Christian Suhr

“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)

“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.”  (Maria Vivod, Somatosphere.net)


TRANSCULTURAL MONTAGE

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.


ABOUT THE EDITORS

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.

The suspension of verbal and perceptive judgments on lived experience is the common ground of both phenomenology and meditative practice. But how does one suspend judgment? How does it feel? What kinds of understanding of ourselves and our relation to others and to the world may unfold through this particular operation?

In May 2019, 40 phenomenologists and meditators met near Loire valley to form a living laboratory. Their purpose was to investigate the experience of épochè; a central concept in phenomenology, often referred to as the act of suspending judgment.

This film documents how new understandings emerge in interactions between phenomenologists and experienced meditators. Through microphenomenological interviews and meditation they come to see the contours of specific micro-acts and micro-events that appear to be key to our ability of suspending judgment.

Ethnographic film, 58 min
Directed by: Christian Suhr and Claire Petitmengin
Filmed by: Christian Suhr; Edited by: Mette Bahnsen
Produced by: Christian Suhr, Mette Bahnsen, Claire Petitmengin, Natalie Depraz, and Michel Bitbol

The workshop was sponsored by Mind & Life Europe
© Mind & Life Europe and Persona Film

TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/369014148

The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present—as always in a state of emergence and involving images of past and future—the researchers explore the potential of audiovisual media for the critical (re)imagining of pasts and futures, in creative collaborations with their interlocutors. To create platforms for such collaboration different interventionist methods are used, including video feedback, the use of film archives in provocative museum installations, and the use of photo archives in intercultural dialogue and collaborative re-enactment. Another focus of attention is the particular affordances of the camera as technology. Here we explore the resistance that the camera, as a mechanical eye, exerts on the filmmakers’ intentions, thus prompting reflection on ways of seeing. The camera can also act as a mediator between people and their different ways of perceiving. Finally, we see the camera as a context-triggering device that can unsettle deep-seated cultural ways of seeing and understanding. In short, we conclude that audiovisual media have great potential for a cultural-critical and collaborative research practice.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08949468.2018.1497328

The medium of film has long been hailed for its capacity for producing shocks of an entertaining, thought-provoking, or even politically emancipative nature. But what is a shock, how and when does it occur, how long does it last, and are there particular techniques for producing cinematic shocks? In this text we exchange personal experiences of cinematic shocks and ponder over these questions as related to wider theories on human trauma, emancipation, and enlightenment. In conclusion we argue for a revision of anthropological notions of validity in terms of the efficacy of the cinematic shock rather than the perceived correspondence between cinema and the real.

Published in: "Experimental Film and Anthropology," edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino. 2014. London: Bloomsbury.

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.