Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 3
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From Ethnographic Surrealism to Surrealist Ethnographies / Anja Schwanhäußer and Stefan Wellgraf
<1> In his famous essay "On Ethnographic Surrealism" James Clifford describes it as a research perspective shared by anthropologists and artists in Paris during the 1920s and 30s (Clifford 1981). The ethnographic-surrealist perspective focused on the marvelous and the poetic of the everyday instead of its rule- and norm-boundedness. It was characterized by a fascination for the exotic as well as by a playful view toward its own culture and operated with techniques of collage and montage through which disparate elements were artfully combined. While we acknowledge James Clifford's argument that Ethnographic Surrealism is not a scientific program in the strict sense, we also look forward to a future, the emergence of a Surrealist practice of ethnography that acknowledges the scientific influences and dimensions of Surrealism often overlooked in traditional appraisals.
<2> We are revisiting Ethnographic Surrealism to enlarge its temporal and geographical scope and to suggest a surrealist-inspired research approach. Clifford reconstructed the Ethnographic Surrealism of the interwar-period in France. We look at the afterlife of Ethnographic Surrealism after the Second World War in different countries. We are following the assumption that underneath the official history of cultural anthropology a subcutaneous stream of research can be delineated and will sketch the outlines of this alternative history of anthropology with regard to France, Great Britain, the USA and Germany. Doing so means taking national particularities into account, but also being aware of transnational conjunctures and overarching thematic orientations, for example a shared attention to the dark and ghostly or to the profane and ephemeral. The questions concerning the "rogue tradition" (Suarez 1999: 124) of Ethnographic Surrealism can only be answered speculatively and in sketches here, by highlighting remote traces and re-evaluating irritating moments in the history of the discipline. It is an untold story which gains its force by emphasizing the exception rather than the historical consensus. This does not mean that the history of Ethnographic Surrealism is disconnected from the official history of science. On the contrary, as part of overarching cultural constellations and as a reaction to developments inside anthropology the Surrealist perspective appears cyclically, around 1950 when anthropology, folk culture and avant-garde art again had a brief flirtatious liaison, during the counter-culture wave around 1968, and in the context of the discussions on postmodernity and "writing culture" during the 1980s. Following the methodological lead of cultural historian Greil Marcus (Marcus 1996: 10), we are outlining a 20 th century congeniality of Ethnographic Surrealism across different times and places.
<3> Recently reappearing references in art and science indicate that we may witness again a renaissance of Ethnographic Surrealism today. Trendy slogans like "artistic research" express a vague hope that something of an earlier elective affinity between the artistic and anthropological avant-garde might have survived, but they are mainly used in a rather a-historical manner. We want to fuel this hope by looking in the second part at Surrealist-inspired ethnographies dealing with affects, drugs, ghosts and the city and by outlining the methodological consequences and epistemological potentials of this research perspective. By doing so we attempt to make Ethnographic Surrealism usable again. We want to provide concrete suggestions as to what experimental work at the borders of anthropology, art and literature could look like. This critical intervention resists attempts to streamline academic research and to void ethnography of its curiosity, fascination and poetry. It is particularly critical of an anthropology which is so reflexively enlightened that it cannot account for the enchantments of fieldwork anymore and which reacts to the popularity of ethnographic methods outside the discipline with mistrust and by closing its own doors.[1]
1. Avant Gardes of Ethnographic Surrealism
<4> In selecting the countries we were looking for traces of Ethnographic Surrealism in we constrained our view to France, Great Britain, the USA and Germany - obviously a Western-centric selection, which is due to the history of Surrealism as counter-movement to modernity inside Western modernity. We nevertheless plan to look at Ethnographic Surrealism outside the Western Hemisphere in the future, which will include a reassessment of authors like Brazil's Darcy Ribeiro, to name just one example. This time, we start with a short visit to the birthplace of Ethnographic Surrealism in France. In Great Britain we then find a documentary style Surrealism which leads up to current discussions on the everyday. In the USA we encounter with Carlos Castaneda a counter-culture version, with James Clifford a postmodern interpretation and with Michael Taussig a postcolonial Surrealism. And finally, we are looking for some traces of Ethnographic Surrealism in our native Germany, where a rebellious group of left-wing anthropologists were shaking up anthropology in the 1970s.
France: The Birthplace of Ethnographic Surrealism
<5> Ethnographic Surrealism was the offspring of a particular constellation in Paris of the 1920s and 30s, marked by the affinity of the not yet established academic discipline of anthropology with the arts and the rise of Surrealism as a cultural movement during this period. With the journal "Documents", the research diary "Phantom Africa" and the "Collège des Sociologie" we are briefly revisiting some of the key moments of the development of a research approach, whose continuing fascination we deal with in this essay.
