov’s idea of experimental audiovisual montage—radioglaz—tests the limits of transcultural montage. “In fact, the fringe groups form the majority” (Glawogger, pers. comm. 2008).2 With this maxim in mind, Glawogger captured the grinding routine of everyday labor and escapism of people on the outskirts of the metropolises New York, Mexico City, Moscow, and Mumbai in his awarded documentary essay Megacities. By finding a film language that not only reflects Zygmunt Bauman’s (1997: 328) assumption of globalization’s force to stratify the world population in globalized wealthy and localized poor, but that also offers an idiosyncratic insight beyond the description of urban peripheries as slums, the filmmaker came close to the poetics of his (aesthetic but not political) role model Dziga Vertov. However, it was not until 2006 that the Austrian video artist Timo Novotny reviewed the original footage of Megacities in order to rearrange it in the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s radioglaz,3 a film concept and montage policy that counts on the “complex interaction of sound with image” (Vertov in Hicks 2007: 77), sometimes

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even favoring the sound as the overriding rhythmizing element over the image. Whereas Megacities tells twelve geographically dispersed but self-contained stories of survival, Life in Loops breaks them open and uses the audiovisual fragments to paint only five portraits of clandestine ways of living and working in global cities against the backdrop of a filmic contemplation on urban topographies. That way, Life in Loops traces, like Megacities, the conditio humana in relation to glocal subalternity, though making use of Vertov’s radioglaz in a more radical way. Inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s premise that (in documentary) only “displacement causes resonance” (Gokhale in Trinh 1990: 104), this chapter tackles questions about the virtues and vices of experimental montage in form of a comparative analysis of these two films. How do different types of montage challenge and enhance our perception of subaltern living and working conditions in global cities? How can montage be applied to account for exploitative working experiences and their physical and psychological manifestations? How does experimental montage shape social critique—in a (still hegemonic) medium that wants to give a voice and an image to subaltern people? The concept of montage applied here is not restricted to the notion of syntagmatic organization and structuring of footage at the editing table, but is informed by Dziga Vertov’s understanding of documentary filmmaking as consisting of several stages of montage. According to Vertov, observations and reflections on a specific topic already constitute an act of editing, as does the reexamination of an already approved profilmic reality on location. The same holds true for the actual process of filming and the social interactions involved. Therefore, the “adjustment” (Vertov 1984a: 99) of the footage by the editor is but one crucial and powerful stage of a highly complex selection and rearrangement process. While Vertov’s approach is noteworthy for the understanding of the omnipresence of creative intervention in the process of filmmaking, it lacks the final stage of montage: the selection and reassemblage of parts of the film by the spectator according to his or her habitus, i.e., the interpretation of the audiences. Consequently, Alexander Kluge emphasizes a triadic concept of documentary filmmaking which is rooted in the sociohistorical embeddedness of cultural products: “A documentary film is shot with three cameras: 1) the camera in the technical sense; 2) the filmmaker’s mind; 3) the generic patterns of the documentary film, which are founded on the expectations of the audience that patronizes it” (1975: 202–3). As film technology advances and sociopolitical trends change, so do the aesthetics and discursive strategies of documentary film and, accordingly, the expectations of the audiences.

Filmmaking in the Global City In general, Michael Glawogger’s body of work is characterized by his attempt to question and irritate the often negatively stereotyped gaze at people seemingly unusual and different in established Western media (most notably TV, newspapers, and feature films). His documentary Megacities and its follow-ups Workingman’s Death (2004)4 and Whore’s Glory (2011) reflect his humanistic quest not only in the choice of the social strata depicted, but also in the filmic gaze. “The world is a horrible and still livable place, that’s what I want to show. I think a lot about our rela-

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tionship with the ‘rest of the world’ is shaped by fear; we know this rest because of bad news or . . . because of the neo-colonialist perspective of vacationers of resort hotels. But behind these bad news and the friendly exotic waiters of the hotels stand people with very similar fights and dreams like us” (2006a). In the case of Megacities, the setting for his controversial look at subaltern living and working worlds seems at once far away and just around the corner: far away geographically, but in montage just around the corner. Like globalization, the film depends on the local living and working force of people (captured on celluloid) as well as on the speed and vehemence of worldwide interconnectedness (established via swift juxtaposition of images and sounds taken several time zones apart). Like Saskia Sassen (2005: 65) highlights in her analysis of the glocalization of megacities, the globalized spatial dispersal of economic activities and the neutralization of place go hand in hand with the territorial centralization of top-level management, control operations, and specialized services. As a result, the concentration of capital, finance, and resources reserves freedom of choice and action only for a minority. “Glocalization is first and foremost a redistribution of privileges and disfranchisements, of wealth and poverty, of possibilities and hopelessness, of power and powerlessness, of freedom and bondage, . . . in whose process a new, worldwide, socio-cultural, self-reproducing hierarchy is established” (Bauman 1997: 324). Glawogger searches for his protagonists at the bottom of this hierarchy. They are pimps, sex workers, and thieves, but also street musicians, hawkers, manufacturers, and factory workers. In their struggle of survival and their multifaceted ways of escaping the daily grind they seem to be neighbors, not only by their human constitution but also in film space.

Political Aesthetics “Cinema is a moving train. Every film can become a window in which a new landscape, the breeze of a story, a foreign life appear” (Horwarth 1999). This old metaphor applies in particular to Glawogger’s journeys into the habitats of disadvantaged people living at the outskirts or invisible enclaves of global cities. Accordingly, the filmic exploration of the metropolitan areas is often carried out by a gaze out of the window of a moving vehicle, a train or a car. Megacities opens with a cross-cutting, that by means of an overlap of original music and sound, complements pictures of an overcrowded train in Mumbai with reality fragments captured alongside the train route. Inside the train, there are women with colorful saris, a girl playing the accordion and singing, a boy squatting on the basement and pulling on the skirts of people, begging for some money, while alongside the route, a goat is slaughtered, a man’s hair is cut, or breadcrumbs, which are meant as presents for the ancestors, are scrounged by a raven. The open dramaturgy of this stream of images allows the spectator only hesitantly to assemble the impressions into one comprehensible piece. It seems to reflect the touristic experience of foreign worlds that concretizes itself only sporadically in encounters of the filmmaker with individuals. Later in the film, the spectator emerges via steadicam in the crowds of streets and markets in Mumbai and Mexico City, only to get a general idea of this alleged chaos by an abrupt long shot or the short but intense portrait of one of Glawogger’s protagonists. “I tried to find cities that were closer to my own knowledge of upbringing and civilization.

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. . . I had the feeling that I wanted someone in Mexico or Bombay who saw the film—that for him the images of New York and Moscow should be exotic and viceversa” (Glawogger in Kamani 2002: 12). The latent exoticism in Glawogger’s representation of poverty aroused many critical voices. The beauty that the spectators had discovered in the portraits of the poor urban strata was seen as euphemistic alienations born out of sensationalism (Keilbach 1998). His philosophical-artistic intention of evoking the recipient’s affects and reflections by means of filmic condensation of social phenomena—accomplished by a selection of locations “where [already] the landscape, the people, the colors, the moment and the sound are intensified” (Glawogger in Tonnar 2006), of stylized camera angles and frames as well as cliff-hanging compositions of images—divided the audiences. Skinny men wading through drains in Mumbai with stoic ease in order to find waste that can be recycled, a man under a sunlit tarpaulin making dye and glowing in primary colors because the pigments have found their way into his pores, a white horse grazing alongside a haggled couch in the middle of a garbage dump in Mexico City—those pictures are fascinating to look at and uncomfortable at the same time. Thus, not everything that is colorful is picturesque. The contradiction that emerges between the living conditions and their stylized filmic image, the antagonism between a “beautiful” picture and a precarious situation can be significant insofar as it provokes the audience to confront itself with those social problems and phenomena (Reicher 1998). “For, when not equated with mere techniques of beautifying, aesthetics allow one to experience life differently or, as some would say, to give it ‘another sense’” (Trinh 1993: 100). At first sight, Glawogger’s film stands for the non-argumentative, essentially visual quality of cinematography, where already the act of looking—i.e., the act of framing one’s gaze onto the world and the (subaltern) “Other”—is political. The aspect that may unsettle the spectator most about this aesthetical choice is the fact that the cinematographically registered process of looking—“as form of active bodily engagement with the world”—does not draw a line between subject and object, but constitutes an “artifact in which the two are inseparably fused” (MacDougall 1998: 265). It is this play on identification and othering that challenges the spectator of Megacities to “position him-/herself to the world” (Schön 1999) and that, consequently, allows Glawogger to put his aesthetics to sociocritical use. In general, Glawogger wants to draw a clear line between him and the kind of filmmakers that sally forth to find proof for an already prefigured message. “I look at what is going on out there and put it together. A meaning or a message is to be found in every camera angle or in the juxtaposition between the shots—but I wouldn’t want to give it away in one sentence” (2006a).5 He is conscious of the subjectivity of his representations and does not claim to depict universal truths. His ambition is to establish his films as “open systems, paintings that are never fully completed, frescos for which the rooms are too small and which swell through the windows into the open” (2007b: 2).

Life in Loops: A Megacities RMX On this account, nearly ten years later, Glawogger immediately welcomed Timo Novotny’s project of remixing Megacities and provided the Austrian VJ (visual

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jockey) with the original forty hours of footage. Novotny maintained, though reedited, 30 percent of the originally used material, completed it with yet unseen footage and fused it with shots from Tokyo—freshly taken for this purpose by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler. This meant a continuity of photographic style and, in large part, concealed the asynchronicity of the material. Life in Loops deviates from Glawogger’s rather stringent and conservative narrative approach, which divided Megacities into twelve stories of survival,6 by omitting extra-diegetic geographical clues and interweaving the footage to a point where the impressions of the different megacities merge into one big “global village” by means of association. Also, the number of portraits is shrunken down to four and presents only the most remarkable or catchy social performances: Cassandra, a sex-vaudeville dancer in Mexico City; Mike, a hustler in New York; Larissa Tatarowa, a factory worker in Moscow; and Babu Khan, a dye maker in Mumbai. They are joined by a Japanese otaku,7 a young man obsessed with Manga culture. Contrary to the other protagonists who talk abundantly about their aspirations in life, he is satisfied with his virtual two-dimensional world consisting mainly in interactive pornographic Manga games and sees the only purpose of his work at a fast food shop in enlarging his collection of Manga fetishes, posters, and lifesize pillows painted with half-naked Manga girls. In his case, the main overarching question asked by Glawogger and consequently by Novotny—“What is your dream in life?”—falls on deaf ears. Trapped in his private cyberspace, he is “too exhausted by everyday life”8 to have a dream. Or at least his dream has become intangible and of immaterial nature. For Novotny (2006), the sterility and anti-sociality of the otaku’s living world presents an intriguing counterpart to Glawogger’s “earthbound” characters. Moreover, there is none of Glawogger’s aggrandizement of glocal subalternity in the depictions of Tokyo. As film critic Angus Reid concludes: “The alienation expressed in these scenes is nearly unbearable, whether it be the blank indifference of commuters in the underground, the autism of the computer freak or the dressing up of real women as girly cartoon characters. Glawogger’s subjects are people, but Novotny’s are barely people at all: either deadened consumers or people that are actually imitating commodities, being them, turning themselves into them” (2006). While Megacities talked about “life-as-performance [-under-working-conditions],” Life in Loops contemplates on “performance-as-[way-of]-life” (Möller 2006).

Radioglaz On an aesthetic level, Life in Loops distinguishes itself from Megacities by virtue of Novotny’s radical rearrangement of the original footage. The additional footage of Japanese Manga culture, however, remains, in large part, intact. Whereas the VJ “bears not a shred of responsibility” (Reid 2006) toward the original footage— altering its syntagmatic structure with jump cuts, extra-diegetic music, etc., and thereby exploring the boundaries of social critique and video art—he sticks to the long takes and original sounds of the otaku’s one-room apartment and constructs an overall observational, non-interventionist atmosphere. Perhaps it is the highly performative quality of the otaku’s way of life that made Novotny fall back on this fundamental quality of cinema. “[Observational] images of people in social situations (and in particular, film images with sound) convey a complex expressive world in which words, appearances, and actions occupy

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a continuous social and cultural field” (MacDougall 1998: 268). So what is to be gained by adding supplemental layers to the already excessively descriptive, connotative, and associative qualities of film?9 In Life in Loops, the artistic interventions into the filmic material are in large part reserved for the original footage and most noticeable in the change of the aspect ratio. Novotny cropped the images from 4:3 to 1,85:1 in order to enable panning and hence a more versatile use of the recordings. Secondly, his previous work as a performing video artist with the Austrian dub/techno/trance band “Sofa Surfers” inspired him to use the audio track to a greater extent. Not only did the band add music to the original sound, but diegetic and non-diegetic sound also enter into symbiosis—seemingly in compliance with Dziga Vertov’s concept of radioglaz: “The question of audio-visual montage is resolved not according to the simplest coincidence of sound with image, and not according to the simplest opposition of sound with image, but according to the complex interaction of sound with image” (Vertov in Hicks 2007: 77).10 The opening credits of Life in Loops constitute a poignant example of Novotny’s use of radioglaz, beginning with a frontal wide shot of a desolate neighborhood in New York. The traffic noise is superposed by the recitative of an African-American street musician playing the djembé. The blend of music and police sirens fuses with a smoggy panorama shot of skyscrapers and packed streets: “Lights flashing, niggers dashing. Run, nigger, run! Dead, nigger, dead.” Less than one minute into the film, this complex layering of sound and image has fulfilled at least three functions: It documented the precarious living conditions of a Black11 inner-city neighborhood, it conveyed the atmosphere of the “global city” (Sassen 2005) of New York as experienced by an African-American street musician, and it told a more general story about police violence against African-American citizens (and other minorities) in the United States. With the help of radioglaz, Novotny constructs a sequence that comes close to Clifford Geertz’s (1973) “thick description.” The following scene brings us back to where Megacities left off. A radio host asks his listeners to talk about their way of survival in the big city. His respondents are drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes engaging in lively discussions on air. The camera does not dwell on the moderator’s face but descends into the nightly streets of New York to visit the callers.12 Their commentaries mix with an impelling music beat by Novotny’s band “Sofa Surfers” and form the soundtrack for a car ramble throughout the city. Shortly after, the distinctive deep scratchy voice of the street hustler, Mike, intonates “I will survive” by Gloria Gaynor and adds another supplemental audio layer. This polyphony not only serves as the original voice of the streets but, for a short time, also as an overriding rhythmizing element over the image. In correspondence with the music beat, the look out of the driving car does not simply roll up as filmed, but jumps back and forth—a technique of montage comparable to that of a turntablist scratching a vinyl record. By doing so, Novotny seems to bring out the daytime bustle and tension hidden in the nocturnally deserted streets. Moreover, this sequence holds another of Novotny’s shifts of attention. He puts a greater emphasis on the urban landscape and expresses his topographical fascination by dint of repeatedly long drives throughout the metropolitan areas. One of the most intriguing examples is a convertible car ride through uptown Manhattan in which Mike shoots heroin. In the course of this scene, the camera tries to mimic the perception of the high drug addict by shaking and slowing down the images and, thus, seems to account for the corporal experience of the individual.

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All three of these examples of radioglaz demonstrate the capacity of montage to evoke more than can be seen with the naked (cine-)eye. That is to say, Novotny’s rearrangement of Glawogger’s sounds and images hint on layers beyond the visible: on social dynamics as well as on corporal experience.13

Disarranging Documentary’s Frame Most notably, though, these examples testify to the (inter)subjectivity involved in all representation—i.e., the filmmaker’s, the protagonists’, and the audiences’ imaginative involvement in the process of constructing and signifying film recordings. This process of semiosis can usefully be conceptualized in terms of an ongoing dialectic between the image and the imaginary. According to François Niney, cinema turns our order of representations inside out by confusing pictura (the materialized image) and imago (the mental image) by means of montage. To be precise, montage enables two kinds of transport: on the one hand, the actualizing transport (the effect of the real) by documenting points of view. On the other, the imaginary transport (the linkage of visions and sounds through space-time) by the “subjectivization” of the angle/frame (i.e., a filmmaker’s/editor’s subjective structuring of sounds and images according to his/her “point of view”). “It’s this chiasmus real/imaginary that the expression ‘to realize a film’ refers to, i.e. on the one hand, to materialize what one imagines, on the other, to transform the material world into images” (Niney 2009: 91).14 But if both fiction film and documentary share the same basic tool in order to get “from event to narration, from cine-movement to cine-time” (Niney 2009: 90), what is it that divides them? As Trinh T. Minh-ha (1993: 94) observed, it is the choice of the real as “the one basic referent” of documentary that historically “resulted in the elaboration of a whole aesthetic of objectivity . . . the development of comprehensive technologies of truth, . . . and a relentless pursuit of naturalism.” She deplores that “when, in a world of reification, truth is widely equated with fact, any explicit use of the magic, poetic, or irrational qualities specific to the film medium itself would have to be excluded a priori as nonfactual” (ibid.). Trinh draws, inter alia, on Vertov’s (1984c: 91), idea of intervals—i.e., the movements between two shots or rather the interstices between images or sounds and images—to subvert documentary’s tendency to fix meaning. But while Vertov used the notion of the interval in a technical sense in order to mechanically enhance human perception by multiplying and juxtaposing sounds and images taken chronologically and geographically apart, Trinh deploys it to a (self-)reflexive end: “The ‘core’ of representation is the reflexive interval. It is the place in which the play within the textual frame is a play on this very frame, hence on the borderlines of the textual and extratextual, where a positioning within constantly incurs the risk of depositioning, and where the work, never freed from historical and sociopolitical contexts nor entirely subjected to them, can only be itself by constantly risking being no-thing” (1993: 105). Novotny does not only exhaust the specificities of the film medium in order to go beyond the depiction of the visible, as we have seen above, but also in order to fervently participate in the play on documentary’s borderlines. In Moscow, for instance, the VJ utilizes the footage of Larissa Tatarowa at her work in a steel factory to create his own short “mechanical pop-symphony.” He “scratches” the images of the machines and of Tatarowa handling a crane to an

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extent where the flow of images becomes a mere succession of nervous twitches. The ambiguity of the gliding sluggishness of the crane operator’s work (established by the original long takes and use of Shostakovich’s “Prélude” in Megacities) gives way to an edgy speed-up and duplication of images fitting the mix of diegetic and non-diegetic sound administered by Novotny’s band “Sofa Surfers.” These aesthetics could be read as an audiovisual translation of the complete absorption of the human being into the industrial machinery. However they could also justify Angus Reid’s (2006) definition of Life in Loops as “anti-film, as throbbing, unbearable spectacle and pure prostitution of subject matter that derides any notion of reality, of representation, of responsibility towards the documentary subject.” For Reid (2006), the obsessive layering of images makes a “sustained demonstration of disgust for images, for the content of images and the organization of pleasure into this great illusion.” Nevertheless he detects a self-reflexive potential and a tool for critique of the commodification of images in Novotny’s editing style. “Even though both films have been made from the same images, one [Megacities] is enclosed narcissistically within its own admiration of itself, and the other [Life in Loops], mocking the pretension of the enterprise, undermines our security as spectators” (2006). As Glawogger still believes in the subjective truth of documentary representation, Megacities constitutes, according to Reid, a naive critique of human societies, whereas Life in Loops constitutes a critique of images and of how we live by them.

Transcultural Montage As demonstrated earlier with Glawogger’s seemingly “beautifying” film aesthetics, displacement that causes resonance does not necessarily have to be induced by exigent altering of the syntagmatic structure (jump cuts, use of still images, etc.), but can also be caused on other stages of montage like the choice of media (analogue or digital recording, handheld camera or steadicam, etc.) as well as the composition of frames and angles. In addition, Glawogger’s documentary style reveals the possibilities and constraints of montage also at the level of the filming process. Vertov’s third stage of montage, the actual process of filming, depends not only on the filmmaker’s “point of view” and the cameraman’s film techniques and skills, but first and foremost on the interaction, negotiation, and cooperation between the filmmaker and his or her protagonists. “The filmmaker’s acts of looking are encoded in the film in much the same way as the [protagonists’] physical presence” and, in the end, film “contains some trace of this crossing of minds and bodies” (MacDougall 1998: 261). Glawogger actively engages with this transcultural dimension of filmmaking and treats the people he wants to film as actors who are “cast” according to their authenticity in front of the camera and subsequently staged to reenact aspects of their daily life that are crucial not only to the filmmaker’s curiosity, but also to the collaborators’ own social experiences (Glawogger, pers. comm. 2008).15 The reason for Glawogger’s occasional reconstructions is rooted in an ethical pragmatism that gives him the opportunity to film situations that normally could not be captured on celluloid, mostly because of their discrediting nature.

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I let all of them talk about their lives. That’s important for me—I don’t appreciate narrating about them and not letting them talk for themselves. In some cases there is the question about whether I stage a scene or whether it is just impossible to show everything. You cannot film a hustler at work. His clients would see the camera and vanish. That’s as simple as it is. I don’t try to fight a style or a certain way of non-staged documentary filming. On the contrary, I just allowed myself the liberty to represent things that I want to show and to search for the adequate means to make it possible. (2006a)

Inferring from this understanding, reconstruction, or even staging are not part of fictitious invention but rather a documentary method within the realms of probability. “If you alter reality by being there with a camera, you always alter it anyway. Therefore I think that it should lie in the hands of the filmmaker how far he goes and . . . that you have to establish a relationship of trust between you and the audience so that they accept it” (Glawogger in Kamani 2002: 5). This notion contravenes and questions traditions of non-staged documentary filmmaking—especially direct cinema’s canonized style of non-intervention, handheld cameras, and synchronous sound (Nichols 2001: 109) and the relationship of trust they entail. In particular since Glawogger sometimes films reenacted events in an observational manner16 and generally discards “the feeling of participating in a truth-like moment of reality captured despite the filmed subject” as well as “the sense of urgency, immediacy, and authenticity in the instability of the handheld camera” (Trinh 1993: 99). He establishes “his own authenticity” (Glawogger, pers. comm. 2008) by combining “observational” footage of collaboratively reenacted scenes with his otherwise stylized angles and frames, and, thereby, dismisses claims of general truth in favor of a subjective and artistic translation of and confrontation with subaltern living and working experiences and their socioaesthetic conditions. Hence, Glawogger’s play with documentary’s traditional patterns becomes yet another way of destabilizing and challenging the position of the spectator. However, his collaborative reenactments as well as their aesthetically heightened representation not only bear witness to the creative possibilities of cinematography’s dialectic of image and imaginary, but also attest to their subjacent power relations. Even though the transcultural negotiations before and during the filming process17 can yield novel insights into subaltern living and working experiences in global cities, their filmic representations remain utterly unbalanced. It is, after all, still the filmmaker who chooses certain aspects of reality (according to his or her epistemology), the cameraman18 who frames, and the editor who rearranges them. Timo Novotny’s subsequent attempt of seasoning Glawogger’s footage for audiences of the MTV generation bluntly accounts for the authority and responsibility of the film author in the process of documentary filmmaking. Still, not only the negotiations between the filmmaker and his protagonists transgress the boundaries of cultural differences. The film spaces that the two authors establish via montage are transcultural as well, though in highly different ways. With his geographically distinguishable stories of survival, Glawogger starts in difference in order to open up—via filmic comparison—to shared commonalities that transcend differences and characterize the human condition as a whole. “And perhaps in the abodes of poverty, where health, learning, shelter and security are not birthrights, the soul is not a birthright either” (William T. Vollmann in Megacities). It seems that Glawogger inserted this claim of the American writer William

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T. Vollmann at the beginning of the film only to rebut it despite or perhaps by dint of his intrinsic gaze at subalterns’ daily struggle. The process of making visible of escapism that is celebrated not only in form of drugs but also by the protagonists’ dreams of a better future and their multiple ways of storytelling plays a key role in this endeavor. Glawogger appears to use montage’s possibilities of bridging time and space according to MacDougall’s idea of transcultural cinema “which links film’s means of depicting the commonplace features of the world to a capacity to transcend and reframe their own specificity” (Ungar 2003: 316). Films are, according to MacDougall (1998: 245), transcultural, not only in the sense of crossing cultural borders, but also because its disclosure of affinities between ourselves and others “apparently so different from us” remind us that cultural difference is “at best a fragile concept.” Also, Novotny’s more experimental form of montage takes on this quality of cinema by maxing out the descriptive and reflexive capacities of montage. Nevertheless, his construction of transcultural spaces takes place in an inversed way. Novotny starts by submerging all cultural differences to a filmic principle of association and likeness, blurring geographical borders and blending them into sameness. In combination with the additional character, the Japanese otaku, and his nearly autistic social life, however, this operation paradoxically ends up highlighting highly diverse ways of being human. By altering the film texture and, thus, disrupting the spectators’ gaze, difference emerges as something that cannot be consumed but flows from within the film interval. With Novotny, it is not the picture that is the main arena of repositioning and resignification, but rather the interval between images as well as between images and sounds. There, the spectator is constantly urged to make comparisons, to establish relationships, and to differentiate between the impressions and experiences the film offers.

Conclusion Megacities and its remix, Life in Loops, constitute controversial examples of experimental transcultural montage. Not only do Glawogger and Novotny compare subaltern living and working experiences and their socioaesthetic conditions in global cities, but they do so by exhausting the aesthetic and reflexive potential of cinematography at all stages of montage. On the one hand, they create transcultural film spaces by juxtaposing and blending reality fragments from all parts of the globe. While Glawogger tries to give a comprehensive, though still fragmentary insight into subaltern living and working experiences and their respective environments, Novotny disintegrates space and rearranges the geographically dispersed impressions (often by audiovisual association) into one unsettling paste of glocalized subalternity (Bauman 1998). On the other hand, their joint acknowledgment of the omnipresence of creative intervention defies prevalent notions of documentary film about objectivity, non-intervention, and authenticity. Their idiosyncratic artistic handwritings challenge traditional aesthetic and discursive forms of documentary film and blur the thin line between the reflexive shifting of meaning and mere distortion of sociocultural phenomena. Megacities and Life in Loops demonstrate that aesthetics, especially the creative manipulation of footage based on Dziga Vertov’s radioglaz and Trinh T. Minhha’s interval theory, can not only serve as catalyst for the audiovisual translation of

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social conditions and the expression of their physical and psychological manifestations, but might also lead to subjugation of footage to a certain artistic form or message. Clearly, they illustrate the inseparability of aesthetics and politics in the constitution of documentary. Thus, Life in Loops attests to both the rampant audiovisual imaginary of its author as well as the miserable living and working experiences of its protagonists, though often being at risk of degenerating into a narcissistic exercise of selfreflexivity—an “unbearable spectacle” (Reid 2006). Likewise, Michael Glawogger’s aesthetically appealing quest for the underlying similarities of people’s struggles and dreams and his simultaneous celebration of their otherness oscillates between being a provocative example of transcultural montage and a contemporary variation of an exotic “cinema of attraction” (Gunning 1989). Similarly, but in a less radical way than Timo Novotny, he employs Trinh’s (1993: 104) reflexive interval, “a break without which meaning would be fixed and truth congealed [in order to] challenge representation itself while emphasizing the reality of the experience of film as well as the important role that reality plays in the lives of the spectators.” At best, transcultural cinema can be “self-reflexive to an extent that it engages the spectator with an evocation of being in-the-world involving subject, filmmaker and spectator. This evocation in turn aims to replace assumptions of extreme or absolute alterity with an intersubjectivity grounded in an identification with (rather than of) the other” (Ungar 2003: 317). For anthropological filmmaking, these two examples of transcultural montage might be instructive for several reasons. Regardless of the filmmaker’s epistemology, the authority of the filmmaker and respectively his or her point of view inevitably pervade all stages of montage: the choice of topic, the reexamination of an already approved profilmic reality on location, the negotiations between filmmaker and his or her protagonists in the field, the actual process of filming as well as the filtering of the recorded material at the editing table. In addition, inferring from Trinh’s premise that “meaning can be political only . . . when it does not rely on any single source of authority, but rather, empties it, or decentralizes it” (1993: 100), collaborative film approaches may help to destabilize the powerfully charged processes of filmmaking. In combination with experimental montage that plays on the boundaries of documentary, they work to unsettle the spectators’ point of view so as to ultimately open up new sociocritical perspectives on and ways of engaging with the world. Moreover, experimental forms of montage may go beyond what Jean Rouch (2003: 85) called the “[transcultural] miracle . . . of cinema [that occurs] when the filmgoer suddenly understands an unknown language without the help of subtitles, when he participates in strange ceremonies, when he finds himself walking in towns or across terrain that he has never seen before but that he recognizes perfectly.” In contrast to such transcultural identification, (radical) rearrangement of sounds and images works to point to phenomena that exist beyond the audiovisual such as corporal (sensuous) experiences or social dynamics and tensions. It is a question of anthropology’s audacity to actively engage with the expressive possibilities and ambiguities that these experimental forms of montage entail. The “overlapping of experiential horizons, where certain indirect and interpretive leaps of understanding can take place” (MacDougall 1998: 272) is not constrained to observational approaches of filmmaking, but constrained by the shared power and responsibility of signification—shared between the filmmaker, the protagonists, and the audiences.

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In the end, “it is about the ethos of the right demeanor in an encounter between people on this planet. Perhaps Glawogger has invented the impossible genre . . . the melodramatic documentary, the attempt of reconciling reality’s exorbitance with itself” (Kämmerer 2006).19

Notes 1. As Appadurai (2008) points out, technologically enabled processes of transnational economic and cultural flows and advancing interdependencies, which establish transcultural relationships and transnational spaces, are not recent phenomena. Nevertheless, the intensification of these processes in the last decades of the twentieth century has led to their institutional (academic and ecomonic) recognition under the polysemic term globalization. 2. All of Glawogger’s personal comments are originally in German and translated by the author. 3. Due to his futuristic/avangardist belief in the superiority of machines over the human body, Dziga Vertov assumed that (documentary) cinema would revolutionize the visual perception of the world. With the help of montage, the audiovisual apparatus would be able to deliver representations of the world that would be far more complex than those constructed by human perception (Vertov 1984a). He coined his notion of cinematography kinoglaz (from the Greek words kinesis, movement, and kinein, to move, as well as the Russian word glaz, eye), i.e., moving eye. With the invention of sound film in the 1920s, kinoglaz became radioglaz, the hearing eye. 4. For a further analysis of Megacities and other Austrian documentaries treating globalization such as Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) or We Feed The World (2005), see We Shoot the World: Österreichische Dokumentarfilmer und die Globalisierung (Binter 2009). 5. Original quotation in German; translated by the author. 6. Glawogger structure Megacities with help of geographically orienting inserts in the given local language at the beginning of every chapter. 7. Only Glawogger mentions the protagonists’ names in the end titles. In Life in Loops, the protagonists’ identity, including the otaku’s, remains undisclosed. 8. Novotny leaves open whether the young man means his daily working routine or his daily computer gaming. 9. On one occasion, Novotny uses the descriptive qualities of “observational” recordings also with Glawogger’s footage and demonstrates that, in fact, sometimes less montage at the editing table can yield more comprehensive insight into particular social behavior. It this scene, Mike, the street hustler, takes his daily morning shot of heroin and, subsequently, soliloquizes about his way of life. Whereas, in Glawogger’s representation of the situation, a single mid-shot leaves the audience ignorant about the surroundings, Novotny uses more of the original footage and unveils a bedraggled apartment populated with other drug addicts and street hustlers. The insertion of the unused wide angles indeed mirrors more faithfully than Megacities the event-in-context. Novotny’s rendition of the footage makes it possible to appreciate Mike, not as the lone wolf he appears to be in Megacities, but as, in fact, embedded in a social network of like-minded people. 10. Nevertheless, Vertov arranged sounds and images according to complex mathematical and abstract-associative criteria, whereas Novotny counts on the rhythmic and associative interaction of sounds/ music and images. 11. “Black” is used as a political rather than a racial category throughout the text and is, therefore, written with an initial capital. 12. Glawogger sought out the respondents of the broadcast and reenacted their calls. 13. For a highly conclusive discussion of cinema’s capacities of evoking corporal experiences other than the audiovisual, see Marks 2000.

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14. Original quotation in French; translated by the author. 15. One of the many scenes in which the collaborative act may reveal itself via its obvious (self-) staged nature is the reenactment of a robbery. The New York street hustler Mike insisted—against Glawogger’s (2006) original intentions—upon representing one of his most desperate ways of “earning a living” and staged his way of a “prostitution gone sour” with the help of a friend. He would lure a male client into a shabby motel room and undress him only to consequently rob and insult him in a homophobic manner. 16. Grimshaw and Ravetz point out the origins of observational cinema: from the 1950s onward, this approach of filmmaking rejected the former rhetoric, grandiosity, editorializing, expert summary, and the use of pictures to illustrate ideas. Enabled by new technologies like the handheld camera and the portable sound recorder, “filmmakers now claimed to take up a different position with respect to the world. They sought to insert themselves into it, relinquishing their privileged position in favor of an openness to being shaped by particular situations and relationships they encountered” (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: x). This led to particular aesthetic and discursive forms, notably the preference of long shots, non-intervention during the filming process, synchronous sound, and little editorializing. Especially in the 1950s–1960s, the aesthetics of direct cinema placed “the invisibility of means in favor of the presence of the depicted” (Hohenberger 1998: 25, translated by the author) deeply in the common understanding of documentary film. Despite the repudiation of the privileged position of the film author, these forms of representation remain (often unconsciously) authored. A recent development of observational cinema is David MacDougall’s The Doon School Project (2000–4), which recognizes the creative involvement of the filmmaker in the process of constructing a film and thus uses the aesthetic possibilities of cinematography to a greater extent. His newest films are “at once more explicitly observational and more self-consciously authored” (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 79). 17. Needless to say, such transcultural negotiations are not free of power relations either. Cultural and economic capital and, accordingly, suggestive questioning and remuneration, among other things, shape the interaction between filmmaker and protagonists. 18. This unbalanced power relationship applies regardless of whether or not the filmmaker, the cameraman, and the editor are the same person. 19. Original quotation in German; translated by the author.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 2008. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, eds. Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 47–65. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bal, Mieke. 2001. “Performanz und Performativität.” In Kultur-Analysen: Interventionen, ed. Jörg Huber, 197–241. Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1997. “Schwache Staaten: Globalisierung und die Spaltung der Weltgesellschaft.” In Kinder der Freiheit, ed. Ulrich Beck, 315–332. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Binter, Julia T. S. 2009. We Shoot the World: Österreichische Dokumentarfilmer und die Globalisierung. Berlin: LIT-Verlag. Deisl, Heinrich. 2005. “Töne aus Film.” In ray: Filmmagazin 12: 97–100. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Glawogger, Michael. 1998. Megacities. 90 min., super 16mm (blowup 35mm). Austria/ Switzerland: Lotus Film, Fama Film. ———. 2006a. “Fragen der Einstellung: ‘Ein Film über das Überleben im Alltag’: Michael Glawogger über Megacities.” In DVD-Booklet: “Megacities.” Vienna: Der Österreichische Film. Edition Der Standard, no. 33.

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———. 2006b. Bonus audio commentary, Megacities DVD. Vienna: Der Österreichische Film. Edition Der Standard, no. 33. ———. 2007. DVD-Booklet: “Workingman’s Death.” Vienna: Falter-Edition. Glawogger, Michael, and Timo Novotny. 2006. Bonus audio commentary, Life in Loops DVD. Vienna: Filmladen. Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2009. Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gunning, Tom. 1989. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde.” In Early Film: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, 56–62. London: British Film Institute. Hicks, Jeremy. 2007. Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London: I. B. Tauris. Horwath, Alexander. 1999. “Fantasma real.” In Die Zeit 25. Available online at zeit.de/1999/ 25/199925.megacities_.xml (accessed 1 August 2009). Hohenberger, Eva. 1998. “Dokumentarfilmtheorie: Ein historischer Überblick über Ansätze und Probleme.” In Bilder des Wirklichen: Texte zur Theorie des Dokumentarfilms, ed. Eva Hohenberger, 8–34. Berlin: Vorwerk 8. Kämmerer, Dietmar. 2006. “Fremde Spiegelbilder.” In Der Standard. Available online at derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2618298 (accessed 1 August 2009). Kamani, Ginu. 2002. Megacities: Interview with Michael Glawogger. Available online at glawogger.com/images/dokus/E_interv_megacities.pdf (accessed 1August 2009). Kamani, Ginu. 2005. Interview with Michael Glawogger. Venice Film Festival. Available online at workingmansdeath.at/press_en.html (accessed 20 January 2010). Keilbach, Judith. 1998. Diskussionsprotokoll No. 1. Megacities. Duisburger Filmwoche. Available online at duisburger-filmwoche.de/archiv/protokolle98/megacities.rtf (accessed 1 August 2009). Kluge, Alexander. 1975. Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Zur realistischen Methode. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. McKechneay, Maya. 2005. “‘Ich bin nicht ausgezogen, um eine These zu beweisen’: Michael Glawogger im Gespräch.” In ray: Filmmagazin 12: 20–23. MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema, ed. Lucien Taylor. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press. Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Möller, Olaf. 2006. “Ihr kleines Österreich: Wurscht, the World.” In Senses of Cinema. Available online at archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/06/40/diagonale-graz-2006 .html (accessed 1 August 2009). Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Niney, François. 2009. Le documentaire et ses faux-semblants. Paris: Klincksieck. Novotny, Timo. 2006. Life In Loops: A Megacities RMX. 97 min., 35mm. Austria: Ulrich Gehmacher, Orbrock Filmproduktion GmbH, Timo Novotny inLoops. Reicher, Isabella. 1998. “Überlebenskampf in den Megacities.” In Der Standard, 27 October, 6. Reid, Angus. 2006. Timo Novotny and the Anti-film. Jihlava International Filmfestival. Available online at lifeinloops.com/content2.htm (accessed 1 August 2009). Rouch, Jean. 2003. “The Camera and Man.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 29–46. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. “Global Cities and Survival Circuits.” In Einführung in die Entwicklungssoziologie: Themen, Methoden, Analysen, ed. Franz Kolland, 65–81. Vienna: Mandelbaum. Schön, Christina. Megacities. Available online at filmstarts.de/kritiken/53909-Megacities.html (accessed 1 August 2009). Tonnar, Yann. 2006. “Wie darf man die Welt auch anschauen?” In d’Lëtzebuerger Land. Available online at land.lu/html/dossiers/dossier_luxfilm/itw_glawogger_120506.html (accessed 1 August 2009). Trinh, Minh-ha T. 1993. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning.” In Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov, 90–107. New York: Routledge.

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Ungar, Steven. 2003. “Visuality.” In Glossolalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords, ed. Julian Wolfreys, 309–324. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vertov, Dziga. 1984a. “From the History of the Kinoks.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, 92–100. Berkley: University of California Press. ———. 1984b. “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, 85–91. Berkley: University of California Press. ———. 1984c. “The Man with a Movie Camera.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, 82–84. Berkley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 11

Filming in the Light of Memory Alyssa Grossman

Visual anthropologists have traditionally used film to document physical spaces, artifacts, and images, analyzing representational processes linked to visible, tangible aspects of culture (see Morphy and Banks 1999; Rollwagen 1988; Ruby 2000). But what happens when the object of study is an immaterial, cognitive phenomenon not perceptible through vision alone? Making an ethnographic film about memory raises practical, methodological, and theoretical questions. How could a subject such as memory be addressed through images, when its very existence implies an absence of the object of recollection? In what ways do practices of remembrance work differ from or resemble practices of visual representation? What creative filmmaking methods might be mobilized to capture internal, emotional aspects of memory that are not directly manifested through visual means? As a visual anthropologist, I have experimented with various forms of montage to evoke, rather than merely depict, the complex and highly sensory experiences of memory. My 2010 film Lumina amintirii (In the Light of Memory), part of my research on sites and practices of remembrance work in post-communist Bucharest, uses a technique I have called “in-camera montage” to generate affective understandings of Romanians’ present-day memories of their collective past. This particular type of montage invites viewers to engage with memory itself, intending to awaken the “sensual imagination” (Healy 2003: 223) and create visceral impressions that are difficult to convey through academic writing alone. As Healy notes (2001: 233), memories cannot simply be inscribed by language or images; they are inhabited by our bodies in space and time. As Bucharest’s current state of “transition” is an ongoing reminder of particular communist and postcommunist legacies, its residents recollect the past in multiple ways, through their minds, bodies, and emotions. Instead of treating film as an illustrative research tool to describe or explain such processes, I have used montage to push the medium beyond its representative capacity, activating its “evocative” modes of operation (Crawford 1992: 78; MacDougall 1994: 267) to engage with corporeal experiences of memory. Lumina amintirii contains several long, uncut traveling shots obtained by attaching my camera to the seat of a bicycle. These tracking sequences of incamera montage serve to trigger spectators’ emotions and perceptions akin to the very processes of remembering. They resonate with a Bergsonian interpretation of memory not as a substance physically lodged in matter, but as constant yet discontinuous movement woven into bodily experiences of the duration of time (Guerlac 2006). Through these sequences, as well as other montages of image, sound, time, and space, I aim to generate affective, sensory understandings of the fragmented, multilayered experiences of recollection experienced in Bucharest’s current moment of post-socialist transition.

