Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 contributorsanthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curatorsexplore 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.
Trade Review “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
Table of Contents Introduction: Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility
Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr
Part I: Montage as an Analytic
Chapter 1. Montage and Time: Deleuze, Cinema and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite
Bruce Kapferer
Chapter 2. Temporal Aesthetics: On Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology
Morten Nielsen
Chapter 3. All the Difference in the World: Liminality, Montage and the Re-Invention of Comparative Anthropology
Stuart McLean
Chapter 4. Into the Gloaming: A Montage of the Senses
Andrew Irving
Part II: Montage in Writing
Chapter 5. Being a Montage
Anne Line Dalsgaard
Chapter 6. Smith’s Tour Favela
Paul Antick
Chapter 7. Labour days: a non-linear narrative of development
Nina Vohnsen
Chapter 8. Mind the Gap
Karen Lisa Salamon
Part III: Montage in Film
Chapter 9. Women in Cities: Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930s
Catherine Russell
Chapter 10. Radioglaz and the Global City: Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental Montage
Julia T. S. Binter
Chapter 11. Filming in the Light of Memory
Alyssa Grossman
Chapter 12. Montage as analysis in ethnographic and documentary filmmaking: From hunting for plots towards weaving baskets of data
Jakob Kirstein Høgel
Chapter 13. In Defense of Observational Cinema: The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic Filmmaking
Anna Grimshaw
Part IV: Montage in Museum Exhibitions
Chapter 14. Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects: Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond Correspondence
Peter Bjerregaard
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
Afterword: The Traffic in Montage, Then and Now
George E. Marcus