<6> The journal "Documents", founded by art-critic Carl Einstein and led by Georges Bataille, during its brief time span between 1929 and 1931, was one of the earliest prominent examples of Ethnographic Surrealism. The journal offered mainly those artists and writers a forum, who had parted with André Breton after disputes inside the Surrealist movement during the 1920s, among them Michel Leiris, André Masson und Juan Miro (Kieso/Schmidgen 2005 97-122). The original subheading of the journal indicates its main reference points: "Archeology, Beaux Arts, Ethnology, Varieté". "Archeology" was indicating a strong and detailed interest in the objects of material culture. "Beaux Arts" meant mainly contemporary art of the time, for example Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. "Ethnology" stood for the allure of the exotic, which was searched for both in faraway places as well as in Parisian backyards. The designation "Varieté", which later fell away, represented a performative and playful approach. The journal stood for an evocative and sometimes macabre combination of disparate elements from high- and popular culture. Essays on ethnographic research found their place besides photographs of apes dressed in women's costumes, close-up views of human organs and images of Brazilian puppet-heads or the frozen river Seine. The journal thus not only assembled voices of Ethnographic Surrealism, it also put this approach into practice. After the "Documents" ended in the 1930s, it was quickly followed by other rather short-lived Surrealist journals.
<7> One of the protagonists of the "Documents", Michel Leiris, had by then already left France and embarked on a two-year ethnographic expedition - the soon to become famous Dakar-Djibouti-Mission led by Marcel Griaule. After returning to Paris, Leiris published in 1934 a critical travel and research diary called "Phantom Africa" (Leiris 1934), which provoked a scandal and a fierce defense from within French anthropology. Current research by Vincent Dabaene argues that the peculiar tendency of French anthropologists since the 1930s to publish a "second" literary book besides a "classic" ethnographic research report not only had to do with a close relation between French literature and anthropology (Dabaene 2010). The turn to literature was a also a reaction to positivist tendencies in French anthropology, which demarcated its borders with regard to art and writing by restraining itself to strictly scientific writing on social structure, religion and folk customs of foreign people. But anthropologists still felt deeply moved and transformed by their research travels and the poetic "second book" offered them a way to express these experiences, with Claude Lévi-Strauss "Tristes Tropiques" (1955) being maybe the most prominent example.
<8> Michel Leiris was then again influential for the "Collège de Sociologie" led by George Bataille and Roger Caillos, which existed from 1937 until 1939, when German troops invaded Paris and dispersed the members of the original Surrealist movement (Hollier 2012). The "College de Sociologie" added to the Surrealist movement in art and literature a more systematic social science orientation. It was less playful than the "Documents", but offered an outline for a Surrealist-inspired academic research program. Leiris' reflections about "The Sacred in Everyday Life" (1938) was crucial for this project. The "sacred" stood here for those moments, objects and places of everyday life which carried a quasi-religious attraction. The "sacred in everyday life" meant those outbreaks of profane time which often go unnoticed - the allure of an object, the strange sound of a word or the childish excitements on a racing track. Leiris thus limited the sacred neither to the sphere of the religious, nor to faraway culture, but looked for its traces in French contemporary culture of the time. The intellectual interest in the extraordinary of the everyday has later been conceptualized in different ways, among others by Roland Barthes with his reflections on the "Punctum" (1980) and, more recently, by Brian Massumi (2002) and Kathleen Stewart (2007) with regard to "intensities" and "ordinary affects".
<9> What happened to French Ethnographic Surrealism after the end of the surrealist movement in art, film and literature? Though it never again played a crucial role in the intellectual milieu comparable to its influence in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, it also never waned completely. Claude Lévi-Strauss met with the Surrealists during his exile in New York in the 1940s, in the 1970s anthropologists like Roger Renand wrote for journals like La Civilisation surréaliste and Bulletin de liaison surréaliste, and in the 1980s and 90s the idea of Ethnographic Surrealism fascinated French scholars in the humanities. French anthropologists never lost their disposition for literary and experimental approaches to ethnographic writing, which is why the US-American "Writing Culture"-debate did not provoke as much furor in France as it did in other places. A productive liaison between the avant-garde of art and anthropology can also be found with Jean Rouch in the domain of visual anthropology, to which we will turn later in this essay.