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The Double Paradox The relationship between remembrance work and image transmission is far from straightforward (see Melion and Küchler 1991: 2). Historically, images have served as the basis for many theories of memory. Aristotle’s writings describe the act of recollection as conjuring an image in the mind. Roman orators were trained to mentally connect pictures of places and objects to their texts in order to facilitate semantic recall. Visual aids such as maps, tattoos, the zodiac, and photographs all represent means of conveying memories without the medium of words (see Casey 1987; Edkins 2003; Fentress and Wickham 1992; Gross 2000; McQuire 1998; Misztal 2003; Weigel 1996; and Yates 1966). Yet while memory may be analyzed as a visual phenomenon, connected to concrete, material, sensory processes, the experience of remembering is paradoxically impossible to depict through images alone. We cannot document our recollections, or show them to others. We cannot take a picture of something that is by definition absent, unable to be seen. Even if these activities were possible, the resulting pictures would be inherently flawed. Capturing memory through photographic means would only reinforce misconceptions that memory could have a visual, physical presence, that it could be a fixed, unchanging entity, that it could ever be fully accessible or recoverable (Huyssen 2003: 124; MacDougall 1994: 263). Critics have deemed such “photographic paradigms” of memory (Casey 1987: 269) highly problematic. Some have charged photographic technologies with undermining the immediacy and directness of first-hand processes of recollection, or cultivating impersonal and disembodied relationships to the past (Barthes 1981; McQuire 1998; Sontag 1977). Others have described archival footage or old photographs as deceptive “props” (Crapanzano 2004: 162) or “secondary referents” of the past (MacDougall 1994: 263) that could never substitute for memories themselves. Although recollections may resemble pictures, photographic images will never actually mirror the visions in our mind. Expressing memory in concrete form requires more than copying mental impressions and transposing them to the material realm. As a visual anthropologist, I struggled with the task of using film to investigate memory—a highly pictorial, yet ultimately invisible and irreproducible phenomenon. Just because I was expected to present certain “realities” in my film, did I have to literally represent those realities? As Walter Benjamin observed (Leslie 2006: 178), technologies of visual reproduction may replicate the world, but they inevitably mediate it at the same time. Film in particular has the power to stimulate affect (Bennett 2006: 27; Leslie 2006: 180): non-discursive, “sensual intensities” unmediated by cognition (Navaro-Yashin 2009: 12). If I were to present filmic images as Edmund Husserl advocates, not as “juridical evidence,” but as “evidence of sensory intuition” (Buck-Morss 2004: 10), then perhaps I could better access the vivid yet intangible experiences of memory. If my film could slip between the structures of visual representation, to generate evocative spaces of feeling (Crawford 1992: 67), perhaps it could confront the double paradox of grappling with the visual yet invisible dimensions of memory. A documentary film might easily convey the frameworks and contents of particular memories in the Romanian post-socialist context. But could it also communicate memories’ textures and tones, their tendency to be simultaneously blurry and clear, sequential and fragmented, reliable and unstable, nostalgic, ironic, emotional, visceral, and haptic? According to Benjamin, film’s technological properties

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allow it to dig beneath the fragmented surfaces of reality to reach the “optical unconscious,” making film one of the best instruments for capturing the emotional dimensions of modern life (Chapman 1997: 11; Clarke 1997: 3). Film’s “photogénie,” or ability to transmit an enhanced sense of materiality, suggests it may be a particularly conducive medium for approximating subjective phenomena such as memories, reveries, and dreams (MacDougall 2006: 17; see also Connerton 2009: 117). If the eye is a conduit for other bodily senses, then the mimetic images of film have the capacity to “engage with the embodied mind” (Taussig 1994: 206) when used in particular ways. Films that privilege a “language of sensation” through formal innovation may invite spectators to more actively participate in emotional experiences such as remembering (Bennett 2005: 2). Indirect narrative and figurative strategies may address memory more effectively than direct, interpretive approaches (Huyssen 2003: 129). As Charles Green (2008: 681) argues, filmic understandings of memory are best achieved by working through rather than about memory, using visual techniques in ways that inspire distrust of the projected image, rather than adhering to realist conventions of classic narrative cinema. Healy similarly writes that fiction films operating on “anti-representational” principles challenging conventional logics of space and time create viewing experiences that more closely resemble the whimsical operations of memory (2003: 225). Indeed, it is often fictional treatments that most successfully avoid attributing “singular, overarching” meanings to memory, engaging in more “refined, complex” forms of history telling instead (J. Young 2000: 10). Such possibilities, however, have been explored less in anthropological and scientific studies of memory than in artistic and experimental ones. Many ethnographic documentaries still tend to fall within the realms of verifiable “evidence” and “witness” (Winston 1995: 10). Anthropologists all too often expect film to adhere to “reason, to words, to plain style,” and to “seek the discursive and eschew the figurative” (Stoller 1994: 96; see also Ruby 2000: 269). Yet as voices from the “crisis of representation” era remind us, culture is never fully observable, and the “visualist ideology of referential discourse” is ultimately doomed to fail (Tyler 1986: 130). My own struggles to interpret memory within the paradigms of ethnographic film pushed me to abandon any lingering ambitions of representative accuracy. Instead, I explored alternative ways to engage the senses. By experimenting with various techniques of montage, I sought to re-create an experience for my spectators that would be analogous to remembrance work. I wanted my film to critically examine memory by evoking how it operates and feels, rather than by explaining or depicting memories themselves (see Huyssen 2003: 130; Nichols 1994: 82). While my filmic practices are rooted in observational training at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, I have been influenced by other methodologies as well, such as the French surrealists’ traditions of manipulating scientific language to evoke the sensory, subjective dimensions of dreams, memories, and imagination (see Foster 1993; Kelly 2007; Russell 1999; Walker 2002; and Williams 1981). The surrealists’ simultaneous adoptions and disruptions of conventional codes of indexicality playfully call attention to the illusions of documented reality. I have also been inspired by avant-garde filmmakers’ framing, shooting, and editing styles to convey the “velocity, memory, and simultaneity” in the modern experience of temporality (Merx 2008: 425). Using Lumina amintirii as an example, I will discuss how the use of in-camera montage and other forms of audiovisual montage, elements often overlooked

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and under-theorized within visual anthropology, may communicate multilayered, complex experiences of remembering by provoking affective images and sensations. These practices operate not only in visual dimensions, but also in auditory, tactile, and temporal arenas (see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005: 8). My film (more concerned with what memory does, than what it is), works toward an “openingup of memory spaces” in its spectators (Healy 2003: 232), intertwining affect and intellect, cerebral and corporeal reasoning.

Seeds of the Film Between August 2006 and December 2007, I lived in a flat near Cişmigiu Gardens, one of the oldest public parks in Bucharest. In late summer and early autumn, a huge flock of crows would roost in the trees of this park. Each morning the birds would fly out to the city, and each evening they would head back to their trees in Cişmigiu, filling the sky with a cacophony of cawing sounds. This spectacle led me to spend more time in the park. During an intense summer heat wave in 2007, I frequently sought refuge in Cişmigiu, sitting under the shade of the trees, listening to the crows, watching the people. The park was well kept and picturesque, always crowded with people. It had paths and bridges, a playground for children, a pavilion for brass bands, restaurants, and bars. There was a small pond in the center, filled with paddleboats in the summer and ice skaters in the winter. Encircling the perimeter of the park were long stretches of old-fashioned green wooden benches with wrought-iron legs. People sat on these seats, fed breadcrumbs to the birds, chatted with their friends. Elderly people rested. Parents fussed over children and babies. Young people talked on their cell phones, listened to music. Couples unabashedly made out. A photographer known as Uncle Costica had claimed one of the park benches as his own. He took snapshots of passersby for a small fee, and had an old stuffed deer that people could pose with if they wanted (see figure 11.1). Uncle Costica had been taking pictures in Cişmigiu since 1944. Many of my friends had told me stories of their childhoods involving the photographer, his deer, and this park. One Sunday afternoon in August, I filmed Cişmigiu’s line of green benches in a single, uninterrupted shot. I borrowed my friend Ana’s bicycle and strapped my camera to its saddle, the lens directed toward the benches. While I supported the camera, my friend Selena steered the handlebars of the bicycle, and Ana followed behind us, discouraging occasional hecklers. We began filming at one of Cişmigiu’s side entrances, and slowly walked its circumference, until we made a full circle around the park. As we filmed the succession of vacant and occupied seats, the camera caught people’s fleeting gestures, facial expressions, and snippets of conversation (see figures 11.2–13). Sometimes people were unaware of the camera. Other times they looked up, startled to see such a contraption, and interacted with us. One teenaged boy threatened to break the camera if we filmed him, and then burst out laughing. A group of elderly tourists waved and smiled and called out to us in French.

Figure 11.1. Screenshot from In the Light of Memory (Alyssa Grossman, 2010).

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Figures 11.2–13. Screenshots from In the Light of Memory (Alyssa Grossman, 2010).

Children frequently asked us what we were doing. We responded with minimal verbal engagement, but maintained eye contact. If anyone indicated displeasure at being filmed, I covered the camera lens with my hand. It took an hour to complete a single lap around the park. The experience was interesting, but not extraordinary; at times it even felt awkward and tedious. But when I went home and watched the footage, the images on the screen were unexpectedly much more compelling than what I had just seen in “real life.” Why was this the case? By isolating a concentrated swath of time and space, the camera’s

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frame directed the viewer’s attention towards fragments of everyday social activity that ordinarily pass unnoticed. The sequence of green benches, now limited to the spatial field of a monitor, formed a strong visual continuity for the eye. The rolling movement of the camera was reminiscent of a tracking shot in a fiction film, with the images of different people’s faces lasting just long enough to provoke the viewer’s curiosity. The empty benches invited reflection about those who had passed by, and anticipation about those who would appear next. Memories were embedded in this raw footage. Memories were also produced in the very act of watching it.

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I decided to film other scenes in Cişmigiu Gardens. I began to spend more time with Uncle Costica the photographer, who let me document his daily routines in the park. In the meantime, not yet certain what my film would eventually contain, I shot other interviews and landscapes around the city. After I left the field, and my film’s structure slowly emerged in the course of editing, certain theoretical issues surfaced. These included questions about the relationship between different forms of montage and sensory experiences of recollection, and the complex connections between cinematic motion, montage, and memory.

In-Camera Montage While a single, continuous, uncut traveling shot might be perceived as the opposite of montage, which is ordinarily associated with gaps and discontinuities, the lateral movement of my bicycle footage produces the phenomenon of incamera montage, or changes of scene ordinarily achieved by a cut. This type of montage is a product of the horizontal motion of the camera itself. A single scene seamlessly unfolds, yet this view is constantly interrupted as new scenes pass in and out of the frame. In Lumina amintirii, just as the spectator is able to register something about the features, the characters, the relationships of the people in the foreground, their figures disappear, their existence suggested only by the continuing trail of green benches in the background. The mobile camera thus activates the experience of memory through its passing encounters with the occupants of the park benches. The succession of images establishes a perpetually “drawn-out present tense” (Russell 1999: 175), giving viewers a chance to experience (and indeed recall) each moment as it turns into the past. The discontinuous continuity of in-camera montage provokes sensations of immediacy and distance, reinforcing Bergson’s interpretation of memory as embedded in the overlapping temporalities of each occurring instant (Burton 2008: 327; Guerlac 2006: 116; Keiller 2007: 83). The traveling sequences in Lumina amintirii treat the present as a Bergsonian “duration,” revealing the “invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future” (Keiller 2007: 83). These shots evoke the past not merely by transcribing a “prior mental state” (Bennett 2006: 28), but by cultivating in the viewer a new (yet somehow familiar) emotional and intellectual space, situated in the ever-shifting contexts of the present. The potential of motion to evoke emotional and sensory experience can be traced back to cinema’s foundations over a century ago. Railway films from the early twentieth century, containing landscapes shot from the windows of moving trains, have been interpreted as portraying “stream of consciousness” images and feelings (Keiller 2007: 82). The motion picture itself emerged from the legacy of urban, public viewing sites such as cabinets of curiosity, shop window displays, and panoramas, invoking a particularly cosmopolitan world of travel and activity (Bruno 2007: 15; Degot 2006). The filmic term pan derives from the panorama, a nineteenth-century invention where painted landscapes were rolled between two cylinders across a stage, allowing audiences to feel as if they were traveling across distant lands (Keiller 2007: 82). Critics have described contemporary films with similar moving landscapes, such as Chantal Akerman’s video installation D’Est (1993), as conveying a kind of “peripatetic vision” (Bruno 2007: 25; Lebow 2003: 37), or a “stare in motion” (Russell 1999: 163), evoking late-modern experiences of

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remembering the past, and fundamentally connected to spaces of technological perception, and consequently, memorialization. Such presentations of continuous movement are often analyzed for their alienating feelings of speed and their sense of contemporary, fractured vision (Bruno 2007; Schwarzer 2003). While the bicycle footage in Lumina amintirii communicates a new visual perspective, a mechanical form of flânerie, which breaks with conventional human and filmic perspectives of “looking,” it maintains a leisurely, meandering pace. It lingers on the faces of the people in the park, as their eyes linger on the camera. The slow, wobbly movement of the bicycle and the mutual, prolonged stares are simultaneously engaging and unsettling, pushing viewers to experience the continuous yet fleeting images as they experience their own memories, in charged and embodied ways. The subtle yet perceptible sound of the bicycle wheel’s rhythmic ticking further heightens the perception of passing time. This noise echoes the second hand of a clock, alluding to but also literally marking each moment as it gives way to the next. As Iain Chambers writes (1997: 232), films’ “aural maps” of recorded sounds are often “punctuated with memory,” disturbing our “ocular regimes” and evoking images other than the ones presented on the screen (see also Morris 2001). Similarly, the incorporation of accordion music toward the end of Lumina amintirii intends to draw audiences through “gaps in time and meaning” into spaces of memory (Chambers 1997: 234). The accordion player’s song Zaraza, written by Cristian Vasile during the interwar period, is connected in many Romanians’ minds to Bucharest’s reputation as having once been a “European” and “cultured” city, specifically before the arrival of communism in 1945. Lumina amintirii contains multiple audio tracks, with extra-diegetic narratives layered over the diegetic sounds of the park. These narratives are highly edited, reconstructed excerpts of stories recounted by Bucharest residents I had interviewed at different times and in other parts of the city. Though their faces are never seen, their voices are heard over scenes from the park. Their stories accompany the traveling bicycle sequences, as well as other long, static shots of the park’s physical and social landscapes: people paddling boats across the pond; children running around a playground; young people playing card games on the grass. These images do not directly illustrate or correspond to the overlaid spoken narratives, but rather serve as visual backdrops setting an atmospheric tone, inviting the viewer to drift with the voices into deeper, unseen spaces of memory. The overlapping of voices and images evoke the “fluky links and stochastic jump-cuts” of memory that “resist ‘proper,’ orderly reasoning” (Terdiman 2003: 186), leaping across temporal and spatial boundaries to bring fragments of the past unexpectedly into the present. Through these layers, I wished to summon feelings of the superimposition and suspension of space and time, echoing memory’s capacity for the “displacement and condensation of competing temporalities” (Schwarz 2003: 147). Though voice-over is a regular feature in many ethnographic and documentary films, never revealing the narrators’ faces is a less common tactic. The diverse stories recounted by the faceless voices in Lumina amintirii allude to the incongruities and inconsistencies of collective memory. Some are fond and nostalgic; others are tinged with condemnation or regret. Some convey shared sentiments; others overtly contradict one another. They reflect the reality that while certain larger groups may share particular experiences of the past, memories are often highly nuanced and individualized. They point to common social frameworks and

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perspectives, demonstrating certain “structures of recall” (Gross 2000: 133) related to particular moments in Romania’s past. Yet they also reflect diverse generational, social, and cultural experiences, involving numerous intersecting and competing identities (Foucault 1977: 161). Other sequences in Lumina amintirii follow snippets of conversations and interpersonal interactions within the park. Passersby pose with the tattered deer for photographs; Uncle Costica and two of his friends debate the pros and cons of Romanian communism; a homeless man questions me one morning as I film the park’s deserted paths. These scenes conform to an observational style, particularly attentive to body language and sensory experience (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 532). They avoid relying on didactic verbal explanation or textual interpretation, and allow events to take their own shape rather than adhering to predetermined structures or storylines. While editing these sequences, I applied standard methods of cutting and rearranging images and sounds to condense “real time” while preserving the integrity of my footage. Yet while Lumina amintirii loosely alludes to the passage of time over the course of a day, it does not conform to a single, linear narrative, or preserve a strictly chronological coherence. Like memory, it conveys a reordered assembly of fragments containing multiple stories, spaces, and temporalities.

Remembrance Work and Urban Gardens By framing my film within the broader landscapes of a park, I allude to the “ambiguous landscapes” of recollection itself (Chambers 1997: 235). Just as cinematic motion is not only optic but also haptic, or tangible, communicative, and affectively charged (Bruno 2007: 14), gardens similarly serve as a “privileged locus in the pursuit of . . . haptic, emotive space” (ibid.: 24). As sites of solitary contemplation and social interaction, or “affective spaces” (Navarro-Yashin 2009: 13), gardens and parks are landscapes particularly conducive to processes of remembering. Walking along their paths often triggers thoughts and reveries about the past, present, and future (Ingold 2007: 2; Sennett 1994: 179; Tilley 1994: 30). Their architecture may be read as “eloquent expressions of complex cultural ideas” (Hunt 1992: 3), inviting their visitors into meditative spaces (Casey 1987: 207–9). My focus on the interface between “actual landscapes and landscapes of the mind” (Boym 2001: 354) steered me toward deeper investigations of memories about Cişmigiu Gardens itself, as well as the histories of other public parks throughout Bucharest. Just as urban gardens are often interpreted as symbolic landscapes encompassing notions of a city’s idealized, rural past (Hirsch 1995: 2; Hunt 1992: 323; Schama 1996: 16), their particular architectural and horticultural arrangements also hark back to the time of their construction, to the visions and dreams that their original designers had of the future. Parks, courtyards, and gardens appeared to constitute an essential part of Bucharest’s past and present identity for many of its inhabitants. This notion wove in and out of my conversations with older generations and those with long-standing connections to the city. Private gardens once formed the core of Bucharest’s neighborhoods, as it was originally customary for residences to be constructed around interior courtyards. When the landscape architect Carl Meyer was summoned from Vienna to design Cişmigiu Gardens in 1843, Bucharest only had two other existing public parks (Vătămanu 1973: 98). Until that time, the abundance of private courtyards had meant there had been less need for large, public gardens (ibid.: 98). But the city

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was rapidly expanding and changing. By the early twentieth century, green spaces were important features in the city’s public landscapes, and Bucharest was referred to as the “garden city of the future” (Iancu 1996 [1935], cited in Barris 2001: 233). Cişmigiu came to carry strong commemorative associations with Bucharest’s contemporary identity—not as an official memorial, but as an everyday “site of continual reinterpretation” (Crapanzano 2004: 170). When the park was first built, it served as a fundamentally new type of community facility. Instead of being an elite, highly manicured landscape intended only for visual pleasure, it functioned as an arena of enjoyment and recreation for the masses. People would go there to eat, drink, play checkers and dominoes (Toma 2001: 40). Walking on the grass and fishing were prohibited; but the fact that people so often broke the rules indicated that they felt at home in this free and open space (ibid.: 176). Elena (in her early eighties) recalled that during pre-communist times when she was a child, exotic animals such as parakeets and peacocks were kept in Cişmigiu. People had to pay a fee to sit on the benches, she told me, but anyone could enter the park and stroll for free. The street bordering the park was once a red-light district, and she remembered seeing soldiers walking around with their mistresses. Ruxandra (in her thirties) came from a family that had been in Bucharest for many generations; she also held strong associations between Bucharest’s garden landscapes and its “pre-industrialized” (read pre-communist) identity. When I asked her what she liked about the city, she responded, “Its old streets. Its houses with gardens. The scent of linden trees. Looking through people’s windows at night, and seeing the light of a lamp, like in a novel. These are things that make up the perfume of this city. Now, fewer people identify Bucharest with those kinds of things, and instead connect it to the [communist] constructions and demolitions that took place after the 1950s.” Ruxandra’s description of the “perfume” of Bucharest reinforces how the senses are inextricably entwined with memory. Her comments also point to gardens as contested spaces, defying simplistic generalizations of Bucharest as a ravaged, post-communist ruin. In her mind, the green spaces of Bucharest radically distinguish it from its tainted communist past. Her memories echo tendencies among many long-term residents to associate the city with the interwar period, when Bucharest was romanticized as the “Paris of the East,” renowned for its elegant houses and plant-filled private courtyards. These are the lost memories of Bucharest as the “garden city of the future.” Paul, an ethnologist in his early sixties, whose grandparents had settled in Bucharest in the early 1900s, described to me the distinct style of the city’s case pe curte, or “houses alongside gardens,” such as the one where he was raised. The houses would be shaped like wagons, with a garden set parallel to them along one side. At the edge of these gardens, near the principal entrance by the street, usually behind a wrought-iron fence, Paul explained, would be a bench. And in the evenings, between seven and eight o’clock, the elderly people of the house would sit on the bench and chat. I remember my father sitting with my uncle, and strolling along the edge of the garden. Why was it so nice? Because the people passing on the street would greet those sitting in the yard. They wouldn’t chat, but they’d greet each other. You used to see that in village habitats here in the southern part of Romania. And in urban places. Hence the cliché of Bucharest being a big village. It’s not only that it’s a big village—or that it used to be. But in the way that its urban texture was made, it preserved the principle of the connection between the street, the house, and the garden.

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Nowadays, you can’t do those things anymore, because—you’ve seen it—in the houses with yards that are highly valued by those who profited by the [post-communist] transition. In the first place, they take out the classic fence, and make it opaque. They put up tin, or walls. It looks like a prison. So the yard can no longer communicate with the street. The street becomes a mere passageway. And the fence is an opaque thing that you can hide behind. You know? Which is a totally un-Bucharestian thing. To no longer have a connection between the house with its garden, and the street.

This connection between the house, the garden, and the street, so essentially “Bucharestian” for many locals, speaks to the bicycle footage in Lumina amintirii. Family members and friends sitting together on benches, relaxing and chatting. People in the park exchanging greetings with passersby. The open space of communication linking both sides. Only after I had become immersed in my own filming and editing did I recognize the correlation between people’s memories of Bucharest’s gardens and the present-day social dynamics within Cişmigiu Gardens. It was the process of montage itself that stimulated a deeper investigation of how memories, urban landscapes, and gardens in Bucharest were fundamentally intertwined, bringing recollections of the past into perceptual and material spaces of the present.

Reactions and Reflections Romanians and non-Romanians alike have commented that watching Lumina amintirii awakened their own memories about the past. People seemed to relate to the film in highly individualized ways, particularly depending on their generation. Those old enough to remember the communist period associated the film’s stories not only with past political dynamics, but also with events that had been important parts of their own youth or early adulthood. While certain narratives appeared to resonate with some audiences, these same narratives also contradicted others’ experiences. Such reactions underline the inconsistencies and multiplicities of memories themselves. As my friend Lucian, a Romanian in his late thirties living in Germany for several years, noted: Seeing your film, I imagined people’s shared memories as pieces of a puzzle. The problem is that this puzzle has many, many pieces, and even if you have the patience, inspiration, and luck to put them in order, the resulting picture doesn’t make sense. It’s like a photograph that has been taken out of the developer too quickly, it hasn’t been fixed properly on the paper, and then it has been left out in the light for twenty years. . . . But at the same time, I think there is no other way to see it. Everyone filters the past through his or her own experiences. And where your own experience ends, someone else’s fantasy or opinion intervenes, with memories that don’t, in fact, belong to you.

Using in-camera and audiovisual montage provided me with a means to convey the tenacious yet delicate nature of individual and social memories, which Lucian so eloquently described. It is particularly striking that Lucian chose the metaphor of a failed photograph, an incomplete visual representation, to describe his feeling of trying to make sense of the past. His response affirms my film’s goals of transcending the ocular realm, paradoxically while calling upon images to cap-

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ture the invisible yet vivid, visual, and visceral qualities of memory. These images must be simultaneously whole and fractured, well defined and fuzzy, continuous and disrupted. The ability of montage to conjure up such impressions points to the possibilities in shifting ethnographic research from a purely text-based approach. My own filmic practices have helped to hone my sensory and intellectual understandings of memory, spurring insights that also wove into my “non-filmic” research activities. Such experiences point to the camera as a transformative and critical investigative tool, rather than an illustrative aid or afterthought to theorization. Yet while a growing body of literature has encouraged broader anthropological acceptance of filmmaking as productive of critical analysis, there has been relatively little exploration of how particular experimental shooting and editing techniques may be incorporated into such work. By writing about and practicing such techniques, I hope to provide a model for other researchers who might wish to use visual media to study internal, invisible human experiences such as memory. By integrating innovative forms of montage into my filmmaking practices, I both adhere to and challenge existing conventions of ethnographic cinema. Instead of holding ethnographic film responsible for developing its own “codes” of systematic reporting to generate “scientific statements” (Ruby 1975: 104), I wish to broaden the forms and agendas of such statements. I am more interested in shifting away from arguments rooted in scientific discourse, where debates within visual anthropology historically have formed (Asch and Asch 2009; Heider 1976; Ruby 1975, 2000; C. Young 1975), and toward the broader artistic implications of visual inquiry (Grimshaw 2005: 24; MacDougall 2006: 219). Rather than dwelling on whether ethnographic film is capable of communicating “anthropological knowledge” (Hastrup 1992; Loizos 1992; Ruby 1975), I find it more pertinent to use the medium to explore cognitive processes that exist beyond explicitly visible realms. In doing so, I wish to highlight the multifaceted nature of visual research, the intertwining modes of intellectual and affective perception (see Crawford 1992), and the complex relationship between different types of ethnographic practice and forms of anthropological representation. According to Sergei Eisenstein (1986 [1958]: 24), montage involves “arranging images” in the feelings and in the mind of the spectator. Processes of memory also involve arrangements of images and sensations in the remembering subject. The particular types of montage I utilize in Lumina amintirii aim to provoke emotional and intellectual experiences analogous to those of selective remembering. The film’s disparate visual, aural, and verbal elements disrupt linear chronologies and suggest multiple views of reality, invoking the elusive and ephemeral operations of memory (Healy 2003: 223; MacDougall 1994: 261). Its form and contents exploit the medium’s capacity to touch the corporeal space of the optical unconscious and connect with affect and imagination. By conjuring up the partial and multiple temporalities and spaces of remembrance work, it offers more nuanced, sensory interpretations of the individual, social, and cultural memories currently circulating among inhabitants of post-socialist Bucharest.

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———. 2009. “Rethinking Observational Cinema.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 538–56. Gross, David. 2000. Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Guerlac, Suzanne. 2006. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 8–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Healy, Chris. 2003. “Dead Man: Film, Colonialism and Memory.” In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, 221–36. London and New York: Routledge. Heider, Karl G. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hirsch, Eric. 1995. “Introduction—Landscape: Between Place and Space.” In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, eds. Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon, 1–30. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hunt, John D. 1992. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Iancu, Marcel. 1996 [1935]. “Towards an Architecture of Bucharest,” trans. M. Teodorescu. Reprinted in Centenar Marcel Iancu, 1895–1995, 232–40. Bucharest: Simetria. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London and New York: Routledge. Kelly, Julia. 2007. Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects. Paris c. 1925–35. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Keiller, Patrick. 2007. “The Railway and Early Film.” In The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, eds. Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, 69– 84. Bern: Peter Lang, Ltd. Lebow, Alisa. 2003. “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est.” Camera Obscura 52(18): 35–82. Leslie, Esther. 2006. “Absent-Minded Professors: Etch-a-sketching Academic Forgetting.” In Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition, eds. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, 172–85. New Brunswick: Transaction Press. Loizos, Peter. 1992. “Admissible Evidence? Film in Anthropology.” In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 50–65. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacDougall, David. 1994. “Films of Memory.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 260–70. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McQuire, Scott. 1998. Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera. London: Sage Publications, Ltd. Melion, Walter, and Susanne Küchler. 1991. “Introduction: Memory, Cognition, and Image Production.” In Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation, eds. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion, 1–46. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Merx, Sigrid. 2008. “Filmic photogénie in the theatre.” In Theater und Medien, Grundlagen— Analysen—Perspektiven, eds. Henri Schoenmakers and Stefan Bläske, 425–29. Bielefeld: Transcript. Misztal, Barbara A. 2003. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Morphy, Howard, and Marcus Banks. 1999. “Introduction: Rethinking Visual Anthropology.” In Rethinking Visual Anthropology, eds. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, 1–35. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Morris, Leslie. 2001. “The Sound of Memory.” German Quarterly 74(4): 368–78.

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Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 1–18. Nichols, Bill. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rollwagen, Jack R., ed. 1988. Anthropological Filmmaking. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Ruby, Jay. 1975. “Is an Ethnographic Film a Filmic Ethnography?” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2(2): 104–11. ———. 2000. Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Russell, Catherine. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schama, Simon. 1996. Landscape and Memory. London: Fontana Press. Schwarz, Bill. 2003. “‘Already the Past’: Memory and Historical Time.” In Regimes of Memory, eds. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, 135–51. London and New York: Routledge. Schwarzer, Mitchell. 2003. “The Moving Landscape.” In Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olen, 83–102. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Stoller, Paul. 1994. “Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 84–98. New York and London: Routledge. Taussig, Michael. 1994. “Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 205–13. New York and London: Routledge. Terdiman, Richard. 2003. “Given Memory: On Mnemonic Coercion, Reproduction, and Invention.” In Regimes of Memory, eds. Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, 186– 201. London and New York: Routledge. Tilley, Chris. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. Toma, Dolores. 2001. Despre grădini şi modurile lor de folosire. Iaşi: Polirom. Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. “Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 122–40. London: University of California Press. Vătămanu, Nicolae. 1973. Istorie bucureşteana. Bucureşti: Editura enciclopedică română. Walker, Ian. 2002. City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Weigel, Sigrid. 1996. Body and Image Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. G. Paul with R. McNicholl and J. Gaines. London: Routledge. Williams, Linda. 1981. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winston, Brian. 1995. Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations, the Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute. Yates, Francis. 1966. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and K. Paul. Young, Colin. 1975. “Observational Cinema.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 99–114. The Hague: Mouton. Young, James E. 2000. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 12

Montage as Analysis in Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking From Hunting for Plots Toward Weaving Baskets of Data Jakob Kirstein Høgel

The suppressed narrative dimension of anthropological writing was exhumed in the debates about Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). There was a sense of entering forbidden territory, describing ethnography as stories with characters and climaxes ordered in terms of genres and rhetorical strategies. The classic monograph was criticized, perhaps most incisively by Robert Thornton (1988). He showed how the detailed use of classification in ethnographic writing often created an artificial sense of a whole culture or society and omitted the dynamics and complexities that are essential in cultural analysis. Ironically, Thornton argues that a neat classificatory system has the same effect on a reader as a well-composed plot in a novel: it provides a sense of closure instead of opening up for curiosity and complexity. Thornton’s critique, along with other literary examinations of monographs, made classification as a structuring tool for representation less attractive for many anthropologists. For some, narrative representation could save ethnography from classificatory gridlocks (Marcus 1990). The narrative dimensions of ethnographic work were overlooked in written anthropology. The overwhelming interest in narrative created much discussion and reinvigorated the practice of writing culture. The “narrative turn” catalyzed discussions far beyond questions of how ethnographies are worded. Attention to narrative has not had and will not have such an effect in filmic anthropology, because narrative is already part and parcel of ethnographic and documentary film. Narrative structuring of material has dominated documentaries for the last halfcentury. This is not surprising when considering documentaries for television, with its demand for a strong grip on the viewer: “The broadcasters’ understanding of ‘good television’ usually requires the molding of ethnographic footage into a familiar story-line. The inevitable product of this demand is a very particular narrative style. . . . While this general organizational pattern is not dissimilar to the standard written ethnography . . . the televised ethnography differs in that there is little room for analysis” (Wright 1992: 274). As a visual anthropologist working in the film industry, I take part in and appreciate the efforts that go into crafting narrative documentaries. Still, I would argue that the insistence on narrative structuring has been an impediment to developing

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other more profoundly analytical approaches to making films. Analysis is here to be understood in the original meaning of the word: taking material apart in order to study it. Of course this is where montage literally comes into the picture. In filmmaking, montage is a way to go beyond the confines of chronological, linear storytelling. It is also a notoriously slippery term. It is derived from French where it means any kind of editing. In the United States, it has mainly been used about shorter sections in narrative films where the pace is much quicker and images are superimposed. The prototype is the sequence where several newspaper headings “land” on top of each other, thereby telling that what happened previously in the film has really hit the news. The most interesting theorization about filmic montage is still a century later that of Sergei Eisenstein, the director who also applied these theories in his own films. He developed a concept of analytical montage. I shall return to this later, but also discuss the clear limitations of Eisensteinian montage when dealing with anthropological filmic practice. In this chapter, I will take outset in an understanding of montage as ways of ordering and assembling material that goes beyond filmic conventions of narrative and continuity. My aim is to bring the suppressed analytical and classificatory dimension of audiovisual work into the light as an alternative to the narrative dominance that I believe has prevailed in all sectors of documentary. I will suggest that we look at filmmaking as a form of databasing and reexamine classification as a tool for anthropologically informed filmmaking. Works of filmmakers that take seminal steps in this direction will be examined and their understanding and practices of montage discussed.

Anthropology and Documentary What is analysis in filmmaking—be it ethnographic or other forms of documentary films? Is there room for something as abstract as analysis in a medium hailed for its concreteness? Documentaries are cultural depictions that work on many levels: aesthetically, emotionally, and ethically. Is it not stretching it to want analytical rigor involved as well? Are documentaries not primarily intended for presenting environments and characters as some anthropologists have suggested (Hastrup 1992; Balicki 1988: 33)? I think not. Most films already rely on one type of analytical operation, namely storytelling. Anthropologists could become better storytellers, as Paul Henley suggests (2006), and thereby expand the role of analysis in filmmaking. In my view, this is not sufficient. Instead, I suggest that anthropologists involved in filmmaking start to explore and develop other analytical approaches in the audiovisual field. There is no reason for visual anthropology to limit itself to the kind of narrative filmmaking that other professions do better, but are also limited by, as I shall argue below. Many documentaries, those with long-term filming especially, are done in ways similar to ethnographic field practice. Much like ethnographers, a surprisingly large share of documentary filmmakers start out from an interest in cultural phenomena. A field of interest is delineated, often by geography and theme. Fieldwork is conducted and a broad assortment of material, thoughts, and notes are gathered. Operating in the field poses many of the same ethical and methodological questions, and problems for documentary filmmakers as for ethnographers (Høgel 2002). Analytical tasks are performed throughout all stages of ethnographic work, but it does become a specialized task when leaving the field, working with the material removed from the source of its creation (see Crawford 1992: 68ff.). This is why I

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have chosen to focus on the editing of films and on how analytical considerations could be a greater part of the work in the editing suite. Writing up ethnography is a long process of writing and multiple rewritings. Notes are compared and recompared with other researchers’ findings, along with theories. Concepts are tested as to their capacity to shed light on the material (Sanjek 1990). In the equivalent stage in filmmaking, the filmic material is logged and divided into segments that are labeled and given notes. Every clip can be tagged in numerous ways and any number of cross-references can be made. With nonlinear editing tools, clips can easily be compared and metadata as well. Editing can be undertaken in any number of ways using anything from color to ontological status to help structure the work. Film work is technologically more complicated than writing but it can be as free-floating and abstract as thinking or writing. The main difference between the current practices of ethnography and documentary filmmaking, I will argue, is how their makers sense, perceive, and structure field material. Whereas written anthropology has developed diverse methodologies as to how notes are processed, closely linked to theoretical considerations (Sanjek 1990), the methodological focus in ethnographic filmmaking is usually limited to the actual filming with very little consideration for the ensuing elaboration of filmic material. I am not claiming that an analysis can be performed in film exactly as it would be done in text. Rather, I shall be arguing that every film is bound by the material and aesthetic qualities of what goes into making it (Kiener 2006; Biemann 2008). First I want to turn to current practices of editing. How is editing and montage thought of and what are the methodological guidelines in different filmmaking disciplines? I shall look at mainstream documentary filmmaking practice, ethnographic filmmaking, and Eisensteinian editing in turn.

Documentaries: Editing for the Story Film production is a team effort and editing is marked by the advent of a new person on the team, the editor. On the one hand, film editors work to fulfill the ambitions of the director, on the other, editors see themselves as the “first audience,” i.e., as representatives of the public that will view the film (Barbash and Taylor 1997: 378). Sometimes directorial intentions and audience reception can be neatly matched, but in many cases editing is a diplomatic effort with the editor as a broker. It is not an open-ended process. Editing is a fairly expensive and non-reversible part of filmmaking. What is in the computer at the end of the editing period is the final film. One widespread dogma in mainstream documentary is that the editing process should only include what is readily available. Editors often do not want to know about the filming experience, because they want to assess the qualities of the filmic material untainted by the circumstances of its production (Barbash and Taylor 1997: 378). Unlike directors who may feel very strongly for a particular shot or scene for reasons that are not necessarily in the frame, editors focus on what an audience will experience within the frame. In this sense, editing of documentaries is often more occupied with cultivating what stands out in the filmic material rather than discussing conceptual or invisible input that may be hard to extrapolate. During the work of watching material and assessing it—logging—it is necessary to identify the distinct qualities that are crucial for the editing process. It is obvious that with limited time and with audience anticipation in mind, it is difficult

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to work with multiple parameters in selecting and piecing together clips. Directors may have a broader cultural analysis at heart while filming, but they may not have ways of addressing and highlighting this analytical ambition when assessing and labeling clips. In contrast to this, there is a readily available film language that can pinpoint the elements that are essential for creating narratives: character motivation, plot points, and dramatic curves. In mainstream filmmaking, montage is not part of every film. As mentioned earlier, U.S. studio films use quick-paced superimpositions for “special occasions.” Certain media events or moods that stand out are highlighted through montage. Mainstream documentaries employ montage in the same way, but it is considered an artistic break from the main mode of storytelling. Ordering material along narrative lines is the dominant mode in mainstream documentary filmmaking. Put simply, it is performed by identifying a main character and this person’s goal. Clips are categorized according to their capacity as narrative kernels and building blocks for creating a narrative of the character(s) in pursuit of their goal(s). The editing takes on the task of testing the narrative capacity of the single shots and scenes and adjusting the narrative accordingly. Protagonists and their actions are obviously not without cultural meaning. Good and experienced directors manage to choose main characters that are more likely to play out conflicts of cultural significance. Nonetheless, once a narrative framework has been set up, many of the editing decisions are made on an almost mechanical basis. The behavior of protagonists determines the overall structure of narrative documentaries. The result is that many mainstream documentaries are clearer about what happened to our main character than about the cultural significance or relevance of the filmic action. The length of films for television is determined before the start of editing and there are moulds for what type of story each standard length (24 or 52 minutes are the preferred broadcast formats) caters for. Films with many layers or complex narratives are a problem (Kiener 2008: 399). Within the film industry’s mode of production and with narrative build-up as the only verbalized methodology, there is a tendency to look for directly observable causality and to build dramatic tension around what can be resolved in visible, interpersonal conflict. With this focus, other kinds of insight are downplayed or blocked out, such as thought patterns or historical determinants. It may be that a main character expresses a link between her actions and a historical event that the director is interested in. But if this link is not created in the “natural” unfolding of events, it is likely not to appear in the final film, because including it in the film would necessitate imposing non-story elements. Narrative structuring per se does not exclude any theoretical consideration or analytical point. Documentary masterpieces are regularly produced using standard procedures of narrative structuring among other analytical tools. However, in practice, within a majority of films, it is often the case that cultural analysis is sacrificed on the altar of making events narratively comprehensible. Only the very best filmmakers manage to imbue their films with cultural analysis. Is it not expecting too much of visual anthropologists, with limited film experience, to tell good stories and at the same time perform analyses on a par with those in written anthropology? I believe that anthropology should be less concerned with improving its narrative standard, which will always lag behind that of professional storytellers, but rather focus on the analytical perspectives with which only anthropology can provide filmmaking.

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Ethnographic Filmmaking: Natural Stories Single works of ethnographic film have used distinct editing strategies as a way of thinking through fieldwork and filmic material. Just to mention two films that stand out: The montage of Forest of Bliss (1985), by Robert Gardner, is guided by a synaesthetic analysis of burials in Benares. In The Ax Fight (1971), by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon, the title event is shown five times with different graphical and verbal analysis added to each reiteration. The structure of these films is the result of specific analyses of the filmic material at hand and the structuring adheres to aesthetic and analytical rigor and not to standard narrative demands (Høgel 2002). However, these films and other inspirational works have not created “schools” or even coherent descriptions of analytical methodology in ethnographic filmmaking. Very little is written about the complex work of sensing, understanding, and composing filmic material, neither in visual anthropology nor in documentary theory, whereas the shooting experience is more than duly covered (Kiener 2008). It is striking how much has been written about the master of ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch, and the camera and the shooting situation, and almost no attention to the fact that he spent much effort on systematic, experimenting editing (Bregstein 2007). Observational Cinema has traditionally focused on film material as record and visible evidence. Spatiotemporal continuity and chronology are qualities of the filmic record that were tampered with when editing. As a consequence, editing and even more so montage were considered a corruptive process (Heider 1976; Winston 1993; Jell-Bahlsen 1988: 217–18; see also Balicki 1988: 33). The positivist paradigm that observational cinema was founded upon has by and large disappeared. Contemporary, observational anthropology has a lot to offer in terms of developing our understanding of observation and filming as a complex practice and parts of this has analytical implications (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009). There is still a leaning toward what one could call natural organization of material, such as to hold together the unity of time and space in the face of the impulse to fragment (see Vaughn 1999). Most ethnographic filmmaking is still most comfortable with single, chronological narratives such as events and rituals (Henley 2006). This shape of ethnographic films is often justified by the fact that these comply with informants’/protagonists’ ideas of what took place or with their active participation in the making of scenes: “The shape of the text may be said to take on characteristics of the subject by virtue of ‘exposure’ to it, like a photographic plate” (MacDougall 1998: 156). One of the most respected practitioners and theoreticians in the field, David MacDougall, describes the process from rushes to film in terms of “loss” (1998: 216). He sees editing as losing interpretive space, excess meaning, sense of encounter, and internal contextualization (ibid.). It is hard to argue against the fact that something is lost in the edit suite. Many documentaries have a shooting ratio of 100:1, meaning that 99 percent of the recorded material does not appear in the final film. However, it is worthwhile asking on what grounds the losses occur and whether something is gained in the process. According to MacDougall, the losses incur in order to create a linear sense of narrative: “Throughout the editing process there is a constant tension between maintaining the forward impetus of the film and providing enough contextual information so that the central narrative or argument continues to make sense” (ibid.). Narrative is what keeps the film moving forward

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and non-narrative elements are only relevant insofar that they provide information crucial for the narrative. Wilma Kiener describes the last decades of Observational Cinema as “a fetishizing of the camera” (2008: 393) and she contrasts it to a cinema of montage “that cuts and reorganizes connections in time and space; thus it is a medium, almost a definition of ‘analysis’: understanding things invisible, by way of taking things apart and putting them together anew; rather than chronology, montage follows a question, an idea, an individual and social imagination” (2006: 3). I believe that the notion of “natural” stories from observational cinema combined with the perception of editing as “loss” have led to ethnographic films being “supplemental and naturalistic” (Marcus 1990: 2). What George Marcus argued twenty years ago still holds true: “Ethnographic films have not yet in themselves served as arguments about established ethnographic representations of a particular subject so as to alter fundamentally the way anthropologists see or think about their objects of study” (ibid.). I am sure writing anthropologists feel that they have to omit many important elements when writing up, but it is hopefully made up for by the propositions and the perspectives arrived at in the process. We need a similar interest in what can be gained through analysis and aesthetic elaboration in ethnographic filmmaking. Writing anthropologists find satisfaction in playing with and testing a comparison, a metaphor, or a concept. There is a similar achievement or joy to be found in shooting and making a visual analysis through montage.

