About this item
Highlights
- The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world.
- Author(s): Christian Suhr & Rane Willerslev
- 300 Pages
- Social Science, Anthropology
Description
Book Synopsis
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.
Review Quotes
"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