Great Britain: The Documentary Tradition
<10> In a footnote James Clifford points to British "Mass Observation" as "another possible example of "surrealist ethnography" (Clifford 1981: 143). This research project developed in England in the 1930s, where otherwise the Surrealist movement was rather weak. It was initiated by the Surrealist painter and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, who just before had organized a big Surrealism exhibition in London together with André Breton, and the poet and journalist Charles Madge, who proclaimed that the British know too little about their next door neighbors. "Mass Observation" aimed at a comprehensive inventory of British popular culture, which was regarded as an exotic world. There were more than 500 associated lay-researchers, which is why it was called a "movement". They applied a variety of methods, characteristic was the strong focus on ethnography and the embrace of the subjectivity of the researcher, who was invited to follow spontaneous ideas and look for unexpected findings. According to Ben Highmore the motive of "Mass Observation" was to counter the aloof qualities of French Surrealism with a "popular poetry". Madge and Jennings understood Surrealism not as an art movement but as a "laboratory of studies" (Madge in Highmore: 82) focused on everyday life.
<11> The British version of Ethnographic Surrealism showed another orientation compared to the French one. The cultural context was different and according to George Melley rather unfavorable for the Surrealist movement: The British lacked cafés at the time, they mistrusted lofty ideas, group activities were rather short-lived and Protestantism dominated over Catholicism - compared to the more playful Paris, London seemed rather "masculine" (Melly 1991: 63). The anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fisher point in the same direction when they locate Surrealism in France and associate the Anglo-Saxon world of the time with a documentary tradition (Marcus/Fisher 1991). Or to put it another way: while the French emphasized the "Sur-", the British stuck more to the "-realism" of Surrealism.
<12> In a newspaper ad by Madge and Jennings calling for people to participate, a range of topics was suggested, which juxtaposed Politics and the Profane in a surreal manner:
Behaviour of people at war memorials. / Shouts and gestures of motorists. / The aspidistra cult. / Anthropology of football pools. / Bathroom behaviour. / Beards, armpits, eyebrows. / Anti-semitism. / Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke. / Funerals and undertakers. / Female taboos about eating. / The private lives of midwives. " (New Statesman and Nation, 30.1.1937, In: Calder/Sheridan 1984: 4)
<13> The first and most famous book of "Mass Observation" was called "May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by over two hundred observers" (Jennings/Madge 1937) and documented British everyday life at the day of the king's inauguration. Parallel to the book Jennings arranged diverse visual sequences for a poetic documentary film, which resembled Surrealist film-collages. The combination of extensive documentary material and artful montage was the specificity of this version of British Ethnographic Surrealism. Just like Breton had proclaimed in France, this form of Surrealism produced film-like images, which brought together far-away realities (Breton 1924/Matthews 1977).
<14> The history of science has largely neglected "Mass Observation" and only recently begun to reassess its influence on British Society before and after 1945. It is little known that Charles Madge was later professor of sociology at the University of Birmingham, when the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was born there. Some indeed see "Mass Observation" as a crucial precursor of British cultural studies as both focus passionately on everyday life (McGuigan 1992). Taking the work of CCCS-ethnographer Paul Willis as an example, this claim seems justified. His study on motor-bikers (1981) realizes decades later Mass Observation's call to make the "shouts and gestures of motorists" a relevant topic of research and the title of his study - "Profane Culture" - brings to mind the valorization of the profane and of the products of mass culture in Surrealism. At the CCCS Tom Jeffrey (1978) even published a paper on "Mass Observation", in which he notes a "serious lacuna": "it may be that I should have paid more attention to the importance of surrealism in the early years of M-O." (Jeffrey 1978: 1).
<15> This link has been revisited more recently in contemporary approaches to the everyday. The cultural historian Ben Highmore, who teaches at the university of Sussex, where the archive of "Mass Observation" is housed, calls the movement a kind of surrealist ethnography (Highmore 2002; see also Sheringham 2006). Lately, projects and studies once again experiment with this approach, for example London's "Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop" (Read 1993), which combined performance and ethnography in the 1990s, or the popular study "Queuing for Beginners" by Joe Moran (2007), which follows the sequences and rhythms of everyday life. Most recently, the well-known London based anthropologist Les Back gets inspiration from Mass Observation in his "Live methods" manifesto. The way one should listen carefully to the popular poetry, blur the boundaries between academic work and life and work "on the move" draws from Mass Observation ideas. Back even suggests a new kind of mass observation which produces a "pluralization of observers" with the help of digital technology (Back/Puwar 2012). What makes "Mass Observation" attractive is that it developed a research perspective on the poetry of the everyday, which combined the real with the surreal. It stands for an approach which embraces the complexities and contradictions of everyday life by wandering and living through it and by assembling the collected materials into collages and images.
USA: Varieties of Ethnographic Surrealism
<16> It was in U.S.-American anthropology where Ethnographic Surrealism had probably its most influential revivals after the Second World War. As U.S.-anthropology is very diverse and multi-faceted important authors like Ruth Behar, Allen Shelton and Craig Campbell will not find a place in this brief overview. We limit ourselves instead to three iconic figures in U.S.-anthropology since the 1960s: Carlos Castaneda, James Clifford and Michael Taussig.