Eisenstein: Intellectual Montage In his seminal article, Marcus (1990) wondered why ethnographic filmmaking had not seriously experimented with the cinematic tools of crosscutting and montage, especially at a time when written anthropology was inspired by cinematic techniques in fostering new modes of representation (ibid.: 9ff.). Montage in the way conceived and used by Eisenstein has enormous analytical ambitions. What would be more obvious than aligning visual anthropology with perhaps the most elaborate and precise cinematic methodology? Eisenstein’s exploration of montage is a lifetime’s work and has a profound understanding of how analysis and aesthetics coalesce. Eisenstein asserts that images have to be neutralized and decontextualized, whereby they become complex signs that have “inertia as a montage piece” (1949: 37). Images have to be stripped to their basic functionality for montage. It is this functionality that is central when he writes: “the shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell” (ibid.). The aim of the montage is to work toward collision. To achieve this, every filmic shot has to be carefully thought out prior to shooting. It is not a single technique; it is rather the climax of a longer structuring process. In intellectual montage, the ideological collision comes only at the end of a film after a basic understanding and a specific emotional state has prepared the spectator to be affected by the eruptive force of the collision. The cells of montage are decontextualized in order to serve a specific function within a larger whole that, as Eisenstein put it, will plow through the consciousness of spectators. An example of related montage technique in ethnographic film is found in War of the Gods (Moser 1971). The film contrasts Amazonian Indians in Columbia, the Maku, and Barasana, with different groups of missionaries in the region, especially

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those from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Throughout, the film crosscuts between the two cultures in demonstrative ways. Images of Maku tools cut to images of Tupperware; Maku in close physical contact cut to the missionaries’ airplanes and the climax is a montage of very different spiritual and religious gatherings. As Terence Wright concludes: “The build-up of oppositions leads to an estrangement of the missionaries. . . . This narrative style, in its use of montage, takes the viewer away from Bazinian contemplation towards Eisenstein’s directed meaning” (1992: 278). Eisenstein’s understanding of film practice is perhaps not conducive to cultural research. Eisenstein developed a language of fiction and was therefore not occupied with considerations of film as empirical data. His understanding of filmic material as “means to an end” is in my view not compatible with anthropological analysis based on fieldwork. It was never intended for inductive filmic studies of real life. On the contrary, it has an ideological starting point demanding distinct strategies of shooting and editing. The analytical strength of Eisensteinian montage is inseparable from its basic understanding of how social reality is constituted and what the role of representation in society is. Eisensteinian montage is holistic in Thornton’s sense. The understanding of film language in documentary, and in particular visual anthropology, needs to be refined and Eisenstein is one of the pillars within this field. But resorting to Eisensteinian montage as the solution to representational problems, as suggested by Marcus (1990), could lead to substituting narrative or classificatory holism with ideological holism. The first important steps toward a new practice of analytical documentary should, in my view, be to identify montage strategies that acknowledge the openended character of fieldwork experiences. In a broad generalization, the prevalence of overarching stories, natural or not, in documentaries and visual anthropology, has suppressed cultural analysis. In order to create a narrative arc or a collision, clips are rendered discrete for this purpose, creating uniformity in the material and suppressing other qualities of analytical importance.

Works and Thoughts Toward Analytical Montage There are a number of anxieties connected with making films without a storyline as the main guiding principle. Telling a story is the only firmly established methodology of editing across the board of filmic genres and deviating from it takes courage. The editing software available can be used in other ways than for narrative editing, but the latter constitutes the preferred usage. Filmmaking also attracts many, not least academics, because of its potential for attracting mass audiences (Wright 1992). If the main aim of a film is to have a large viewership, experimentation with analytical montage is not the failsafe choice. Working with analytical montage, however, should be seen as a way of engaging audiences in what could be enriching and challenging films. In the following I will examine works of Ursula Biemann (2005) and Flemming Lyngse and Mia Fryland (2003) that have pushed the boundaries of integrating analysis in film work, especially through montage. The works do not belong to a particular genre, movement, or school but I am interested in thoughts and methods involved in the production of the specific works. The kinds of analytical montage they employ are still in the making since there is no established practice or methodology.

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The great director and analyst of American institutions Frederick Wiseman describes editing as “thinking through the material” (Grant 1992: 240). The majority of his films examine institutions such as a high school, a model agency, a welfare office, etc. He explains that he enters institutions with inevitable preconceptions or stereotypes about it. The firsthand experience of seeing the place and meeting people slowly reveal a greater complexity to him. In the editing, he works out a “theory” about the institution and the actions taking place within it, and this theory is then reflected in the film’s structure (ibid.). I think this proximity between theoretical elaboration and representational structure is a sound starting point. His method of working has been described as “voyage of discovery” and the filmic form as “mosaics” in which the facets express distinct aspects of the total design without merging into a single impression or narrative. Moreover, each film is a facet in a larger mosaic of the fundamental institutions in American society (Nichols 1978). His films avoid both categorical holism and narrative singularity. Wiseman is a founding figure in developing an understanding of analytical editing and it is worth noting that he is one of the very few in the documentary tradition that edits his own films. Another artist who has worked consistently with editing of her own works is Swiss documentarian artist Ursula Biemann. She is also a curator and theorist working at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design in Zurich. Over the last decade, she has done documentary installations on transnational phenomena, as the titles of her works indicate: Black Sea Files, Performing the Border, Remote Sensing, Contained Mobility, Sahara Chronicles, and Europlex. The outset for Black Sea Files was the building of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline. The work investigates the correlation between the flows of people and those of fossil resources, investments, information, and images along and around the pipeline in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey. It has ten synchronized doublevideo files consisting of fragments. Illustrative images of oil wells are edited with testimonies of people involved in the building and living near the pipeline, statistical data on this gigantic infrastructure project, two-dimensional mapping of it, Ursula Biemann’s personal reflections as voice-over, and anthropological concepts in one-liners running on the screen as if they were stock prices. There is no consistent level of abstraction through the work. Rather, she juxtaposes sensations, information, and analytical comments. There are a number of cross-relations between the elements, but images, texts, and sound are not hierarchically ordered and fitted into an overarching structuring principle. As one critic has pointed out: “Neither image nor text enjoys any integrity. . . . It allows voices to slide themselves in among the images” (Rehm 2008: 169). In one scene, Biemann found herself with her camera in a volatile situation in Ankara, where young Kurds openly threaten a local politician and set fire to huge amounts of garbage because they had been displaced. This could easily have been the dramatic high point in a storyline. Instead of pursuing this and structuring a film on this premise, Ursula Biemann questions her own practice in a voice-over: “What does it mean to take a camera to the field, to go to the trenches? How to resist making that one image that will capture the whole drama in one frame? How to resist freezing the moment into a symbol?” (Biemann 2005). Biemann’s works engage audiences in complicated, geopolitical subject matter. She has taken the filmic material apart, sensed it, classified it, and worked with it in logging and editing. She has not limited herself to what was on videotape, but has included both invisible elements and visible elements that are only connected in the

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mind of the filmmaker: “In the case of transnational politics, data can come from geographically dispersed sources, linked only through a political relationship that is not always obvious for the uninitiated. The relations reveal themselves during the investigative process and through the figure of the researcher” (Biemann 2008: 64). Her practice is centered on an open-ended analytical editing process: “The structure of the video is dependent on the material; it is not something I know in advance. For two weeks in the field, I spend one year at the editing computer. I think I can make very subjective choices, I can tell my own stories about what I find interesting in an area. My main strategy is to organize knowledge, organizing very complex circumstances into a new set of documents that can convey meaning” (pers. comm., March 2009). The overall structure of the work could be called a catalog or a mosaic, while Biemann herself calls it a video essay. Importantly, there is no rhetorical figure that precedes the structuring process. The ordering process is not a means to another end, but an analytical process whose ordering is partly visible in the final representation: “I opted for files because they are open structure, indicating progress which tends to contain unique combinations of documents whose logic often lies entirely with the author. The project foregrounds the ordering system, and the ordering process itself, through the use of files as a metaphor for categorizing information” (Biemann 2008: 64). My last case is Forestillinger (2003) by Danish directors Flemming Lyngse and Mia Fryland. It is an interactive documentary where audiences determine the structure of their own viewing experience. Forestillinger was preceded by the documentary Glistrup (2001) about the controversial, Danish, right-wing politician Mogens Glistrup. Lyngse recorded fifty-three hours of material over a seventeenday shoot at Glistrup’s home. The film oscillates between scenes showing what the director thought of as a sympathetic side of Glistrup (a cozy grandfather fiddling about) and his negative sides (a blatant racist warning against Muslim invasion). The director felt uncomfortable having to do this balancing act and telling a singular story about such a character (Christensen 2003). As a reaction, he and co-director Mia Fryland chose to create Forestillinger two years after finishing the film. In the later work, the burden of choosing scenes and morally judging Glistrup was—at least partly—handed over to the viewer now becoming a user. The choice of material available in the overall work was still the directors’, but the cuts between sequences are handled by the user, who thereby exposes his or her own interests and, perhaps, prejudices. Instead of leaning back and having the option of criticizing the directors’ ordering of the material, the user is confronted with his or her own lines of thoughts and need for progression. After a brief introduction, the user is presented with three code words related to the clip just shown that are also clickable options for which clip to see next. At all stages there are three types of code words; one related to an object (e.g., telephone), another to an action (e.g., paper cutting), and the third to a theme (e.g., Islam). If one chooses Islam, the next clip shown can be any clip tagged “Islam.” No two viewings of the work are the same. The database is programmed not to show a clip more than once. Of course the programming of Forestillinger ultimately determines the choices available: “Instead of a narrated plot, cyber text produces a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the reader” (Aarseth 1997: 112). Forestillinger is based on the same material as the film and contains a total of fifteen hours of unedited clips, each clip being between thirty seconds and two

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minutes. The user experience is arranged into days of being with Glistrup and the work finishes when the user has spent “seventeen days” watching new clips or— more likely—when the user decides to leave the work and sees a last clip of Glistrup closing the front door. Forestillinger engages the user in exploring and ordering documentary material. The user takes on the task of a filmmaker trying to piece together a portrait of Glistrup. In the process, the user is forced to create conceptual connections and contrasts. At first, the code words seem to offer handles or paths, but they turn out to be quite slippery. They do create threads through the material, but they do not encompass or control the flow of material. It is interesting that the only overview available in the work is not related to the material but to the metadata. The user can look at a wall with all three hundred code words where the ones accessed by the user are highlighted. It is a graphic representation of a user-specific meta-story. The analytical terrain is explorable. This type of interactive work enables filmmakers to use complex analytical tools and engage users in a relatively open examination of the analyses performed. I find the works of Wiseman, Biemann, Lyngse, and Fryland inspirational in their careful and continuous working with their empirical material and in their creative use of editing to sense and make sense of what they set out to study. In the works mentioned, I find no conflict between respect for empirical material and elaborate montage of the same material. The structures of the works reflect the analyses the filmmakers have performed through logging, arranging, and rearranging film clips. Filmic innovation and original analysis go hand in hand.

Montage in Databases According to Eisenstein, artistic syntax depends on two human principles: hunting (plot) and basket weaving (interweaving forms) (Ging 2003: 70). As a human activity, hunting is high paced, goal orientated, and binary in the sense that either you manage to kill or not. Basket weaving is slow paced, repetitive, and with multiple outcomes. The montage efforts I am interested in are primarily the second principle. The material is not hierarchically ordered in the logging stage; rather, the editing is spent on identifying multiple qualities in the clips including non-story elements. Logging for this type of editing is not about reducing information to manageable narrative kernels. It is about seeing qualities that may not stand out in a single clip but can become visible when put in a certain sequence, like the patterns in a basket. Editing is not building up to a plotted climax, but an arduous process of prying out links and contrasts by trying many possible combinations of clips. The ordering principles may vary. Invariably parts will be narrative, but other types of ordering of non-story elements will stand a chance. The main bulk of this process is not “editing” in the sense of making editorial decisions about a final product. It is what I shall call database work. It is—in the simplest sense—that clips are registered in a digital database that is configured and reconfigured. In traditional filmmaking, clips are logged once and mainly on the grounds of how they can serve a specific function in the overall narrative. In the kind of audiovisual basket weaving I am propagating, logging is a functionless, continuous process of rubbing elements against each other to find new meanings. The use of digital databases has made operations easier and faster, but linking editing and database is nothing new. Lev Manovich writes in Language of New

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Media: “Cinema already exists right at the intersection between database and narrative. We can all think of all the material accumulated during shooting as forming a database. . . . During editing, the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films that could have been constructed” (2001: 237). This does not mean that there is a harmonious relation between these two cultural forms: “The database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narratives are natural enemies” (ibid.: 225). Like Manovich, I am convinced that there will be an overall move in the audiovisual media from linear, narrative representation, toward non-linear, non-hierarchical, databased representation. It is also a move from temporal to spatial representation (see Thornton 1988: 299; Seligman 2006). Forestillinger is just one of a spate of art works that basically are databases that users access through an interface. We will see a proliferation of digital representational forms that may sound like relics: catalogs, kaleidoscopes, filing systems, and mosaics. Manovich grandly writes: “After the novel and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate—the database” (2001: 218). These representational changes are not contingent on technological development. In my view, they stem from cultural necessity. As films and anthropology move toward dealing with amorphous fields of study, with transcultural phenomena, with invisible patterns, the need to work with complex categorizations and new representational forms is on the rise.

The Problem of Classification Revisited In Thornton’s dissection of classical monographs, he describes the transformation that ethnography undergoes from field experience to publishable book. The hallmark of ethnography is that it “is compiled over a relatively long period and from a range of discrete, disparate and fundamentally incommensurate experiences” (1988: 295). In the classical process of writing culture, these experiences—or data understood in the widest sense possible—would be categorized in ways that ensured that they could be counted, compared, and ordered hierarchically. The highest level in this taxonomy would become the chapters in the monograph, typically agriculture, economy, etc. Thornton describes the transformation as follows: “Incommensurate experiences become commensurate within the domain of rhetorical project through which they are defined, isolated, and rendered discrete” (1988: 297). The rhetorical project of the timeless, isolated, and wholesome cultures generates a particular kind of classificatory work. As mentioned, some have reacted to Thornton’s poignant analysis with a move away from classification altogether toward a move into the realm of narratives. I believe this is too rash a step. It is possible to work with categorizations that are not uniform, i.e., elements can belong to many categories and every element can have any number of categorizations, as we have seen in the works of Biemann, Lyngse, and Fryland. It is possible to include tactile, abstract, and invisible experiences throughout the editing process. Working with a database structure it is possible to avoid prefigured hierarchies or other imaginary wholes that elements

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have to be fitted into. Meaning can be reached by slowly prying out connections, contrasts, causalities, congruencies, and other relations. Categorization is not problematic in itself. It is a sound part of doing anthropology and of making films. What is problematic is when classification is performed in order to feed a preconceived template, be it the classical monograph or a narrative documentary. Working with templates preempts a genuine engagement with the field material and the analytical montage it could foster. It also obliterates the viewpoint and the presence of the analyst filmmaker. Visual anthropology could have a unique role to play as a methodological and analytical lab for documentary film. Anthropology has maintained continuous discussions of connections between practice and representation, research and analysis, construction of a field and application of concepts. These discussions are invaluable for any analytical filmmaking. The film industry at large is in need of original and rigorous audiovisual analysis. It requires that the analytical potential of montage is recognized in visual anthropology and that refined methods of audiovisual classification and database work are developed. This could raise academic capital for the discipline of visual anthropology, and more importantly, enrich documentary representation. Filmmakers with analysis in mind and anthropologists interested in media should move from practicing filmmaking as predominantly shooting for a plot and take pleasure and pride in weaving baskets of data through montage.

References Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Litterature. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Asch, Timothy, and Napoleon Chagnon. 1971. The Ax Fight. The Yanomamö series. 30 min. Venezuela/United States. Balikci, Asen. 1988. “Anthropologists and Ethnographic Filmmaking.” In Anthropological Filmmaking, ed. by Jack Rollwagen, 31-46. London: Harwood Academic Press. Barbash, Ilisa, and Lucien Taylor. 1997. Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos. Berkeley: California University Press. Biemann, Ursula. 1999. Performing the Border. 45 min. Ciudad Juarez/Switzerland. ———. 2001. Remote Sensing. 53 min. Switzerland. ———. 2003. Europlex. 20 min. Switzerland. ———. 2004. Contained Mobility. 21 min. Switzerland. ———. 2005. Black Sea Files. 43 min. Caucasus/Switzerland. ———. 2005. World Sex Work Archive. 43 min. Switzerland. ———. 2006. Sahara Chronicles. 78 min. Switzerland. ———. 2008. Mission Reports. Umeå: Bildmuseet Umeå. Bregstein, Philo. 2007. “Jean Rouch, Fiction Film Pioneer: A Personal Account.” In Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch, ed. Joram ten Brink, 165–80. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Christensen, Ralf. 2003. “Mennesket er en labyrint.” In FILM 28. Copenhagen: DFI. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, Keith. 1979. Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Crawford, Peter Ian. 1992. “Film as Discourse: The Invention of Anthropological Realities.” In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 66–82. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace.

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Gardner, Robert. 1985. Forest of Bliss. 85 min. India/United States. Ging, Debbie. 2003. “The Politics of Sound and Image. Eisenstein, Artifice and Acoustic Montage in Contemporary Feminist Cinema” In The Montage Principle: Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical Contexts. Critical Studies 21, eds. Jean Antoine-Dunne and Paula Quigley, 67–95. New York: Rodopi. Grant, Barry Keith. 1992. Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman. Urbana: Illinois University Press. Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2009. Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority. In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 8–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heider, Karl. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Henley, Paul. 2006. “Narratives: the Guilty Secret of Ethnographic Film-Making?” In Reflecting: Using the Camera in Anthropological Research, eds. Metje Postma and Peter Ian Crawford, 376–402. Højbjerg: Intervention Press. Høgel, Jakob. 1997. “In Anthropology, the Image Can Have the Last Say.” In The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory 9: 1–52. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 2002. “Debatten der strandede: en tvillingehistorie om antropologi og dokumentarisme” (The Debate that Died: A Twin Story of Anthropology and Documentary Film). In Kosmorama 223. Jell-Bahlsen, Sabine. 1988. “On the Making of EZE-NWATA—THE SMALL KING.” In Anthropological Filmmaking, ed. Jack Rollwagen, 197–222. London: Harwood Academic Press. Kiener, Wilma. 2006. “Traveling Images: Towards an Ethnographic Cinema of Montage.” Paper presented at Colloque du Cinéma Ethnographique à l’Anthropologie Visuelle, Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Available online at comite-film-ethno.net/colloque-2006/pdf/ transactions-transformations-savoirs/kiener.pdf (accessed 26 May 2012). ———. 2008. “The Absent and the Cut.” Visual Anthropology 21: 393–409. Lyngse, Flemming. 2001. Glistrup. 58 min. Denmark: Barok Film. Lyngse, Flemming, and Mia Fryland. 2003. Forestillinger. Available online at filmwork.dk. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcus, George. 1990. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” Visual Anthropology Review 6(1): 2–12. McDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Moser, Brian. 1971. War of Gods. Disappearing World Series. 52 min. Columbia/UK. Nichols, Bill. 1978. “Fred Wiseman’s Documentaries: Theory and Structure.” Film Quarterly 31(3): 15–28. Rehm, Jean-Pierre. 2008. “Political Typographies.” In Ursula Biemann: Mission Reports. Umeå: Bildmuseet Umeå. Russell, Catherine. 1999. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Sanjek, Roger. 1990. Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Seligman, Eleonora. 2006. “La scénographie du film documentaire interactif.” Paper presented at Colloque du Cinéma Ethnographique à l’Anthropologie Visuelle, Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Available online at comite-film-ethno.net/colloque/colloque-programme.htm (accessed 15 December 2011). Thornton, Robert. 1988. “The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism.” In Cultural Anthropology 3: 285–303. Vaughan, Dai. 1999. For Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winston, Brian. 1993. “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription.” In Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov, 37–57. London and New York: Routledge. Wright, Terence. 1992. “Television Narrative and Ethnographic Film.” In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter I. Crawford and David Turton, 274–82. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CHAPTER 13

In Defense of Observational Cinema The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic Filmmaking Anna Grimshaw

Debates in the field of ethnographic filmmaking have been profoundly shaped by two interventions. Observational Cinema, Colin Young’s 1975 article, is emblematic of the first; George Marcus’s The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage of the second. If the latter is frequently hailed as the manifesto of a progressive ethnographic project, the former has come to be viewed as its negative counterpart. In this chapter, I call into question such a simple opposition. In particular, I challenge reductive, rhetorically driven interpretations of the observational impulse in ethnographic filmmaking. Drawing on selected examples, I argue for the continuing importance of observational perspectives in contemporary anthropological enquiry.1 The title of this chapter reflects the centrality of the French film critic André Bazin to the case I intend to make. Specifically, it pays homage to Bazin’s open letter of 1955, In Defense of Rossellini. Addressed to Guido Aristarco, editor of the influential Cinema Nouovo, Bazin sought to counter the growing criticism of what was perceived to be “regression” in Italian neorealist cinema. In defending Rossellini against such a charge, Bazin reaffirmed the principles that distinguished his work and underlined its significance in breaking with the conventions of expressionist and montage-based cinema. In the narrative that follows, Bazin’s writings on Rossellini and the postwar Italian filmmakers will serve as the basis for exploring observational approaches in ethnographic documentary. Despite the ubiquity of the terms observation and observational, there has been little in the way of agreement about their cinematic origins or meaning as descriptions of filmmaking practice. On the whole these terms have become a shorthand designation for a series of negative features—objectivity, objectification, detachment, distance, scientism, and so on (Fabian 1983; MacDougall 1998; Ruby 2000; Winston 1993). As a consequence, it has been difficult to generate an expansive conversation about observational cinema—about its history, its contemporary saliency, or future possibilities. An investigation of the relationship between Bazin’s conception of cinema and the observational turn in ethnographic filmmaking is long overdue. It is a necessary first step in dislodging the existing discourse and thereby clearing the ground for the development of a new dialogue about the genre. For, without a proper understanding of its antecedents, it is impossible to evaluate the kind of enquiry—cinematic and anthropological—that is pursued by observational film-

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makers. In the absence of a proper analytical framework, their work is all too easily dismissed as “realism,” even though this is hardly a straightforward or commonly agreed upon notion.2 When cast in these terms, observational filmmaking is taken to be synonymous with epistemological naïveté and simple mindedness. It is also perceived to be profoundly out of step with the movement and complexity of a postcolonial world. But the picture is more complicated and interesting than the recent anthropological debates about aesthetics might suggest. The observational impulse has continued to be an important and vibrant part of ethnographic filmmaking. It is neither a relic of an earlier era nor a reflection of an unchanging, rule-bound approach. Indeed, I will propose that it be considered a mode of experimental anthropology. Moreover, it is important at the outset to acknowledge that the situation is more often complex than a simple duality suggests since the two modes of filmmaking—observational and montage—are intertwined in important and interesting ways. Observational work has, from the outset, been predicated on a subtle, yet powerful use of montage. But evaluating this form of cinema for what it is rather than what it is not is crucial in changing discussion about techniques, knowledge, and strategies of anthropological representation. Specifically, it shifts the predictable equation—“montage/good,” “realism/bad.” Arguments about observational cinema have long been intense and divisive. Although initially seen as representing a revolution in the theory and practice of ethnographic filmmaking, the genre quickly fell out of favor. For the last thirty years or so it has been a convenient focus for much that has been perceived to be wrong with visual anthropology (Loizos 199; Ruby 2000; Trinh 1992). Most favorably, it has come to be seen as an approach to be combined with interview or other kinds of contextualizing strategies (Henley 2004) or it is understood as an “early” form that represents a step on the way to a more sophisticated, reflexive practice (Nichols 1994). Less favorably, observational filmmaking can sometimes appear to be nothing more than reality television (Bruzzi 2000). Nevertheless, despite considerable skepticism, observational filmmaking has proved to be remarkably resilient as a way of doing anthropology. Indeed, to the irritation of many, it has continued to haunt the project of ethnographic cinema and, as such, it has been perceived to be an obstacle to the emergence of new, innovative forms (Loizos 1997). Colin Young’s 1975 essay is acknowledged as one of the foundational texts in debates about observational cinema. Published as part of Paul Hockings’s edited volume Principles of Visual Anthropology, it represented an early attempt to identify the key elements constituting the new approach. In particular, he highlighted the “showing” rather than “telling” approach of the observational filmmakers (1995: 103). By this he meant the camera was not “omniscient,” used in the service of illustration or exposition. Instead, it should be located within events and encounters as they unfolded; it became a way of asking questions, bringing together filmmakers, subjects, and their audiences in an active, participatory process of inquiry. This inquiry was rooted in an intense engagement with the concrete particulars of lived experience.3 Young traced the origins of observational cinema to earlier attempts to create a cinema of reality—most notably Italian neorealism and cinéma vérité. At the center was a repudiation of approaches that fragmented reality as a preliminary to its reconstitution according to the vision of the film director. Although largely for-

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gotten, the observational turn in ethnographic filmmaking was predicated on such a break, too. In place of the style associated with, say, Margaret Mead or Robert Gardner that hinged upon the assembly of individual shots according to a thesis or framework imposed from outside the filmmaking encounter, the analytical work of the observational filmmakers was not “added on” as a means for transforming ethnographic data into anthropological knowledge. Knowing was reconceptualized as a collaborative process, embedded within and inseparable from, the inquiry itself. Of course, at the heart of Young’s essay was the meaning of observation as both a principle and practice. Nowhere does he offer a formal definition of this key term, but his discussion, nevertheless, makes the critical parameters clear. Most importantly, Young was at pains to distinguish observation from objectivity and its association with distance or detachment (1995: 100–101). Indeed, as he pointed out, working observationally hinged, crucially, upon a forging of intimacy and trust between filmmaker, subject and audience. For Young, observation was never about a visual strategy, but it was instead interpreted more broadly as about observance—that is, showing respect for, complying with, or having humility toward the real.4 Despite the clarity of Young’s description of observational cinema, much of the subsequent debate invoked the very terms that he had originally ruled out. In particular, Johannes Fabian’s critique (1983) of what he called anthropology’s “visualist” bias, and the centrality to it of “observation,” was quickly adopted by those skeptical of ethnographic filmmaking, whether they understood the finer distinctions between one sort of approach or another. Anything that referred to “observation” was assumed to imply the discredited strategies of science—that is, strategies of distance and control that objectified human subjects and denied their social and historical agency.5 During the 1990s, the perception of observational cinema shifted, though it continued to remain largely negative. The publication of Marcus’s (1994) influential essay proposed “montage” as a key concept in the rethinking of the techniques and forms of ethnographic representation. Although writing was the primary focus of his concern, Marcus’s advocacy of “modernist” strategies suggested new aesthetic possibilities for those struggling with established anthropological conventions that foregrounded context and spatial-temporal continuities. In the field of visual anthropology, observational work came to be seen as the conservative “other” to what were considered to be more advanced and aesthetically sophisticated montage-based approaches. What was surprising and intriguing in this shift, however, was—and is—the vehemence of the critique directed against observational filmmaking. The writing of Wilma Kiener (2006, 2008) offers perhaps the clearest expression of the hostility and anxiety provoked by observationally oriented work. In one article, for example, she asserts: “the camera is the object-fetish of the Observational Cinema [sic]—a kind of audio-visual vacuum cleaner, voraciously sucking in time and space” (2006: 405). Linked to a whole series of discredited notions—salvage anthropology, being there, authenticity, spatial-realism, and so on—Kiener’s discussion of the techniques that she associates with an observational approach is never less than alarming. Such a response is puzzling, given the consistently modest, low-key tenor of the work itself. But beneath lies a fundamental misunderstanding about the genre of observational filmmaking and the kind of anthropology that might be pursued in this way.6

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Bazinian Cinema and the Observational Turn in Ethnographic Filmmaking In his classic essay on observational cinema, Young did not acknowledge the importance of André Bazin to the new moment in ethnographic filmmaking. Bazin, however, haunts this moment and his writings are indispensable to any critical examination of it.7 Bazin’s extended discussion of the work of the postwar Italian directors is especially important, since it offers a framework by which we may begin to evaluate changes in the ways that the ethnographic filmmakers understood their task. For the cinema of David and Judith MacDougall, Herb Di Gioia, David Hancock, Paul Hockings, and others represented an extension of the tradition that Bazin traced through Robert Flaherty, Jean Renoir, Georges Rouquier, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica (1967: 24). The identification and clarification of this tradition was critical to Bazin’s broader thesis about cinema. It emerged from his study of individual films and his particular interest in understanding the contribution of the postwar Italian directors to the development of a distinctive cinematic language. Many of Bazin’s key insights appeared in essays that were contemporaneous with the work they engaged. Specifically, in a series of film reviews published in the late 1940s and 1950s, along with his extended discussion “An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation” (1948), Bazin sought to clarify the contours of neorealist cinema. While recognizing that its origins lay in prewar Italian film, he nevertheless argued that the work of Rossellini, De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Luchino Visconti, and others represented a definitive new stage in the development of cinema (Bazin 1972). For Bazin, the unusual social, economic, and moral circumstances that followed the war and occupation created the context from which neorealism developed as a fully fledged aesthetic movement. But, although he noted the leading figures were making films that depicted life as it unfolded around them, he was quick to point out that content was not the defining feature of the new cinema of reality. Bazin’s interpretation of the new cinematic language he associated with the postwar Italian directors was anchored in the details of key films. For example, he was especially interested in the second part of Rossellini’s War Trilogy, Paisà (1946). In his discussion of the film, he drew attention to the abandonment of the conventions of linear or dramatic narrative, noting the director’s innovative short-story structure that dispensed with causal links in favor of a web of diffuse connections and resonances. He was also interested in Rossellini’s use of what he termed “the image fact” as opposed to the individual shot. By this Bazin referred to the director’s refusal to isolate and analyze a subject in conventional ways through successive shots. Instead Rossellini’s camera technique opened up a space around his subjects, inviting imaginative and empathetic engagement by the viewer.8 Another key feature identified in Bazin’s study of Rossellini’s work was the distinctive quality of the neorealist camera—specifically, its human, embodied, and mobile quality: The camera must be equally as ready to move as to remain still. Traveling and panning shots do not have the same god-like character that the Hollywood camera crane has bestowed on them. Everything is shot from eye-level or from a concrete point of view, such as a roof top or window. . . . The Italian camera retains something of the human quality of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera, a projection of hand and eye, almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness. (1972: 33)

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Nowhere was this more evident than in Paisà. In one of the film’s final sequences, Rossellini positioned his camera alongside a group of partisans in the marshlands of the River Po. For Bazin, the haunting, unforgettable quality of the scene derived from the precise placement of the camera—with its subjects, rendering their partial, incomplete perspective that hovered uncertainly between sky and water. Following the completion of his 1948 landmark essay, Bazin continued to develop his case for the significance of the postwar Italian films in the evolution of cinema. For, as his subsequent reviews made clear, the new approach pioneered by Rossellini was not static. In a series of reviews—most notably of Visconti’s La Terra Trema and De Sica’s and Zavattini’s Bicycle Thief and Umberto D, Bazin elaborated on his earlier discussion of the key features marking the neorealist approach. He celebrated the continuing evolution of the form. For example, he identified Visconti’s audacious use of deep-focus photography outside the studio and his use of events as the basis for the structure of his shots (1972: 43). In particular, with La Terra Trema, Visconti showed how what had hitherto been considered “background” or peripheral to the main focus of attention was now brought into a new, dynamic relationship with foreground, creating a dense cinematic space in which the viewer explored several actions unfolding simultaneously. As Bazin acknowledged, in place of the convention of montage in which a simultaneity of actions was generated through the juxtaposition of individual shots, Visconti’s move paid homage to the originality of Orson Welles’s cinematic innovations achieved in his 1941 film Citizen Kane. For Bazin, the work of Visconti’s contemporaries De Sica and Zavattini offered important additional evidence of the new aesthetic directions being charted by the Italian filmmakers committed to the development of a cinema of reality. Like Visconti, De Sica and Zavattini were experimenting with conceptions of cinematic space and time—and, with each film, they moved further away from conventional notions of the actor, the set, the scenario, drama, and action toward what Bazin called “a cinema of duration” (1972: 76). Bicycle Thief and Umberto D revealed neorealist cinema to be a fluid, complex form profoundly shaped by the unique sensibilities of individual filmmakers and the conditions in which they worked. Bazin’s letter to Aristarco, written in response to the critical reception of Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, made clear the importance of understanding this interplay. Neorealism was to be found neither in a particular subject matter nor in adherence to a set of techniques. It was to be discerned in “ a particular way of regarding things” (ibid.: 97). The neorealism of Rossellini’s cinema was not “declared,” but it was to be discovered in how he approached the world as a filmmaker. At its heart was a belief in, and commitment to, preserving the “wholeness” or continuous nature of reality. Rossellini’s rejection of the conventions of analysis, dramaturgy, and character in favor of a filtering or rendering of the real yielded a distinctive kind of cinema—one in which meaning was generated “a posteriori” (ibid.: 98). In his essays, Bazin approached neorealist cinema as preeminently a way of seeing or a particular stance toward the world. Its characteristic techniques—the extended shot, the use of non-professional actors, the abandonment of traditional drama, and so on—followed from this. The neorealist directors in choosing “the real” over the “image,” continuity over cutting, the camera’s documentary qualities over its expressionistic ones, were not then aesthetically simpleminded or “retrogressive” (1972: 26). As Bazin acknowledged, there was nothing straightforward about rendering the real. “Realism in art,” he declared, “can only be achieved in one way—through artifice” (ibid.).

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Before turning to an investigation of the Bazinian character of observational cinema, it is important to note that the new turn in ethnographic filmmaking was not guided by established or agreed upon rules and principles. It was essentially an ad hoc movement, growing out of a series of improvisations that individual filmmakers devised in response to problems they encountered in their work. The term observational cinema was itself not in circulation at the time but was later coined by Young and others. Its use, however, has tended to suggest a self-conscious, coherent movement. But, unlike Dogme or American cinéma vérité, the observational turn was never manifesto based or declamatory. Leading figures did not make grand claims about the reinvention of cinematic language. Indeed the radical nature of the observational turn was not immediately obvious. But, as I will suggest, a proper examination of the work reveals it to be profoundly subversive of anthropological expectations—both substantive and formal. The group of filmmakers associated with Colin Young and Walter Goldschmidt at UCLA during the late 1960s was critical in the development of what later became known as “observational cinema.”9 The varied backgrounds and interests of its members, and the loose, open-ended nature of their connection with one another reflected the essentially improvisatory character of the movement. What the individual filmmakers shared was a general dissatisfaction with the existing conventions of ethnographic documentary—most notably the tendency to talk over subjects, to lecture audiences and appropriate individual lives and practices in the service of abstract generalizations.10 In seeking to work differently, the UCLA filmmakers were fortunate in being able to draw on the rich and diverse intellectual culture that surrounded them. It offered a stimulating context in which to explore issues they confronted as ethnographers and filmmakers, and it opened up an unusual range of creative possibilities in the development of their practice. As David MacDougall’s memoir of this period makes clear, he (along with his cohort) was actively reading philosophy and literature, while at the same time immersing deeply himself in all that cinema had to offer, whether fiction or documentary, Hollywood or European (2001). From the beginning, the observational movement was not located in any kind of scientific or academic context—indeed leading practitioners were not cardcarrying anthropologists at all. It grew out of—and reflected—the broader historical moment, one characterized by a sustained challenge to established social, political, cultural, and intellectual orthodoxies. Two films from this period, David and Judith MacDougall’s To Live With Herds (1972) and Herb Di Gioia’s and David Hancock’s Peter Murray (1975), are emblematic of the changes in approach that defined the observational turn in ethnographic filmmaking. Although different in almost every way—scope, focus, location—these examples allow us to identify the Bazinian character of observational cinema and consider the nature of its radical intervention. In selecting such sharply contrasting films, my purpose is also to point to the complexity of the form—that far from anything rigid or anonymous, observational work has, from the beginning, been unusually expressive of particular subjectivities and sensibilities. To Live With Herds (1972) has long been hailed as the classic example of observational cinema. Shot in East Africa during the late 1960s by David and Judith MacDougall, the film explored the lives of Jie pastoralists in the aftermath of colonial independence. Specifically, it addressed the implications of nationhood for herding peoples whose lives and practices were often at odds with the expectations and needs of new national governments. At the time of its release, To Live With Herds

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was perceived to be a bold departure from the usual conventions of ethnographic documentary. Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, for example, described her response to the film’s screening at Granada Television: “I couldn’t believe it, I was so overwhelmed by it; and I didn’t realise you could just take a camera and listen to what people were saying and put it on the screen and that it would be so thrilling. There was an honesty and seriousness about the whole enterprise. It was an extraordinary thing for me to see” (Grimshaw 1995: 41–42). This example offers interesting evidence of the “shock effect” or disorienting potential of an observational approach. Long seen as the defining characteristic of its opposite, a montage aesthetic, LlewelynDavies’s response is however an important reminder of the subtle ways that observational work serves to subvert conventional assumptions and thereby effect a radical reconfiguration of perceptual realities. Audiences were surprised and impressed by the attention to detail, the intimate camerawork and meticulous rendering of sound,11 the long, exploratory shots and complex, extended sequences, the careful juxtapositions and narrative structure, and the strategic placement of text and chapter titles. The unusual techniques that defined this work were not, however, abstractly conceived or devised prior to filming. They were essentially a series of improvisational moves made within the context of the fieldwork encounter itself. As David MacDougall was to discover, it was only later that the implications of some of these changes in practice could be fully grasped.12 Critical, however, to any understanding of To Live With Herds is an acknowledgement of the profound shift it represented in the MacDougalls’ conception of their role as filmmakers. The techniques they devised followed from, and expressed, the new position they sought to take up with respect to their subjects and audiences. By conceptualizing their process of inquiry as essentially an openended, collaborative enterprise, the MacDougalls embarked on a project that departed significantly from the one hitherto pursued by ethnographic filmmakers. It also diverged in significant ways from the kind of anthropology pursued by their textual counterparts. Herb Di Gioia and David Hancock’s film Peter Murray is not as well known as To Live With Herds but, when placed alongside the MacDougalls’ film, it serves to underline some of the key elements that characterized the new approach. Peter Murray was part of a group of films that Di Gioia and Hancock developed in an area of Vermont where Di Gioia lived with his family. Like the MacDougalls, they wanted to work differently as filmmakers and to find ways of more effectively integrating their practice into the worlds of their subjects. They, too, sought to forge a new engagement with viewers that did not entail interviews, narration, voiceovers, a preconceived list of shots, and so on. It also meant giving up the search for “characters” or “crisis” situations. In place of an appeal to audience curiosity about the exotic or its expectations of action and drama, Di Gioia and Hancock shared with the MacDougalls an interest in generating a filmmaking space that facilitated imaginative and empathetic intersubjective connection. Peter Murray is about a man making a chair. The film starts with the completion of one chair and documents the process of making a second. At the outset, Murray offers a series of spontaneous reflections on his practice but as the film unfolds he gradually withdraws, moving into a quiet, meditative space. Never once leaving the workshop, Hancock and Di Gioia hover close to their subject, exploring the rich sensory nature of Murray’s task—his expert handling of materials, the

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skilled actions and choreography of movements, the active process of discovery by which the chair maker yields what he calls “the light” of the piece. Di Gioia and Hancock’s film has often puzzled and divided viewers. For some, it is just a film about a man making a chair. For others, it is a transformative poetic piece that hints at the possibility of a transcendental cinema. For the filmmakers themselves, Peter Murray was something of a breakthrough. In their earlier work, Di Gioia and Hancock had found themselves struggling to render their subjects’ lives in ways that reflected what they had discovered by working alongside them in different contexts. Abandoning the established techniques of documentary filmmaking had, in many ways, been the easiest part of their task. Murray’s approach—the searching for, and finding of, the form within the material—became a crucial metaphor for Di Gioia and Hancock as they sought to understand their own emerging film practice. In presenting two contrasting examples of the observational turn in ethnographic filmmaking, my intention is to raise the question as to where the Bazinian influence might be located in such work. While it seems clear that it does not reside in the choice of subject matter, the situation with respect to techniques is not so straightforward. The use of certain techniques does not necessarily produce an observational film and yet an examination of techniques has to be the starting point in any investigation of the Bazinian foundations of observational cinema. After all, this is precisely where Bazin himself began as a critic—attending carefully to the details of specific films as the basis for the articulation of a broader thesis about the development of cinema. But his essays make evident that this is only the first step. For, as he argued, the distinctive techniques to be found in the work of Rossellini, De Sica, and others in the tradition of cinematic realism, were a reflection of something more fundamental—what Bazin called “an ontological position” (1972: 66). The early commentators on observational cinema followed Bazin’s lead, highlighting changes in filmmaking techniques that they found significant in the work of the MacDougalls, Di Gioia, Hancock, and their contemporaries. Roger Sandall (1972), for example, pointed to the long, unbroken camera takes, the particular use of the camera zoom, deep-focus photography, and the commitment to extended, continuous scenes as hallmarks of the new developments in ethnographic cinema of the late 1960s. For Young, the observational turn involved significant changes in both shooting and editing techniques. In terms of the former, it meant the abdicating directorial control, the keeping together of shot and sound, attending to detail, context and temporality, and the commitment to a close and intimate camera animated by, and responsive to, whatever unfolded around it. Young drew on notes made by David Hancock to underline the distinctive features of the shooting style that Hancock pursued in partnership with Di Gioia: “We shoot in long takes dealing with specific individuals rather than cultural patterns or analysis. We try to complete an action within a single shot, rather than fragmenting it. Our work is based on an open interaction between us as people (not just as filmmakers) and the people being filmed. Their perspectives and concerns shape and structure the film rather than our emphasis on a particular topic or analysis of their culture which would distort or overemphasize, perhaps, the importance of that topic to those people and that culture” (Young 1995: 108). In his essay, Young also used Hancock’s reflections to clarify the distinctive editing techniques that were necessitated by changes in the filming approach: “If

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you have shot in the observational style and wish to edit in a way which respects the integrity of the shooting,” Hancock explained, all you are doing is providing fewer events and less information than the rushes give. This is why we end up by dropping whole scenes or sequences rather than trying to keep them all, but at a shorter length. Each scene is made up of discrete pieces of information and behavior and shortening it for dramatic effect would lose the resonances (to use Blue’s phrase) and misrepresent the material. More and more we seem to be finding scenes that have no crisis, no main structural or dramatic point, but are composed of the bits of behavior which are the ingredients of our daily lives. Scenes in which nothing appears to be happening dramatically can gradually be revealing. (Young 1995: 109)

The terms that Sandall and Young used to describe a different kind of ethnographic film, namely observation and observational, were intended to describe the philosophical or epistemological shift that stood at the heart of films such as To Live With Herds and Peter Murray. For both writers, the observational character of the work was rooted in what Bazin called “a particular way of regarding things” (1972: 97). Perhaps best conceptualized as a sensibility or orientation that first and foremost acknowledges that the world is, such a stance involved the filmmaker attending to it—actively, passionately, concretely, at the same time as relinquishing the desire to circumscribe or appropriate it. “Direction inhibits; observation frees,” Sandall declared (1972: 194). Returning to Bazin’s writings on the films of postwar Italy, it is now possible to identify areas of significant overlap in the techniques of the neorealist directors and those of their observational counterparts. But, in identifying the elements that contribute to a shared cinematic aesthetic, it is important to acknowledge that the connection is a reflection of a more fundamental orientation—philosophical, existential, epistemological—that is anchored in a belief in the material and continuous nature of the real. In important ways, not only did the work of the observational filmmakers represent a continuation of the cinema of reality that Bazin was at pains to chart in his essays, it also represented a significant extension of it. As I noted earlier, Bazin’s interest in Rossellini, De Sica, and the other Italian directors was closely tied to his broader ambition to chart the emergence of a distinctive cinematic language. In particular, he sought to draw a clear distinction between those filmmakers who “put their faith in reality” and those who “put their faith in the image.” The latter, exemplified by German expressionist photography and Soviet montage, was a kind of cinema built on assertion, fragmentation, and the primacy of directorial intervention. By contrast, the Italian neorealist filmmakers resisted “making reality the servant of some à priori point of view” (1972: 64). For Bazin, their cinema was one of ambiguity—a cinema of revelation. Of course, this distinction did not mean that those committed to Bazin’s notion of cinematic realism, including the observational filmmakers, did not use montage. It remained a crucial part of their practice but, as Hancock’s notes make clear, its role is different than in other approaches. Montage was not elevated or considered the place where the “real” filmmaking happened, with shooting relegated to a secondary role and seen as a preliminary gathering of materials for analysis. In observational work, shooting and editing were of equal status, continuous with one another. To Live With Herds, Peter Murray, SchoolScapes, and Sheeprushes are an excellent place to start in any investigation of these questions.

