Transcultural Montage

Published by Berghahn Books 2013

Transcultural Montage

Edited by: Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857459657

Overview
Contents

About this book

The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very “combustion chamber” of social theory by juxtaposing one’s claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.

Author / Editor information

Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and a post-doctoral research fellow in anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the co-director of the award-winning films Unity through Culture (DER, 2011), Ngat is Dead (DER, 2009), as well as Want a Camel, Yes? (Persona Film, 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?” (with Rane Willerslev, Current Anthropology, 2012).

Rane Willerslev has his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2003) and is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007) and On the Run in Siberia (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). He is the co-editor of Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (Ashgate Publishing, 2013). In addition, he has written extensively on topics related to vision, visuality, and filmmaking.

Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and a post-doctoral research fellow in anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the co-director of the award-winning films Unity through Culture (DER, 2011), Ngat is Dead (DER, 2009), as well as Want a Camel, Yes? (Persona Film, 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?” (with Rane Willerslev, Current Anthropology, 2012).

Reviews

“Transcultural Montage contains an abundance of fresh ideas in many sub-disciplines of anthropology such as medical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, cultural and economic anthropology, but also semantics, museology and knowledge production not to mention visual anthropology, the main sub-discipline to which this publication is dedicated. As one flips through the pages of this aesthetically striking edition (300 pages with more than 70 color illustrations) one stumbles upon beautiful, almost poetic accounts, photo images, self-ethnographies and descriptions of religious rituals. While reading the book one has the feeling of having a nice, handpicked collection of anthropological ideas in one’s hands.” · Somatosphere.net

“This is an ambitious and ground-breaking volume which takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective on what the editors have branded as ‘transcultural montage.’ ...The total effect is a mesmerising and in many ways insightful comparative endeavour that will do much to consolidate montage as a theme that goes to the heart of contemporary social theory.” · Martin Holbraad, University College London

“This is an important, innovative, and timely collection. Edited by two creative Scandinavian anthropologists, and with contributions from an impressive mix of established and up-coming names within performative anthropology, visual anthropology, and museum anthropology among other disciplinary subfields, the volume offers a significant contribution to this and cognate disciplines, and it is bound to have a great and lasting impact.” · Morten Axel Pedersen, University of Copenhagen

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I Montage as an Analytic
CHAPTER 1 Montage and Time Deleuze, Cinema, and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite Bruce Kapferer, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
CHAPTER 2 Temporal Aesthetics On Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology Morten Nielsen, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
CHAPTER 3 All the Difference in the World Liminality, Montage, and the Reinvention of Comparative Anthropology Stuart McLean, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
CHAPTER 4 Into the Gloaming A Montage of the Senses Andrew Irving, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
PART II Montage in Writing
CHAPTER 5 Being a Montage Anne Line Dalsgaard, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
CHAPTER 6 Smith’s Tour Favela Paul Antick, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	106
CHAPTER 7 Labor Days A Non-Linear Narrative of Development Nina Holm Vohnsen, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
CHAPTER 8 Mind the Gap Karen Lisa Salamon, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
PART III Montage in Film
CHAPTER 9 Women in Cities Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930s Catherine Russell, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
CHAPTER 10 Radioglaz and the Global City Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental Montage Julia T. S. Binter, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
CHAPTER 11 Filming in the Light of Memory Alyssa Grossman, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	198
CHAPTER 12 Montage as Analysis in Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking From Hunting for Plots Toward Weaving Baskets of Data Jakob Kirstein Høgel, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
CHAPTER 13 In Defense of Observational Cinema The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic Filmmaking Anna Grimshaw, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	226
PART IV Montage in Museum Exhibitions
CHAPTER 14 Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond Correspondence Peter Bjerregaard, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
CHAPTER 15 Assembling Bodies Cuts, Clusters, and Juxtapositions Rebecca Empson, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	262
CHAPTER 16 Project Villa Sovietica Clashing Images, Expectations, and Receptions Alexandra Schüssler, Willem Mes, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	278
AFTERWORD The Traffic In Montage, Then and Now George E Marcus, Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	302
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	308
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	312

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 300
Keywords: Anthropology (General); Cultural Studies (General); Film and Television Studies; Museum Studies

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780857459657