<17> Carlos Castaneda has most likely been the best-selling anthropologist of his time and at the same time he was, arguably, the most controversial and criticized one. We constrain ourselves to his first and still most famous book, "The Teachings of Don Juan" (1968), which we read as a 68-counter culture version of Ethnographic Surrealism. Castaneda was, like the Surrealists he appreciated, aiming at another level of reality beyond Western rationalism. "The Teachings of Don Juan" reflects on his apprenticeship with an Indian shaman and his experiences with hallucinogenic drugs in the form of a diary. But it is not only magic and spirituality or dreams and ecstasy which this book is about. It starts not in the "wilderness" but at a "profane" bus-station. Anthropologists at the time valued his way of combining sensual anthropology with an anthropology of the senses as an innovative approach (Noel 1976). Castaneda's questioning of the modern way of life by contrasting it with alternative realities articulated a sensibility of the American counter cultures of the 1960s and 70s. Their preoccupation with "Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll" has moved to the centre of society since, with alternative tourism, ecstatic partying and shamanism cults by now well incorporated into Post-Fordist capitalism. "The Teachings of Don Juan" has become a New Age commercial classic in the meantime, an enigmatic example of the "Psychedelic Sixties" (Fikes 1993) with an impact far beyond anthropology. In anthropology itself Castaneda has lost most of his early credit with his subsequent publications and his self-staging as a macho and guru (Noel 1976 / Fikes 1993). What is lost with the often rightful critique is a recognition of the literary and evocative qualities of "The Teachings of Don Juan" and Castaneda's focus on the senses, which valued drugs as a complex cultural practice worthy of ethnographic analysis.
<18> Another version of Ethnographic Surrealism appeared in the early 1980s in the context of the debates on postmodernity. It was James Clifford who coined the current use of the term "Ethnographic Surrealism" and who earns the major credit for putting this approach back on the academic landscape. As every post-mortem adaption of Surrealism, his historical reading of the French intellectual scene of the interwar-period was also a motivated one - a "partial truth" (Clifford 1986) as he himself might have said. The Surrealist motive of playing around with disparate cultural elements fitted well into a postmodern affinity for fluctuating and hybrid signs. The Surrealist writings of early French anthropologists became inspirational for a US-anthropology starting to question traditional ways of ethnographic representation and beginning to experiment with literary and polyphonic approaches. What was left out in Clifford's reading, however, was the revolutionary and anti-capitalist orientation of the Surrealist movement. His Ethnographic Surrealism was not only stripped of Surrealism's revolutionary rhetoric, but was also a very academic, script-centric and US-focused one, which neglected some major works of Ethnographic Surrealism, like the films by Jean Rouch.
<19> While Clifford moved on to other fields of inquiry and became one of the prominent voices of the "Writing Culture" (1986) debate in the 1980s, Ethnographic Surrealism was once again given another touch by Australian-born anthropologist Michael Taussig. His recourse to Surrealism occurred in the mid-1980s after he had spent time in different Western universities but also years in Colombia's Amazonian forest, where he followed a shaman who introduced him to the world of Yagé rituals. Back at Sydney he struggled to find a way to convey these life-changing experiences in the jungle without falling into structural reductionism. It is the reading of Walter Benjamin and the French Surrealists which opens a door and shows him a path for poetic anthropology, which he has followed since then with impressive conviction and productivity. His research on Colombian shamanism developed into the by-now classic "Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man", which was followed in the coming decades by a number of studies. His ethnographic writing stands for radical subjectivism and evocative storytelling, which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. Like French Surrealism was born out of the shocks of World War I, Taussig's surrealist ethnography grew out of the massive (post)colonial violence he encountered in Colombia, both in the archive and on the streets. It is a poetic but also a bloody Ethnographic Surrealism Taussig developed, fueled theoretically by his idiosyncratic usage of concepts by Walter Benjamin, including "profane illumination" and "dialectical image", and ideas by George Bataille, like his reflection on "wasting" and "the rotten sun".
<20> Taussig is today arguably the most influential representative of Ethnographic Surrealism. He inspired a younger generation of anthropologists, but also has a reputation far beyond academia. His writings, as well as those of Castaneda, Clifford and others, exemplify how Ethnographic Surrealism has repeatedly resurfaced in U.S.-anthropology. It is alive, as long as it is reinvented by every new generation and adapted to new theoretical developments.