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Observational filmmakers, like their Italian predecessors, were committed to “the long, hard gaze” (Aitken 2001: 184), a cinematic endeavor that exchanged declaration for suggestion. It involved “filtering” the real, not by means of a tightly integrated succession of shots but through the framing of certain interpretive possibilities that invited exploratory and imaginative viewer engagement. Instead of the super-human, all-seeing, all-knowing camera, the MacDougalls, Di Gioia, and Hancock sought to anchor their practice in specific relationships located in time and space. This move was expressive of the profound change in their conception of their task. But in relinquishing their conventional position, the filmmakers did not—as Bazin pointed out with respect to Rossellini—abdicate their responsibility to offer an interpretation of reality. But, in place of a highly organized vision that served to organize and circumscribe the real, observational work involved a radically different knowledge practice. It was continuous with, rather than separate from, the filmmaking encounter itself. Meaning was not presented “a priori” but emerged “a posteriori” from the active engagement between filmmaker, subjects, and audience (Bazin 1972: 98). Young’s discussion of the observational turn in ethnographic filmmaking makes a case for understanding it to be representative of a new stage in the Bazinian tradition of cinematic realism. For, in a number of ways, filmmakers like the MacDougalls, Di Gioia, and Hancock had moved beyond the limitations that Bazin himself had acknowledged in Italian neorealism—most notably, the problem of narrative and the continued dependence on melodrama. As Young noted, the American cinéma vérité filmmakers had also largely failed to find alternatives to these conventions. Neither To Live With Herds nor Peter Murray depended on an appeal to exoticism, action, character, drama, crisis, and so on. But, as the two films demonstrated, abandoning the established devices did not involve a return to “raw data” or random footage—far from it. It involved the creation of a new cinematic form. But if observational filmmaking posed an important challenge to existing conceptions of cinema, it also proposed a radically different way of thinking about and doing anthropology. The identification of the Bazinian character of observational work is then only part of the story. Certainly it is crucial to understanding the new kind of cinema pioneered by certain ethnographic filmmakers at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s; and, as we have seen, it was a kind of cinema with a long and distinguished history underpinned by particular philosophical and epistemological foundations. But what sort of anthropology was being pursued in this way? As works of anthropology, To Live With Herds and Peter Murray have not attracted much critical attention from the discipline. If the former film is frequently cited, the distinctive nature of its anthropology is rarely acknowledged, even less understood. The lack of serious engagement is perhaps not unexpected, given the general perception that ethnographic film has little to offer anthropology beyond an illustrative or popularizing purpose. Certainly, at the time of their release, these two films were significantly out of step with the prevailing theoretical paradigms and approaches of textual anthropology. Not least the specific characteristics of the film medium—concrete/specificity, co-presentation, etc.—were perceived to be a serious drawback for a discipline oriented according to theoretical frameworks derived from Marxism, structuralism, and semiotics. Measured against such perspectives, filmmaking seemed hopelessly empirical. But it is important to acknowledge that To Live With Herds and Peter Murray are works of anthropological seriousness. Their importance stems not only from their subject matter but also from the techniques and epistemology that underlie the

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filmmakers’ observational practice. Specifically, they serve as the awkward counterparts to neat generalization, offering up the messy details of individual lives that cannot be encompassed by the imposition of analytical categories. In this way, these films might be said to produce something akin to a montage “shock”—not as conventionally understood as an effect within the film itself. But rather by counter posing another reality to that constructed according to anthropology’s disciplinary conventions. Until recently, however, anthropology has lacked a language by which to describe or evaluate what is entailed in such filmmaking practice. Over the last decade or so, the renewed interest in phenomenology (Ingold 2000; Jackson 1996) and modes of sensuous scholarship (Stoller 1997) have opened up a new critical space for thinking about observational cinema as a distinctive kind of knowledge practice—one that is not preliminary to anthropology “proper” but understood as a distinctive and legitimate mode of anthropology in its own right (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009a, 2009b). Instead of interpreting the commitment to detail, to continuities, relationships, context, material practice, and so on as evidence of a lack of sophistication on the part of the observational filmmakers, we can now see it as an expression of a particular approach toward understanding human subjects in the world. It was a kind of anthropology that did not begin with a series of static categories or hierarchically arranged dualities—mind/body, self/world, culture/nature, symbolic/ material, theory/practice, knowledge/experience, observation/participation, and so on. Located alongside human subjects in an unfolding life-world made and remade through ongoing, dynamic relationships forged between subjects and other living organisms within their environment, the observational filmmakers attended to what Tim Ingold has subsequently termed “the poetics of dwelling” (2000: 26)— that is, ways of being and knowing generated through creative embodied practice in the world. Aside from overlooking or misunderstanding the distinctive kind of anthropology yielded through observational practice, commentators have also largely failed to recognize that the film medium itself has been an integral part of this project. For the fundamental reorientation of theoretical perspective represented by the work of the MacDougalls, Di Gioia, and Hancock was tied to changes in technique and form. The kinds of questions that engaged the observational filmmakers could not be satisfactorily explored by conventional means, whether in the form of the expository documentary or the academic text. Looked at in this way, To Live With Herds and Peter Murray—as examples of a genuinely cinematic enquiry—were remarkably prescient. Not only did this work represent a formal and epistemological break with the disciplinary conventions of the time but it anticipated the sensory and phenemenologically inflected directions that emerged in anthropology some twenty years later.

Innovations in Observational Practice Crucial to Bazin’s defense of Rossellini was his acknowledgment of the “creative inventiveness” of neorealist cinema. As he insisted in his 1955 letter to Aristarco, neorealism had no predetermined, predictable form and, like all kinds of artistic expression, it was neither predictable nor subject to control. It was more of an

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impulse, a sensibility, a creative force that followed its own path. For Bazin, the changing character of Rossellini’s cinema had to be viewed in this way. Although my discussion has focused around two early films, it is not my intention to suggest that observational cinema has remained stuck in the past or that it has been static as a practice. Often perceived as a rigid, anonymous approach (fly on the wall), the genre has, from the beginning, been both a deeply personal cinema and an unusually fluid form. It could not be otherwise, given the commitment of the observational filmmakers to allowing their work to emerge from, and be shaped by, the individual sensibilities, relationships, and contexts in which particular instance of practices have been located. Two recent projects, David MacDougall’s SchoolScapes (2007) and Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Sheeprushes (2008), allow us to briefly consider the continuing development and expansion of the form.13 From the outset, observational filmmaking has been a way of engaging areas of human experience and practice often overlooked by a discipline organized according to certain analytical paradigms. The profound shift represented by the observational moment was, I propose, as much formal as it was substantive. Crucially, it meant working more creatively with, rather than against, the distinctive properties of the film medium—namely its specificity, its stubborn particularity, its synesthetic possibilities, its suggestive rather than argumentative style. It also meant breaking with any lingering attachment to the kind of “word-and-sentence” approach found in the expository film and academic text in favor of a cinematic or “image-and-sequence” aesthetic (MacDougall 1998: 63). Long considered to be evidence of the limitations of “visual” anthropology (Hastrup 1992), contemporary observational practitioners have made film’s aesthetic qualities central to their pursuit of a bolder and more self-conscious experimental anthropology. For example, MacDougall’s SchoolScapes, inspired by the early films of Lumière and the writings of Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, explores the notion of observation itself through an innovative use of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the cinematic medium. In the case of Barbash and Castaing-Taylor, observational techniques are used to effect a further shift away from the linearity of the conventional film narrative toward the creation of an immersive spatial experience. As a gallery installation, Sheeprushes, indicates new directions for a non-discursive project that undermines the conventional boundaries between domains of art and anthropology. In both cases, SchoolScapes and Sheeprushes, the filmmakers use observational techniques to produce the kind of disruptive and disorienting experience usually seen as the exclusive preserve of montage-based forms. These effects are achieved not by means of radical juxtaposition but through a selective heightening and reordering of the senses such that the world appears anew.14 It is often forgotten that the observational turn in ethnographic filmmaking was originally interpreted as a radical move. In overturning the discredited montage-based approaches that had hitherto largely defined the tradition, filmmakers such as the MacDougalls, Di Gioia, and Hancock proposed a more challenging mode of anthropological and cinematic enquiry. However, given the absence of a proper appreciation of its Bazinian origins and the prevailing assumptions of a textual discipline, observational work quickly became caricatured as bad science and unsophisticated cinema. The renewed interest in Bazin promises to both enrich our understanding of observational cinema and form the basis for a more interesting and expansive discussion about montage and anthropological aesthetics.

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Notes 1. This chapter has its origins in a project that I have pursued in close collaboration with Amanda Ravetz; see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009a, 2009b. 2. See Juhasz 1999 for a discussion of this problem in the context of documentary activism. 3. The question of sound is often misunderstood. Observational filmmaking approaches gave new emphasis to sound—not just to what was said (or not said) but to how things were said, who said them, to whom, and in what context. See Young 1995: 106. 4. Crary’s distinction between spectatorship and observation is very helpful here, 1990: 5–6. 5. MacDougall’s 1975 essay enormously complicated the picture, as he himself subsequently recognized (1998). Also, Margaret Mead’s pronouncements about the observing camera added to the general confusion, see her exchange with Gregory Bateson (Bateson and Mead 1976). For further discussion, see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009b; Bruzzi 2000; Grasseni 2007; Okely 2001; Vaughan 1999; Winston 1993, 1995. 6. Kiener’s argument echoes those of others, for instance Trinh 1992 and Weinberger 1994. These positions are predicated upon an aesthetic of fragmentation and juxtaposition understood as inherently more “advanced” and suited to the movement and hybridity associated with postcoloniality. See Kiener 2008; Marcus 1994. 7. An earlier essay by Roger Sandall (1972) explicitly acknowledged the Bazinian framework of observational filmmaking. The writing of Sandall and Young was contemporaneous with the emergence of the new work and both commentators sought to clarify its definitive features. 8. Bazin was also interested in the cinematic innovations of Orson Welles—shooting in depth, whole scenes—that were pursued within the context of the film studio. For Bazin, Welles, like his Italian counterparts, was seeking to developing an exploratory cinema. See Bazin 1967: 33. 9. See MacDougall 2001; Grimshaw 2006; Henley 2007. The observational filmmaking movement was always broader and more eclectic than the work produced by the UCLA circle. But the filmmakers associated with Young and Goldschmidt offer an important case study in tracing the emergence of the genre. 10. The work of Jean Rouch and John Marshall during the 1950s and 1960s also laid important foundations for the new approaches that began to develop at UCLA. Both filmmakers, along with others, were participants in the UCLA Colloquium on Ethnographic Film that Colin Young convened in 1968. I am grateful to Paul Hockings for this information. 11. As noted above, observational cinema has often been thought to be about elevating the visual over the spoken. But this perception is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The observational turn involved a repudiation of expert commentary in favor of a more nuanced soundscape that included attention not to just what might be said but how, to whom, and in what context. Also there was a new attentiveness to the sounds of daily life not as “background” but as integral part of identity, place, and practice. To Live With Herds and Peter Murray underline the importance and centrality of sound to the new observational approach. 12. See MacDougall’s discussion on privileged and unprivileged camera style (1998). 13. Innovations in observational practice have taken many different forms—see, for example, Grasseni 2004, 2007. 14. For a fuller discussion of these particular examples, see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009.

References Aitken, Ian. 2001. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Banks, Marcus, and Howard Morphy, eds. 1997. Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.

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Barbash, Ilisa, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. 2007. Sheep Rushes [Hell Roaring Creek, 19 min; The High Trail, 5 min; Fine and Coarse, 9 min]. USA. Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. 1952. Character Formation in Different Cultures Series [Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea, 17 min; First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby, 15 min, A Balinese Family 20 min, Karba’s First Years, 20 min; Bathing Babies in Three Cultures, 13 min]. USA. ———. 2002 [1976]. “On the Use of the Camera in Anthropology,” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, eds. K. Askew and R. Wilk, 41–46. Oxford: Blackwell. Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ———. 1972. What Is Cinema? vol. 2, ed. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De Sica, Vittorio. 1948. Bicycle Thief [Ladri di Biciclette]. 90 min. Italy: PDS/ENIC. ———. 1952. Umberto D. 89 min. Italy: Dear Films. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Gardner, Robert. 1963. Dead Birds. 84 min. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Film Study Center. ———. 1985. Forest of Bliss. 91 min. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Film Study Center. Grasseni, Cristina. 2004. “Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics.” Social Anthropology 12(1): 41–55. ———, ed. 2007. Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. New York: Berghahn Books. Grimshaw, Anna, ed. 1995. Conversations with Anthropological Filmmakers: Melissa Llewellyn-Davies. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Pamphlets. ———. 2006. “Conversations with Anthropological Filmmakers: Herb Di Gioia.” Visual Anthropology Review 22(1): 45–59. Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2009. Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2009. “Rethinking Observational Cinema.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15: 538–56. Hancock, David, and Herb Di Gioia. 1975. Peter Murray. 50 min. Sutton: The Vermont Center for Cultural Studies Inc. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1992. “Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority.” In Film as Ethnography, eds. Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton, 8–25. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Henley, Paul. 2004. “Putting Film to Work: Observational Cinema as Practical Ethnography.” In Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography, eds. Sarah Pink et al., 109–30. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. “The Origins of Observational Cinema: Conversations with Colin Young.” In Memories of the Origins of Visual Anthropology, ed. Beate Engelbrecht, 139–61. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Herzfeld, Michael. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, Michael. 1996. Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Juhasz, Alexandra. 1999. “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality—All I Want To Show Is My Video: The Politics of Feminist Documentary.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, 190–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Kiener, Wilma. 2006. “Traveling Images: Towards an Ethnographic Cinema of Montage.” In New Hybridities: Societies and Cultures in Transition, eds. Frank Heidermann and Alfonso de Toro, 147–60. Hildessheim: Georg Olms Verlag. ———. 2008. “The Absent and the Cut.” Visual Anthropology 21: 393–409. Loizos, Peter. 1997. “First Exits from Observational Realism: Narrative Experiments in Recent Ethnographic Film.” In Rethinking Visual Anthropology, eds. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, 81–104. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. MacDougall, David. 1972. To Live With Herds. 70 min. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles. ———. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2001. “Colin Young, Ethnographic Film and the Film Culture of the 1960s.” Visual Anthropology Review 17(2): 81–88. ———. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. SchoolScapes: Scenes from a School in South India. 77 min. Australia: CCR Media Works / Fieldwork Films Australia. Marcus, George. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 37–53. London and New York: Routledge. Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Maysles, Albert, and David Maysles. 1968. Salesman. 91 min. Albert and David Maysles. New York: Maysles Films Inc. McCarty, Mark. 1969. The Village. 70 min. Ethnographic Film Program, University of California at Los Angeles. USA. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Okely, Judith 2001. “Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy.” Ethnos 66(1): 99–120. Rossellini, Roberto. 1945. Rome, Open City [Roma, città aperta]. 105 min. Italy: Excelsa. ———. 1946. Paisà. 115 min. Italy: OFI. ———. 1953. Voyage to Italy [Viaggio in Italia]. 80 min. Italy: Sveva Films. Ruby, Jay. 2000. Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sandall, Roger. 1972. “Observational and Identity.” Sight and Sound 41(4): 192–96. Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York and London: Routledge. Trinh, Minh-ha. 1992. Framer, Framed. New York and London: Routledge. Vaughan, Dai. 1999. For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press. Visconti, Luciano. 1948. La terra trema: episodio del mare. 160 min. Italy: Universalia. Weinberger, Eliot. 1994. “The Camera People.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A. R. 1990–1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, 3–26. New York and London: Routledge. Welles, Orson. 1941. Citizen Kane. 119 min. Orson Welles. Los Angeles, CA: RKO Radio Pictures. Winston Brian. 1993. “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription.” In Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov, 37–57. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1995. Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its Legitimations. London: British Film Institute. Young, Colin. 1995 [1975]. “Observational Cinema.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 99–113. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

PART IV

Montage in Museum Exhibitions Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr

In his influential book Art and Agency (1998), Alfred Gell makes the apparently odd suggestion that agency is not limited to human beings, but that inanimate objects can have agency too. Peter Bjerregaard (in chapter 14), Rebecca Empson (chapter 15), and Alexandra Schüssler and Willem Mes (chapter 16) all elaborate on this insight in their descriptions of montage in the ethnographic museum. Displayed objects are not just things to be seen. Rather, they have a certain force, a certain way of resisting or accepting our look and returning that look to us. On this ground, Bjerregaard, Empson, Schüssler, and Mes all argue for a break with conventional forms of realist museum display that aims at faithful correspondence with a preordained order of reality, whether in the theoretical framing of evolutionism, cultural diffusionism, or structural functionalism. Instead, they suggest, each in their own way, taking seriously the animated object that “stares back,” and using this effect to generate new unpredictable understandings of what reality is. Bjerregaard proposes a new emphasis on “atmosphere,” by which he means specific montage assemblages of objects along with the perspectives that they afford to an audience. The aim of exhibition making, he argues, is not to reproduce the historically real, but to create new imaginaries. As a case study, he uses the exhibition on Benin at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna. The objects displayed are marked by a troublesome history of colonial violence and thievery. Bjerregaard shows how the exhibition becomes a montage of perspectives accrued in the objects themselves over the centuries. The Vienna exhibition on Benin, therefore, does not correspond with history as “fact” but rather displays an atmosphere of the objects’ perspectival biographies. This experimental zone of “museumification” and uncontrollable activations and deactivations of material potentiality demands of the museum staff to abandon the regime of correspondences and venture into the shaping of yet unseen worlds. Empson’s case is the interdisciplinary exhibition Assembling Bodies, which she organized with other curators at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, United Kingdom. For her too, the commitment was to transcend realist forms of exhibition making: viewers were to “lend their bodies to the artifacts on display and, quite literally, animate them with their presence.” As Walter Benjamin (1999: 227) compares the filmmaker’s craft with “the surgeon who cuts into the patient’s body,” Empson proposes a view on the function of ethnographic museum objects, not merely as inanimate materialities to be inspected and consumed, but as “transitions” that “cut” into the bodily experience of visitors thereby reassembling new embodied ways of seeing and understanding. The Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in Cambridge turned into a conglomerate of perspectives, in that every object, from the paintings on the wall to the shaman’s cos-

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tume on display, grew “eyes” and stared back. Empson draws on both Cubism and montage and their confrontation with realism to discuss the phantasmatic “whole” made present by these multiple perspectives. In Empson’s “Cubist holism,” as in Bjerregaard’s use of “atmosphere,” we sense a pre-perspectival vision, which is already in place within the orchestration of the exhibited objects. Vision within these exhibitions, therefore, does not begin and end in the individual viewer. It is defined by a horizon of an indefinite number of perspectival views, which blend with one another according to the given “style” of the display (see Singer 1982). This understanding of museum display supports Bruno Latour’s (2005: 24) argument that the dream of unity, wholeness, and totality needs to be engaged through the phantom object that activates spectators as the screen upon which museum display is projected. Now, while much discussion within the world of museums is concerned with how to attract the attention of an audience, Schüssler and Mes (chapter 16) are confronted with the opposite problem: the need to protect the dignity of museum objects from the gazes of Western museum visitors. In words and images Schüssler and Mes discuss the ethnographic exhibition, Villa Sovietica, at the Musée d’Ethnographie in Geneva. As curator, Schüssler was given the task of exhibiting a great number of everyday Soviet objects, all “dirty, used, shabby, and ordinary.” She was convinced that if these were exhibited in the ordinary fashion, the audience would compare them with similar, but more advanced items from within their own Western consumer society. This in turn would lead them “to carry off the exhibits as trophies of an alleged victory over a hated and feared political and economic regime.” This makes Schüssler decide on an exhibition strategy akin to montage: “allowing the objects to be perceived and at the same time making them vanish.” Exhibition making becomes a form of “camouflage” obtained through a wealth of experimental means, ranging from showcases displayed within showcases to concealment of objects behind cloths, so only their shadows are seen—all of which serves to destabilize and redirect the spectator’s certainty and customary ideas about Soviet reality. However, as Schüssler and Mes openly acknowledge, the reactions toward the exhibition among many of their own colleagues and the public more generally were full of frustration and discontent. Many simply did not understand what she was attempting with the exhibition. As one museum visitor commented: “I am disappointed, the organizers had fun, contrary to me—left behind with empty hands.” This is an interesting point because it exemplifies, among other things, that although montage can be a powerful weapon in the service of deconstruction, it also carries a real danger of dissolving the things it presents into obscure haze.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or “How to Make Things Public”. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 4–31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Musée d’Ethnographie Geneva. 2009–10. Villa Sovietica. Museum für Völkerkunde. 2007. Benin—Kings and Rituals. Museum für Völkerkunde. Singer, Linda. 1981. “Merleau-Ponty on the Concept of Style.” Man and World 14(2): 153–63. The University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. 2005–9. Assembling Bodies: Art, Science, and Imagination.

CHAPTER 14

Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond Correspondence Peter Bjerregaard

Ethnographic museums have always been obsessed with information. Hours, days, and years have been spent tracing the original location of objects, their function, their culture of origin, and describing the materials they have been made of, their shape, color, traits of use, etc. As such, this obsession with cataloging valid information has worked to authorize the institution and authenticate the objects presented to the public. The museum was the place to see “the real thing.” This system of collecting, preserving, and cataloging material entities has been based on a particular object epistemology, based in tracing correspondences. The museum object is a document that corresponds to a specific reality outside the museum, and enormous amounts of effort have been staged to trace the correct correspondences of these objects, to gather information around the object. Still, although this care for detail has provided much needed information of not only objects but also the relations through which the object was produced, acquired, modified, etc. (see, for instance, Thomas 1991; O’Hanlon and Welsch 2004), the interest in materiality that has occurred within the recent couple of decades has made clear that we need not only a strong epistemology but also a new ontology of objects (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007) in the museum. That is, museums do not simply need more information about their objects, but an increased awareness of how museum objects contain and shape worlds. In this chapter, I will suggest that the concept of montage is central to the development of a new understanding of the role of the museum object. Not only does the transportation and preservation of objects cause a montage of otherwise parted worlds, but the continuous reactivation of museum objects in new social settings also accumulates an increasing potentiality within the object. But this potential may only be released through realizing the extent to which exhibition making is based on montages. I build my argument on the case of the exhibition Benin—Kings and Rituals, which was developed at Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna in 2007. The history of the Benin bronzes stands out as one of the starkest examples of Western museums’ intricate involvement in colonial exploitation (see, for instance, Coombes 1994). While recognizing the highly problematic character of the appropriation of these objects, I will argue that the conventional critical approach to this case has impaired our ability to see the analytical purchase of the case. Thus, I argue that

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the Benin bronzes make a particularly strong case for a more general aspect of museum objects—namely, the museum object as an accumulation of potentials. Rather than a document of a specific social reality, I argue that the museum object is, in fact, a montage of a range of different activations of the object, dispersed in time and space. This montage quality may not be visible in the object per se, but it becomes evident in the close historical account presented in Benin—Kings and Rituals, as well as in the hidden process behind the exhibition. More than that, while Benin— Kings and Rituals in many respects may stand out as an ideal for future standards of museum work, I argue that a more radical approach would be able to tease out an even greater potentiality of museum display. Toward the end of this chapter, I will therefore turn more speculative and suggest that the concept of “atmosphere” (Böhme 1993, 2001), the non-objective qualities of physical presence, offers a valuable approach to the role of objects in exhibitions. Emerging from the specific montages objects appear in, rather than referring to a stabile relation between the object and “the world,” the concept of atmosphere points our attention exactly to the role of montage in exhibition making.

Exhibitions of Sensemaking The idea of correspondences has not only been evident in the way museums have cared for and established evidence for their objects. Most of the styles of display to be tracked in the history of ethnographic museums have been based on an idea of correspondences. While not intending to suggest a thorough rendition of the history of ethnographic exhibitions, I will point to a few characteristic styles of display to make this point. In the earliest modern ethnographic exhibitions, based in evolutionary theory, objects were presented in series reflecting the development of tools, weapons, pottery, etc., from the most rudimentary to the most exquisite. Evolutionism almost lent itself to museum display since it allowed a clear conceptualization of the structure the objects where placed within—the development of culture—within a certain kind of aesthetic. With each object as a metonymic part of a specific stage of evolution, the series of objects comprised a model of the entire human cultural history. As such, the objects on display made visible the process of cultural evolution that was not accessible to our historically situated perception, but became evident from the gathering of objects in the museum laboratory (Bouquet 2001a; Bjerregaard 2009; Shelton 2001). As anthropology broke its ties to the museum and turned into an independent discipline, it also estranged itself from the cross-disciplinary approaches to evolutionary theory (Sturtevant 1969; Bouquet 2001a; Ames 1992; Jackniss 1985). What emerged from this break was what we may term the monographic exhibition. Finding a theoretical grounding in cultural relativism and structural functionalism these kinds of exhibits worked as the three-dimensional version of the ethnographic monograph. Entering the exhibition, the audience was faced with chapters on history, ecology, cultivation, men and women, power and government, festivals, etc. Here, objects were rendered meaningful by the sub-themes they were displayed within. In contrast to the evolutionary exhibition, the object of the monographic exhibit does not help us much in conceptualizing. Objects in the monographic exhi-

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bitions primarily work as illustrations, and by displaying similarities in style they contributed to the larger argument of cultural coherence. In this sense objects did not conjure up evocative images by themselves (as in the evolutionary exhibition), but had to be interpreted through their contextualization within themes that rendered the display meaningful (see figure 14.1). Often, this display of coherence was so strong that it did not allow for any presentation of change or historicity, thus materializing the much criticized “ethnographic present” (see, for instance, Durrans 1995). In the 1970s and 1980s, a new kind of ultra-realistic display developed, which discarded the reliance on old colonial collections and the ethnographic present of the monographic display. In opposition to the model making of evolutionism and cultural relativism, these displays attempted instead to present objects as they were found out there in the “real world” (see figure 14.2). These displays tried to present the field, not through the obsolete reserves of metropolitan collections, but through the objects you would actually find out there, in the contemporary (Third) world. These exhibitions aimed at the utmost reference to real life. Therefore, well-known approaches to exhibition making, like the use of showcases, aesthetic arrangements in object series, thematic organizations of objects, etc., were rejected, as they did not confer to the presence of objects in their original setting. While these exhibits allowed for the contemporary and the cross-cultural to have a place in the museum, they were soon to be trapped in their own style. While aiming for contemporaneity in contrast to the ahistorical objectiveness of past exhibition styles, these kinds of exhibits very quickly reached their expiration dates as the world inevitably changed faster than the bureaucratic museum machinery was able to keep track of.

Figure 14.1. The monographic exhibition. From Hall of African Peoples, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Photograph by the author.

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Figure 14.2.  The naturalistic-realistic display. As a historical “snapshot” (Ferdinand 1974), these kinds of displays aimed at establishing a direct correspondence to the “real world” that escaped the museum’s established theoretical dogmas. From the Africa exhibition at Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Photograph by the author.

Despite the major aesthetic and ethical differences between the styles of display mentioned here, I will argue that they share a common idea of the purpose of exhibition as being based in the ambition of making a truthful account of a reality that is not accessible to the eyes of the audiences. Whether this inaccessibility is caused by the limited biography of human existence, the layperson’s lack of capability to interpret cultural coherence, or the physical distance from the places portrayed all three kinds of exhibits aim at reconstructing a reality external to the museum through tracing the proper correspondences to this reality. It is against this backdrop of exhibitionary sense making and naturalism that I will suggest that the concept of montage holds a rich potential. While both the theoretical sense making and the documentary naturalism would argue that the objects displayed represent a world out there that can be reestablished in the museum—whether in the form of underlying biological or social forces, or in the form of subaltern perspectives—I argue that the concept of the montage turns our attention to the singularity of the display, and indeed, to museums as a potential technique for producing imagined worlds that do not correspond to any objective reality but thrust the audience and the museum staff into new imaginaries about the constitution of human existence. To make this point, I first address the nature of the museum object and, secondly, consider the space of the exhibition.

Assembling “Benin Art” My first step toward analyzing the process of museumification, i.e., the process through which things move from the field to be presented as objects in the mu-

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seum, is through Alfred Gell’s idea of the indexicality of the art object (1998). Based in Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift, Gell sees art as a way of distributing personhood. Thus, personhood is not confined to the physical body, but includes also objects, indexes in Gell’s terms, which are somehow capable of distributing the mind of the artist. The archetype of this distributed personhood is the trap (Gell 1996). The trap is a physical manifestation, not only of the hunter’s intentionality, but also his physiognomy (it stands in for the real hunter’s body), and his knowledge of the world in the way the trap is designed to attract particular game (ibid.: 12–16). As the trap, Gell sees artworks (a category that transgresses the institutional conception) as distributed parts of the artist that captivate the spectator, momentarily allowing the mind of the artist, effectuated through the art object, to take power over the spectator. In much the same way, Gell argues that the artwork is a material object that creates disturbance in the social environment, thereby attracting attention and capturing the spectator’s stream of consciousness and imposing itself upon him. In other words, an art object takes power over us by standing out as intentionally willed, setting it apart from our natural environment thereby distributing the intentionality of the artist (Gell 1998: 28–50). However, despite his stress on intentionality and the willed nature of the art object, authorship never describes a stable relation between the object and the world in Gell’s framework. Authorship is not confined to the original producer or commissioner of an artwork, but is continuously reconfigured as the object is reactivated through the exchange networks it appears in (Thomas 1991: 27–30) or, for instance through the installation of readymades or acts of iconoclasm (Gell 1998: 62–65; Latour and Weibel 2002). It seems that these considerations on the reactivation of objects may have great impact on how we understand what takes places during the process of museumification. Rather than moving an artifact from the field to the museum, the process of collecting, accessing, and cataloging objects may be considered a process of continuous reactivation that teases out new efficacies from the same object. To develop this point, I will turn to my empirical case. In May 2007, Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna was reopened after renovation with an exhibition on Benin art. The case of Benin is exemplary to the argument of this chapter, as it allows us to trace the agencies involuted in what is today known as “Benin art.”

Capture In January 1897, the young, British deputy consul-general James Philips, together with “nine countrymen and more than two hundred porters” (Duchâteau 1994: 23), set out to meet the king, Oba, of the kingdom of Benin. Apparently Philips had neglected the Oba’s declination of being visited due to important ritual activities, and, likewise, he did not wait for the permission for his expedition from the British Foreign Office (Duchâteau 1994). Thus it seems that Philips was determined to finally settle what had been termed “the Benin problem” (Plankensteiner 2007c). Anyway, young Philips’s aspirations for history making were soon to be prematurely extinguished as he and the rest of the expedition crew were ambushed on 3 January with Philips among the people killed. Apparently a group of local chiefs were dissatisfied with the increasing British control over the area, and decided to take action (Duchâteau 1994; Plankensteiner 2007c).

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The British were fierce in their response. In the beginning of February, an expedition of 1500 men gathered from different parts of North Africa, South Africa, Great Britain, and Malta and started to move up the Benin River on what was to become known as The British Punitive Expedition (Duchâteau 1994; Plankensteiner 2007a). After considerable resistance, the British took possession of Benin City on 18 February. Inside the city they were facing a troubling sight. The city had been deserted by the Oba and other important dignitaries, but left was a number of mutilated bodies, sacrificed by the Oba in hope for divine support in the prospected battle against the British (Plankensteiner 2007b: 200; Coombes 1994; Graham 1965: 327–30).1 Apart from the corpses, the members of the Punitive Expedition found, in and around the royal palace, an unexpected treasure of bronze statues, bronze plaques, ivory carvings, and a number of other amazing objects. Even if Europeans had maintained relations with Benin since the late fifteenth century, only few objects not made for exchange had come out of the Kingdom. Therefore, the quality of these objects came as a surprise to Europeans who had not expected such “artworks” to come out of “Dark Africa” (Plankensteiner 2007c). While the members of the expedition where granted selected objects (Plankensteiner 2007a: 32), most of the Benin pieces were shipped to Europe and sold at auctions. Letters from auction houses reveal how value was attached to these objects according to rarity, size, motifs, etc., as auction houses tried to induce collectors into buying Benin objects, using their insider knowledge of the purchases of other museums (Plankensteiner 2007a: 31). Indeed, a veritable scramble occurred as museums and private collectors tried to get hold of these new treasures. One of the first and most important persons in recognizing Benin art was the Austrianborn curator at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, Felix von Luschan. Apart from publishing what is still considered one of the most important overviews of the Benin material, von Luschan (1968) also guided museums in German-speaking countries in their acquisitions of Benin objects. Thus, von Luschan’s immediate recognition of the value of Benin art resulted in the peculiar fact that most of the pieces originally found in Benin City are now in collections in German-speaking countries.

Materiality Historians date the first meetings between Benin and Portuguese merchants and missionaries to the third quarter of the fifteenth century (Ben-Amos 1980: 5). But even before that, Benin was included in commercial networks with neighboring states through which they acquired metals, shells, and beads (ibid.: 18). In the very early years of exchange with Europeans, around 1500, the Portuguese brought copper or brass manillas2 and cowrie shells that were exchanged for Guinea pepper, ivory, raffia, cotton, and beads, and—later—firearms and munitions (Plankensteiner 2007c: 77). Later on and up to the abolition of the slave trade, slaves became an important trade item for Benin. Captives from wars with neighboring states were exchanged for goods brought by the Europeans. In Benin, bronze and copper was used for the statues and plaques that served both to continuously re-create the role of the Oba as divine king, and for the plaques that depicted historical events and ceremonies at the court. Bronze and brass were important materials to the confirmation of the status of the Oba. In local perception, brass, as a material that does not corrode or rust, captured the permanence of the institution of the Oba. While local chiefs were allowed to have

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statues of heads carved out of wood made for their commemorative altars, only the Oba (and the Iyoba, the king’s mother) was allowed to have a statue cast of brass made for his personal altar (Plankensteiner 2007a: 28). The color red was connected to the gods Osun and Ogun. These gods occupied a space in between the original king, Olukun, and the black Ogiuwu who operated as a kind of demon. While Olukun was connected to white and “coolness,” and Ogiuwu to black, Osun and Ogun occupied a place in between, where they could be both frightening and drive away evil. So, the red color of the brass heads would also allude to the power of the Oba to drive away evil forces (Ben-Amos 1980: 45–64). In this way, the copper and brass supplies from the Portuguese were partially used to reinforce the power of the Oba, not just as the ruler of the here and now, but also as the divine king in possession of magical powers.3 Today, the materiality of the Benin objects has come into focus again. As these objects have attained almost mythical status on the art market, an “original” Benin piece—i.e., a piece from before 1897—has become a treasured investment object. This has forced museum and private collectors to put alleged original Benin pieces under scrutiny, applying a wide array of scientific technologies (Nevadomsky 1997: 87) in order to check the authenticity of these pieces. In this sense, the specific alloy used for casting is enrolled in demarcating a historical break between “real Benin”—i.e., Benin up till 1897—and what is considered as a less interesting and artistically inferior contemporary state of Benin. The materiality of the bronzes opens up for other unexpected kinds of agency. A conservator from the Völkerkunde Museum told me how he had seen Benin pieces exhibited a number of times around the world. Still, he had never seen any with a “glow” like the ones in the Vienna collection. He connected this observation to the special circumstances under which the Vienna collections are kept in the basement of the Habsburgian Neue Hofburg.

Display At the end of 2006, Barbara Plankensteiner, curator of Sub-Saharan Africa at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna, was entering the final stages of preparing the upcoming ethnographic exhibition on Benin art. At that time, Plankensteiner had been working for more than five years on the exhibition that was going to mark the reopening of the museum, which had been closed down for renovation and reinstallation since 2004. While the Benin objects are generally acknowledged as a major contribution to world art, and therefore in some sense should be an appreciated material to display, many things had made the establishment of the exhibition a complicated project. Indeed, the Benin material epitomizes almost every aspect of what makes contemporary ethnographic exhibition making an interesting, but troublesome task: the Benin objects were seized through violent circumstances; most of the objects are ritual objects that are displaced from the context of their ritual efficacy; the Benin objects have today become valuables on the international art market, some of them insured for millions of Euros; and while Benin still exists with its crafts, rituals, and royal court, the fame of the treasures of Benin art has produced an image of Benin in the West as a state of the past rather than a place having a contemporary existence. Other issues complicated the making of the exhibition. As a consequence of a change in the Austrian museum law, the Völkerkunde Museum was included in

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the neighboring Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2001. The decision to reopen the Völkerkunde Musuem with an exhibition on Benin should probably be seen in this perspective: the Benin art objects would be a perfect material for an exhibition that could stress the new collaboration and which built on what the art-historian management saw as the valuables of the ethnographic collection. Plankensteiner was very clear in what she wanted, though. In order to make a contemporary Benin show, representatives of the contemporary court in Benin should be consulted throughout the process, and the exhibition should be based on a selection of objects from a number of different museum collections in order to focus on a reconstruction of the history of Benin and to transgress the usual show off of Benin treasures. Finally, a central aspect of the exhibition, should be to present the “multi-referentiality” (Plankensteiner 2009: 200–202) of the Benin objects. Thus, it should be clear to the audience that these objects were not simply works of art, but also narrators of local history and scientific documents. In other words, the exhibition should be different from other Benin exhibitions in not focusing exclusively on the Western reception of the Benin bronzes as “art,” but reestablish their function as mnemonic devices, narrators of history. The exhibition should make clear that the kingdom did not vanish from earth in 1897, but still lives with court ceremonies and bronze casters (see Nevadomsky 1997 for a similar critique). In order to establish such a display, Plankensteiner and her colleagues went through a demanding process of selecting objects and organizing them into themes and correct ensembles. The first part of this work went past a number of collections in Britain, the United States and Nigeria. Objects were selected according to their aesthetic and narrative qualities as well as whether they had been on display before. As a consequence of the fame gained by some of the Benin pieces, Plankensteiner and her colleagues wanted to present objects that were not well known publicly. After the first general selection an intricate work of categorizing objects and developing themes appeared. International experts were enrolled to comment on the motifs, dating, use, etc., of objects in order to allow relevant clusters of objects to appear. From the initial intention to show the “multi-referentiality” of the Benin objects, a thorough analysis of objects was carried out in order to decide which objects were to be exhibited as singular pieces on basis of their technical execution, which objects could be used to allude to the atmosphere of the Benin Palace, and which objects could narrate the history of the kingdom through motifs. This process was further complicated with the spatial design of the exhibition hall. Initially, an architecture company had developed a sketch that incorporated a stylized version of the original spatial layout of the Benin Palace within the Habsburgian Neue Hofburg, where the museum is located. The general director of the museum found this approach too intellectual, though, and explicitly asked for elements to be included that would create an atmospheric rather than a conceptual experience (Plankensteiner 2009: 205–6). Thus, a new exhibition designer was hired, who developed a new design, which alluded to the palace architecture by covering part of the installation with reddish mud, resembling the materials used for the Benin palace. The architecture of Neue Hofburg ended up having major influences on the exhibition, anyhow. It turned out that the exhibition halls were too narrow to accommodate the themes as planned in the synopsis, based on the careful analysis of objects. Therefore, Plankensteiner had to rearrange the clustering of objects,

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reconsidering how to distribute objects so that the intention to stress the multireferentiality of the objects still appeared to the audience. This meant that some objects had to be moved from a status as aesthetic highlights to become part of an atmospheric backdrop or included as historical narrators and vise versa. In sum, the space allowed for the exhibition influenced what the objects could be exhibited as, and how the multi-referentiality aimed for could be orchestrated. In this way, the Habsburgian empirical architecture influenced how the history of the kingdom of Benin could be presented.