Germany: Influential Outsiders
<21> In German anthropology Ethnographic Surrealism has been rather weak. Anthropology and folklore studies had been instrumental to Nazi-ideology and lost touch with the avant-gardes in art and science in the meantime. After lofty constructions of Aryan racial superiority fell to pieces, German anthropologists preferred to restrain themselves to seemingly innocent empiricism. What followed was a period of academic boredom and stagnation (Haller 2012). Since the 1970s, however, German ethnology was transformed: folklore studies changed into cultural studies and anthropology was shaken up by a group of rebellious outsiders: Fritz Kramer, Hans Peter Duerr, Hubert Fichte and Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. It was a young generation of leftwing 68-anthropologists, which focused their revolutionary hopes since the 1970s increasingly on foreign cultures. They became well-known intellectuals in Germany but struggled to find a place in academic anthropology. Although very different in character and working-style, what united their work and made it provocative was its surrealist touch.
<22> Fritz Kramer was fascinated by the complex mirroring effects between European and African cultures, for example how in demonic possession rituals mimesis and trance was used to deal with and keep at bay the dangerous European other (Kramer 1977, 1987). By following the different cultural processes of constructing the division between "us" and the endangering "other", he showed that exoticism was a two-way street, though operating differently in both directions. Kramer was the central intellectual figure in the Berlin-institute of anthropology in the 1970s, which informally was labeled the "Kramer-Institut", but was regarded as too radical to ever get a professorship there. Only in the 1990s did he receive tenure at an art-school in Hamburg. His friend Hans Peter Duerr was similarly emblematic, though in a louder and more aggressive way. His book "Dreamtime" (1984), dealing with alternative forms of thinking and living, was inspired both by Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan" and by his own experiments with psychedelic drugs. It was rejected as a doctoral thesis in anthropology and became a commercial bestseller with the high-ranking Suhrkamp publishing house instead. Hubert Fichte was already a successful novelist when he embarked on expansive research on Afro-American religions in the 1970s. His subsequent books "Xango" (1976) and "Petersilie" (1980) failed to support his academic ambitions at the time. Only posthumously his empirical depth, his reflexive postcolonial approach avant la lettre and his impressive style of literary montage were regarded as groundbreaking (Neumann 1991). Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs contributed to opening up German anthropology by expanding its canon. His Qumram-Publishing House offered in the 1980s a well-noticed place for alternative anthropological approaches by combining literature, photography and ethnography. He first published the writings of Victor Segalen and his favorite Michel Leiris (Heinrichs 1981) in German and wrote himself on Ethnopoetry and Ethnopsychoanalysis among other things (Heinrichs 1989). By doing so, he put subjective and literary approaches, and particularly French Surrealism, on the German intellectual agenda.
<23> Kramer, Duerr, Fichte and Heinrichs were major figures but not the only affiliates of the surrealist avant-garde in German anthropology. They were part of a loose group of intellectual bohemians, including also Johannes Fabian and Michael Oppitz, some of whom you can still meet when frequenting the cafés of West-Berlin, where they tend to enjoy their retirement. Though their outstanding personalities and publications had a major impact in the 1970s and 80s, they struggled to be accepted in academia. But by doing so, they opened in the long-run the doors for their students, many of whom by now have made careers in anthropology and contributed to making German ethnology more diverse and exciting. By focusing on magical combinations of disparate cultural artefacts, by trying to reach alternative stages of consciousness, by combining ethnography with literature and by introducing the writings of French Ethnographic Surrealism in Germany they all tended in different ways toward Surrealist approaches, but also changed and adapted Ethnographic Surrealism for their own research agendas. In living at the margins - being highly influential both within and outside anthropology but also being excluded and made into academic outsiders - they shared another common feature of many of the avant-gardes of Ethnographic Surrealism.
2. Fields and Methods: Outline of a Surrealist Ethnographic Style
<24> After pointing to different but also overarching national trajectories of Ethnographic Surrealism, we now look at selected fields of inquiry, in order to outline the epistemological potential of this approach. Ethnographic Surrealists have been fascinated by the counterparts of Western rationality, affects and drugs, trance and obsession, dreams and ghosts, or the floating and the ephemeral of the city. Again, other topics could have been included or reevaluated with a Surrealist agenda in mind, those at the border between anthropology and art like performance anthropology, media anthropology and ethnographic museums or those at the centre of the Western modernity like schools, hospitals, the military - and, of course, the university. Our selection serves to outline a Surrealist ethnographic research style, to grasp the point of view of Ethnographic Surrealism, to see what comes to the fore with such a perspective and to show what instruments can be used or should be developed for it.