Assembling Potentials In many ways, the exhibition presented in Vienna in May 2007 appeared quite classical. Pivoting around the spectacular selection of objects, assembled from numerous institutions around the world, the exhibition convincingly introduced its audiences to the history of the kingdom, ritual activities, and the organization of the court through a careful presentation of all objects with details on motif, date, and the collection they belonged to. In the following, I will propose how the making of Benin—Kings and Rituals may add to our understanding of museum objects as montages. Furthermore, as the radical montage character of Benin—Kings and Rituals remained somewhat hidden to the general audience, as the exhibition certainly had an air of scientific rigor, I will also consider how the status of the museum object as a montage may be presented more expressively than it was in the Vienna exhibition. As we follow the Benin bronzes in their movement from the City of Benin to Vienna, we can trace how these material entities constantly appear as something different. Rather than carrying a particular representational value, these objects are reactivated into new realms where their physical and artistic qualities are highlighted in new ways. These reactivations take place through a manipulation of matter in the broadest sense of the word. From the transformation of matter from one stable form as manilla into another as a statue or plaque, to the gathering of objects produced over centuries into a synchronic war booty, to the preservation of objects in the museum store, and, finally, to the assembling of dispersed objects into a composite artifact in the exhibition. All the way through this process, the Benin objects are included in a range of processes letting humans and objects stand forth as agents in the elongated network of actions they are engaged in (Strathern 1995; Bjerregaard 2009). What becomes clear by looking at the process of museumification in this light is the way new potentials are discovered and activated in the object as it passes through the network. At one moment, it is the color, enduring materiality, and shape that is activated as the efficacy and permanency of the institution of the Oba. At other times, what is considered the exquisite artistry turns these objects into desired objects among collectors. And at yet other times, stylistic traits or the physical constitutions of alloys are traced out to estimate whether the object is valuable or not. In other words, different aspects of the objects are foregrounded and backgrounded drawing forth new potentials of how the object may gain efficacy. Thus, rather than claiming to preserve a particular authentic state of the object, I will argue that what the museum technology establishes is an accumulation of potentials. Through the extended exchange network created by the museum,

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new potentials of the object are continuously turned into effects that, rather than reproducing states of affairs, aim at creating new possibilities for acting. This is what Plankensteiner experienced when she had to decide how to draw out particular aspects of each object in the orchestration of display. One line of reasoning would inflict that these reactivations all depend on which perspective we follow; do we chose to see the Benin bronzes from the point of an Oba, from a colonial officer, a contemporary museum curator—it all depends on the context. This kind of reasoning would maintain that the object is merely the material point through which mental worlds may find an anchoring—that intentionality is already contained within the body of the human agent who simply needs a material point through which this mental world can be projected into the social world. But the case of the Benin bronzes makes evident that the human agents involved can and do not merely represent any alleged “worldview” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007: 10–12) through these objects. Constantly the characters appearing in the network created have to struggle with the previous activations of these objects. Thus, objects do not merely stand out as agents (Gell 1998), but also appear as what we see as a kind of creative resistance in the sense that they force humans to redirect their projects, and reconfigure their worldview (Gell 1999: 169). Let me just look briefly at two such instances. The unexpected discovery of the bronzes turned the capture of Benin City into what may have seemed like an epic drama to the British soldiers taking part; after the end of the battle a treasure was discovered in the heart of the jungle. A number of photos (see figure 14.3) are found with British officers parading in front of the assembled bronzes and tusks before leaving Benin City (see, for instance, Plankensteiner 2007a: 23). But the unexpected outcome of the punitive expedition did not simply offer itself to the British to present their imperial power through seizing war booty. The impression of Benin as a place of severe savagery that was not allowed the providence of progress, which the inclusion in British trade could provide, had to be altered. How could such objects come out of a place that was at that time mainly known for human sacrifices and its part in slave trade? Thus, the stumbling on the Benin bronzes caused a reconfiguration of the world the British were engaged in. If these objects did really originate in Benin (and not in Egypt or India, as some experts suggested at the time), a number of relations between colonial power and the colonies had to be refigured. In other words, the world seen through the Benin bronzes looked differently from the world seen through the scheme of cultural evolution that prevailed in the museum-based anthropology of those days. Thus, history had to be inscribed in Africa as well as in other parts of the world. If the kingdom known to the British had been the source of this kind of artistic creativity, it had to have had a prior superior state from which it had fallen to the present state of savagery. To Plankensteiner and the rest of the staff working on Benin—Kings and Rituals, the previous reactivations of the Benin bronzes influenced their way of working with the exhibition. As accumulated potentials, these objects did not only tell the story of the kingdom of Benin, but also that of the violent capture of the objects, and the appropriation of Benin art in European museums as art of a kingdom of the past, as relics of a savage state practicing human sacrifice, or as the treasures of individual museums. All of these reactivations involuted in the objects affected the way a contemporary Benin exhibition could be conceived of.

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Figure 14.3. Assembling “Benin art.” British troops ready to ship the body of objects to become known as “Benin art.” Photograph by the author, from the exhibition Benin—Kings and Rituals, Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna 2007. Original photographs from the Council of the National Army Museum, London.

Still, while staging this kind of multi-referentiality of the objects was precisely a main point of the exhibition, the materiality of the Benin bronzes also made only certain perspectives possible. Thus, the works presented in the exhibition were not simply reflections of royal power. They were royal power residing in the durable form of bronzes. The fact that bronze was a material monopolized by the Oba meant that what could be presented in Vienna was the story of the kingdom rendered through royal rather than folk art. While most wooden statues and objects

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made from other organic material have decomposed, royal power is immanent in the objects that have reached museums and private collectors over the years. Therefore, the monopolization of the use of bronze did not only reflect class distinctions in the historical state of Benin—it was effectuated again in 2007 as the objects related to royal power were the only ones left to work with for Plankensteiner and her colleagues. These bronzes are not merely reflections of royal power—they are royal power and endurance in material form. In sum, more than material entities, the Benin objects are storages of accumulated potentials. Rather than carrying a certain meaning, they accumulate ways in which they have been activated to create effects in the social nexuses they traverse. Therefore, in reactivating these objects, we are dealing with the past activations “involuted” (Gell 1998: 51–65) in them, which may support or obstruct our own effectivities, our capability to stand out as agents (Ingold 1993).

Mounting Effects: The Exhibition as Experimental Zone With the dispersal of the Benin objects shortly after the Punitive Expedition, the objects once gathered within the confines of the royal palace were included within the totalities of private and museum collections around the world. Benin—Kings and Rituals was the first occasion since 1897 for such a large number of these objects to be reassembled (see figure 14.4). Thus, even if this exhibition assembled a considerable number of the objects found in Benin in 1897, what is presented in Vienna in 2007 are actually objects that cover a half millennium of Benin history and a century of Western accumulation and museum practice. To add to this, we have also to consider the circumstances under which these objects appear to us in the Völkerkunde Museum in Vienna. Displayed within the Habsburg Neue Hofburg, the Benin bronzes work within a considerably different setting than what they did in Benin. Not only the coolness and brightness of the Hofburg as compared to the heat and opacity of the royal palace, but also the dimensions of the rooms in the Hofburg affected the way objects could be installed here. Indeed, what the audience might experience at the exhibition might best be termed a montage, the coming together of a number of different “worlds” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007) in the exhibition hall. This montage does not in any straight or simple manner refer back to a stabile origin in Benin City, but accumulates engagements that have occurred over centuries. In this sense, what was presented in Vienna is something that has never been done before, but still works through the numerous activations the Benin pieces have had in previous assemblages. But if we see the object as continuously reactivated, we move into a new conceptualization of the purpose of exhibiting. In the regime of correspondences we have been accustomed to deciphering meaning that is culturally reproduced through objects. This kind of didactics seems to be unable to frame displays that will evoke the effects of objects. Indeed, how do we install effects? I do not intend to suggest how effects may be installed in museum displays here. What I will do, though, is to develop what I think will be a central concept in a framework of display based in effect, namely, atmosphere. Finally, I argue that by engaging in exhibitions that focus on effect we are actually recentering the museum as an important institution in the development of anthropological practice.

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Figure 14.4. Assembling the upper and lower parts of a dignitary plaque. Photograph by the author, from the exhibition Benin—Kings and Rituals, Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna 2007. Upper part from Ethnologisches Museum— Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, lower part from Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg.

Effects on Display In the beginning of this chapter, I argued that ethnographic exhibitions have been occupied with tracing correspondences to either empirical realities or theoretical tenets. With Benin—Kings and Rituals, we saw an approach that consciously played on the multiple possible readings of objects, the multiple worlds residing in a single object. This was done through a classical approach, where the multi-referentiality of the objects was played out as different thematic orientations toward the objects. Thus, the exhibition language was still based in a strategy of correspondence, in which each theme pointed toward a specific aspect of “reality.”

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But, one may ask, is it possible to create more radical expressions of the accumulated potential of the museum object? Rather than explaining about “multireferentiality,” could we turn such a perspective into an effect in itself? If so, how would a display based on effects differ from what we saw in the earlier kinds of display? And what do we mean by “effect”? Gell has provided an example of an imaginary exhibition based on effect (1996). In a response to a debate concerning whether a Zande hunting can be rightfully displayed as “art,” Gell imagines an exhibition on traps, featuring the Zande hunting net displayed next to Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” This artwork features a stuffed shark in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde. The presentation of the famed hunter of the sea encapsulated in a tank not much bigger than the animal itself obviously plays on the contrast between powers of the animal and its inescapable fate in the tank, manipulated by the artist. Gell imagines that being placed side by side with this piece of Western art, the Zande net will transgress its obvious classification of “Zande material culture” or “an instrument used for hunting” and affect reflections on the ultimate entrapment of human existence within the span of a lifetime. Importantly, Gell acknowledges that these ideas were probably not intended by the original Zande net maker, and that the hunting net does not occupy any major ritual importance apart from the fact that all hunting equipment among the Zande is empowered with magical qualities. Still, the net being presented together with Hirst’s shark might very well evoke these existential perspectives. By letting the objects on display become each other’s referents in the plane of the exhibition, the montage as a strategy of display might establish qualities not visible in the object as it is. Thus, montage may serve as a strategy to tease out the involutions hidden within the material and suggest potentials never realized before. The unlikely bringing together of the net and the shark highlights the space of the museum: this is a place where things are brought together in new ways and new effects are created. It stresses the ultimately constructed character of the museum. But rather than trying to transgress this constructedness, for instance by reconstructing the Zande net in its “natural habitat,” the construction is used to trace new potentials in both the net and Hirst’s work. In sum, this display aims at creating effects by not letting the object stand forth as a symbol of something, which is not here, in the display. Instead, the installation aims at letting the immediacy of what is present bring new effects into play. Rather than putting, say, magic on display, presenting implements for enacting magic, explaining about systems of magic in this or that place of the world, what the exhibition may aim at is to install magic—to make magic present as an experience to the museum guest, sensing the way objects and invisible forces may take power over us. This would not simply evoke new potentials in the objects; it would also evoke possible states of the spectator being confronted with magic as a potential part of his or her reality.

Toward Atmospheres What we realize from Gell’s imaginary example is the fact that effects are always orchestrated. It is the orchestration of the object in a certain state that evokes a certain effect (Bateson 2000: 411–16, 419–31). There are vast differences between the effects evoked in the nexuses created around a Benin bronze statue at a com-

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memorative altar in Benin City, on sale at Webster’s auction house in the summer of 1897, and on display at the Museum für Völkerkunde in the summer of 2007. As Nicholas Thomas has powerfully stated, objects are promiscuous (Thomas 1991: 27–30). Their apparent stability covers the fact that they actually are different things, they draw different interests and relations together according to the way they are presented (Strathern 1988; Latour 2005; Gell 1998; Bjerregaard 2009). But, as I argued earlier, we would be mistaken to think that this means that we can do whatever with these objects. We only realize ourselves and our intentions in the engagement with objects and environments (Ingold 1993; Miller 2005). Thus, there seems to be a space between the subject and the object, which needs more careful treatment. There is something in the way the object becomes apparent to us that we need to deal with in order to come closer to an idea of what “effect” may be. I suggest that in acknowledging this immediacy of objects, ethnographic museums will have to move toward being more alert to the staging of atmosphere. The German philosopher Gernot Böhme (1993) describes atmosphere as an undifferentiated space between subject and object. We enter a space and recognize an atmosphere that does neither belong to us nor to the object exclusively (ibid.: 122). Atmosphere is a quasi-objective presence, which can be sensed but does not have a physical embedding. In this way, we may suggest that atmosphere is something new that emanates from the relation between what we conventionally consider a stabile subject and object relation. Now, the role of the object in this relation is not caused by what it encapsulates in terms of meanings, but what it radiates through its material reality. Böhme differentiates between two similar but different German concepts—Realität and Wirklichkeit. If Realität is “the factual fact” (Böhme 2001: 57), what can be conferred as belonging to the object in terms of color, materials, narrative, etc. (what is registered through the cataloging of museumification), Wirklichkeit is the “actual fact” (ibid.), the observation of the object in a particular state. Thus, Wirklichkeit points to the effects of the object in the particular setting. What these observations point to in terms of exhibition making is an attention to installations as orchestrations of atmosphere making objects apparent in a particular state. Such an approach would demand that we interrogate the ways in which objects may become present to us in museum display, instead of only interrogating the ways in which they have become present in their changing manifestations through the network created by museumification.

Atmosphere and the Reassembling of Worlds I will suggest that the concept of atmosphere may open up a new ontology of museum objects—one, which may embrace the concept of montage. With Böhme, the focus on the object changes from meaning to radiation, or the object’s “ecstacies.” Böhme rejects the idea of the object as a container, focusing instead on the object’s radiations, which always take place in an orchestrated environment. Thus, the object is continuously recreated, becoming part of new orchestrations of atmosphere through an infinite potential of montages. This is the point where I find atmosphere and montage to be such vital concepts for our understanding of objects in the museum. What the museum does, tracing and documenting the exchanges the objects of their collections pass through, is precisely to document how these entities constantly conjure up new

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worlds—they take part in new montages suggesting new potentials. Still, in their focus on the ways in which humans and material entities constantly move in and out of new assemblages, creating new worlds that disperse without leaving their constitutive elements shattered, these two concepts may be the building blocks for truly implementing the ideas of Mauss, and later Gell, in the practices of museums. In terms of authorship and agency, the entanglement of the museum in exchanges covering vast distances in time and space, questions our capacity to shatter worlds and create truly new images. Instead, the images we may suggest are already implied as the infinity of potentials suggested by the objects. Arguing so, we also imply that museum practice could never be one of tracing correct correspondences, but should always be oriented toward exploring new potentials, mounting new kinds of effects from the same elements.

Beyond Correspondence, Back to the Laboratory Bateson once paraphrased Immanuel Kant’s Ding an Sich by talking about the way a piece of chalk appears to us: I suggest that Kant’s statement can be modified to say that there is an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk. There are the differences between the chalk and the rest of the universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon. And within the piece of chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between its locations and the locations in which it might have been. (2000: 459, emphasis in the original)

By way of conclusion, I bring in Bateson’s remark to consider exhibition making. If museumification amounts to an accumulation of potentials, an accumulation of the ways in which objects have been activated, it is clear that these activations, while working as obstacles for future activations should be seen as emanating from an infinite pool of possible activations. What has been historically activated does not preempt the ways in which the object can possibly be reactivated. Or, with Böhme, there are in principle no limits to the Wirklichkeits in which the objects may take part. We may argue that this was what was lacking in Benin—Kings and Rituals. While this exhibition was exemplary in the display of past activations, it did not take the step further and suggest that new worlds, new perspectives on the constitution of the world could be teased out of the orchestration of these objects. While explicating how the objects in themselves worked as montages, they did not take the final step to suggest that new perspectives, specific to the museum enactment, could come out of creating new montages in the exhibition hall. If we accept the logic of Bateson’s remark, we have to finally transgress the idea of the museum as a regime of correspondences and turn it, instead, into an experimental zone. Experimental not in the sense of an affront to any alleged establishment, but experimental in a very practical sense, causing the museum staff to venture into shaping worlds whose end we have not conceived yet. We may be able to recognize what Gell is arguing in his imaginary exhibition, but anyone who has worked with exhibitions in practice will know that while the idea may work, we have no guarantee that the actual installation of a Zande net next to Hirst’s shark will have the effects sought for. The dimensions of the object, their placement in the room, the lighting, the actual presentation of the net (should

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it be wrapped or should it be open ready for catch)—all these parameters are part of the effect we strive for and all of them may obstruct the intended effect. Therefore, entering a style of display aiming at mounting effects takes the museum staff into a less solid grounding. While this may question our scientific authority, it also opens up for turning the exhibition into an experimental zone, where we challenge the borders of our knowledge through the resistance offered by objects and space. If we refrain from staking our academic authority with the certainty of correspondences, of pooling information, we may realize that rather than communicating existing knowledge, the exhibition may become a research site in and off itself.

Acknowledgments This chapter is based on my PhD research supported by the Knud Højgaards Foundation and the Industrial PhD program under the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. The research was hosted by Moesgård Museum and University of Aarhus. I am grateful to Barbara Plankensteiner and the rest of the staff at Museum für Völkerkunde for allowing me to follow their work and engage in discussions during a three-month case study at the museum in September–December 2006. I wish to thank Ton Otto and Inger Sjørslev for their kind and critical supervision of the work. Finally, I also wish to thank Christian Suhr, Rane Willerslev, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on my drafts for this chapter.

Notes 1. While Graham questions the amounts of human sacrifices actually carried out in Benin, he does not question that human sacrifice has actually been practiced, also immediately prior to the Punitive Expedition (1965: 327–30). 2. Manillas were horseshoe-shaped exchange currencies, most often made from bronze or copper, used locally in West Africa. Later on they were used by European traders. 3. Other exchange objects occupied central positions. Among the most valued objects were the red coral beads used for the robe worn by the Oba at the two most important annual rituals, Ughie Erha Oba and Igue. These beads were originally traded with Hausa merchants, but later on the Portuguese also brought beads along with the brass manillas and other goods. The beads are said to have entered Benin life with the historical Oba Ewuare (who reigned around the early fifteenth century), who brought the beads from a fight with the king of the sea, Olukun. This event is celebrated at the annual Bead Festival, Ughie Ivie, where all the coral beads of the Oba, the chiefs, and the queens are covered with blood (originally from humans but today from a cow). Through this ritual, the mystical powers of the beads are augmented (Ben-Amos 1980: 75).

References Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: the Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Bateson, Gregory. 2000 [1972]. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press. Ben-Amos, Paula. 1980. The Art of Benin. London: Thames and Hudson. Bjerregaard, Peter. 2009. Inside the Museum Machine: Mind and Agency in Contemporary Ethnographic Exhibitions. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Aarhus: University of Aarhus. Böhme, Gernot. 2001. Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnemungslehre. Munich: Hans Fink Verlag.

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———. 1993. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36: 113–26. Bouquet, Mary. 2001a. “Streetwise in Museumland.” Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 43: 77–102. ———. 2001b. “The Art of Exhibition-Making as a Problem of Translation.” In Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, eds. Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto, 177–199. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Coombes, Annie E. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dark, Philip J. C. 1973. An Introduction to Benin Art and Technology. Oxford: Clarendon. Duchateau, Armand. 1994. Benin—Royal Art of Africa from the Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna. New York and London: Prestel. Durrans, Brian. 1995 [1988]. “The Future of the Other: Changing cultures on display.” In The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display, ed. Robert Lumley, 144–169. London and New York: Routledge. Gell, Alfred. 1999. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, ed. E. Hirsch, 159–186. London: Athlone Press. ———. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1996. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” Journal of Material Culture 1(1): 15–38. Graham, James D. 1965. “The Slave Trade, Depopulation and Human Sacrifice in Benin History: The General Approach.” Cahiers D’Études Africaines 18: 317–34. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell. 2007. “Introduction: Thinking Through Things.” In Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, eds. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, 1–31. London and New York: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “The Art of Translation in a Continuous World.” In Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse, ed. Gisli Pálsson, 210–30. Oxford: Berg. Jacknis, Ira. 1985. “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology.” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking, 75–111. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Junge, Peter. 2007. “Age Determination of Commemorative Heads: The Example of the Berlin Collection.” In Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria, ed. Barbara Plankensteiner, 185–98. Vienna and Ghent: Kunsthistorisches Museum mit MVK and OTM and Snoeck. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2002. Iconoclash. London: MIT Press. Miller, Daniel. 2005. “Materiality: An Introduction.” In Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller, 1–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nevadomsky, Joseph. 1997. “Studies of Benin Art and Material Culture, 1897–1997.” African Arts 30(3): 18–27. O’Hanlon, Michael, and Robert L. Welsch, eds. 2004 [2000]. Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Plankensteiner, Barbara. 2009. “The Making of . . . Genese und Rezeption einer Benin-Ausstellung.” In Das Unbehagen im Museen: Postkoloniale Museologien, ed. Belinda Kazeem, Charlotte Martinz-Turek, and Nora Sternfeld, 193–216. Vienna: Verlag Turia + Kant. ———, ed. 2007a. Benin: Kings and Rituals. Court Arts from Nigeria. Exhibition catalog, Museum für Völkerkunde Wien. Vienna and Ghent: Kunsthistorisches Museum mit MVK and OTM and Snoeck.

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———. 2007b. “Introduction.” In Benin: Kings and Rituals. Court Arts from Nigeria. Exhibition catalog, Museum für Völkerkunde Wien. Vienna and Ghent: Kunsthistorisches Museum mit MVK and OTM and Snoeck. ———. 2007c. “The ‘Benin Affair’ and its Consequences.” In Benin: Kings and Rituals. Court Arts from Nigeria. Exhibition catalog, Museum für Völkerkunde Wien. Vienna and Ghent: Kunsthistorisches Museum mit MVK and OTM and Snoeck. Shelton, Anthony. 2001. “Unsettling the Meaning: Critical Museology, Art and Anthropological Discourses.” In Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, ed. Bouquet and Porto. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 517–35. ———. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sturtevant, William. 1969. “Does Anthropology Need Museums?” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 82: 619–50. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. von Luschan, Felix. 1968 [1919]. Die Altertümer von Benin: Mit 889 Abbildungen nach Zeichnungen v. B. Ankermann, G. Kilz, L. Sütterlin u.a. sowie nach Photographien usw. New York: Hacker Art Books.

CHAPTER 15

Assembling Bodies Cuts, Clusters, and Juxtapositions Rebecca Empson

This chapter contrasts two distinct ways of seeing in museum exhibits and relates these to ideas in cubism and montage. While cubism makes multiple perspectives of a single object visible at once, montage juxtaposes partial “cuts” or “fragments” in a sequence, so as to reveal a new perspective. Each technique exposes different kinds of insight, but they are both concerned with challenging realism to reveal the “hidden” and “true” nature of things.1 In relation to these ideas, I suggest that ethnographic objects in museum exhibits may be understood, not so much as something to be consumed by the gaze of visitors, but as “transitions” that “cut” into the bodily experience of visitors revealing different ways of seeing and understanding. Cubism and montage, thus, provide two different ways of arranging exhibits, leading to different kinds of knowledge and information. I argue for the need to make use of both of these, allowing for new ways of seeing to emerge while at the same time retaining a layering of perspectives and histories. To understand how these ideas might work in practice, I focus on an exhibition that emerged as a part of an interdisciplinary project funded by the Leverhulme Trust called “Changing Beliefs of the Human Body” (2005–9). The project involved classicists, historians, artists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, mostly based at the University of Cambridge, whose research was concerned with the human body. Toward the end of the project, an exhibition called Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination was shown at the University’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (www.maa.cam.ac.uk/assemblingbodies). I was employed on this project as an anthropologist studying organ transplantation in Mongolia and as a co-curator for the exhibition, working with colleagues Mark Elliott and Anita Herle. In the following, I outline some of the processes that went into planning the exhibition and draw attention to some of the theoretical underpinnings that guided the display. In particular, I stress the use of juxtaposition to transcend particular boundaries in exhibition making, especially in anthropological exhibits that continue, on the whole, to be committed to realist forms of display. In drawing attention to the use of juxtaposition, I focus on themes in the exhibit and the different kinds of bodies that these aimed to highlight. I then examine the use of kinetic artworks, which allowed viewers to lend their bodies to the artifacts on display and, quite literally, animate them with their presence. Firstly, however, let me contrast the two distinct ways of seeing in museums, related to ideas in cubism and montage, respectively. This provides a general framework by which to understand the creation of the exhibition. In this sense, this chapter is as much about the making of an exhibition on the human body as it is about the theoretical approach we took to understanding what the human body might be.

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Figure 15.1a–c. Atomised, by Jim Bond, 2005. Sensors that pull apart the body and put it together again are triggered when someone stands in front of the sculpture.

It is commonly assumed that cubism, arising at a time when painting was being challenged by photography, sought to reveal a more truthful whole—or the real—made visible through multiple perspectives of a single object presented on a single canvas. In their famous treaty On Cubism, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote that “an object has not one absolute form: it has many: it has as many as there are planes in the region of perception” (1912: 46). Gleizes and Metzinger’s idea of “planes of perception” resonates with the museological idea that different kinds of information should be stored, archived, and selectively presented about a single object. It is generally assumed that these will allow us to understand, or “grasp” the object. Creating an archive of information around an individual object makes us “know” it better. A case in point might be the commonly found “in-case text labels” found in most exhibits. These give detailed information—the date, provenance, materials, etc., about an object and provide different “planes” or “levels” of information. Indeed, these texts create a kind of archive of information around an individual object that seems to gather endless kinds of information to it. These multiple kinds of information (provenance, materials, use, etc) do not need to “add up” to create a coherent whole, but speak to the interests of different kinds of audiences and viewers. Revealing the object’s different “forms” is one way of making visible the different ways of apprehending a single object. In contrast, the technical juxtaposition of images in montage, most notably pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, allows for a new

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overall perspective to be generated out of the intersection of fragments (see also Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2007; Marcus 1994; Deleuze 2003: 64–65; see also Gleizes and Metzinger 1913). Here montage sought to reveal more than what was immediately visible to the human eye; to expose new connections and links between disparate spheres that could transcend the limits of human vision. Eisenstein wrote: “The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image (idea) just as it was experienced by the author” (1942). This way of seeing has, I think, much more in common with the more impressionistic impressions we glean when glancing at particular objects in an exhibit. It stands in contrast to the layering of different kinds of information about a single object described above, and allows for analogies to be made and ambiguities maintained. Here, the juxtaposition of different objects or interpretations allows for new kinds of understandings. In short, the absence of certain kinds of information or ideas generates the space for new connections and perceptions to emerge. Below, I describe how these two ways of seeing inspired different ways of organizing and presenting artifacts, information, and ideas in the exhibition. I will use various terms drawn from cubism and montage theory, such as juxtaposition, cuts, assemblage, and interval to describe these practices. Furthermore, the term sequence will be used to refer to a series of different objects arranged as cinematic “cuts” in a particular way to create an overall impression. Here, objects are used as transitions toward other objects producing a kind of sequence, reminiscent of the temporal arrangements proposed by Eisenstein in film montage. These sequences were also arranged according to themed “clusters,” indicating spatial arrangements where objects are placed in groups, layering insight into certain kinds of bodily forms or features, more reminiscent of the kind of information presented about a single object in cubism. It will be suggested that cubism and montage brought these ideas together in its confrontation with realism. The cubist turn, like the political underpinnings that motivated the practice of montage, was a politically driven practice. It sought to question our widely held assumptions about everyday reality and confront different manipulations of it. It is these political underpinnings, I will suggest, that provide a perfect platform by which to question our general assumptions about what the human body is.

Making Bodies Visible When thinking about how to put together an exhibition on the human body, two things became apparent. Firstly, as curators we wanted to avoid an exhibition that simply showed how people in different cultures viewed the body differently. This would limit the exhibit to geographical regions that addressed the theme of the human body from different cultural perspectives. Taking such an approach would confine our understanding of the body to a kind of social constructivism, amounting to the relativist point that human bodies are the same everywhere, but different cultures view the body in different ways. In contrast, and drawing on the work of scholars such as Annemarie Mol (2002) and Helen Lambert and Maryon McDonald (2009), we wanted to highlight the idea that different technologies—be these medical instruments, forms of legislation, genealogies, burial methods, and so on—found across times and places, actually make very different kinds of bod-

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ies visible. In making bodies visible through these technologies, the human body comes to be acted on in different ways, and these actions have consequences. Genetic testing (as a particular kind of technology), for example, may reveal that a fetus is the carrier of a particular gene that makes it predisposed to a particular illness. Information of this kind might determine how geneticists come to understand ideas about certain illnesses. It might also determine how the parents view the fetus and prompt them to terminate the pregnancy. In this instance, the technology of genetic testing reveals a particular kind of body that comes to be acted upon beyond the initial instance in which it was revealed. What may be called the “real” body is, then, not something that simply lurks behind various “social” constructs. What counts as a body is always social; it is constantly being made to appear in particular ways through the practices and technologies by which it is manipulated. In accordance with this wider theoretical approach we decided to arrange the exhibition according to overarching themes, rather than regions, disciplines, or time periods. Secondly, experienced curators warned me that exhibitions were emphatically not “books on walls.” Radically different ways of conveying ideas would have to be employed, tested, and experimented with. Part of this involved an “object-centered approach,” whereby the artifacts themselves trigger thoughts and connections not immediately apparent. Indeed, during the planning stages of the exhibition many thematic connections arose unexpectedly when we placed certain objects next to each other in the gallery space. Here, the comparative enterprise of juxtaposition evoked different kinds of dialogues between the objects themselves. The objects, we might say, were our cinematic cuts, and we had to work out which cuts we wanted to use in which order and in relation to which other cuts in order to highlight different themes. Here the “cuts” were arranged in a certain sequence, prompting viewers to reflect on wider themes and ideas beyond the individual objects themselves. Through their combination, new insights and ideas emerged. In saying this, it is also important to highlight that the “cuts,” on their own, also had a kind of power. Indeed, there was a constant tension between wanting the objects to illustrate our own more abstract ideas and the objects themselves pushing us in different directions. In order to facilitate this process, we decided to take out most of the temporary building work and reveal some of the gallery’s original architecture. Taking down walls, built-in cases and plinths, created a sense of space in which— across the great gallery void—multiple connections could be made visible and links could be forged from different corners. Despite these positive starting points, we were faced with a series of dilemmas: connections (or relations) between objects seemed endless, the stories we could tell multiple. How were we going to display historical shifts, as well as cultural differences? And how would we draw attention to the political implications of viewing and understanding bodies in different ways? The difficulty, it seemed, was going to be in deciding when to stop juxtaposing or making connections. Some brutal cuts had to be performed (Strathern 1996).

Clusters and their Internal Juxtapositions In the end, the exhibition was not organized according to conventional types or regions. Rather, different bodies were juxtaposed next to others in seven clusters. These consisted of the following themes:

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1. “An Assembly of Bodies,” an area that I describe in some detail below. 2. “Measuring & Classifying,” which looked at the ways in which bodies have been measured and classified in historical periods and across disciplines. 3. “Art & Anatomy,” where, among other things the shift from “type” to “individual” was highlighted in anatomical drawings, portraiture, classical busts, and so on. 4. “Multiple Bodies,” an area that consisted of six 2-meter-high self-portraits of women with HIV/AIDS. 5. “Extending & Distributing,” which looked at the ways in which bodily parts come to stand for persons in certain forms of exchange, such as hair ornaments, votives, organ transplants, and death masks. 6. “Genealogies & Genomes,” an area I describe shortly. 7. “Bodies & Landscape,” which focused on some of the ways in which engagement with the landscape and the built environment bring the human body into view. This section also examined ideas concerning scale, whereby the body may be viewed as the microcosm that replicates the macrocosm of the wider world. In Jo Stockham’s monoprint on paper, “Human Geography” (1990), loaned from the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, for instance, one saw a mapping of the body onto particular parts of the globe. This evoked ideas about access to particular places in the landscape and its resources. It was also suggestive of the enduring traces that bodies leave on the landscape in which they inhabit. Arranging objects according to these clusters provided a fruitful way in which to transgress certain rules of composition and illuminate connections between very different kinds of bodies that were not immediately apparent. In addition, between each cluster was a small interval or space, often with a seat or bench that allowed visitors to pause and reflect on what they had seen. Alongside this physical arrangement, different kinds of text guided viewers through the exhibit in various ways. Larger A2 text panels described wider themes, while in-case text labels provided detailed information about individual objects. Finally, the website, which was accessible toward one side of the exhibition, allowed visitors to look across the gallery space and make links between objects, creating different kinds of groupings or assemblages. Organizing the exhibit in this way did not, overall, amount to a whole, or single narrative, nor was there any specific pathway through the exhibit. Rather, visitors were invited to forge their own bodies out of engagement with the displays and map their own routes through the gallery space. Not focusing exclusively on one particular historical period or region was one way of breaking out of linear narratives and to create tensions and connections across different time periods, cultures, and disciplines. This form of display also disturbed any assumptions about chronology and forced visitors to make their own links and, in doing so, assemble their own bodies/exhibition through the objects on display. At the same time, of course, the different objects and their clusters did augment the way in which visitors moved through the space, drawing them here and there while also forcing their gaze across the bounded zones and between the thematic clusters. This creative interplay between visitors and the objects created its own dynamic push and pull of bodies in the museum space. In some ways, this kind of arrangement echoes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “ruin” and the “fragment.”2 Here, the museum collector destroys the “aura” of an object by detaching it from its original functions (Brent Plate 2005: 97). Drawing on

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Benjamin’s concept, S. Brent Plate notes: “The museum is a collection (Sammlung), creating a coherent experience of the past by making history visible in the present” (ibid.: 99). Museum exhibitions, it could be argued, tend toward a unified narrative, something that can be experienced as a coherent and complete whole. In contrast, we wanted to make allegorical connections that opened up a place for intuitive singular experiences that disrupted any idea of a chronology or singularity of form (ibid.: 99). In order to illustrate this, I turn now to focus on three particular clusters in the exhibit that revealed very different kinds of bodies on display.

Cluster 1: An Assembly of Bodies On entering the exhibition, visitors were confronted with a large wire sculpture made by the artist Jim Bond (see figure 15.1a–c). Triggered by a sensor that registered their presence, the sculpture began to move, slowly pulling apart a figure suspended from thin telescopic wires, and then reversing this procedure, putting the figure together. This sculpture formed part of a series of interactive sculptures created by kinetic artists for the exhibition. These sculptures required visitors to lend their bodies to the artworks in order to stimulate them into action. We might say that the sculptures extracted parts from visitors and used them to animate themselves. Sometimes, the presence of the visitor was picked up through a sensor attached to a particular piece that triggered the sculpture to move. At other times, video cameras were embedded in the eyes of sculptures that filmed visitors looking at them and then projected this footage in the “brain” of the sculpture. Extracting or “cutting” parts of people in this way to reveal others provided a montage of different bodies on display. The idea of assembling, of taking things apart and putting them together alluded to in the sculpture pointed to two overlapping themes that extended throughout the exhibit. Firstly, it pointed to the process of putting something together, of creating something new out of component parts as in montage theory. The way in which this is done obviously has an effect on the way we come to know and understand the human body. Frequently, for example, the technologies that we use to measure the body often become models for the human body itself. In the history of Western scientific thought, the human brain has been thought of as working in a similar way to a violin, a telegraph, and a computer. The pupil was understood to work like a pinhole camera, while the telephone became a model for the human ear. This insight, drawn from the history and philosophy of science, is crucial for understanding the point that in the invention of technologies used to control the body, new bodies are continually crafted and made visible. Hence, many objects on display in the exhibition were not figurative, but consisted of various kinds of tools used to measure, compose, and put together new kinds of bodies (cf. Herle, Elliott, and Empson 2009). The second point concerning assembly could be found in the rest of this cluster area. On either side of this sculpture and making up the first thematic cluster of the exhibition, visitors were confronted with an “Assembly of Bodies.” This included a shaman’s costume from Manchuria, a Bronze Age funerary vessel from Europe, a 2-meter-high model of the double helix, and a Malangan from Papua New Guinea. The installation pointed to the second meaning of the term assembly. Here, assembly—or the bringing together of cuts in a certain sequence, and perspectives of a single form from different angles on one page—evokes the idea

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of a gathering for a common purpose, such as a legislative “body.” This idea of assembly emphasizes the political implications of the ways bodies are known and regulated, and the impact that this has on the ways that bodies are imagined and acted upon. Following the idea of assembly as a gathering for a common purpose, visitors were invited to become a part of the exhibit as they gathered in the gallery alongside the other bodies on display (cf. Herle, Elliott, and Empson 2009). What was there before and what emerged from visitors was not always clear as the boundaries between who was making whom visible were transcended. One of the figures in the assembly was a highly decorated military-looking shaman’s coat from North East Manchuria (MAA 1933.377–379). Among the Imin Numinchen (a subgroup of the Evenki), shamans were primarily concerned with healing, prediction, and with people’s relations with their ancestors. The coat is one of a series of elements that allowed a shaman’s body to transform into a “vessel” that received different spirits. This particular costume belonged to a young female shaman who died in the 1930s, aged twenty-five. No two costumes are identical. They are assembled and added to as a shaman becomes more experienced, incorporating materials from different sources. For example, the main part of this costume was probably made by Dagur embroiders. The brass mirrors came from Chinese merchants, and the embroidered lions at the back were taken from her father’s Manchu military dress. These features reflect some of the historical and political concerns of the people at the time. They also point to the heterogeneous elements that are juxtaposed and assembled to make the body of the shaman. The heavy mirrors act in a double capacity—they protect the shaman by deflecting harm, while revealing what is normally invisible to the human eye. The number of mirrors on the costume indicates the shaman’s powers and maps a geographical cosmos. By wearing the costume, the shaman is located in the center of this cosmos. During performance, a shaman is seized by one or more ancestral spirits, so that what is inside the mirror-costume are the spirits, rather than the shaman’s body (cf. Humphrey 2007). Here, the body is open to forces that can control it, inhabit its form, and shape its physical features. Another figure in the assembly area was a large Bronze Age Urn (Chippenham, Cambridgeshire, MAA 1934.1040). While the urn would have been buried underground and the decoration on the outer rim concealed from view, the inside of the urn actually contained partially cremated human remains. The Bronze Age marked an interesting shift in relation to dead bodies. During this period, cremations came to replace inhumations as the dominant mortuary practice. In the shift to cremation, we can identify new attitudes toward the human body. The cremation fire literally “ruptured” the body’s integrity and transformed it into a new substance. This “rupturing” was followed by further treatment and engagement with the remains, as urns became used as containers for the cremated bones of the deceased. This involved collecting, selecting, and reassembling remains of the body, and then placing them in an urn. The urn’s form may be seen as a way of reconstituting a person’s skin; it was a means of giving a new kind of wholeness and boundedness to the remains of the person. In this sense, urns embody persons, while at the same time providing metaphorical links to storage vessels and houses. The shift in the treatment of human remains in the Bronze Age signals a shift in the way that the body was acted on after death (cf. Sørensen and Rebay 2008). What parts of the body were selected for the urn, the place that the urn was buried, and the containment of certain people in mortuary urns over others, may all be viewed as political acts that assemble particular kinds of bodies.

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Surrounding these different figures and pasted to the walls around them in large font were a selection of different forms of legislation, old and new, such as the 1971 Act for Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder, the 1832 Act for Regulating Schools of Anatomy, and The Human Tissue Act of 2004. These forms of legislation drew attention to the fact that bodies are always contained and shaped by the wider political formations of which they are a part. Displaying these forms of legislation allowed us to highlight the diverse political structures that give rise to particular kinds of bodies. They reminded visitors that while the body may be acted on by various technologies, such as medical instruments, they are also acted on by legislation that enshrines certain concepts of the human body in particular terms. These terms can be said to create new kinds of bodies as an outcome of these acts. The existence of people referred to as “donors” and “recipients,” for instance, are an outcome of specific kinds of technical intervention and political collaboration. Some acts allow the corpses of murders for dissection, others restrict the sale of organs, while others still determine the kinds of procedures for cornea grafting. Drawing on the cinematic metaphors suggested above, we might say here that the individual objects act as “cuts” that were juxtaposed next to each other in wider sequences, or clusters. Passing through or stopping inside these sequences, viewers lent their bodies to the displays, or were caught by them, animating new perspectives and visions. In turn, the objects threw the gaze of the viewers in different directions creating unexpected and novel connections and insights and transforming their own bodily experiences. This allowed us to highlight the highly volatile nature of the human body that is continually made and remade in different contexts and through different forms of technical and political intervention.

Cluster 2: Genealogies & Genomes An example of the way in which objects were juxtaposed in clusters can be illustrated by focusing on a display area within the cluster “Genealogies & Genomes.” Following from the idea of the body as enmeshed in the wider political structures of which it is a part, a section was concerned with the ways in which bodies are known by the relations that are passed between them. Be these actual substances, or forms of property, title, and rank, these all serve to bind people to one another in relations that compose and define who they are. Along one wall in this area hung three paintings, below which stood a table-case containing three manuscripts. The first manuscript was a twelfth-century encyclopedia, open at a page showing the “Table of Consanguinity” (St John’s College Library, MS H.11). The large table maps relations bilaterally in seven generations and depicts who you can marry according to the celestial origins of marriage prohibition. The head at the top is that of Christ. It is worth noting that the extraordinary range of prohibited marriage degrees in this table made their actual application highly impractical and impossible to uphold without violating the “tie of consanguinity.” The second manuscript was a sixteenth-century bible depicting a biblical genealogy (St John’s College Library, U.15.13). Such images became the foundation for many European family trees, whereby secular genealogies were grafted onto sacred ones in family bibles. Thirdly, there was a Volume from The Human Genome Library (Chromosome 1, Volume 1) containing series upon series of letters that refer to the sequence of chemical base-pairs that compose human DNA (designed by Kerr Noble for the Wellcome Trust Collection). The sequence of chromosome 1 is the largest of the

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Figure 15.2. Juxtaposing portraits and genealogies show different ways of mapping relations between bodies.

human chromosomes. Interestingly, this volume included the letter n, showing places where researchers have, as yet, been unable to identify base-pairs through sequencing technology. Each of these manuscripts charts different ways of understanding what is transmitted or passed between bodies. At the same time, they are also prescriptive documents that define certain relations at the cost of others. On the wall above these manuscripts hung a sixteenth-century Dutch portrait in a large ornate gold frame (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 534). The painting depicts people standing in front of a group of family portraits. European portraits such as these often served as markers for ideas about succession, entitlement, rank, and the transfer of property. Technical analysis, conducted as part of cleaning this painting, revealed that the portrait frames were a later addition, suggesting that some of the figures had become ancestors, immortalized in portraits within the painting. Next to this painting hung a double portrait of the geneticist Sir John Sulston, by the artist Marc Quinn (2001) (National Portrait Gallery 6591, 6592[1]). The portrait is composed of a photograph and a sample of the sitter’s DNA suspended in agar jelly and mounted in a stainless steel frame. Together, this pair challenged the viewer to consider the accuracy of different forms of portraiture and underlined the complexity of our understanding of personal identity and descent (cf. Herle, Elliott, and Empson 2009). By juxtaposing these rather different objects, and grouping them together in a kind of montage series, we immediately get a sense of the different ways that bodies are imagined as connected to others. Each description maps a different idea about what is transmitted between bodies—from ideas about inheritance (both biological and material), marriage prohibition, and property, to recent ideas about genetics and an individual’s health or well-being. These descriptions often become manipulated and altered for various political agendas. Genealogies, for example, are a powerful means of mapping social relations that produce, distin-

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guish, and connect bodies. They categorize bodies in different ways as persons. But who does this categorization and what are the implications for the people being categorized in these ways? New technologies for mapping social relations according to genetics, for instance, often challenge the extent to which we “own” information about our own bodies, and blur boundaries between ourselves as subjects, objects, and citizens. It is also important to keep in mind that the power of many kinds of genealogies (or genealogical-like descriptions) is not simply to serve as records, lists, or documents that objectify relations for others. Many of these artifacts are actually held to bring forth the power or capacity of the bodies depicted in their forms. This point was forcefully realized in a display case alongside these portraits containing, among other things, an ornate Taiwanese wooden tablet, referred to as a “spirit tablet” (shen zhu pai) (MAA 1994.10 a–b). The spirit (shen) of the deceased are said to reside in such tablets. They remain in close proximity to living people and are often arranged in order of seniority at an altar in the home, or in a structure in the household compound. Descendents take care of the tablets and offer incense to each of them. Sometimes, threads of red rope divide the tablets so they do not argue. In return for being looked after, the deceased are said to protect their living descendents. Here, people may be considered as coming from a single ancestral “body” as they reside together in one tablet or altar. The tablet on display in the exhibit contained three male spirits, presumably brothers. They died at a fairly young age not long after each other at the end of the 1800s, possibly due to some disease or famine. At the top, the main gold text dedicates the tablet to the whole of the Manchu (Qing) Dynasty. The position of each man’s name on the tablet reflects his seniority. The first person to die has the most honorable position, on the central front and inner part of the tablet. His name, family name, and the name of his household are written in gold ink and in a large font size, indicating his importance. His date of birth and death, as well as his burial place, are written in black ink in the inner part of the tablet. His two sons dedicate the tablet to him, and their names are written in gold ink to the left, along with his grandson. The man’s two brothers are also on the tablet. The position of these people’s spirit on the front of the tablet corresponds to further information about them on the back of the tablet. In each case, it is as if the front and back (or inner part) of the tablet are like the front and back of a person’s body, whereby each person has his front (spirit position) and his back, or inner (spirit position). The tablet may also be considered as one body, with two people acting as the shoulders of the other. Here, genealogies do not just map or chart people’s relations to each other, they are held to contain some part of the mediating or connecting principles that link people to each other. This section of the exhibition drew attention to some of the ways in which people have thought that information “travels” or is “transmitted” from one person to the next, via their bodies. Following Margaret Lock’s (2002) work on the way in which the invention of the artificial respirator radically recast our understanding of the body at death, or Lesley Sharpe’s (2006) work on the kinds of sociality produced as a result of organ transplantation in America, we may say that technologies such as DNA databases, paternity testing kits, twelfth-century Tables of Consanguinity, and Taiwanese Spirit Tablets bring the human body into view in new and radically different ways. These different technologies have consequences for the way in which we understand what the body is and who is counted as having a particular kind of body.