Touching & Moving: Senses and Affects
<25> Michel Leiris' already mentioned reflections on "The Sacred in Everyday Life" still point to a major preoccupation of Surrealist inspired anthropologists. At the centre of this approach lies the interest in the extraordinary of the ordinary. A preoccupation, which is currently at the focus of sense- and affect-studies, where it is empirically expanded and theoretically reconceptualized. Sensual Anthropology criticizes the dominance of vision and asks for a "sensual revolution" (Howes 2006: 1) much like the Surrealists have done before. Aiming to break with ocular-centrism, it is intended to bring new forms of feeling and subjectivity to the fore. In a similar vein, the moving and the touching have been grasped by affect studies as forces below or before social convention and established categorizations. Affects are those things or moments in art or everyday life that touch and move us even though we often do not have a language for them (Massumi 2002). Affect-theory focuses on emergent and latent emotional formations and connected regimes of sensual perception, bodily movement and atmospheric attunements (Seigworth/Gregg 2010). The attempt to grasp affective and sensual moments without robbing them of their ambiguity or reducing them to fixed semantic forms often goes along with literary and subjective forms of writing and with Surrealist inspired modes of introspection and montage. Michel Taussig's methodical reflections and Kathleen Stewart's ethnographic take on the sensual and affective quality of the ordinary show us ways how this can inspire ethnographic research.
<26> Taussig points to the epistemological potentials of being moved and disturbed in the field in his methodological reflections on drawings in field diaries (Taussig 2011). When passing a highway tunnel in Medellin, Columbia, he notices in passing a scene in which a woman lying in the tunnel is wrapping the man beside her in a kind of sleeping bag. "I swear, I saw this" - Taussig's book title refers to the amazement of the ethnographer in the face of the banality of such ordinary and yet memorable scenes of everyday poverty. The researcher is not the master in the field, but captured by his observations. Taussig emphasizes the importance of such affective and sensual moments during research, their fleeting and fragmentary character, and recommends the use of diaries and drawings to incorporate them into process of ethnographic knowledge production. A kind of self-chosen alienation helps one to be receptive to the extraordinary of the ordinary. If the absurd, strange, surprising and banal moments are not overlooked, secretly put to the side or responded to with structural reductionism, we may gain insights to the surreality of the "normal". Taussig also rejects the strict separation between facts and fiction, as this border suggests that in contrast to the subjective world of the affected researcher there might be a "safe" sphere of facts, in which data exist in a quasi raw condition. Consequently, Taussig has turned to arts and literature in recent years and understands ethnography itself as a kind of artistic endeavor.
<27> Taussig's poetic anthropology has been a major inspiration for Kathleen Stewart, an anthropologist whose ethnographic writings focus on the affective and sensual qualities of the everyday. Her most recent study on "Ordinary Affects" (2007) is a radical experiment of ethnographic writing, a dense collage of observations of the emotional force of somehow outstanding ordinary events and encounters. She uses surrealist techniques of montage and collage to convey the rhythms, the emergent forms and the underlying forces of everyday American class culture. Taking up Gilles Deleuze's conception of "assemblages" and Brian Massumi's reflection on "intensities" she understands affects as those electrifying but often barely noticed emotional textures of the everyday, whose poetry and density she attempts to convey by mixing intriguing observations of US-American class- and consumer-culture with personal and theoretical reflections. Even though the scenes she describes are loaded with political meaning, she avoids theoretical short-circuits with regard to scientific catchwords like "class society" or "neoliberalism". Instead, she intends to preserve the ambivalent emotional terrain beneath the cloud of big explanations in its fragility and contradictoriness. She uses Surrealist techniques of montage and collage to evoke an image of the everyday as highly affectively charged and loaded with sensual qualities, as touched by forces and movements, shocks and surprises.
<28> Both Taussig's and Stewart's ethnographic take on the incommensurability of the everyday goes along with a critique of mainstream social science approaches and their often rash categorization and solidification of fragmentary and disparate cultural elements. Emergent and fleeting forms do not always make up for a coherent whole. There is often something like another level of reality beyond the smooth and profane surface of the ordinary. In a way they follow Breton's call from the First Manifesto of Surrealism to not reduce the unknown to the known and to be caught by the images which offer themselves in a spontaneous and tyrannous fashion (Breton 1924: 15, 34).
The „Wild" - Shamans and Possession
<29> The idea of trance, ecstasy and allusions to another dimension of reality, seen in reference both to "primitive" cultures as well as to psychoanalytic experiments at "home", has played a crucial role in Surrealism. Antonin Artaud, for example, saw in Mexican ecstasy-rituals a way to arrive at a deeper understanding of his own European identity, a means to access a "truth" which the people in Europe have "lost" (Artaud 2002). Also Surrealist inspired ethnographers have been passionately attracted by the "wild" and the "other" of Western modernity. Drugs, shamans and possession have become a leitmotif of Ethnographic Surrealism. We could once again visit the work of Michael Taussig, Hans Peter Duerr and others mentioned above in this regard, but instead, we'll limit ourselves to examples from the domain of ethnographic film. We do so in order to highlight the work of three extraordinary filmmakers obsessed with possession rituals - Maya Deren, Jean Rouch and Michel Oppitz - but also to point out some methodological implications of their visual approaches. While Surrealist inspired ethnographers have tended to literary forms of writing, they have also been more inclined than others to break away from the limits of the written text and to experiment with film and photography, as well as with combinations of image and text.