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In this description, I have presented an enormous amount of detail about some of the individual objects (or cinematic cuts) that were juxtaposed in different clusters. Visitors looking at the display would, I suspect, not register even a fraction of this detail. Instead, they might form an overall impression as they scan the artifacts in front of them, and maybe read the labels of one or two of the things on display. Oscillating between forming a wider overall impression and focusing in detail on an individual object points to two ways of seeing that most of us are familiar with in museum exhibits. Indeed, it recalls the difference I made at the beginning of this chapter regarding cubism and montage. Juxtaposing objects in sequences allows the visitor to make links between objects from very different times and places. Here the objects were not bound by historical or cultural boundaries. Rather, they were juxtaposed in order to suggest possible links and ideas that were not always explicit. An advantage of this kind of display in a Museum context is that it allows for multiple perceptions across the displays and beyond the gallery itself. It seems to me that Museum exhibitions need to make use of this kind of juxtaposition as well as the use of more realist notions of layering different kinds of information in text labels. It is the tension between these ways of seeing that allows for new impressions to be formed and connections to be made, so that visiting a Museum exhibit can be experienced as a generative as well as extractive experience.

Cluster 3: Multiple Bodies I turn now to my third, and final, example of a montage sequence in the exhibition. I hope that you have now got a sense that even though the body may look like a single unified form that can be understood from different points of view, the body itself is always shifting. Distinct bodies are made through varying social practices. This insight is drawn from Mol (2002), whose work examines how bodies are created through the diagnosis and treatment of a disease in a hospital setting. It was not just the juxtaposition of a series of objects in a particular montage sequence that served to highlight this sense of multiplicity in the exhibition. Some of the objects, I will show, also held this multiplicity within their singular form. A series of six “body-maps,” painted by women with HIV/AIDS in South Africa, powerfully visualized this tension between singularity and multiplicity. In these life-sized paintings, the women’s bodies may be viewed in relation to biomedical science, religious belief, or as an outcome of moral pollution. The contours of their bodies articulated the virus and areas marking individual histories. The shadowy forms of people who supported the women hovered behind them, showing how the body is also defined by its relations with others. Through these paintings, one could see how the body was able to hold these multiple bodies simultaneously within a single corporal form. Focus on a detail of Nondumiso’s body-map, for example, painted as she began to take anti-retroviral medication, points to religious, relational, and biomedical concepts of the body. In talking about her painting, she states: “On my picture I drew the virus—it is the small blue dot. The white dot is my blood. The red circles are the ARVs [the anti-retrovirals] eating the virus, and the virus is going down” (Morgan and the Bambanani Women’s Group 2003: 41). In addition to mapping the disease, her body-map depicts scars incurred from hot water, “the light of God” emanating from her mouth, her hand, and foot prints, and the outline of her brother, all of which come together to make up her single corporeal form. This single piece could be seen as composed of multiple cuts that are juxtaposed in a particular sequence to present an overall montage-like body

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Figure 15.3. Malangan in foreground with visitors and body-maps in background.

for the viewer. Standing in front of the painting, our eyes dart between the details and the larger, imposing form towering in front of us. Which body is forcing itself upon and defining which, is never entirely clear. The idea that we move between different kinds of bodies is, of course, not confined to non-Western perspectives. Advances in the biomedical sciences continually have to confront the coexistence of multiple kinds of bodies as tissue samples, organs, and DNA databases are made from the detached pieces of individual people that come to stand for a generic/prototypical person (cf. Lock 2002).3 In this final cluster, we see that while different technologies make very different kinds of bodies visible, we tend to move between these bodies in our daily lives in an almost seamless way. Only when something goes wrong, or we are alerted to some change, do we halt and find ourselves confined to one of these more singular states. Drawing attention to this idea of multiplicity was not simply a way to categorize the content of the exhibition. It is also to highlight that our understandings of the human body are themselves multiple, determined by our interactions with others, and with various technologies that attempt to manipulate and shape who we are. Following the idea of an assembly as a gathering for a common purpose (see above), we invited visitors to become a part of the exhibition as they gathered in the gallery alongside the other bodies on display. Omnipresent throughout the exhibit and visible from all locations was a large, specially commissioned 2009 sculpture by the artist Jim Bond, called Anamorphic Man (see figure 15.4a–b). The sculpture hung from metal wires in the center of the gallery or void. It consisted of sections (or cuts) of the body suspended from a metal frame. These fragments converged to make a human figure from only one vantage point. From here a person could suddenly be observed bursting out from the front of the totem pole. The realization of this figure was, thus, dependent on the viewer’s perspective, something not unlike the theoretical use of montage to make use of different fragments that are placed together to reveal something new.4

Figure 15.4a–b. Anamorphic Man, by Jim Bond, 2009, seen from side and front.

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Conclusion In these concluding remarks, I draw attention to two underlying themes that have run throughout this description. One concerns the practice and presentation of anthropological exhibits, and the other the way in which this practice can inform wider theoretical insight. Firstly, studies of the human body in the social sciences and humanities often draw on phenomenological ideas concerned with “embodiment” in order to go beyond a dualistic, Cartesian view of the body. By incorporating a sense of process and agency, these studies have highlighted the ways in which bodies are shaped and crafted in relation to the world around them (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 15; Csordas 1990: 35). Recently, scholars have noted that such approaches often tend to carry echoes of the assumptions they seek to transcend (cf. Vilaça 2005; Mol 2005; Lambert and McDonald 2009). For example, they tend to stress the idea of the body as a knowable stable substrate associated within the boundaries of the human skin. In this way, we often think of the body as a single, unified reality with multiple perspectives cast on to it (cf. Mol 2005: 12–13), not unlike the relativist idea that different kinds of information create different “perspectives” of the same body. Here a single body is seen or apprehended in different ways, as an object is perceived from different “planes of perception” in cubism. This view of the human body is increasingly being challenged by ethnographic descriptions, from Amazonia and Inner Asia, as well as through new developments in biomedical science (cf. Mol 2005; Vilaça 2005; Lambert and McDonald 2009; Scheper-Hughes 2002). What kind of body is the human body, for instance, when a piece of it can be severed as a transplant and placed inside another body to help it grow? And what to make of the idea that our body is in fact made up of a “field of forces” that can escape the confines of the human form and inhabit different corporal containers through ideas about rebirth or shamanism (Empson 2011)? In the exhibition, we focused on various technologies used to inspect, transform, display, and recompose the human body in cultural and historical contexts. This allowed us to highlight the different kinds of bodies that are made visible through the processes of which they are subjected to. Arranging objects in sequences according to thematic clusters allowed us to challenged taken-forgranted ideas about the human body, both in terms of its physical form as well as its capacities. Artifacts and images were juxtaposed as cuts in a film highlighting similarities and contrasts and transforming the bodily experiences of visitors. Together these juxtapositions allowed us to explore how the human body is enacted through different kinds of practices. Thus, it was suggested that, the human body is the Anatomy Act of 1832, a malangan sculpture from Papua New Guinea and the charred remains in a Bronze Age urn. It is also the costume of a Manchurian shaman and a sample of DNA in a steel frame housed at the National Portrait Gallery. In giving an account of the creation of this exhibition, I hope to have illuminated different ways of apprehending the human body. In describing some of the multiple bodies on display, I have shown that these are not simply different perspectives on the same corporal form (or the layering of different “planes” of information on a single object as in Cubism). Rather, radically different bodies are made visible through different technological interventions and perspectives. In this sense, the practice of exhibition making, and the kind of techniques used in the display of artifacts and information, such as the juxtaposition of objects in clusters not immediately related, might just be an important ground from which more general theoretical insights can themselves be made to appear.

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This leads me to a wider point. That is to the importance of various kinds of “cuts” that determine the sequence, halting connections into something vaguely static and fixed. Text labels, titles, contained clusters, and clearly defined themes all restrain impressions into smaller manageable sequences. Indeed, it is the productive interplay between open-ended interpretations and realizations, while also guiding the visitor through the exhibition as a specific “event,” that is the important balance to maintain. Oscillating between this free, open, and endless interpretation while also guiding and allowing space for reflection is to challenge the hegemonic space of the anthropological museum as a source of knowledge and allow for a space that generates serendipity and chance. Here the exhibition is not so much a fixture or feature of a museum, but an event that cuts into the everyday and allows the visitor to curate their own exhibition and insight within the confines of the building. Indeed, it is in this light that one of the visitors commented, when having used one of the interactives, “they allowed us to use all the senses. I felt like I became a part of the exhibition . . . it makes going to the museum feel like an event.”5 Maybe viewing the exhibition as an event and allowing the visitor to become part of it is something that can only be realized through forms of display that draw on montage theory. I would like to suggest that it is certainly something that facilitates this, allowing for the creative potential of disruption and disconnect, as well as linear, chronological forms of display.

Acknowledgments My thanks to Rane and Christian for inviting us to think through montage for this book project and for their comments on our chapter. A version of this chapter was presented at the Medical Anthropology Research Seminar, at University College London. I thank David Napier and others for their comments. Finally, my warm thanks to the co-curators of the exhibition, Anita Herle and Mark Elliott, for their great vision and sense of collaboration. Much of the descriptive text presented here is drawn from the exhibition catalog, which we co-authored. All photographs taken at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are by Rebecca Empson, 2009.

Notes 1. They also rely on different technologies—one, for instance, is inherently spatial while the other is more temporal. 2. Thanks to Holland Wilde for drawing my attention to this similarity. 3. The human DNA sequence, mapped through the Human Genome Project, for example, is a mosaic of some hypothetical average person corresponding to no one. In assembling this complex sequence from multiple people, we are all, in effect, deviations from this abstracted and composite norm. 4. Indeed, the omnipresence of this figure recalls the power of the filmmaker to frame, cut, halt, and determine the sequence one witnesses flashing before one in a montage series. 5. This and other information has been gleaned from the Museum’s evaluation and feedback processes. Focus groups (made up of different ages, occupations, backgrounds, etc.) were consulted about the different kinds of text used in the exhibition. “Visitor Tracking” was also carried out by Museum attendants. “Meaning Maps” were used to discover what prior knowledge visitors brought to the exhibition and what they learnt from it. Finally, a questionnaire included questions such as: Did you learn anything new from your visit? What did you like most?

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References Brent Plate, S. 2005. Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts. London: Routledge Csordas, Thomas. 1994. “Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the-World.” In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, 1–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. ———. 2003. “Montage: The American School and the Soviet School.” The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche, 56–66. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1942. “Word and Image.” In The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda, 3–68. New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Company. Empson, Rebecca. 2011. Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gleizes, Albert, and Metzinger, Jean. 1913. Cubism. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Herle, Anita, Mark Elliott, and Rebecca Empson. 2009. Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Press. Humphrey, Caroline. 2007. “Inside and Outside the Mirror: Mongolian Shamans’ Mirrors as Instruments of Perspectivism.” Inner Asia, Special Issue of the Journal Inner Asia, On Perspectivism, eds. Morten Axel Pedersen, Rebecca Empson, and Caroline Humphrey. Lambert, Helen, and McDonald, Maryon. 2009. “Introduction.” In Social Bodies. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Lock, Margaret. 2002. “The Alienation of Body Tissue and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines.” Commodifying Bodies, eds. N. Scheper-Hughes and L. Wacquant, 63–91. London: Sage Publications. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Marcus, G. E. 1994. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A. R. 1990– 1994, ed. L. Taylor, 37–53. New York and London: Routledge. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. London: Duke University Press. Morgan, Jonathan, and the Bambanani Women’s Group. 2003. Long Life: Positive HIV Stories. Victoria: Spinifex Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. “Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking.” In Commodifying Bodies, eds. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 31–62. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Sharp, Lesley A. 2006 Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Berkeley: University of California Press Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517–35. Sørensen, M. L. S., and K. Rebay. 2008. “From Substantial Bodies to the Substance of Bodies: Analysis of the Transition from Inhumation to Cremation during the Middle Bronze Age in Europe.” In Past Bodies, eds. J. Robb and D. Boric, 59–68. Oxford: Oxbow. Teitelbaum, Matthew, ed. 1992. Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Willerslev, Rane, and Olga Ulturgasheva. 2007. “The Sable Frontier: The Siberian Fur Trade as Montage.” Cambridge Anthropology 26(2): 79–100. Vilaça, Aparecida. 2005. “Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporalities.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(3): 445–64.

CHAPTER 16

Project Villa Sovietica Clashing Images, Expectations, and Receptions Alexandra Schüssler and Willem Mes

An Exhibition of Soviet Utilitarian Objects at the Musée d’ethnographie in Geneva, 2 October 2009–20 June 2010 Villa Sovietica is an exhibition of about a thousand Soviet objects for everyday use, hundreds of objects from the European department of the ethnographic museum in Geneva, as well as countless items from the waste containers from Emmaüs (an organization comparable to the Salvation Army selling second-hand textiles, furniture, and objects). In this chapter, the exhibition is presented in form of a montage of various text sources and photographs.

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Figure 16.1.

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Figure 16.2.

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Selected Comments from Reviews in Newspapers and Magazines “The Geneva countryside takes on a Siberian touch. In the Datcha occupied by the ethnographic museum (MEG), resides the exhibition Villa Sovietica. From the basement to the attic, a thousand consumer items from the ex-USSR are discovered reflecting Soviet daily life. As always at the MEG, the exhibition is nicely tidied up. Visit is mandatory, otherwise, off to the gulag!”1 “Walking through the different rooms of the building, the visitors dive into visual and corporeal sensations to analyze their relations with the objects, ours and those of the others, play with them and rethink them.”2 “An emotional journey to question our way of interpreting a culture.”3 “It [Villa Sovietica] is not a historical inventory, but according to the vocation of the museum an anthropological approach. The visitor is invited to make this approach his own in order to better question his/her pre-suppositions. If one is ready to play the game, the visit is worth it.”4 “Our fantasies are not to be left in the cloakroom, neither are our prejudices on the East and its communist past: thanks to them, the physical and sensual experience of the exhibition will be all the more intense.”5 “Plain, confused and pretentious, the exhibition accumulates all the defects of a misunderstood ‘new museography.’”6 “Villa Sovietica thus creates a new elitism. Only a rare few will understand what it is about. . . . Most disturbing in the meanwhile is that the initial topic has been forgotten: the times of the gulag. Would anybody dare to fool around, like Alexandra Schüssler does here, with Nazism?”7

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“Testimony of a time-worn daily life, these object reveal themselves as sadistic or comical.”8 “To empty out our attempts of exoticizing.”9 “The public is lead to question the intention behind this accumulation of treasures.”10 “On the first floor, the curator has set up a sort of auto-reflection and auto-criticism of the anthropologist’s role.”11 “All this is meant to make us think about our relation to the collected, museographied object, about the possible interpretations. . . . In short, we are given the umpteenth lecture on easy and amusing anthropology since the 1970s.”12 “There are some moments of happiness that do not need any accessories. Everything happens through the imaginary. To get there you just have to climb the museum stairs to the top floor. The attic. Here the USSR falls back on its past, a specific Russia, the one of poets that one thinks to encounter here. . . . Tchekov is here with his Cherry Orchard, abandoned by its owners.”13 “And in front of all this emptiness, we think back of the Soviet objects piled up in the basement, piled up seemingly to arouse and, in spite of a few texts on the fringe of the exhibition, disappoint our curiosity. A curiosity that may seem outdated to some people.”14 “All along this journey, the visitor has gone through a purification to reach this site of creation, separated from the sky and the stars only by a thin skin of ceiling.”15 “As for us, we will only say that in its attic, Villa Sovietica hides the triumph of the mind over the object.”16

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Figure 16.3.

Figure 16.4.

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Figure 16.5.

Figure 16.6.

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Figure 16.7.

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Figure 16.9.

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Figure 16.10.

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The Exhibition Above in the Sky In Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987), Daniel Miller develops his argument of Hegelian dialectic between object and subject based on the premise to understand culture as process, impossible to be reduced to its material or immaterial form. He demonstrates the incompleteness of the subject without object, and vice versa, and shows how the subject reaches full subjectivity only in relation to the object and how the object is nothing without the proximity of a subject. Formerly, the switch from user to consumer was conceived as a loss of freedom (Williams 1980), but with the concept of “creative consumption,” a different reading was introduced: a creative potential was attributed to consumerism. Within the capitalist system of production, the construction of the self is propagated on the basis of consumerism (Ullrich 2007). The subject is supposed to “(re)-create” him/herself due to the acquisition of consumer goods. The sheer unlimited offer of consumer products creates an illusion of strengthening the individuality of the consumer. An extremely ethnocentric viewpoint characterizes the subject, which functions in this system and which is unable to imagine an alternative existence. In the exhibition of Soviet everyday culture within the context of a Western museum, I turned my attention to an (in the capitalist world by now unimaginable) alternative. In former Soviet countries, the emphasis was put on the exploration of space, heavy industry, the production of weapons, and agriculture. Compared to the “capitalistic West,” the production of consumer goods was relatively neglected in the former Eastern bloc countries. Within the frame of so-called soz-art, the Western overproduction of consumer goods was contrasted with the communist overproduction of ideology. Rather than striving for individuality, values like equality, fraternity, and solidarity were celebrated. These ideals—in line with the official ideology—are supposed to be retraceable in everyday material culture. As a symptom of the centripetal forces inherent in every human being, citizens from former socialist countries were also seeking for the individuality in consumer items promised by capitalism. One only has to think of the illegal import of Burda sewing pattern magazines, blue jeans, plastic bags with colorful commercial prints, etc. (The MEG collection did not contain these kinds of items then). My conception of the exhibition Villa Sovietica, which was based on the then current state of the Soviet collection (collected by Umstätter-Mamedova in 2006– 8), was a deconstruction of the capitalistic conviction that full subjectivity can only be reached via consumer goods (here I also include museum objects). Consequently, I sought to disturb the direct, in other words canonical “exposure” of the object (item of everyday use—now museums object) to the viewer.

MEG Conches: Villa Sovietica At first, the collection of Soviet material culture for everyday use owned by the Musée d´ethnographie de Genève was an imaginary one. Not yet living and working in Geneva, I had already heard about it from museum staff. As I found out later, the MEG’s collaborators were actually describing the objects to me without having seen the latest acquisition themselves. They talked about a huge volume of items formerly used by Homo Sovieticus, millions of people being formed by the specific design of objects they were obliged to make do with; they mentioned an entire

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Stalinist living room, certainly also a Trabant in one of the crates just arrived from Moscow, curious objects from another world. With the keys to the museum storage and high expectations, I set off in May 2008 to finally see the objects I was asked to exhibit in my position as the new curator of the European department. What I found was very different from what I had imagined: two tables, like the ones used at flea markets, and three shelves crammed with items from different Soviet epochs. Pieces of furniture scattered about the room. Everything looked dirty, used, shabby, and ordinary. I recognized a few of the things from my childhood in Bratislava, still in Czechoslovakia back then. Viewing these unspectacular objects I felt that such “things” did not belong in the storage of a museum in Geneva. If someone had asked me where this forlorn material culture did belong, I could not have said. Should these remnants be sold for a dime on a flea market? Should they be returned to the people who had discarded them for nicer looking items appropriate to the winds of change? Or thrown on the garbage heap? Or kept for eternity in the depot of some ethnographic museum? I had no answer for these questions, but I was convinced that the pots and pans, toys and clothes, stools and sofas should not be exposed to a Western gaze. I did not want these objects to be displayed in front of an audience who would compare them with familiar items from another epoch of their own cultural horizon. They were not exotic enough for a viewer to project on to them desires stemming from life in a post-industrial society. Another problem was what or whom these pitiful material remnants should represent to the viewer. Whose point of view should the curator take? The (n)ostalgic stance of people who have spent an important part of their lives surrounded with these objects—sublimating them and displaying them like jewels for others to admire? It would have been truly ethnographic to celebrate them as tokens of a universe that has ceased to exist, framing them as exotic artifacts that need to be explained and (de)valued. Or should I demonstrate their ridiculousness as materialization of “a” particular culture? None of these options seemed appealing. My instinctive reaction proved right—as my fieldwork data would later show. I started to invite experts and laypersons from in- and outside the museum to the storage to view the Soviet collection. My guests worried how I would ever succeed in making an exhibition displaying these “things.” Museum professionals gave me the advice to drop the project, as there was no documentation that came with the collection. They were not able to recognize a collection strategy in the accumulation of objects shown to them. Laypersons judged the items by their functionality and aesthetics. People experienced Soviet material culture in the MEG storage as ugly and bad quality. They compared this “stuff ” with things they knew from the post-war era in Switzerland and concluded that the Soviet collection would prove socialism as a worthless system and that one could be happy that it has come to an end. Analyzing these reactions, I concluded that my exhibition concept should forestall the visitors’ attempts to carry off the exhibits as trophies of an alleged victory over a hated and feared political and economic regime. The exhibits, which were once everyday items in a different social context, needed protection against the consuming gaze, so much part of the capitalistic world and in particular of museums. The usual process between viewer and object on display within a museal context is defined by at the one hand an “armed,” consuming gaze and at the other hand a displayed, exposed object. Defenselessly, it is delivered to a gaze that is used to appropriate

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what comes into its focus. It was precisely my aim to subvert this process, as I was convinced that the Soviet object from the MEG collection could not put up resistance against the Western gaze. Fulfilling my duty as a curator, I was obliged to exhibit and not hide away the material culture I was in charge of. So I decided to opt for the strategy of camouflage: allowing the objects to be perceived and at the same time making them vanish. In the display, I intended not only to resist the collective memory of the Cold War, but also to interrogate an institutional memory in the sense of a reflection on museum canons. Visiting a museum, the audience usually expects to see what there is to see. As the book of comments made clear, in the case of Villa Sovietica, people expected to see the Homo Sovieticus and his living environment (a datcha, a Soviet village, etc.). My goal was to demonstrate that there is nothing to see except what the museum “produces for the visitors to see.” In this sense, Villa Sovietica shows how the visitor’s gaze is manipulated, how the institution produces the frames of perception.

Beneath in the Soil Moving between the Eastern bloc and the West, I realized early on in my life that objects for everyday use produced in communist countries were not designed to compete with capitalist consumer goods—either in quality or aesthetics. I remember enviously watching my new classmates in an Austrian school drawing with thick Jolly or Caran d’Ache colored pencils. Oh, what saturated and vivid colors! The marks made by my socialist-produced Koh-I-Noor pencils were bleak shadows of Western color intensity. Not to mention the fragility of the leads. My fountain pen leaked and my writing paper was hyper absorbent. Imagine the mess! Nevertheless, I always managed to be among the best pupils in my class. I was ashamed only of my gym gear: a white T-shirt, so thin it was almost see-through, a pair of dark blue teplaky (the socialist equivalent of jogging trousers), and white gym shoes. Nothing like the perfect, deep red, super elastic Adidas training suit by worn by Gabi Weiss, the best athlete in the class. With such an outfit, no wonder that I never played in the winning team and that everybody trampled on my toes during ball games. I have probably made you feel sorry for this poor girl from the East with her wretched equipment. Villa Sovietica deals only with losers’ objects, when consuming means winning. But, to the disappointment of many, my childhood in a former satellite of the USSR was not at all traumatic because of some so-called material lack. So I figured that the subject must be constituted of something other than creative consumption. How do subjects construct themselves in societies in which the emphasis is laid on production and not on consumption? What happens to the human being when individuality is undermined by the monotony of consumer items spread over a large geographical area, the same items everywhere from Bratislava to Vladivostok? The question of how we relate to the material world runs like a red thread through the exhibition. Unfortunately, I was born too late for conducting extensive fieldwork in the Soviet Union or in one of its satellites; nevertheless, my research trips for this exhibition took me to post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Romania. Even if I could have extended these relatively short stays in the field, I would always have refused to “explain” the objects from the Soviet collection. Holding a discourse

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about the other means “making” the other and always implies an appropriation of power. Knowing that when talking about an anthropological research subject, there will always be a “rest” that escapes symbolization, I respect the other’s “obstinate otherness,” a term coined by Mattijs van de Port (1999), and I take the view that, in my discipline, it is only the relationships between subjects, and between subjects and objects, that should be analyzed. As I was primarily interested in how users relate to the objects that were once part of their everyday lives, I decided to build up a team of collaborators who had lived much of their lives in socialist countries. I was curious about their views of Soviet material culture (their history, as Yuriy Kruchak has pointed out to me) and their dealings with it within a Western museum context. Not unlike Roland Barthes (1980), who in “Camera Lucida,” a text analyzing the punctum and studium in photographs, puts himself into the position of a research tool, I sought to use my own sensitivity to the topic as a guiding line. But as an anthropologist, I have to be aware of transfer and counter transfer and so I decided to check and contrast my estimations with those of others. And these others had to be people who knew the objects in question from their own day-to-day experience and who have also made the switch from Eastern to Western material culture. Furthermore, I considered it to be important to bring these attitudes in contact with the Westerners’ point of view. This is why I invited artists, designers, photographers, theoreticians, and scientists from different cultural contexts (and traditions of thinking) to work with me on the problematic of exhibiting Soviet objects in a Swiss museum of ethnography. A challenging and fruitful translation adventure started. Not only did our working language switch between Russian, Ukrainian, English, French, Dutch, German, and Slovak, but many presumptions and preconceptions had to be translated if we were to reach a common understanding. Some of us were productive emitters and receivers, others gifted mediators—especially those who were strong in empathy and familiar with traveling between cultures.

Polarities Due to our site-specific and context-bound working method, the MEG’s Conches villa turned into a starting point: it was our working site and necessary context. The building is so dominant aesthetically that it would be a sheer impossibility to silence the architectural structure. So my team and I chose to work with the building and not against it. Basing ourselves on a text by Gaston Bachelard (1991 [1957]), we emphasized the verticality of the temporary home of the Soviet objects. The polarity of cellar and attic is so stringent that it creates two different axes for the phenomenology of the imaginary. The cellar: of course it has its functions and naming them is an attempt at rationalization. Nevertheless, the cellar remains the dark space of a house, the unit that dwells in the chthonic depths, our humus. The imaginary evoked by this part of the house makes the irrationality of the depths accessible. There is an analogy between the process of constructing a house and the images that the individual spaces of the structure evoke in us. The basement is dug into the soil. The ground, which to us is limitless, encloses the space of the basement. Likewise, it constitutes a basic attachment to all other buildings having their fundaments equally embedded in the ground. In Gaston Bachelard’s view, the irrationality of the basement, engendering fear in the subject, is opposed to the rationality of the roof. Only a

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thin layer of tiles separates this space from the limitless sky and the universe. The attic represents an intellectualized and, I would dare add, spiritualized space. Although in some cases, it is a rather dark space it does not create anxieties. To signify that the visitor is welcome, a red carpet leads from the main entrance to the garden. This is an invitation to come and see. But the carpet is not made out of usual velvet fabric, but is red latex molded—in countless matriochkas, one next to the other—forming a wavy surface on which the visitor finds it hard to walk; imagine walking on eggs. An effect of disbalance should decenter the one, who came with the purpose to experience, who came with the intention to consume the other with his/her eyes. At the entrance, the visitor is welcomed by museum staff at the ticket desk, where he or she can pay the entrance fee and receives an architectural map of the house, a guide through the exhibition. Visitors have no access to the hall, which potentially leads to other areas in the museum furbished for them to see. No, they are immediately sent to penetrate into the dark realm of the house, which guests rarely get to see. What was repressed comes to light. Here visitors discover a myriad of objects from the European collection of the MEG mixed with objects from Emmaüs waste containers—and among them, somewhere, there are the Soviet items on display, the objects they have come to see. But as these foreign things are so specific in the visitors’ minds, it is left up to the visitors to find them. The attic, a space of the house associated with the rational and intellectual, constitutes the opposite from the basement. This is why the makers of Villa Sovietica reserved it for production: first as a studio for the anthropologist and participating artists, and later, after the opening of the exhibition, as a space in which young and old could try out different modes of production: artworks, handicraft, serial and mass production. The only restriction for the visiting bricoleurs was that they were obliged to work with white material. At the opening the attic was rather empty. Over time it was supposed to fill up with the visitors’ production of objects until it turned into a “white mirror image” of the basement.

In Between In between the two poles, cellar and attic, we have two floors. First of all, with the help of my museum collaborators, I dismantled the villa’s straitjacket of professional museum equipment. The black ceilings concealing the spatial dimensions (creating a black box effect) we painted cream. All the “theater” lighting equipment had to disappear and, most importantly, the fake walls hiding the real architecture of the building of the house had to be taken out. I was longing to finally see the villa and show it to our audience. Many elements hardly anybody had seen before appeared in the light of day: beautiful fireplaces, wooden timbering, doors fetched from depots and store rooms and put back in their original places. Light entered all the spaces and revealed what some people would rather have concealed as they were longing for working in a professionalized museum instead of having to set up exhibitions in a turn-of-the-century villa. We dirtied our hands when we reached into the humus, the manifold objects in the basement, and raised a number of specific items to the “clean” ground floor. Here the visitor is invited to experience a very different relationship to the same type of objects. They are presented as singular collections on display at that level

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of the villa. We tried to find already existing collections or started to collect ourselves, taking specific Sovietica of the MEG’s storage as a starting point. A threefold exploration of scientific, art, and private collections raises the question of whether there is a right way to collect. It shows that the aims and strategies of collecting are various. And it demonstrates the fluidity of the frontiers between culturally legitimate and “wild” collecting. The next floor of the building is a reflection on how the museum makes its object, applied to the case of the MEG Soviet collection. Instead of reconstituting the “Stalinist living room” the furniture is dealt with in a sculptural way. Entering the exhibition hall, visitors get to see only the shadows of the stools and tables, sofas, and cupboards. The furniture arranged inside a white cube made out of textile with a strong light source in the middle can be viewed directly only if visitors climb the stairs and look down from above. Another installation consists of a Soviet item in a small showcase, which is exhibited in another showcase, which again is placed in an even larger showcase, and so on, until the largest showcase restricts the visitor’s movement in space. The object of display is there, but at the same time so far away—separated from the viewer by a number of glass plates. It becomes unclear who is exhibited behind glass (inside or outside): object or viewer. At the same time this intervention is a reference to the framing that occurs in every display and determines the number of possible meanings constructed around the object. In a condensation of the way a museum constructs frames of perception and manipulates the visitor’s gaze, a Moskvitch toy car is put behind a closed door and can be seen only through a lens, which magnifies the tiny object. Things are not what they appear to be, at the end of a corridor with many doors leading nowhere.

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Figure 16.11.

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Figure 16.12.

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Postscriptum In times of television, internet, and low-budget flights accessible to large numbers of people, in an era of globalization and frequently evoked post-colonialism, ethnographic museums have to rethink their role for their audiences. To represent the cultural Other is obsolete—there must be more an ethnographic museum has to offer. Searching for exhibition forms that transcend a lecture on cultural particularities of the Other, I designed Villa Sovietica for the MEG Conches. My intention was to tear down the Iron Curtain one more time, to make the Berlin Wall crumble again twenty years after its actual collapse. I wanted to interrogate the notions of “WE” and “THEM,” “OUR OBJECTS” and “THEIRS,” and challenge Cold War phantasies. Russian visitors mistook items issuing from Emmaüs Genève as Soviet. Swiss audiences identified collection items from the MEG European department as Emmaüs garbage. Object careers, in the sense of “stuff ” turning into museum items, proved to be rather arbitrary. The attitude taken on by the makers of Villa Sovietica polarized. Already during the setup of the exhibition in Conches, the MEG collaborators were divided in their judgments of the exhibit; part of them welcomed “something slightly off the track,” the other part felt assaulted by a search for an alternative, which was perceived as iconoclasm. This extreme divide can also be felt in the reactions of the visitors: either they loved the display of Soviet material culture in Conches or they despised it. A lot of people enjoyed the display, with its many layers and multiple interpretabilities. Some could not deal with having their expectations turned down by the content, and even more so, the aesthetics of Villa Sovietica. This exhibition did not display all the atrocities the Soviet regime is associated with, it did not explain life in the context of communism, it did not imitate the atmosphere of a datcha (country house) or a communalka (communal flat with shared kitchen and bathroom). These are the topics visitors ask to be included into a presentation of Soviet material culture. Not only the content of the exhibit, even more so the aesthetics caused polemics. The scenography in Conches was rather minimal and unpretentious based on the principle of site-specific installations using as much material as possible found in situ. The production of sense was based on recycling found material elements by inserting them into new principles of order. As a result, many visitors experienced the setup as “empty,” as objects were not presented in ordinary showcases explained by text boards in expensive lightning. With this strategy, Villa Sovietica can be understood as an emulation of a wide spread practice in the Soviet Union: turning into a useful and valued treasure what others (would) have discarded. Villa Sovietica does not represent anything, but stages situations that invite the visitor to reconsider relationships between subject and object and how these influence relationships between subjects. Inherent to the project is an attitude to switch the attention from the consuming subject and simultaneously the museum as an acquiring and preserving institution to the making of identity in terms of (collective) production. This creative transformation might be the cornerstone for an alternative construction of identity—be it the one of the subject or of the museum.

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Figure 16.13.

298 • Montage in Museum Exhibitions

Selected Comments from the Livre d’or (Book of Comments) “Unsettling, but permeated with a real atmosphere, an astounding dive into Soviet daily life. Thank you” (translated from French). “From the basement to the attic, a climb back in time where the imaginary mixes with elements of every day” (translated from French). “I am disappointed, the organizers had fun, contrary to me—left behind with empty hands. It is a pity” (translated from French). “A rather large dose of intellectual and stylistic masturbation by modernist creators, but without actual comprehension—and in truth—respect for the Soviet people, their history and the ‘Russian soul.’” “The exhibition is too easy, rather artificial and therefore sometimes disobliging” (translated from French). “Very interesting exhibition without the usual prejudices. It stages serious questions about objects in museums and the interaction of cultures” (translated from Russian). “Very beautiful exhibit. It reminded me of my childhood!” (translated from Russian). “I consider this exhibition as an insult to the thousands millions of people, who lived in the Villa Sovietica. Where is the time when the museum was preparing a superb, meaningful exhibition on the Gulag? It is truly distressing, and I don’t want to ‘become conscious of my corporeality,’ as the catalog puts it, in this place. Where are the people?” (translated from French, emphasis in the original). “This is an exhibition full of memories and nostalgia, but also full of benevolent irony and hope! I would like to thank you for this place full of magic moments!” (translated from French). “Thank you very much!” (translated from Russian).17 “I am deeply upset by this exhibition!! I came here because I had a deep interest in feeling and understanding the way of living in the Soviet Union, but nothing is explained. If I know nothing and nobody explains me anything, I finish ignorant as I came! Useless, theoretical and unpractical exhibition! A waste of time and disillusion [sic] for the visitor.” “The idiocy of the exhibit is only equaled by its presumption! How could the MEG ever employ this curator?” (translated from French). “Very interesting exhibit. You are pointing out the visitors’ passivity. The attic room first reminded me of the table of a bureaucratized surgeon, whereas in your intent it’s an imaginary place. . . . Congratulations!” (translated from French). “Thank you for this superb exhibition! The scenography is magnificent. It is stimulating how you push the visitor to think. Leaving the exhibit I was all astonished

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to have seen such a well-done museographic object in Geneva!!” (translated from French).18 “My previous visit of a museum was the Villa Borghese with its splendid paintings by Caravaggio! I am speechless in front of your exhibition. It makes me sad and I am deeply disappointed. A huge failure! [This was underlined three times by the visitor.] I could cry!” (translated from French). “Ethnography? Ethnography? You have said ethnography! This is strange! No approach whatsoever of culture. The term ethnography is here ill deserved. However, this museum deserves the prize for cheating people. Disagreeable impression of having been taken for a ride” (translated from French). [Regarding the previous comment] “I see that some people have an opinion based on a very developed argumentation. As to me, I find the structure very interesting. . . . Shaped as an island with its map and . . . necessary information and if needed! I enjoyed wandering around the rooms and losing myself a little. Thank you for this exhibition” (translated from French).19 “I realize for the first time that the object, when well displayed, takes on a completely different meaning than the one it has when lost among others; that in the end, the manner of displaying, the staging, is extremely important depending on what one wants to show” (translated from French). “Too bad, I didn’t learn anything! But it’s curious, I often come to see the exhibitions, in fact, very often! I will come back, but surprise me!” (translated from French). “Thanks to all for allowing a family of six, from 0 to 40 year-old, the visit (for 10 francs) of this exhibition. The reception is excellent. The command of the contents and the capacity to transmit them in an innovating manner, mingling symbolism and play, is to me remarkable. Visiting this museum while revisiting the notion of museum is a pleasure, which was shared. Thanks again. Long live this project” (translated from French). “Successful immersion! I do not leave this room as I entered it. Excellent reflection on museography” (translated from French). “We sometimes feel more in a contemporary art museum rather than in an ethnographic museum. Confusion in perspectives!” (translated from French). “The exhibition in Conches does not reflect life in the USSR, only the accumulation of jumble in the museum.”20 [Another visitor, answering] “You are not right! The exhibit is not bad, it’s only too complicated for simple visitors, above all for visitors from Geneva. It is necessary to understand the idea of the organizers and to read the catalogue! Anyway, thank you for trying!” [A third visitor, in answer to the first one] “You are stupid! It shows all that’s necessary! You should visit exhibitions more often! What did you expect to see?” (translated from Russian)21

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Figure 16.14.

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Notes 1. 20 minutes, 21 December 2009. All comments translated from French by the author. 2. Stéphanie Giauque, “Une exposition camouflage,” Amnesty. Le magazine des droits humains, no. 60, February 2010. 3. Julie Bauer, “Villa Sovietica,” Scènes magazine, 1 November 2009. 4. Philippe Faehndrich, “L’Homo Sovieticus entre au musée,” 24 Heures, 8 October 2009. 5. Samuel Schellenberg, “Soviétique, pas toc,” Le Courrier, 3 October 2009. 6. Étienne Dumont, “Conches au pays des Soviets,” Tribune de Genève, 22 October 2009. 7. Étienne Dumont, “Conches au pays des Soviets,” Tribune de Genève, 22 October 2009. 8. Ghania Adamo, “L’URSS, un décor poussiéreux,” Swissinfo, 5 November 2009. 9. Samuel Schellenberg, “Soviétique, pas toc,” Le Courrier, 3 October 2009. 10. Samuel Schellenberg, “Soviétique, pas toc,” Le Courrier, 3 October 2009. 11. Samuel Schellenberg, “Soviétique, pas toc,” Le Courrier, 3 October 2009. 12. Elizabeth Chardon, “Une Villa Sovietica trop vide à Genève,” Le Temps, 3 October 2009. 13. Ghania Adamo, “L’URSS, un décor poussiéreux,” Swissinfo, 5 November 2009. 14. Elizabeth Chardon, “Une Villa Sovietica trop vide à Genève,” Le Temps, 3 October 2009. 15. Julie Bauer, “Villa Sovietica”, Scènes magazine, 1 November 2009. 16. Ghania Adamo, “L’URSS, un décor poussiéreux,” Swissinfo, 5 November 2009. 17. This visitor has signed her comment. Her name allows us to deduce that she is originally Russian speaking. 18. This visitor is an art historian working at the University of Neuchâchtel. I know this, as he later on sent me an email complimenting us for Villa Sovietica. 19. This visitor signed with her first name and “Student at the Academy of Arts and Design.” 20. This visitor indicated that she is from Moscow. 21. This visitor also wrote USSR underneath his comment. This exchange took place in the livre d’or for a different (yet related) exhibition, Cadrer l’EST (17 September–8 November 2009). The Villa Sovietica team designed and produced a second exhibition in the MEG main building with only pictorial material. This exhibit was thought of as complementary to Villa Sovietica and as a preparation for the visitor of an exhibit, where only objects were on display. Cadrer l’EST presented photographs of Soviet objects in social situations taken during several fieldwork trips in post-socialist countries in 2008–9.

References Bachelard, Gaston. 1991 [1957]. La poétique de l’ espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Frances. Barthes, Roland. 2000 [1980]. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Port, Mattijs van de. 1999. “It Takes a Serb to Know a Serb. Uncovering the Roots of Obstinate Otherness in Serbia.” Critique of Anthropology 19(1): 7–30. Schüssler, Alexandra, ed. 2009. Villa Sovietica. Soviet Objects: Import-Export. Gollion: Infolio. Ullrich, Wolfgang. 2006. Habenwollen. Wie funktioniert die Konsumkultur? Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Williams, Raymond. 1980. “Advertising: the Magic System.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture, ed. Raymond Williams, 170–195. London: Verso.