<30> The experimental filmmaker Maya Deren was a key figure in bringing European Surrealism in conversation with post-war US-American avant-gardes in art and anthropology, notably with Gregory Bateson, who at that time had worked on "Trance and Dance in Bali", together with Margaret Mead (Nicholls 2001, Russel 1999, Deren 2005). Deren's experimental short-films replaced conventional narrative structure with a dream-like flow of images, intended to bring forward a deeper mythological or psychological truth. By taking a position critical of both Hollywood fiction and naturalist documentary she opened the way for a Surrealist inspired ethnographic film, and by considering filmic means such as camera and editing as means of art, she further assisted in breaking down the borders between artistic and documentary film. Around 1950, Deren embarked on a series of research trips on Voodoo-rituals in Haiti. While she intended to make a film, she ended up writing an ethnography on voodoo and possession-rituals (Deren 1953), but also left hours of unedited film-footage. Having collaborated with dancers before, her fascination for the bodily movements of trance and dance was going far beyond a controlled participant observation. To understand the cathartic effects of Voodoo, she went a step further and used the movements of her own dancing body as an instrument of research.
<31> Like Deren, the French anthropologist filmmaker Jean Rouch was inspired by the Surrealist movement of his youth and remained in lively contact with the arts throughout his life, for example by collaborations with the theatre of Jean Genet and Peter Brook. In the context of his films on possession-rituals he developed the concept of ciné-trance according to which the filmmaker leaves his "normal self" during the filming and gets into a condition of quasi-hypnosis, a process that resembles surrealist experiments of the 1920s like automatic writing (Russel 1999: 218-229). His most famous film on possession rituals is called Les Maîtres Fous and depicts a ritual of the West-African Hauka, who deal with colonialism by mimesis and forms of trance, in which they become possessed by distinct elements of foreign colonial culture, like the train or the governor. In the early 1990s it was argued in the journal "Visual Anthropology" as to whether Les Maîtres Fous is a good example of Ethnographic Surrealism or not. Jeanette de Bouzek (1989) located Rouch's "ethno-fiction" in this tradition by pointing to his use of montage-techniques, while Michael Roberts (1996) saw Rouch as a representative of an apolitical postmodern American version of Surrealism. Though Roberts was misunderstanding Rouch by using a very restricted notion of the political and by not looking at the diversity of his oeuvre, he nevertheless pointed to existing differences in time- and place-specific anthropological adoption of Surrealism and thus to the contingency of recent US-American interpretations.
<32> Michal Oppitz - who was kind of an outsider of the loose group of the left-wing outsiders of German anthropology mentioned above, as he spent much of the 1970s and 80s away in Nepal - has devoted his four-hour long film on Himalayan shamanism to Maya Deren, as he saw them meeting at the same crossroad, just coming from different directions. In contrast to Deren, who ended writing an artistically inspired ethnography, Oppitz made an ethnographic film with artistic qualities, feeling unable to grasp shamanic rituals with words alone. Oppitz opposes the separation between words and images in anthropology and his subsequent exhibitions and books are richly illustrated, especially his recent 1240-page long oeuvre on "The Morphology of the Shaman Drum" (Oppitz 2013). His landmark film "Shamans in the Blind Land" from 1980 has been influential in anthropology and art alike. Artists like Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys visited the screenings of the 35-hours raw material, with the latter commenting that the shamans have stolen from his work, and beat-poet William Burroughs has borrowed his old smoky voice for the English version of the film. "Blind" refers to those who can only see with their eyes but lack the spiritual perspective of the shamans. The artistic quality of the film comes not with obvious visual experiments, but subtlety with the passing of time and with what Oppitz calls "the beauty of exactitude" (Oppitz 1989). Catching a specific mood, situation or feeling with all its subtleties through intense research and the mastery of verbal and/or visual form can lend ethnographic work an aesthetic surplus, it will make ethnography not only better but also more beautiful.