AFTERWORD

The Traffic In Montage, Then and Now George E. Marcus

“It is hard for me to perceive myself as a person, as an I. I am a site where certain things happen in a transitory manner. Thought is like water passing through a sieve that completely escapes me. I can’t recuperate memories of my past. I suffer from a total lack of identity. . . the ethnologist in his office trying to be a place where foreign thoughts develop . . . this infirmity of my nature makes me almost a passive place since I don’t control what happens, almost a passive site of phenomena that don’t belong to my own existence, to my own history, or my social milieu.”—from a documentary of interviews with Claude Levi-Strauss on his one hundredth birthday. “In the end, the editor of a film must try to take advantage of all the materials that are given to him, and reveal it in a way that feels like a natural but exciting unfolding of the ideas of the film. It’s really a question of orchestration: organizing the images and sounds in a way that is interesting, and digestible by the audience. Mysterious when it needs to be mysterious, and understandable when it needs to be.”—from interviews with Walter Murch by Michael Ondaatje “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.” —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

The variety and creativity of the contributions to this volume are a testament to the sustained fecundity of montage as a trope of inspiration, a mode of representation, and a method of thinking visually across media, genres, and disciplines: here ethnography, film studies, documentary filmmaking, cultural criticism and analysis, museum curation, and applied anthropology. I am honored to have an essay that I wrote more than twenty years ago considered in a number of these chapters. That essay was produced in the thick of debates about ethnographic writing, specifically for a conference at Australian National University. This conference was concerned in part with the relevance of the “Writing Culture” discussions about ethnographic writing for those that were developing in parallel about ethnographic and documentary filmmaking. The chapters by the film scholars Anna Grimshaw, Jakob Kirstein Høgel, and Alyssa Grossman are immensely informative about what the different kinds of stakes were (and are) in the strong development of observational cinema and its settling in as the leading doctrine of ethnographic

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filmmaking. And I can see more clearly now than I could before why the main elements of the “Writing Culture” critiques, concerned with the “being there” miseen-scène of classic anthropological fieldwork, had so much theoretical and practical significance for the expression of theory and doctrine in observational cinema. The elaborate discussions of reflexivity, of power and authority, and of narrative in the production of ethnography with written texts primarily in mind had a visceral connection to the actual practices of filmmakers, trying to overturn more rigid, and less artful habits of making ethnographic/documentary films that presumed to be just looking and describing, under constricting empiricist doctrines. However, my own paper for that conference tried to leap over these central tensions in critiques of representation to push a certain edge of the Writing Culture debates that anticipated emerging challenges to “being there,” site-focused ethnography. These challenges were stimulated by thinking of culture in global flows, multiple sites of production and making, and the non-literal presence of the conceived object of ethnographic description and analysis. This is the problem of the unseen and the invisible posed to intensely present ethnographic observation, both literal and subtle (see Marcus 1998 [1989]). In my case, then, it was the problem of the “mundane” unseen in the place of fieldwork as connecting to the social elsewhere in simultaneity (as explored, here, by the uses of montage in the chapters by Julia Binter, Paul Antick, Nina Holm Vohnsen, and Catherine Russell). For others, the problem of the unseen concerns access of the ethnographer through image and sound to the fantastic, the ecstatic, the uncanny, and the magical real (especially potent in the chapters by Stuart McLean and Bruce Kapferer in this volume). The idea and development of montage as a practice consistent with the realist commitments of experimentalist Soviet filmmakers provided me with material of great intellectual range and possibility to think about challenges to ethnography, as the central technique and form of inquiry in anthropology, even beyond those posed by the Writing Culture debates. Many of the chapters in this volume are positioned in the same way in relation to montage—finding usefulness in its inspirations and applications beyond the medium of film where it finds its historic milieu of application and practice (see especially, Anne Line Dalsgaard, Vohnsen, and Peter Bjerregaard). So in these brief remarks, I want to sustain that same perspective about the power of montage as a concept and practice in its diffusion and influence beyond its natural domain and milieu of practice and debate. Accordingly, I will restrict myself, again, after having learned so much more about the history of montage and its possibilities from these chapters, to its continuing traffic of influence. And, though its reach of influence is much more extensive, I will also stay within the domain of ethnography and try to update my sense of montage’s continuing value as a trope of inspiration by posing three interrelated and rather elementary observations that reading these chapters has stimulated. My agenda in so doing is consistent with the impetus originally to suggest the importance of montage, not so much as an alternative to the main issues of the Writing Culture debates about ethnographic representation, but as a change in their articulation. For ethnography, I believe, this has come to mean over the past two decades a shift in attention to changes in the provisional forms by which anthropologists produce knowledge in fieldwork rather than concerns with writing as end product, as texts. No longer is analysis simply of ethnographic material; it is analysis in ethnographic material (see, e.g., Morten Nielsen, this volume). For me, montage does not suggest specific strategies for writing a different sort of ethnography. Post-1980s ethnography has certainly been infused with montage-

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like techniques of juxtaposition and writing around strongly evoked, often colliding images drawn from fieldwork. Neither does montage produce a formal kind of analytic (i.e., montage as a high modernist expression of non-determinist contradiction and dialectic process). Rather, montage suggests experiments in the constitution of the data of ethnography—that is, with the engagement and constitution of the material itself, for which the longstanding medium has been the mostly unshared and non-circulating notebook, diary, and private archives of fieldwork (and their newer digital versions), rather than the finished monograph, report, or account. Increasingly, between these private forms and conventional public/published results—monographs, articles, conference papers—there are currently experiments with forms of collaboration, with evolving ideas in the handson, material processing of the “stuff ” of fieldwork, what might be called “raw data,” or analogously to film, footage, that in the digital age, is constantly morphing and merging with commentary, provisional interpretation, and thinking through prototypical scenarios—in other terms, editing.1 This interval of craft and labor, both manual and intellectual, merging with the accumulation and recording of data and extending to expression in genre forms of representation has been the milieu of montage. The theory of montage as articulated by pioneer filmmakers (especially, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin) and then by Benjamin and most recently by Gilles Deleuze provides resources for conceiving of intermediate accessible forms of ethnographic expression beyond well-established genres of fieldwork narrative and reflection. It seems to me that it is in the development of such intermediate forms where extended uses and thinking about the tradition of montage might still make the provocative, disruptive, and welcome trouble that it always has.2 The chapters by Paul Antick and Nina Holm Vohnsen in this volume seem especially to be working with a concept and practice of montage that are attempting a mode to present the material developed in the doing of ethnographic inquiry in the interval between inscriptions as data and more composed descriptive-analytic genre forms of presentation.

Three Related and Elementary Observations About the Continuing Traffic in Montage’s influence First, why montage? —and not one of its high-modernist, avant-garde cousins like pastiche, collage, assemblage, cubism, and more lately remixing? Indeed, in this volume, especially in the chapters on museum exhibitions, Bjerregarrd discusses the concept of assemblage in relation to montage, and Rebecca Empson compares cubism and montage, and argues for cubist representation as an alternately precise expression of how her exhibition communicates and provokes changes in visitor cognition. In the project Villa Sovietica, the desired effect of the exhibition depends much more upon the active work of montage by the viewer than upon that in the curator’s craft. Curation in this case seems much more akin to the simpler modernist technique of provocation by collage. So, there are many alternatives to montage in artistic technique and practice to elaborate on and enhance what is at base, an operation of juxtaposition. Any act of montage is distinctive in that it entails deep tactile, methodological play within a form of visual thinking and an artisanal labor of arrangement immersed in materials as and after they are recorded and observed. Concepts, ideas, allusions, and gestures emerge as intellectual “things” in this immersive play.

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Argument, story, and representation are artificial and built out of this immersive process of thinking through and within materials that requires engaged concepts and ideas in the task of their editing. This is a more precise and analogous version of the process that anthropologists more loosely imagine as fieldwork in their professional culture of method (see Faubion and Marcus 2009). None of montage’s avant-garde cousins, though powerfully focused on image, cut, and visual arrangement, have this same depth of context of essentially auto-ethnographic reflection on and theorization of its own practices of producing representations. Thus, montage, more than the other avant-garde forms of juxtaposition and editing of images, encourages thought and insight about the process of doing, of workshop, of—analogously—fieldwork and being immersed in observationsbeing-made-into-representations. Montage captures this labor conceptually and as process. Yet, second, it is intellectual montage, as Eisenstein theorized it, primarily that has traveled in montage’s traffic of influence. The power of intellectual montage is in its images and their cuts in movement—the famous ability to shock, or disorient. The striking, meaning-filled juxtaposition and illumination is most often what the ethnographer wants to reproduce in her text making. But intellectual montage, as concept and effect, is built up from and integral to the more technical levels of montage as editing that Eisenstein also theorizes contiguously with his evocation of intellectual montage. The stunning juxtaposition of colliding images and the dynamics of their generative meaning in their intervals is only made possible by a cumulative labor of metric, rhythmic, tonal, and associational editing—a more mundane work of montage. So, intellectual montage, like post-1980s narrative/analytic ethnography, is the product of the mix of observations and their manipulation as effects, created by editing strategies. In this volume, this is most clearly expressed for film by Grossman in her discussion of montage strategies in conveying the mise-en-scène of memory of the residents of a neighborhood by the sustained visual effect achieved in attaching her camera to a bike with the motif of circulating the park. In her film, memory is explored multidimensionally by thinking ethnographically through images beyond a normative fealty to observation. There is a thorough assimilation of her material to integrated strategies of montage from its technical forms to its intellectual license. The challenge for intellectual montage in ethnography is no less—to do something more, analytically, descriptively, and narratively—with the cumulative power of acts of intellectual montage (such as Levi-Strauss, for example, achieved in the name of structural dialectics) but at the level of immersion in the “stuff ” of ethnography (as expressed, for example, by a master editor—amid complex working collaborations—such as Walter Murch). Outside film, this meticulous cumulative production of intellectual montage is conveyed in this volume by Andrew Irving’s remarkable account of how the visual moves between the imagination and the material by means of language. It is a deeply analogic account of how montage might work sensorially in fieldwork. And Dalsgaard’s is an equally powerful experiment in word imagery precisely in the space of fieldwork between the deeply personal, private archive of notes, reflection, and experience, and the textual account. Finally, montage is producing effects, as representations, without a presumed fealty to the empirical or the observable real.3 This aspect of pursuing montage practices in traditions of documentary and ethnography, whether in filmic or textual genres, has been deeply controversial

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since the active creation of an effect, or effects, that merges the representation of data with argument, challenges baseline principles of empiricism, objectivity, and detachment that still guide even the most reflexively oriented ethnography. It is just very difficult to make the unseen or invisible somehow “real” and susceptible to analysis without engaging in the deep play with images that intellectual montage entails. Going beyond simple evocation of a clash of images to creating sustained effects, analogous with using the more technical means of montage work that produce its intellectual form, somehow tweaks the boundaries between art and science in ways that are uncomfortable even for anthropologists. While there are seminal examples of how montage theory and practice in film influenced the creation of modernist narrative in literature—Ulysses and Dr. Faustus come immediately to mind—sustained experiments in actual montage strategies of thinking and writing in ethnographic writing are more difficult to locate. Perhaps the corpus of writing by Michael Taussig, under the influence of Benjamin, is the most prominent example. He turns the “making” process of ethnography inside out, so to speak, and develops a language for presenting the work of montage that forms ethnography as the ethnography. Indeed, if one looks to (and listens within) the in-between world of those stories of fieldwork which struggle to develop concepts and shape ideas from data between periods of solitary fieldwork and periods of writing-up for professional audiences and other publics—a terrain of prototypical and provisional thinking increasingly made accessible through digital media—then one sees work that would very closely resemble that of the film editor, with an eye for intellectual montage. It entails a practice free to create arguments with data, designed for effect and response. What is not permitted or easily indulged in the range of final version discourses or accounts that we now have in anthropology is fully embraced in the backroom equivalent of the editing console. Several of the chapters in this volume verge on moving beyond montage as inspirational trope in this way to exploring how it constitutes argument through the structuring of material in form—Irving shows this perhaps most reflexively, Dalsgaard most viscerally. Finally, then, developing further the traffic in montage, at least within the sphere of ethnography, depends on finding the forms of representation that break with longstanding norms of empirical practice. Most importantly, this continuing traffic depends on developing accessible new forms of expression and media betwixt the private archives of fieldnotes and finished texts that at least tolerate the grounded work of the imagination that montage as critique, as interpretation, and as translation has accomplished and stood for in the past. In my opening quotations, Levi-Strauss, Murch, and Benjamin evoke in their multisensory experiences of their respective intellectual labors, a micro-technical engagement with material and observed stuff of the world, as well as their respective ambitions for insight about relationship and connectedness among the visible, the perceived, and the unseen. The continuing stimulus of the idea and traditions of montage for the contemporary pursuit of ethnography urges no less.

Notes 1. Johannes Fabian has produced a suggestive and masterful demonstration of such an intermediate genre and practice, which he terms commentary (2008). I prefer a more visual evocation of this same process, and thus prefer the term editing, suggestive of the theory and practice of montage. For Fabian, the text, textuality, and dialogue (the

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tropes of biblical hermeneutics) seem to be the “laboratory” for this intermediate form; for me, it is the design studio, and the play of the visual, of images in movement. 2. This leads, I believe, to current discussions about ethnography’s relation to design practices and processes, and to notions of how design methods might overlap and structure the traditional process of ethnographic inquiry as fieldwork (see Rabinow and Marcus et al. 2008; Faubion and Marcus 2009). The production of design in studio processes is very much analogous to the collaborative editing of material as it is collected, analyzed, and made into a result in contemporary fieldwork processes—a thing, an account, a performance. Kelty’s discussion (2009) of fieldwork inquiry as a process of composition moves it ever closer to classic theories of montage as a mode of thinking and doing immersed in both the material and the observed. 3. This tension between observational cinema—sophisticated and consistent with the norms of social science—and intellectual montage as violation is brilliantly explored in this volume by Grimshaw, Høgel, and Grossman.

References Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fabian, Johannes. 2008. Ethnography As Commentary: Writing From the Virtual Archive. Durham: Duke University Press. Faubion, James, and George E. Marcus. 2009. Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelty, Christopher. 2009. “Collaboration, Coordination, and Composition: Fieldwork After the Internet.” In Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be, eds. Faubion and Marcus, 184–208. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marcus, George E. 1998 [1989]. “The Problem of the Unseen World of Wealth for the Rich: Toward an Ethnography of Complex Connections.” In Ethnography Through Thick & Thin, 152–61. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul, and George E. Marcus, et al. 2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.

Contributors

Paul Antick is senior lecturer in photography in the Department of Media, Culture and Language at the University of Roehampton, London. He has shown work at numerous galleries including John Hansard Gallery (UK), Walter Philips Gallery (Canada), Limerick City Art Gallery (Ireland), and Galeria Rusz (Poland). He has published visual materials and essays on photography, fashion, and “dark tourism” in various books and journals including Photographies (2010), Journal of Visual Communication (2012), Informal Architectures (2008), and Journal of Fashion Theory (2002). Julia T. S. Binter lectures at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and works as curatorial assistant of the Subsaharan Africa collection at the WeltmuseumWien. Her publications include We Shoot the World: Österreichische Dokumentarfilmer und die Globalisierung (2009) and the essay “Globalization, Representation and Postcolonial Critique: Austrian Documentary Film Auteurs’ Take on Globalism,” in Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (edited by Hans Belting etal., 2009). Peter Bjerregaard is currently doing postdoctoral research at the Museum of Cultural History University of Oslo within the research project Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time. As part of this work, he is conducting a number of design experiments exploring the potential for turning exhibition making itself into a research process and thereby put the museum at center stage of academic research. His PhD dissertation, Inside the Museum Machine, was a theoretical rethinking of Western ethnographic museums. Anne Line Dalsgaard is an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the author of the book Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilisation in Northeast Brazil (2004), which received an honorable mention from the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize committee, under the Society for Medical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association (2004). The book has been translated and published in Brazil (2008), where Dalsgaard has conducted research over a span of fifteen years. Also educated as an actor, Dalsgaard is interested in the bodily and emotional components of understanding. Rebecca Empson is lecturer in social anthropology at University College London. She was co-curator of the exhibition Assembling Bodies at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her monograph, Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia (OUP), was published in 2011. She is interested in ideas about personhood, kinship, and memory, and is

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currently developing a new project on the expectations and experiences of living with predicted economic growth in East Asia. Anna Grimshaw is professor of visual culture in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. She is the author of The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (2001) and co-author (with Amanda Ravetz) of Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film and the Exploration of Social Life (2009). She is currently completing a series of films, Mr Coperthwaite: A Life in the Maine Woods. Alyssa Grossman is a post-doctoral research fellow in Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester. Her research incorporates filmmaking and other experimental, sensory, and collaborative practices to explore everyday sites and practices of memory work in post-socialist Romania. She is co-director (with Selena Kimball) of the video installation Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues (2011), and director of the award-winning films In the Light of Memory (2010) and Into the Field (2005). Andrew Irving is based in the Department of Anthropology and Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His research explores how the world appears to people approaching death, particularly in relation to transformations in perception in terms of time, existence, religion, otherness, and imagination. He uses collaborative and mixed-media approaches to understand how culture, religion, and gender mediate people’s experiences of illness, death, and dying. Recent articles include “Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue” (Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2011); “The Color of Pain” (Public Culture, 2009); and “Ethnography, Art and Death” (JRAI, 2007), which was awarded the American Anthropological Association’s AIDS Research Group’s “Clark Taylor Professional Prize.” Bruce Kapferer is a professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen and has been professor and chair at the universities of Adelaide, James Cook, and University College London. Among a wide range of topics, he has worked extensively on ritual, cosmologies, folk dramas, and healing systems. His publications include Aesthetics and Performance: Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience (2005, ed. with Angela Hobart), Beyond Rationalism: Sorcery, Magic and Ritual in Contemporary Realities (2003, ed.), Legends of people, Myths of State (1988, new edition 2012), The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power (1997), and A celebration of demons: Exorcism and the aesthetics of healing in Sri Lanka (1983). Jakob Kirstein Høgel is artistic director of New Danish Screen, an innovation and talent-development fund for film and television, a joint venture of the Danish Film Institute and the two Danish public broadcasters. He holds an MA in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen and an MA in visual anthropology from the University of Manchester. Stuart McLean is associate professor of anthropology and global studies at the University of Minnesota. He holds a BA in English Literature from Oxford University

310 • Contributors

and a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. His interests are in historical, literary, and philosophical anthropology and in the relationship between academic research and artistic practice. Among his publications are The Event and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (2004), “Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativity Beyond ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’” (Cultural Anthropology, 2009), and “Black Goo: Forceful Encounters With Matter in Europe’s Muddy Margins” (Cultural Anthropology, 2011). George E. Marcus is Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where he established in 2005, after directing the anthropology program at Rice University for twenty-five years, a Center for Ethnography. The Center is concerned with innovative forms and expressions of contemporary ethnography knowledge in their making during the process of fieldwork. The Center experiments with third spaces within and alongside fieldwork as studios, stages, and workshops for the prototyping of ethnographic concepts in their formation, and media of their communication. The politics of collaboration, design practices, and forms of experiment have been key frames in Center projects. Marcus is coeditor of the volume Writing Culture (1986), co-author of Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), and interlocutor to Paul Rabinow, James Faubion, and Tobias Rees in Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008). Willem Mes graduated at the Royale Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague in 1990. His photography has been published in various books and magazines, including Pilgrimage in Europe (1998), Avantgarde (1999), European Landscape (2004), Villa Sovietica (2009), and Oberflächlichkeiten (2012). In 2009, Villa Sovietica, Soviet Objects: Import-Export was praised by Nouvelle Observateur as one of the most beautiful published books of the year. Represented by Hollandse Hoogte, he works for numerous Dutch and international clients. His series “The Seven Works of Mercy,” made for the Rijksmuseum Catherijneconvent, was one of his major accomplishments. Morten Nielsen is associate professor at Aarhus University. Since 2004, he has been working in Mozambique on access to land, house-building and, recently, on Chinese infrastructural interventions. In 2013, he will commence a new research project in Islay, Scotland, on the materiality of 'collapsed futures. He has published in several leading anthropological journals on issues such as urban aesthetics, time and temporality, materiality, relational ontologies, and political cosmologies. Catherine Russell is a professor of film studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of many books and articles, including Experimental Ethnography (2009). Her most recent book is Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited (2011). She has published extensively on Japanese cinema, experimental, and ethnographic cinemas, Canadian cinema, narratology, and Walter Benjamin. She is presently coeditor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Karen Lisa Salamon is associate professor of social anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She has published extensively on cultural production industries, management, and audit culture, and has previously worked as independent consultant and ethnographic writer. She has also been associate professor at the The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (School of Design) and Assistant professor at

Contributors • 311

Copenhagen Business School. She holds a PhD in critical management studies and a Magistra Scientiarum research degree in social anthropology. Alexandra Schüssler has studied sculpture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles and scenography and costume design at the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) in Prague. In 2006, she defended her PhD thesis in cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, which won the Praemium Erasmianum in 2007. After working as a lecturer, curator, exhibition designer, and scenographer in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Geneva, she currently is co-director and exhibition curator of the poster collection at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel. Her research interest is focused on performing theory in exhibition displays and the interdisciplinary crossover between anthropology and the arts. Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He is the director of the awardwinning films Unity through Culture (with Ton Otto, 2011), Ngat is Dead (with Ton Otto and Steffen Dalsgaard, 2009), as well as Want a Camel, Yes? (with Mette Bahnsen, 2005). He is author of the forthcoming ethnographic film monograph Descending with Angels about Islamic exorcism and Danish psychiatry and the article “Can Film Show the Invisible: The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking (with Rane Willerslev, Current Anthropology, 2012). Nina Holm Vohnsen has her PhD degree in anthropology from Aarhus University (2011). Her thesis, “Absurdity and the Sensible Decision,” was awarded the Aarhus University Research Foundation’s PhD prize in 2012. Through her current position as an assistant professor at the Aarhus University and a research fellowship at the University of St Andrews, she continues her research into the inconsequentiality of human life as she explores the rise in evidence-based policy making in the Danish state and the connections between institutions, documents, and political decisions. Her publications have been directed toward policy makers and explored topics such as implementation, development, and decision making. Rane Willerslev has his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2003) and his MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester (1996). He is professor in anthropology, Aarhus University. His main research has been concerned with hunting and spiritual beliefs among the indigenous peoples of Siberia and he is the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (2007) and On the Run in Siberia (2012). He is currently the leader of an interdisciplinary research project exploring time and death and he is the editor (with Dorthe Refslund Christensen) of Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (2013). In addition he has published extensively on topics concerned with vision, visuality, and filmmaking.

Index

A absence, 5, 104, 148, 264 of analytical framework, 227 and the between, 61–62 and desire, 104 of experience, 146 making present by a certain absence, 4, 9 and memory, 160–61, 198 sickness absence, 131 of sound and smell, 84 of structure and language, 149 of unity, syntax, and meaning, 149 from work, 134 absurdity absurd condition, 137 the absurd paradox of karma, 38n19 messiness, absurdity, coherence, and clarity, 140–41 overwhelmed by absurdity, 137 transcending the absurd, 140 accumulation, 223, 282, 289, 304 of defects, 281 of jumble, 299 of potential, 243–44, 251–54, 258 of treasures, 282 actor and authenticity, 190 conventional notion of the actor, 230 and experimental documentary, 166 and mediated women, 167 non-professional, 230 actual, 22, 33, 37n8, 68–69 actualize, 32–34, 38n20, 135, 189 virtualizing of the actual, 32 actualities, 33–34, 37n5, 67 actualized positions, 42, 51 actualizing a “liminal” state, 55n15 See also Bergson, Henri; Deleuze, Gilles aesthetic, 2, 88, 155n11, 164, 217–18, 229, 230, 232, 238n6, 246, 251 excess, 178 form, 42, 53, 195n16 functioning of images, 51 imagination, 86 means, 40–41 of objectivity, 189 orchestration, 134

possibilities, 195n16, 228 practical and aesthetic meanings, 94 qualities, 215, 237, 250 shared cinematic aesthetic, 234, 237 socioaesthetic conditions, 191–92 techniques, 9 vocabulary, 164, 169 aesthetics aesthetics and politics of modernity, 180 aesthetics of Villa Sovietica (exhibition), 296 anthropological aesthetics, 227, 237 beautifying aesthetics, 186, 190 Chinese and Japanese aesthetics, 69 of direct cinema, 195n16 of documentary film, 184, 192–93 of elicitation, 47 functionality and aesthetics, 289 modernist aesthetics, 169 political aesthetics, 185–86 relational aesthetics, 51 surrealist aesthetics, 169 of social forms, 40–41, 46–48, 53–54 temporal aesthetics, 18, 40ff of time, 41–42, 48, 54 affect affect and imagination, 209 affection-images, 24 affective images, 201 affective spaces, 206 stimulation of, 199 unpredictable affects, 61 Africa, African, 12, 13, 188, 231, 245, 248, 249, 252, 259n2, 272 agency, 22, 101, 104, 161, 172, 228, 258, 275 Art and Agency (book), 241. See also Gell, Alfred agent, 2, 32, 46, 251, 254 agent and active subject, 173 human agent, 252 social agency, 46, 228 state agents, 46 Akerman, Chantal, 204 Alford, Violet, 64 alterity, 3, 4, 12, 183 extreme or absolute, 193 the invisible and alterity, 5, 9

Index • 313

irreducible, 155 radical, 154 Althing (Icelandic Parliament), 58 American African-American, 188 American Museum of Natural History, 245 cinema, 7, 163, 169, 177 cinéma vérité (style of documentary filmmaking), 231, 235 culture, 172 editing patterns, 169 filmmaking, 159 institutions, 220 montage tradition, 6 modernities, 167, 177, 179–80 native American peyote, 66 pre-code films, 176 sound film, 167–68 analysis, 33, 50, 42, 47, 50, 61, 102, 154, 184–85, 217–18, 223–24, 230, 233–34, 250, 270, 302–3, 306 anthropological, 17, 21, 159, 219 of cinematic montage, 48 correspondence as the goal of analysis, 5 critical analysis, 163, 209 documentary analysis, 167 in filmmaking, 213–15 ritual analysis, 21 of social context, 66 textual analysis, 98 tools of analysis, 159, 180, 216, 222 analytic, analytical, 9, 11, 18–19, 37n13, 40, 53, 54n5, 59, 62, 69, 154, 161, 214–15, 217, 219, 224, 227, 237, 304–5 account, 47, 52 ambition, 216, 218 anti-analytics, 1 approach, 20, 54n3, 214 Deleuze’s analytic strategy, 23 editing, 220, 221 leap, 41, 48 model of ritual, 17 montage, 214, 219, 224 Montage as an Analytic, 2, 17ff perspectives, 13, 98, 216 Anthesteria (festival of Dionysus), 65 anthropological, 5, 6, 11–13, 35, 51, 60, 66, 98, 138, 200, 220, 226–28, 231, 237, 254, 291 aesthetics, 237 analysis, 17, 21, 159, 219 approaches, 70n3, 281 comparative anthropological scholarship, 69, 71n16 comparativism, 68 exhibits, 262, 275 fieldwork, 97, 303 filmmaking, 193, 209, 214 knowledge, 18, 98, 209, 228 museum, 276

pre-anthropological quality of film, 183 representation, 209, 227 understanding of elicitory processes, 41, 42 writing, 1, 59, 97, 213 anthropology, 2, 5–6, 18, 36, 59, 61, 66–68, 71n12, 71n15, 101, 135, 138, 143, 155n2, 161, 163, 193, 217, 223–24, 227–28, 232, 235–37, 282, 303, 306 applied anthropology, 302 comparative anthropology, 68–69 cultural anthropology, 165, 167 Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology, 40 experimental, 227, 237 filmic, 213 Liminality, Montage, and the Reinvention of Comparative Anthropology, 58 Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (Cambridge), 241, 262, 276 museum-based anthropology, 252 of ritual, 22, 24 visual anthropology, 160–61, 166, 180, 200–201, 209, 214, 217–19, 224, 227, 228, 237, 244 visualist bias of, 228 written, 213, 215, 216, 218 Antick, Paul, 9, 97, 106, 303, 304 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 108 Arcades Project, 151, 168, 177. See also Benjamin, Walter archive, 54n7, 54n9, 54n10, 154, 163–65, 177, 180, 263, 304–6 Aristotle, 76, 199 Arnheim, Rudolf, 12 art, 6, 12, 18, 21, 24, 28, 35, 42, 48, 65, 68–69, 79, 80, 82, 88, 103, 155n11, 163, 165, 169, 177, 179–80, 187, 220, 223, 230, 237, 241, 247–50, 252, 253, 256, 262, 266, 293, 299, 301n18, 302, 306 artifact, 153, 186, 198, 241, 247, 251, 262, 264, 265, 271, 272, 275, 289 artist, 88, 89, 90, 145, 165, 166, 170, 183, 188, 220, 247, 256, 262, 267, 270, 273, 291, 292 Asch, Timothy, 13, 209, 217 assemblage, 12–13, 23, 48, 80, 92, 241, 254, 258, 264, 266, 304 assembling, 82, 180, 214, 241, 251, 253, 255, 262, 267, 276n3 reassemblage, 184 reassembling, 12, 241, 257, 268 atmosphere, 92, 187, 188, 241, 242, 244, 250, 254, 256–57, 296, 298 audience, 8–9, 28, 29, 37n9, 150, 153, 164, 172, 176–77, 183–84, 186, 189, 191, 193, 194n9, 204–5, 208, 215, 219, 220–21, 227–28, 231–32, 235, 241, 242, 244, 246, 250–51, 254, 263, 289, 290, 292, 296, 302, 306 audiovisual, 183–84, 190, 192–93, 194n3, 194n13, 200, 208, 214, 222–24

314 • Index

authenticity, 111, 116, 190–92, 228, 249 authority, ethnographic, 145–46, 155 authorship, 183, 247, 258 avant-garde, avant-gardist, 13, 59, 164–65, 169, 171, 181, 200, 304–5 Ax Fight, The (film), 13, 217 B Baby Face (film), 168, 173–77, 180 Bachelard, Gaston, 291 Bacon, Francis, 79–80, 90–91 Barasana (Amazonian Indian group), 218 Barbash, Ilisa, 161, 215, 237 Baroque, 168 Barthes, Roland, 148, 199, 291 Bateson, Gregory, 8, 92, 238n5, 256, 258 Bauman, Zygmunt, 183, 185, 192 Bazin, André, 226, 229–30, 233–37, 238n8 Bazinian turn, 226, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238n7 becoming, 20, 23, 29, 30, 33, 55, 60, 66, 69, 70n8, 98. See also Deleuze, Gilles being being-in-the-world, 5, 18, 92–93, 193 being-with-others, 10 Benin art, 247–50, 252, 253, 256 and British punitive expedition, 248, 252, 254, 259n1 bronzes, 243–44, 250–54, 256 city, 248, 251, 252, 254, 257 gods, 249 history, 250, 251, 252, 254 Oba, king of Benin, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 259n3 river, 248 statues, 248, 249, 253 Benin: Kings and Rituals (exhibition), 241–44, 251–55, 258 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 98, 149, 151–54, 163–64, 166–68, 177, 179–80, 199, 241, 266–67, 302, 304, 306 Bergson, Henri, 22, 24, 25, 28–31, 34, 37n13, 66, 69, 198, 204 Berlin, 149, 166, 243, 255, 296 Biemann, Ursula, 215, 219–23 Binter, Julia T. S., 9, 160, 183, 194n4, 303 Birth of a Nation (film), 6 Bjerregaard, Peter, 10, 241–44, 251, 257, 303 Black Sun (film), 90 blindness, 18–19, 81–82, 89, 90–99 Blue (Film), 88–89 Boas, Franz, 67 body, 8, 23, 25–26, 28, 30–31, 37n10, 37n13, 47– 48, 58, 61, 76, 78–85, 88, 92–94, 97, 100–102, 104–5, 145, 148, 150, 153, 155n11, 165–66, 168, 184, 194n3, 206, 209, 236, 241, 247, 252–53, 262–69, 271–73, 275 Böhme, Gernot, 244, 257, 258 Bond, Jim, 263, 267, 273, 274

Boorstin, Daniel, 111, 116 BOPE (military police unit in Brazil), 126 borders, 146, 160, 192, 259 boredom, 101 Bourdieu, Pierre 101 Brazil, Brazilian, 9, 97, 100, 111 breakbeat, 150, 151 Brechtian (Bertolt Brecht), 164, 169 bricoleur, 292 broadcasting, 141 Brown, George Mackay, 62, 70n6 Bucharest, 198, 201, 205–8 identity, 206–7 Buddhism Buddhist rituals, 17, 18, 20ff Zen, 66, 76 Buñuel, Luis, 80 Burch, Noel, 169 Bürger, Peter, 145, 149 Burkert, Walter, 65 C cacophony, 97, 145, 146, 201 Callicantzari (Greek and Macedonian folklore), 64–65, 69 camera, 23, 48, 190, 233, 238n5, 237 -man, -person, 7, 8, 9, 166, 187, 190, 191, 195n18 angles and frames, 186, 189–91, 202–3 Camera Lucida (book), 291 eye of the camera, 51 fetishized, 218, 228 handheld, 190, 191, 195n16 Hollywood camera, 229 humanized, 8 in-camera montage, 198, 200, 204, 208 lens, 86, 202 Man with a Movie Camera (film), 7, 50, 165–66 mobile, 27, 37n9, 204 movements, 83, 87, 169, 170, 171, 175, 178, 204 neorealistic camera, 229 newsreel camera, 229 nineteenth-century camera, 86 observational, 10, 161 super-human, all-seeing, all-knowing camera, 235 as a transformational and critical investigative tool, 209 work and cutting, 178, 232 camouflage, 242, 290, 301n2 capitalism, 176, 288 commodity capitalism, 168, 177 caress caressing the Other, 147–48, 154 Cartesian, 29, 275 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, 161, 237 cataloging, 243, 247, 257

Index • 315

category/ies, 5, 37n4, 40, 55, 59–62, 90, 194n11, 223, 236, 247 categorize, categorization, 69, 216, 221, 223–24, 250, 271, 273 causality, 145, 149, 216 censorship, 165, 167, 173, 181n5 self-censorship, 172 Chagnon, Napoleon, 13, 217 Chambers, Iain, 205, 206 Chaplin, Charlie, 153–54 chiasmus, 189 Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea (film), 8 chronology, 63, 217, 218, 266, 267 cinema, 5, 7, 35, 50, 193, 195n16, 204, 238n8 American, 7, 163, 167, 169, 177, 179, 180 Chinese, 169, 177 The Cinema of Naruso Mikio (book), 181n1, 181n4 cinema and rituals, 20, 24, 28, 36 cinematic creation, 21 classical cinema, 22, 27, 48 and the construction of global modernity, 164 Deleuze’s work on cinema, 17, 20, 21, 23–24, 25, 35, 36 development of cinema, 80, 229, 233 of duration, 230 as an ethnographic phenomenon, 34, 209, 227, 233 the global spectacle of cinema, 180 Japanese, 163, 167, 168, 169, 176, 177, 179, 180 as a manifestation of reality, 24 modern cinema, 22, 27, 29 narrative cinema, 49, 165, 167, 168, 200 neorealist, 226, 229, 230, 236 observational, 8, 10, 159, 160, 161, 167, 195n16, 217, 218, 226–29, 231, 233, 236, 237, 238n11, 302, 303, 307n3 potential of cinema, 29, 35 of reality, 229, 230 of revelation, 234 Soviet, 7, 163, 167 transcendental, 233 transcultural, 183, 192, 193 Western, 169 cinematic montage, 1, 6, 13, 17, 40, 41, 48, 52, 53, 80, 159, 167, 173, 180 cinematic motion, 30 and memory, 204–6 and railway films/panoramas, 204 and tracking shots, 198, 203–5 cinematic technique, 28, 31, 48, 50, 70n2, 77, 79, 80, 165, 168, 176, 218 cinéma vérité (style of documentary filmmaking), 227, 231, 235 Cişmigiu Gardens, 201, 204, 206–8 citation, 98, 146

without quotation marks, 151 clash, 97, 306 Clifford, James, 5, 71n15, 97, 145, 151, 155n2, 163, 214 clusters, 250, 262, 264–67, 269, 272, 275–76 Cohen, Erik, 111 Cold War, 290, 296 collaboration, 13, 43, 238n1, 250, 269, 276, 304, 305 collage, 13, 98, 163, 165, 171, 304 collecting, 163, 243, 247, 268, 293 collection, 243–59 art, 163, 266 European, 248, 292 private, 248–49, 254, 293 scientific, 250, 251, 293 collectors, 163, 248, 249, 251, 254 collision, 19, 25, 34, 180, 218, 219 Colomina, Beatriz, 179 color, 3, 4, 19, 64, 80, 88, 90, 215, 243, 249, 251, 257, 290 blue, 83, 88, 89, 234, 272, 288, 290 red, 3, 64, 71n10, 83, 108n2, 176, 249, 259n3, 271, 272, 290, 292 commentary, 9, 151, 238n11, 304, 206n1 commodification, 190 commonalities, 8 human, 10, 160, 183 shared, 191 communalka (communal flat), 296 communism, 205, 206, 296 post-communist, 198, 207, 208 comparativism anthropological, 18, 68 as art of montage, 67 history of, 67 comparison anthropological, 138, 218 filmic, 160, 191 of Japanese and Hollywood cinema, 177 consanguinity, 269, 271 consciousness, 21–23, 25–26, 28–29, 35, 37n5, 38n19, 65, 78–79, 82, 93–94, 97, 135, 153, 168 false consciousness, 2, 181n2 stream of consciousness, 204, 247 construction, 11, 17, 21, 24, 26, 28, 37, 56, 79, 104, 168, 170, 176, 178, 180, 192, 206, 224, 256, 288. See also deconstruction of identity, 296 of modernity, 164, 167, 169, 171 constructivism, 13, 264 consumption consumer goods, 288, 290 creative consumption, 288, 290 container, 86, 257, 268, 275, 281, 292 contextualization, contextualized, 154, 217, 227, 245 decontextualization, 153, 218 recontextualization, 146, 150, 151, 153

316 • Index

continuity, 6, 49, 61, 145, 214, 230 continuous discontinuity, 9 editing, 166, 169, 175, 176, 180 existential, 82 of movement, 29 of photographic style, 187 spatiotemporal continuity, 217 contradiction, 27, 42, 47, 59, 102, 103, 143, 153, 154, 159, 163, 173, 186, 304 Copenhagen, 133, 154 copyright, 151 corporeal, 76, 92, 209, 272, 281 experience, 198 reasoning, 201 correspondence, 1, 5, 6, 188, 241, 243, 244, 246, 254, 255, 258, 259 realist principle of, 97 Crapanzano, Vincent, 61–62, 69, 70n5, 199, 207 creativity, 20, 21, 63, 69, 252, 302 crisis, 66, 76, 116, 232, 234, 235 of representation, 5, 200 critical analysis, 163, 209 appreciation, 28 approach, 21, 243 consciousness, 153 cultural theory, 180 examination, 135, 229 perspectives, 9 property, 23 thinking, 143 critique anthropological, 143 auto-critique, 181n2, 282 ideological, 152, 153 cross-disciplinary, 244, 266n2 crystal crystal image, 22, 32–34, 38n18. See also movement image, time image crystal of total event, 98, 154 cubism, 242, 262, 263, 264, 272, 275, 304 culture, cultural American culture, 171, 172 analysis, 213, 216, 219 anthropology, 165, 167, 180 art-culture system, 163 boundaries, 1, 2, 8–10, 272 commodity culture, 165 consolidation of mass culture, 163 development of culture, 244 differences, 8, 9, 69, 160, 183, 191, 192, 265 evolution, 67 factors of culture, 60 film culture, 167, 180 history, 17, 244 intellectual culture, 231 intellectual property and culture jamming, 155n14

manga culture, 187 Material Culture and Mass Consumption (book), 288 material culture, 288, 289, 290, 291, 296 media culture, 166 mediated culture, 180 mobility and shifting identities, 164 modern culture, 145 movements, 155n10 nature and culture, 69 otherness, 145 ownership, 151 popular culture, 164, 167, 179, 181 Primitive Culture (book), 72 as process, 288 processes, 159, 160 professional culture of method, 305 relativism, 67, 244, 245 tangible aspects of culture, 198 understandings, 33, 61 visual, 163 Western culture, 169 writing culture, 97, 213, 223, 302, 303 Zande material culture, 256 curation, 302, 304 curator, 13, 154, 220, 241, 242, 248, 249, 252, 262, 264, 265, 276, 282, 289, 290, 298, 304, 221 cut, 6, 18, 26, 31, 34, 43, 49, 50, 85, 136, 137, 141, 161, 166, 167, 185, 187, 190, 204, 218, 219, 241, 262, 264, 265, 267, 269, 272, 273, 275, 276, 276n4, 305 cutting, 7, 34, 40, 77, 80, 165, 166, 173, 176, 178, 206, 230, 267 D dadaism, 149 Dalsgaard, Anne Line, 9, 97, 100, 303, 305, 306 dark matter, 5 data, 67, 69, 137, 150, 213, 215, 219–20, 228, 235, 289, 304, 306 database, 221–24, 271, 273 databasing, 161, 214 datcha (country house), 281, 290, 296 David, Jacques-Louis, 84, 85 de Montalembert, Hugues, 90–94 de Sica, Vittorio, 229, 230, 233, 234 death, 1, 25–27, 34–35, 60, 82–85, 89, 104, 131, 184, 256, 266, 268, 271 Death of Marat (painting), 85 deconstruction, 153, 242, 288 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 6, 20–25, 27–30, 32–33, 35, 36, 37n5, 37n6, 37n8, 37n9, 37n13, 38n15, 38n16, 38n18, 38n20, 40, 41, 48–53, 69, 70n8, 72n17, 155n10, 264, 304 Deleuze, Cinema, and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite, 20ff Deleuzian approach, 36n2, 36n4 model of sensation, 80

Index • 317

movement image and time image, 17, 27, 29–32, 42, 49 pure form of time, 66 seeing Francis Bacon’s paintings, 79 subject/object dualism, 22 theory of cinema, 5, 17, 20, 21, 24, 31, 35, 48 theory of montage, 18, 23, 40–41, 48, 50–53, 304 transcendental empiricism, 32 demonic, 27 denaturalization, 12 design, 82, 110, 134, 143, 166, 172, 175, 206, 220, 250, 288, 301n19, 307n1, 307n2 desire, 5, 26, 62, 104, 164, 167, 178, 234, 289 development, 21, 22, 27, 37n13, 48, 50, 70n3, 72n16, 80, 93, 131, 140, 170, 189, 195n16, 223, 226, 229, 230, 231, 233, 237, 243, 244, 254, 275, 302, 303, 304 Di Gioia, Herb, 8, 229, 231–33, 235, 236, 237 dialectic, 28, 38n20, 167, 180, 189, 191, 304 dialectical awakening, 178 dialectical montage, 50 dialectical optics, 173, 177, 179 Hegelian dialectic, 4, 288 structural dialectics, 305 dialogue, 86, 87, 97, 145, 146, 148, 169, 180, 226, 265, 306n1 differentiation, 3, 25, 27, 32–34, 41–42, 49–51, 53–54, 60, 65–66, 69 digital, 20, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 163, 165, 177, 180, 190, 222, 223, 304, 306 Dingpolitik, 69 Dionysus/Dionysian, 21, 65, 69, 71n11 direct cinema, 191, 195n16 direction (of film), 21, 230, 234 display, 11, 27, 36n3, 48, 80, 164, 168, 170, 204, 241, 242, 244–46, 249–50, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 262, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 289, 290, 292, 293, 296, 301n21 disruption, 25, 94, 148, 156n16, 276 of conventional codes of indexicality, 200 counterbalancing disruption, 13 of illness, 82, 88 through montage, 11 dissonance, 4, 13 distance, 35, 63, 72n16, 97, 100, 101, 116n8, 126n17, 145, 146, 148, 153, 204, 226, 228, 246, 258 distribution, 27, 168, 174, 185 DJ (disc jockey), 145, 150 documentary analysis, 167, 219 boundaries of documentary, 193 ethnographic, 161, 217, 226, 231–32, 302–3, 305 experimental, 160 film, 183–84, 189–94, 195n16, 199, 205, 213–16, 224, 233, 302–3 mainstream, 161, 215

method, 191 narrative, 224 theory, 217 documentation documenting, 13, 76, 189, 257 strategy, 289 textual, 154 dogme (filmmaking movement), 231 Douglas, Mary, 59, 61, 70n3, 156n15 Drama, 17, 21, 25, 36, 48, 220, 230, 232, 235, 252 melodrama, 170, 179, 235 dreamtime, 63, 68 Duerr, Hans Peter, 63–66, 68 Dugdale, John 19, 77, 81, 87, 89, 90, 92–94 Dumézil, Georges, 64 duration, 7, 26, 30–31, 66, 105, 198, 204, 230 duree, 30–31 dwelling, 8, 72, 82, 209, 236 E Eagleton, Terry, 80 eclipsing, 46–47, 54n11 editing, 6, 88, 141, 151, 169, 184, 193, 194n9, 204, 206, 208, 214–23, 234, 304–5, 306n1 analytical, 220, 221 cinematic, 1, 79 collaborative, 307n2 continuity, 166, 169, 175–76, 180 editing style, 190, 200 film, 6 idiosyncratic, 169 narrative, 219 parallel, 159, 160 strategies, 217, 305 techniques, 18, 169, 209, 233 visual, 165 Eisenstein, Sergei, 2, 97, 160, 215, 218 analytical montage, 214 combustion, 4 haiku poems, 17 intellectual cinema, 7 intellectual montage, 133, 135, 139, 218–19, 305 on montage, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 41–42, 48, 50, 80, 103, 155n11, 209, 219, 263, 264, 304 October: Ten Days that Shook the World (film), 49, 50 Potemkin (film), 50 ekphrasis, 76, 86, 87 elicitation, 18, 40–41, 47, 51, 53, 54n2 Elliott, Mark, 262, 267–68, 270, 276 emancipation, 11, 33 embodiment, 17, 102, 159, 275 embodied action, 92–94 Emmaüs, 281, 292, 296 emotion, 9, 62, 77, 82, 198 Empson, Rebecca, 10, 12, 241–42, 262, 267, 268, 270, 275, 276, 304 epistemology, 191, 193, 235, 243

318 • Index

estrangement, 102, 146, 149, 153, 154, 219. See also ostranenie making strange, 93–94, 146, 153 ethics, 8, 98 ethnocentrism, 288 ethnographic, 1, 36, 78, 80, 154, 245, 250, 262 authority, 145, 146 auto-ethnographic reflection, 13, 305 cinema, 209, 227, 233 documentary, 200, 226, 231–32 exhibitions, 10, 242–44, 249, 255 fieldworker, 145, 150 film, filmmaking, 8, 10, 12, 13, 67, 159, 160, 161, 198, 200, 209, 213, 215, 217, 218, 226–29, 231, 233–35, 237, 238n10, 302–3 filmmakers, 159–60, 232, 235 montage, 145, 151, 159 museum, 241, 243–44, 257, 281, 289, 296, 299 representation, 166, 218, 228, 303 research, 2, 60, 71n15, 149, 155, 155n10, 209 writing, 11, 67, 180, 213, 226, 302, 306 ethnography, 20–22, 25, 37n13, 67–68, 71n15, 145–46, 152, 155n2–3, 166, 213, 215, 223, 299, 302–6, 307n2 multi-sited, 59, 66 Europe, 59, 64, 116, 180, 248, 267 evocation, 12, 66, 68, 193, 305, 306, 306n1 evolution, 17, 29, 35, 67, 72n16, 79, 230, 244, 252 evolutionism, 72, 241, 244, 245 Ewing, Katherine, 97, 102 exchange, 46, 76, 139, 238n5, 247, 248, 251, 259n2, 259n3, 266, 301n21 exhibition, 1, 6, 10, 13, 241–47, 249–57, 258–59, 262, 264–67, 271, 272–73, 275–76, 281–82, 288–90, 292–93, 296, 298–300, 301n21, 304 objects, 241–42, 243–59, 262, 264–67, 269, 270–72, 275, 281–82, 288–92, 296, 298, 301n21 Exotic Tours (travel agency), 108n3, 122n14 exoticism, 186, 235 experiment, 1, 2, 7, 28, 48, 50, 97, 146, 304, 305, 306 explanation, 13, 18, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70n9, 140, 143, 146, 206 F Fabian, Johannes, 226, 228, 306n1 façade, 27–29, 30, 31, 175 face Baby Face (film), 168, 173–77, 180 face-vision, 90–93 faceless voice, 205 of the Other, 3 failure, 28, 142–43, 299 faith in image, 234 in reality, 234 false consciousness, 2, 181n2

favela tourism, 9, 97–98, 108n3, 110, 111, 116n8, 120, 122n14, 126, 126n16–17, 130 fetish, 187, 228 fieldwork, 97–98, 100, 154, 214, 217, 232, 289–90, 303–6, 307n2 film character, 167, 170, 174, 176, 179, 187, 192, 214, 216, 230–31, 234–35, 243, 251 clip, 167, 215–16, 219, 221–22 complex narratives, 216 director, 6, 37n6, 41, 48, 50, 76, 165, 167, 214–16, 220–21, 227, 250 ethnographic, 8, 10–13, 67, 159–61, 198, 200, 209, 213, 215, 217–18, 226–29, 231, 233–35, 237, 238n10, 302–3 filmic material, 220 filmmaker, 1–2, 7–10, 13, 17, 88, 103, 133, 159, 161, 163–65, 180, 183–85, 189–91, 193, 195, 200, 214, 216, 221–22, 224, 226–41, 276, 303–4 filmmaking, 8–10, 159–61, 166, 183–84, 190–91, 193, 195, 198, 209, 212, 214–19, 222, 224–29, 231–38, 302–3 footage, 6–7, 12, 160 language, 87, 93, 103, 148, 164, 176, 182–83, 193, 198, 200, 216, 219, 229, 231, 234 language of sensation, 200 photogenie, 200 and photography, 164 production, 215 transcultural, 192 See also cinema Fischer, Michael, 143, 155n2 Flaherty, Robert, 229 flânerie, 205 flashback, 6, 77 Forest of Bliss (film), 217 fracture, 9, 19, 27, 62, 145, 205, 209 fragment, 11, 18, 27, 70n1, 98, 145, 147–50, 152, 153, 163, 184, 185, 192, 203, 205, 206, 217, 220, 262, 264, 266, 273 fragmentation 33, 103, 105, 163, 166, 169, 171, 234, 238n6 frame, 49, 164, 186, 189–91, 203–4, 215, 220, 254, 270, 273, 275, 276n4, 288, 290, 293 framing, 8, 23, 48, 146, 186, 200, 206, 235, 241, 289, 293 Frazer, James George, 70n3, 70n9, 71n9 Frow, John, 111n7 Fryland, Mia, 219, 221–23 function, 6, 11, 41, 50, 53, 60, 153, 165, 218, 222, 241, 243, 266, 291 G Gallistio, Adriani, 122n12 gap, 1, 4–5, 69, 98, 143, 147–50, 152, 155, 156n16, 204, 205 between images, 40, 41, 50, 53 between peoples experiences, 145–46

Index • 319

Gardner, Robert, 217, 228 gaze, 28, 62, 77, 80, 108n4, 184–86, 192, 235, 242, 262, 266, 269, 289–90, 293. See also perspective, vision Gell, Alfred, 54n11, 241, 247, 252, 254, 256–58 genealogy, 65, 269 genre, 151, 155n13, 164, 167, 169, 173, 176, 194, 213, 219, 226–28, 237, 238n9, 302, 304–5, 306n1 Ginza, 170 Gioia, Herb Di, 8, 229, 231–33, 235–36, 237 Glawogger, Michael, 160, 183–87, 189–94, 194n2, 194n6, 194n7, 194n9, 194n12, 195n15 Gleizes, Albert, 263–64 Glistrup, Mogens, 221, 222 gloaming, 76, 81, 83, 86, 89, 92 globalization, 1, 183, 185, 194n1, 194n4, 296 glocalization, 185 Goldschmidt, Walter, 231, 238n9 Goodwin, Glenn, 49, 140 Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, 200 Green, Charles, 200 Griffith, D. W., 2, 6 Grimshaw, Anna, 8, 12, 161, 195n16, 201, 206, 209, 217, 226, 232, 236, 238n1, 238n5, 238n9, 238n14, 302, 307n3 Grossman, Alyssa, 10, 160, 198, 201, 202, 302, 305, 307n3 Guattari, Felix, 35, 72n17 Guenther, Lisa, 104 H H.D. Harootunian, 171 habitus, 101, 184 Habsburg Neue Hofburg, 254 haiku, 17 Hancock, David, 8, 229–37 Hansen, Miriam, 164, 168 haptic, 78, 81, 199, 206 hauka (possession cult), 12 Hays office, 173–74, 176 Healy, Chris, 198, 200–201, 209 hearing, 78, 81, 93, 194n3 Heidegger, Martin, 25, 37n5 Henare, Amiria, 5, 243, 252, 254 Henley, Paul, 8–10, 12, 214, 217, 227, 238n9 Heraclitus, 59, 70n1 Herle, Anita, 262, 267–68, 270, 276 hierarchy, 79, 149, 173, 175, 185 hieroglyphs, 103 Hirst, Damien, 256, 259 history, 17–18, 28, 32, 34, 49, 59, 67, 148, 154, 163, 168, 173, 176, 180, 200, 226, 235, 241, 243–45, 247, 250–52, 254, 267, 291, 298, 302–3 Hitchcock, Alfred, 50 HIV/AIDS, 82–83, 88, 266, 272 Hockings, Paul, 227, 229, 238n10 Høgel, Jakob Kirstein, 6, 161, 213–14, 217, 302, 307n3

Holbraad, Martin, 3, 5, 243, 252, 254 holism, 22, 79, 155n10, 219, 220, 242 Hollywood, 159, 163–65, 167–69, 173–75, 177, 179, 180, 229, 231 Homo Sovieticus, 288, 290, 301n4 hope, 62, 67, 80, 82, 101, 104, 143 Hull, John, 89–90, 92–94 human, 11, 53, 60–61, 64, 69, 80–81, 101, 153, 192, 222, 228–29, 268 action, 20, 21 being, 20, 22–25, 28, 35, 36n3, 37n5, 67, 71n10, 72n16, 79, 82, 84, 86, 143, 190, 241, 288, 290 body, 28, 84, 92, 93, 194n3, 262, 264–69, 271, 275 consciousness, 22, 37n5, 37n13 DNA, 269, 276n3 existence, 8, 10, 13, 246, 256 form, 62, 63, 65, 71n10, 275 human-centric, 24, 36n3, 37n5 life, 1–2, 71n12, 160 non-human, 23, 25, 36n3, 50, 71n13 perception, 3, 9, 23, 24, 189, 194n3 sacrifice, 252, 259n1 society, 26, 72n16, 190 subject, 28, 236 Husserl, Edmund, 21, 28–29, 199 Huyssens, Andreas, 111n7 I Iceland, 5, 58–59, 62, 72n16 iconoclasm, 247, 296 identity, 18, 48, 52, 54n13, 65, 67, 69, 70n8, 97–98, 116n8, 146, 148, 151, 194n7, 206–7, 238n11, 270, 296, 302 identification, 60, 64, 70n11, 103, 186, 193, 229, 235 ideology, 160, 167, 169, 200, 288 counter-hegemonic, 12 illustration, 71n16, 176, 181n3, 227, 245 image, 7–8, 11–13, 18, 21, 22–24, 27–29, 32, 34, 36n2, 40–42, 48–52, 59, 62, 77, 79, 80, 84–90, 92–94, 97, 102, 116n8, 122n12, 146, 153, 155, 160, 163, 165–66, 168, 170, 173, 175, 179–80, 181n2, 183–85, 188, 189–93, 194n10, 198–206, 208–9, 214, 218–20, 229–30, 234, 237, 242, 245, 249, 258, 263–64, 269, 275, 278, 291, 302–6 affection-image, 24 crystal image, 22, 32–33 film image, 103, 186–87, 199 images-in-movement, 49–50, 307n1 incommensurable, 40, 49, 50, 52–54 movement image, 22, 27, 29–33, 37n9, 42 photographic image, 84, 199 self-image, 116n8, 141 time image, 17, 22, 27, 30–34 imaginary, 10, 18, 22, 24, 32–33, 38n18, 50, 189, 191, 193, 223, 256, 258, 282, 288, 291, 298

320 • Index

imagination, 1, 76, 81–82, 84, 86, 90, 101, 161, 198, 200, 209, 218, 262, 305–6 imitation, 8, 167. See also mimesis incommensurability, 50–53, 54n13 incongruence, 4, 147, 153 individuality, 288, 290 information, 19, 76, 78–79, 81, 83, 87, 89, 92–93, 131–32, 138, 142, 217–18, 220–22, 234, 238n10, 243, 259, 262–66, 271–72, 275, 276n5, 299 installation, 204, 220, 237, 247, 249–50, 256–58, 267, 293 site-specific, 296 intentionality, 21, 247, 252 intercalary period, 71n9 interconnectedness, 185 interval, 32–33, 38n18, 40–42, 48, 50, 52–53, 59, 62–63, 69, 103, 148, 150, 152, 166–67, 189, 192–93, 264, 266, 304–5 intervention, 81, 134–35, 184, 187–88, 191–92, 195n16, 226, 231, 234, 269, 275, 293 interwar period, 177, 180, 205, 207 invisibility, 3, 159–60, 180 amplifying invisibility, 12 invisible, 1–6, 8–9, 11, 13, 148, 160, 164, 185, 199, 204, 209, 215, 218, 220, 223, 256, 268, 303, 306 layer of invisibility, 4 of means, 195n16 of night, 81 structural invisibility, 60 Iron Curtain, 296 Irving, Andrew, 9–11, 18, 19, 76, 77, 82, 305, 306 J Japan, 159, 163–65, 167–69, 172–73, 178–80 Jarman, Derek, 88–89, 93–94 jazz, 151, 175, 177 jump cut, 7, 187, 190, 205 juxtaposition, 4, 5, 9–13, 17–18, 27, 31, 33, 40, 49, 50, 53, 59–61, 67, 72, 76–77, 79–80, 90, 98, 133, 143, 151, 163–65, 172, 180, 185–86, 230, 232, 237, 238n6, 262–65, 272, 275, 304–5 K Kapferer, Bruce, 5, 11, 17, 20–21, 29–30, 32–34, 37n9, 38n15, 38n16, 38n19, 38n20, 70n3, 72n17, 303 Karlsson, Gunnar, 58, 104 Karmic, 25, 34 Kauffman, Michaels, 166 Kiener, Wilma, 8, 160, 215–18, 228, 238n6 kinetic, 262, 267 kino-eye, 159, 165, 175 kitsch, 168–69, 177 Kluge, Alexander, 184 knowledge, 3, 5, 18, 26, 58, 66–69, 78–79, 81, 83, 90, 98, 143, 147, 185, 209, 221, 227–28, 235–36, 247–48, 259, 262, 276, 276n5, 303 knowledge-in-the-making, 13

Kubrick, Stanley, 38n15, 50 Kuleshov, Lev, 304 L laboratory, 244, 307n1 Lambert, Helen, 48, 264, 275 language, 23–24, 37n13, 38n19, 50, 62, 67, 86–88, 93, 103, 148–49, 164, 167, 176, 183, 193, 194n6, 198, 200, 216, 219, 222, 236, 255, 291, 305–6 body language, 206 cinematic, 50, 229, 231, 234 of sensation, 200 Latour, Bruno, 58–59, 69, 242, 247, 257 Lawson, John Cuthbert, 64–65 leap, 4, 41, 48, 72, 79, 98, 148, 193, 303 Les Maîtres Fous (film), 12 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 20, 36, 36n1, 163–64, 302, 305–6 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 3–5, 98, 147, 149, 152 Life in Loops (film), 160, 183–84, 186–90, 192–94n7 liminality, 58, 60–61, 63, 68, 70n3, 72n17 linear argument, 10 linearity, 10, 41, 49, 237 non-linear, 131, 215, 223 Llewelyn-Davies, Melissa, 232 Lock, Margaret, 271, 273 long take, 10, 187, 190, 233 Lubitsch, Ernst, 167, 172, 177 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 327 Lumina Amintirii (film), 160, 198, 200, 204–6, 208–9 Lyngse, Flemming, 219, 221–23 M ma (interval in classical Chinese and Japanese aesthetics), 69 MacCannell, Dean, 111n7 MacDougall, David, 8, 10, 160–61, 183, 186, 188, 190, 192–93, 195n16, 198–200, 209, 217, 226, 231–33, 235–36, 237, 238n5, 238n9, 238n12 MacDougall, Judith, 8, 161, 229, 231–33, 235–36 Mackay Brown, George, 62, 70n6 magic, 26, 67–68, 189, 249, 256, 298, 303 Maku (Amazonian Indian group), 218–19 Maltby, Richard, 175–76 Man with a Movie Camera (film), 7, 50, 165–66 manga culture, 187 Manovich, Lev, 222–23 Maputo (ethnic group), 40, 42–43, 53, 54n8 Marcello Armstrong Tours, 108n3, 126n17 Marcus, George E., 2, 5, 10–11, 13, 18, 59, 71n15, 97, 143, 155n2, 159, 180, 213, 218–19, 226, 228, 238n6, 264, 302–3, 305, 307n2 Marxism, Marxist, 2, 4, 235 Massumi, Brian, 61 material culture, 167, 256, 288–91, 296

Index • 321

materiality, 34, 61, 200, 243, 248–49, 251, 253 materialization, 31, 66, 289 McDonald, Maryon, 264, 275 McLean, Stuart, 4, 18, 58, 69, 71n15, 303 Mead, Margaret, 8, 228, 238n5 meaning, 2, 8, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36, 36n1, 36n4, 37n13, 41, 48, 79, 90, 94, 98, 102, 133, 134, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 151, 154, 156n16, 166, 171, 181n5, 186, 189, 192, 193, 200, 205, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 235, 254, 257, 276n5, 293, 299, 305 MEG (Musée D'ethnographie De Genève), 281, 288–93, 296, 298, 301n21 Megacities (film), 160, 183–88, 190–94 Melanesia, 53, 54 memory, 58, 77, 82–84, 93, 102, 160, 290, 305 collective and individual, 198, 205–6, 208–9 Matter and Memory (book), 30 and post–socialism, 209 sensory qualities of, 90, 198–201, 204–5, 207, 209 and temporality, 200, 204–6 theories of, 198–99 and visual representation, 198–201, 203, 208 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 145, 155n1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3–5, 9, 11, 19, 46, 78, 88, 104, 275 Mes, Willem, 6, 10, 241, 242, 278 method, 18, 23, 59, 62, 67, 159, 166, 171, 191, 198, 206, 215, 219–20, 224, 264, 291, 302, 305, 307n2 comparative, 71n16, 165, 180 methodology, 163, 167, 177, 180, 200, 216, 217, 218, 219 montage as, 1, 11, 97 Metzinger, Jean, 263–64 Meyer, Carl, 206 Miller, Daniel, 257, 288 mimesis, 8 mimicry, 12 See also imitation Miner, Horace, 153 mise-en-scène, 305 missionaries, 218–19, 248 modernism, modernist, 163–64, 169, 172, 228, 298, 304, 306 high, 146, 148, 152, 155n3 modernist sensibility, 11, 226 postmodernist, 155n2 vernacular, 164 modernity, 17, 70n2, 111n7, 163–73, 178, 181n4 American, 167–69, 171, 177, 180 Japanese, 164–65, 167–69, 170–71, 173, 179 modulation, 40, 49–50, 53, 55n15 moga (modern girl), 171–72 Mol, Annemarie, 264, 272, 275 montage, 3–4, 6, 8–12, 51, 92

analytical, 214, 219, 224 anthropology as an art of, 69 capacity of, 2, 11, 189, 192 cells of, 10, 11, 218 cinematic montage, 1, 6, 13, 17, 40, 41, 48, 52, 53, 80, 159, 165, 167, 173, 180, 218 complex, 78, 79, 82, 84, 92 contribution to social theory, 1–2 deconstructive, 161 Deleuzian montage, 17, 40, 42, 51 dialectical, 50, 180 disruptive, 5, 10–13, 41, 54n5, 160–61 Eisensteinian montage, 214, 219 ethnographic exhibitions as, 10, 244 ethnographic, 145, 151, 303 experimental, 167, 183–84, 192–93 facade, 27, 29, 31 film, 6, 160, 183, 214, 216 history of, 17, 173, 303 in-camera, 198, 200, 204, 208 intellectual, 4, 133–34, 135, 139, 218, 305, 306, 307n3 Japanese, 169–70 juxtaposition of, 1, 4, 5, 172, 263, 270, 272 living, lived, 76, 80 mundane, 4, 305 photographic, 97, 281 and representation, 27, 145, 303, 305 sound montage, 150 Soviet, 234 stages of, 184, 190, 192–93 strategic, 154, 256, 303, 305 techniques, 8, 13, 17–18, 48–50, 70n2, 80, 159, 163, 165, 172, 188, 200, 218 textual, 59, 145, 146, 148–49, 150, 153, 154, 155, 281 theory of, 17–18, 164, 304, 307n2 traffic of, 2, 306 transcultural montage, 70, 183, 190, 192–93 Montalembert, Hugues de, 90–91, 92, 93–94 mosaic, 97, 220, 221, 223, 276n3 motherhood, 100, 104 Mozambique, 18, 40, 42–43, 46, 51, 53–54 multilayered, 160, 163, 179, 198, 201 multiplicity, 5, 28, 34, 143, 149–50, 272–73 Murch, Walter, 302, 305–6 museum, 100, 245, 248, 250–51, 276, 290–93, 302 American Museum of Natural History (New York), 245 curators, 13, 241, 252 display, 241–42, 244, 254, 257 ethnographic, 241, 243–44, 257, 281, 289, 296, 299 exhibits, 242, 244–46, 262–63, 267, 272, 275, 289, 304 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 82 Musée D'ethnographie De Genève (MEG), 281

322 • Index

Museum für Völkerkunde (Vienna), 241, 243, 247, 249, 254–55, 257, 259 Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (Cambridge), 241, 262 Museum of Ethnology (Berlin), 248 museumification, 241, 246, 247, 251, 257–58 objects, 241–44, 246, 251, 256–57, 288, 298 realist, 241 myth, 2, 20, 26, 36n1, 134 N narration, 88, 134, 189, 232 narrative, 20, 23, 35, 36, 41, 48–50, 77, 88, 93, 131, 134, 145–47, 149, 161, 164–65, 167–70, 172–73, 175, 177–78, 187, 200, 205–6, 208, 213–14, 216–18, 220, 222, 223–24, 226, 229, 232, 235, 237, 250, 257, 266–67, 303–6 turn, 213 Naruse, Mikio, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 179, 181n1, 181n4 naturalism, 189, 246 Ndembu (ethnic group), 60 neighborhood, 42–43, 45, 51–53, 77, 100–101, 104–5, 170, 188, 206, 305 new woman, 159, 164, 167–68, 173, 176–79 New York, 81, 84, 90, 163, 167, 173, 175, 183, 186–88, 195n15, 245 Nielsen, Morten, 4, 18, 40, 43, 46, 48, 51–52, 303 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 36n4, 66 on Dionysus, 21, 65, 71n11 Niney, François, 189 Novotny, Timo, 160, 183, 186–93, 194n8, 194n10 O objectification, 38n19, 146, 226 objectivity, 189, 192, 226, 228, 306 objects, 2, 4, 11, 18, 34, 48, 60, 67, 78–79, 81, 90, 92–94, 97, 103, 120, 122, 138, 147, 180, 199, 218, 241–42, 245, 247–48, 250, 252–54, 264–67, 269–72, 275, 296 and accumulation, 244, 251, 254, 258, 282, 289 and effects, 255 ethnographic, 262 everyday, 58, 281, 290 material, 10, 153 museum, 241–44, 246, 251, 256–57, 288, 298 ritual, 30, 249 Soviet, 281–82, 290–91, 301n21 observation, 10, 12, 30, 82, 166, 184, 217, 226, 228, 234, 236–37, 238n4, 249, 257, 303, 305 observational, 11, 12, 187, 191, 193, 194n9, 200, 206, 232, 234–35 cinema, 8, 10, 159, 160–61, 167, 195n16, 217–18, 226–29, 231, 233, 236–37, 238n11, 302–3, 307n3 October (film) Eisenstein, 49

ocular, 205, 208 ontology, 62, 67, 71n13, 243, 257 opening, 1, 4, 13, 23, 36, 37n6, 67, 97, 147–48, 151–52, 165–66, 170–71, 188, 292, 306 Orkney Islands, 62 oscillation, 10, 18, 32, 50, 53 ostranenie, 93–94 other, the, 3–4, 98, 146–47, 155, 160, 190, 193, 291, 296 consuming the other, 5, 152, 292 grasping the other, 98, 146, 152 otherness, 3, 5, 9, 145, 147, 160, 180, 193, 291 Ouaknin, Marc-Alain, 98, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152 out of field, 49–50, 52. See also Deleuze, Gilles ownership, 151 Ozu, Yasujirō (filmmaker), 169 P paradox, 9, 12, 38n19, 51, 97, 146, 152, 155, 159, 199 Paris, 12, 163, 168, 176, 207 pastiche, 13, 304 pathos, 148–49 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 135 perception, 4–5, 51, 54n1, 78, 80, 86, 92, 102, 104, 145, 165–66, 183–84, 188, 198, 205, 218, 228, 235, 238n11, 244, 248, 264, 272 affective, 209 common-sense, 2, 18 complex assemblages of perception and feeling, 80 frames of, 290, 293 human, 3, 9, 19, 23–24, 189, 194n3, 302 natural, 23, 28 planes of perception, 263, 275 retriocentric, 81 sensory, 76, 81, 88, 93 theory of object, 11 transcultural, 9 visual, 81, 89 performance, 17, 20, 24–25, 29–30, 37n13, 64, 80, 93, 108n2, 150, 166, 176, 178, 187, 268, 307n2 performativity, 177 personhood, 42, 247 perspective, 3–4, 12, 17, 18, 20, 24, 28, 36n2, 41, 51, 71n13, 92, 98, 138–39, 146, 149, 155, 161, 177, 179, 205–6, 216, 218, 230, 233, 236, 241, 246, 252–53, 256, 258, 263, 267, 269, 273, 299 analytic, 13, 98, 216 anthropological, 13, 167, 226 cinematic, 10, 40, 50, 52–53 comparative, 67 critical, 9, 193 Deleuzian, 21, 49 infinity of, 3, 11 multiple, 17, 23, 159, 173, 242, 262–63, 275 neo-colonialist, 185 new, 258, 262, 269 shift of, 6, 163, 165, 180

Index • 323

Peter Murray (film), 8, 231–36, 238n11 Petro, Patrice, 166 phantasmagoria, 72, 159, 164, 165, 167, 168, 173, 177–80, 181n2 phenomenology, 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 76, 171, 236, 291 Phillips, James, 247 photography, 6, 86–88, 163–64, 230, 233, 234, 263 plagiarism, 151 Plankensteiner, Barbara, 247–48, 249, 250, 252, 254, 259 poesis, 77 politics, 51, 59, 134, 139–40, 173, 180, 193, 221 counter-politics, 12 gender, 166 political agenda, 139, 160, 270 polyphony, 145, 146, 188 Port, Mattijs van de, 291 postcolonialism, postcolonial, 145, 152, 160, 166, 227, 238n6 postmodernism, postmodernist, 146, 155n2, 155n4 Potemkin (film) Eisenstein, 50 power, 1, 3–5, 7, 11–13, 41–42, 47, 49–51, 53, 63, 65–66, 68–69, 72n17, 155, 174, 185, 191, 193, 195n17, 195n18, 199, 244, 247, 249, 252–54, 256, 259n3, 265, 271, 276n4, 291, 303, 305 pragmatism, 35, 190 presence, 3, 4, 6, 9, 49, 60, 61, 92, 100–101, 133, 154, 163, 190, 192, 195n16, 199, 224, 241, 244–45, 257, 262, 267, 276n4, 303 preservation, 146, 243, 251 producer, 13, 159, 247 psychoanalysis, 2–3 Public Enemy, 152, 155n14 public urban gardens as affective spaces, 206 as contested spaces, 207 and private gardens, 206–8 and remembrance work, 206, 208 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 304 punctum, 291. See also Barthes, Roland R Radioglaz, 183–84, 187–89, 192, 194n3 rap (poetry, music), 151–52 Rashomon (film), 177 reading closed reading, 147, 154 open reading, 147–48, 150, 154 realism naïve, 2–3, 6, 8, 161 neorealism, 227, 229–30, 235–36 reality, 1–2, 4, 7, 9, 12–13, 22, 24, 28–29, 32–33, 37, 40, 50, 61, 63, 65, 67–69, 71–72, 78, 80–81, 92, 98, 104–5, 111n7, 139, 145, 149, 154, 159,

180, 185, 190–94, 200, 205, 209, 229–30, 234–36, 241–43, 246, 255–57, 264, 275 of the between, 18, 66 fragmented, 11, 185, 192, 200, 227 pro-filmic, 184, 193 the real, 13, 22, 24, 28, 34, 38n18, 67, 69, 161, 189, 228, 230, 234–35, 263 reality tourism, 98, 116n8 social, 6, 11, 17, 34, 219, 244 reciprocal, 7, 40, 42, 46, 47, 51–53 recollection, 38n18, 93, 198–99, 204, 206, 208 reconstruction, 190–91, 250 recording, 80, 120, 150–51, 171, 188–90, 194n9, 304 Red Desert (film), 108n2 reflexivity, 21–22, 36n4, 164, 166, 193, 303 auto-reflection, 282 refugee, 146, 148 relativism, 67, 244, 245 remembrance, 198–99, 200, 209. See also memory remixing, 186, 304 Renoir, Jean, 229 representation, 1, 6, 27, 29, 41, 66, 86, 102, 146, 151, 169, 180, 189, 193, 195n16, 219, 222, 224, 304–6 alterity beyond, 3 anthropological, 209, 227 anti-representational principles, 200 cinematic, 80 collective, 70n3 crisis of, 5, 200 cultural-linguistic, 69 cultural patterns of, 165 ethnographic, 166, 218, 228, 303 filmic, 7, 191 and Glawogger, 186, 190, 194n9 indirect, 33, 38n18 narrative, 213, 223 realist, 163 scholarly, 1 visual, 198–99, 208 resistance, 12, 28, 248, 252, 259, 290 resonance, 13, 21, 68, 184, 190, 229, 234 rhythm, 33, 50, 80, 150, 151, 152, 155n13 Riefenstahl, Leni, 11 Rio de Janeiro, 97, 106–30 rite, 20–21, 24–27, 30, 32–38, 153 rites of passage, 60 See also drama, ritual ritual, 41, 65, 72n17, 126n16, 147, 153, 155n7, 217, 247, 249, 256, 259n3 analysis, 17, 21 anthropology of, 22 approaches to, 24 Benin: Kings and Rituals (exhibition), 243–44, 251, 253–55, 258 cinema and, 20 fertility, 12

324 • Index

object, 30, 249 phenomena of, 17, 70n3 possession, 12 practice, 32, 35, 38n17, 70n3 repetition, replication, 31 ritualist, 27–30, 32, 33 ritualized, 40 Sinhala Buddhist rituals, 17, 18, 25–30, 34, 37n7, 37n9 Rocinha, 106n1, 126 Romania, 207, 208 Rossellini, Roberto, 2, 226, 229–30, 233, 235–37 Rouch, Jean, 12, 193, 217, 238n10 Rouquier, Georges, 229 ruin, 84, 88, 163–64, 207, 266 Russell, Catherine, 9, 11–12, 159, 163–65, 169, 181n1, 200, 204, 303 S Sacks, Oliver, 92 sacrifice, 9, 11, 27, 32–34, 147, 252, 259n1 sacrificial, 26–27, 33–34 Salamon, Karen Lisa, 4, 12, 98, 145–46, 148, 153–54, 155n10 sameness, 9, 10, 160, 192 sampling, 145–46, 149–52 digital, 146 musical, 145, 146, 150, 155n14 Sandall, Roger, 233, 234, 238n7 Sassen, Saskia, 185, 188 Schneider, Arnd, 2 Schüssler, Alexandra, 6, 10, 241–42, 278, 281 science, 20, 155n10, 228, 237, 259, 262, 267, 272–73 and art, 21, 24, 35, 306 social science, 275, 307n3 seeing, 3–4, 6, 8, 18–19, 41, 79, 90, 100, 105, 165, 180, 207–8, 220, 222, 230, 235, 241, 262, 264, 272. See also gaze, perspective, vision Selkies (seal people), 62–63 semiotics, 149, 235 senses, 2, 5, 29, 37, 78, 80–81, 207, 276 bodily, 200 and collision, 19 deep blindness, 92 emancipation of, 33 montage of, 76 loss of sight, 83–84, 86, 88, 90–92 reorganization of, 79, 237 sentimentality, 148–49 sequence (cinematic), 7, 13, 41, 135, 165–66, 170, 172, 175, 188, 198, 203–6, 214, 221, 230, 232, 237, 262, 264–65 sex, 102, 104, 143, 168, 175, 185 Sharpe, Lesley, 271 Sheep Rushes (video installation), 234, 237 shock, shocking, 1–2, 17, 23, 90, 98, 305 de-signifying, 150–51 and fragmentation, 169

montage, 236 and opening, 147, 151 shock-effects, 4, 153, 232 signification, 18, 59, 61, 192, 193 de-signification, 147–48 Silverberg, Miriam, 170, 171, 181n3 singularity, 25, 34, 220, 246, 267, 272 social change, 18 constructivism, 264 form, 40–42, 46–48, 51, 54 formation, 164, 176, 179 identity, 40, 42, 46–48, 51, 53, 54n13 life, 1, 6–9, 41, 70, 192 process, 2, 7, 166 reality, 6, 11, 17, 34, 219, 244 relation, 40, 54n3, 61, 68–69, 270 sociality, 40–41, 53, 93, 271 theory, 1–2, 5, 10, 58 society, 18, 25–26, 46, 59–61, 67, 76, 141, 151, 153–54, 169, 213, 219–20, 242, 289 sorcery, 20, 25–34, 37n7, 37n8, 37n9, 37n10, 37n12, 37n14, 38n19 Soviet/Russian cinema, 7 film, filmmakers, 7, 13, 159, 163, 303 item, 292, 293 material culture, 288, 291, 296 montage, 234 objects, 242, 281–82, 291, 301n21 Union, 159, 164, 173, 290, 296, 298 space, 1, 6, 8, 26, 32–34, 37n9, 49–50, 52, 55n15, 59, 62, 72n16, 72n17, 79, 81–82, 84, 88, 90, 93, 103–4, 122n14, 141, 146, 148, 164, 179–80, 185, 187, 189, 191–92, 194n1, 198–202, 204–9, 217–18, 223, 228–29, 232, 235–36, 244, 246, 249, 251, 256–59, 264–66, 276, 288, 291–93, 305 cinematic, 163, 168, 178, 230 public, 170, 177–78 urban, 165, 167–68, 171, 178 spectacle, 9, 111n7, 166, 171, 173, 179, 180, 190, 193, 201 spectator, 7, 30, 49, 134, 148, 178, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198, 200, 201, 204, 209, 218, 238n4, 242, 247, 256, 264 Stanwyck, Barbara, 168, 173–78 Stoller, Paul, 5, 200, 236 story, 20, 48, 62–63, 102–3, 126n16, 138, 151, 175, 185, 188, 221–22, 252–53, 305 storyline, 23, 26, 134, 170, 206, 213, 219–20 storytelling, 11, 66, 161, 192, 214, 216 Strathern, Marilyn, 18, 40, 46, 47, 53, 54n2, 54n3, 54n12, 54n13, 138, 251, 257, 265 Straus, Erwin, 79, 82 Strike (film), 133, 135, 139 structuralism, 2, 235 studium (concept of Roland Barthes), 291 subaltern, subalternity, 183–87, 191–92, 246

Index • 325

subjectivity, 23, 101, 104–5, 146, 149, 167, 176, 186, 189, 288 Suhr, Christian, 1, 4, 9, 17, 97, 159, 241, 259 suicide, 84, 85, 173 Suniyama, 21, 25–26, 30, 31–33, 34–36, 37n7, 37n8. See also ritual surplus, 1, 4 surrealism, surrealists, 149, 151–53, 163, 167, 169, 180 French surrealists, 200 Svilova, Elizabeta, 166 symbol, 21, 24, 36n2, 70n3, 102, 220, 256 symbolic, 3, 8, 17–18, 20–21, 24, 36, 40–41, 54n4, 60–61, 66, 97, 116n8, 166, 206, 236 Synott, Anthony, 76 T tactility, 19, 201, 223, 302, 304 Talmud, 147 Tarn, Gary, 90, 94 Taussig, Michael, 9, 12, 59, 138, 155n5, 159, 200, 306 Taylor, Lucien, 5, 8, 161, 215, 237 technology, 20–21, 23–24, 30, 32, 35, 79–80, 84, 141, 151, 159, 166, 177–78, 184, 251, 259, 265, 270 television, 80, 141, 154, 213, 216, 227, 232, 296 temporality, 200, 233 tension, 11, 13, 21, 27, 32, 80, 153, 159, 173, 188, 193, 216–17, 265–66, 272, 303, 307n3 tertium quid (third element), 41, 52 text, 3, 13, 26, 37n6, 38n15, 38n19, 68, 97–98, 100, 138, 140, 145–52, 154, 155n14, 156n16, 167, 169, 175, 180, 194n11, 199, 209, 215, 217, 220–21, 227, 232, 236–37, 263, 266, 271–72, 276, 276n5, 281–82, 291, 296, 303, 305–6 theater, 17, 20, 36, 166–67, 172, 292. See also drama thick description, 188 Thomas, Nicholas, 243, 247, 257 Thornton, Robert, 213, 219, 223 time, 6–8, 20–21, 25, 27, 29–35, 37n14, 38n18, 41–42, 48–50, 53–54, 63, 65–66, 69, 79, 82, 103, 146, 148, 165, 189, 192, 198, 200, 205, 217–18, 228, 230, 235, 244, 264, 292 -image, 17, 21, 22, 27, 30–34 Timothy of Ephesus, 64 To Live with Herds (film), 8, 161, 231–32, 234–36, 238n11 Tokyo, 167–68, 170–71, 187 totality, 3, 5, 18, 27–30, 34, 37n8, 38n20, 145, 149–50, 242 transcultural cinema, 192–93 filmmaking, 190 human likeness, 160 identification, 193 montage, 70, 183, 191, 192, 193 negotiations, 191, 195n17

perception, 9 phenomena, 223 sameness or otherness, 160 spaces, 192, 194n1 transfer and counter transfer, 291 trap, 6, 247, 256 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 166, 184, 186, 189, 191–93, 227, 238n6 Triumph of the will (film), 11 truth, 2, 12, 19, 33, 76, 78, 88, 92, 98, 147, 161, 166, 186, 189, 190–91, 193, 246, 263, 298 situated, 139 Tsing, Anna, 67, 71n15 Turner, Victor, 20–21, 24, 35, 36, 36n2, 36n4, 55n15, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 69, 70n3, 70n5, 70n17, 155n8, 174 Twelve Days (between Christmas and Epiphany), 64, 65, 70n9, 71n10 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 67, 72n16 U unconscious, 2, 26, 180, 195n16, 209 optical, 200 utopia, 7, 163–65, 167–68, 177–78, 180 V Van Gennep, Arnold, 35, 59, 60, 70n3 Vertov, Dziga, 13, 48, 50, 166, 263, 304 cinematic experiments, 50, 166 idea of intervals, 189, 192 kino-eye, 165, 175 montage, 2, 8, 17, 159, 160, 165–67, 180, 183–84, 190, 194n3 politics, 7, 9, 166 radioglaz, 183–84, 188–89, 192, 194n3 social utopianism, 166 theory and practices, 166 victim, 25–34, 37n10, 37n12, 37n13, 43 video, 151, 174, 183, 187–88, 204, 221, 267 tape, 220 viewer, 4, 6–8, 10, 13, 17, 48, 160, 174, 198, 203–5, 213, 219, 221, 229–30, 232–33, 235, 241–42, 259, 262–63, 265–66, 269–70, 273, 288–89, 293, 304. See also audience, spectator view from everywhere, 3, 4 Villa Sovietica (museum exhibition), 242, 281– 82, 288, 290, 292, 296, 298, 301n3, 301n12, 301n14, 301n15, 301n18, 301n21, 304 violence, 68, 71n11, 92, 116n8, 120, 126, 168, 188, 241 virtual concept of, 22, 38n16, 69, 72n17 of the crystal image, 32 domain of, 5 the image as, 23, 24 not yet actual, 33 realm of, 18, 34 two-dimensional world, 187

326 • Index

virtuality, 37n8, 72n17 See also Bergson, Henri; Deleuze, Gilles visibility, 3, 19, 40, 52, 81 absence of, 5 concealed forms of, 4 of preestablished rationalities, 2 and social identities, 47 unambiguous, 5 the visible, 2, 4, 6, 189, 306 vision, 5–7, 18–19, 71n12, 78–80, 83, 87–89 enlightened vision, 2 face-vision, 90–93 infinite totality of, 3 limits of human vision, 175, 264 non-human, cinematic, 50 normative world of, 4 organized vision, 235 peripatetic vision, 204 phenomenology of, 76 pre-perspectival, 242 realization through, 23 shared vision of anthropology, 67 shattering of, 11 subject of, 166 See also gaze, perspective visual anthropology, 160–61, 166, 180, 198–201, 209, 214, 217–19, 224, 227–28, 237 visualist bias, 228 Vitti, Monica, 108n2 Vohnsen, Nina Holm, 9, 98, 131, 303–4 voice, 77, 81, 97–98, 100, 140, 145–46, 149–50, 154–55, 186, 188, 200, 205 giving, 54n3, 184 voice-over, 90, 205, 220, 232

von Luschan, Felix, 248 voyeurism, 108n3 W Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo, 169 Wagner, Roy, 18, 40–41, 53, 54n3, 54n4 Wastell, Sari, 5, 243, 252, 254 Weiner, James, 40, 53, 54, 54n1, 54n2 Welles, Orson, 230, 238n8 wholeness, 8, 102, 230, 242, 268 Wilde, Holland, 149, 151, 276n2 Willerslev, Rane, 1, 3, 4, 9, 17, 18, 71n13, 97, 159, 241, 259, 264 Williams, Raymond, 288 Wiseman, Frederic, 220, 222 writing academic, 198 anthropology, 1, 59, 66, 97, 138, 143, 213, 218 culture critique, 143, 302 culture debate, 97, 213, 223, 302–3 ethnographic, 11, 67, 180, 213, 215, 302–3, 306 forms, styles, 146, 150 postmodern, 155n4 Y Young, Colin, 209, 226–29, 231, 233–35, 238n3, 238n7, 238n9, 238n10 YouTube, 151–52 Z Zande (ethnic group), 256, 258 Zavattini, Cesare, 229, 230 Zeiderman, Austin, 116n8