Ghosts: The "dark" side of Surrealism
<32> Maurice Nadeau (1945), the first great historian of the Surrealist movement, correlated the Surrealist tendency for the dark and ghostly with the early war experiences of its protagonists. André Breton worked in 1916 in the neuropsychiatric clinic of Saint Dizier, where he treated soldiers traumatized by the First World War (Barck 1986). Similarly, Louis Aragon was first a student of medicine before he met Breton in 1917. The Surrealists had their first contact with the uncanny and the unconscious during the war in an academic milieu strongly influenced by the psychiatric school of Marie Charcot and Pierre Janet. From Janet they took the emphasis of the importance of psychic automatisms, but distanced themselves from his therapeutic perspective. Also their relation to Freud was marked by attraction and distancing. The unconscious is at the centre of much Surrealist work, but the Surrealists did not want to be cured, instead they propagated the non-distinction between reality and imagination. They were fascinated by psychic disruptions, which they took as dissociative means to gain access to historic and psychic underworlds. Through the deliberate production of non-conscious states of mind - for example through dream-séances, automatic writing and chance encounters - a new form of art and knowledge was established, which suited the shocks of war-torn capitalist society and the modern individual.
<33> Going along this line, contemporary art-historians like Hal Foster have emphasized the "dark" side of Surrealism, its traumatic and uncanny dimension. In his book "Compulsive Beauty" (1993) he takes the concept of the uncanny - the return of the repressed in another form - as a key to the understanding of Surrealism and as a central reference point for Surrealist aesthetic categories like the "marvelous" and "convulsive beauty". Since the 1990s, a revival of the uncanny can be observed (Jay 1998, Gordon 1997, Sprinker 1999), connected to a growing interest in dreams, trauma, ghosts, animism and fetishism and theoretically fuelled by the writings of Freud (1919), Adorno (1969) and Derrida (1993). Parallel to this Surrealism has been positively re-evaluated in the 1990s. The ghostly side of Ethnographic Surrealism is especially poignant in a number of ethnographies on East- and Southeast Asia, out of which we have selected two particularly impressive ones: Heonik Kwon's (2008) "Ghosts of War in Vietnam" and Grace Sho's (2008) "Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War".
<34> Kwon interprets the widespread belief in ghosts and the current forms of ancestor worship as a culturally specific form of coming to terms with the Vietnamese War and the violent deaths it caused. Ghosts are those "uncles and aunts" who have died "in the streets" during the war and did not get a proper funeral. The trend of reburials in Vietnam since the 1990s and the numerous reports on ghost-appearances are forms of dealing with death that are in contrast to the official heroic politics of memory. With reference to ethnographic and literary writing traditions Kwon calls his approach "radical empirism" and "magic realism" (Kwon 2008: 9). The reader is carried away and may start to doubt the categorical separation between the dead and the living, as an example we can take the traditional evening of the wandering ghosts, on which Kwon meets a "six-fingered village medium" (Ibid: 150) on a dark cemetery:
Kwon: Do people in your world still argue and fight for a cause? Is there still an "Our side" and "their side" in your world, too?
Sharpshooter: No, my dear foreigner, dead people don't fight. War is the business of the living. People in my world do not remember the intentions and the objectives of the war they fought while they were in your world. (Ibid: 135)
Also the Korean-American anthropologist Grace Cho works on a specific war trauma - yangongju, naming those more than one million Korean women who worked as prostitutes for US-soldiers during the Korean War in the 1950s. They were regarded with a mix of envy and contempt, as they embodied both the American Dream and the national subjugation. More than 100,000 of them married US-soldiers, among them Cho's mothers. The memory of prostitution has been repressed inside her family, and thus passed over from generation to generation in the ghostly form of a family trauma, which haunts much of the Korean diaspora in the USA until this day. Cho does not want to offer an objective report on the Korean War, though she presents much historical material. Instead she is following along the figure yangongju the traumatic traces war has left in Korean cultural and family memory. She approaches the non-linear and eruptive experiences of trauma through the techniques of collage, in which historical source material, court reports, dairies and photos are combined. Her guiding methodological question is he following: " Do alternative methods of sociological inquiry and experimental writing such as autoethnography, psychoanalysis, fiction, and performance bring us any closer to an affective understanding of the yanggongju that cannot be conveyed through traditional narratives? " (Cho 2008: 18)
<35> In both approaches the uncanny is not explained away by historical and sociological narratives, but subjective approaches and poetic forms of language are used to make war traumas both rationally and intuitively understandable. The literary passages of these ethnographies are neither simply real nor solely imagined, they are forms of mixing art and anthropology, which bring something to the fore, which would have remained unsaid otherwise. Their uses of collages may be seen as literary equivalents to the surrealist techniques of "déambulation" and "dérive" (Debord 1958), a kind of wandering in between reality and imagination.
The Ephemeral - Surrealist Perspectives on the City
<36> A famous passage from "Paris Peasant" (1996) by Louis Aragon depicts him and a group of friends walking with a mix of boredom and love of adventure though the Parisian suburbs towards the parc Butte-Chaumont, known as the romantic fantasy of a royal garden. When traversing the fringes of the metropolis they are in such a perceptive mood, they can feel the mystique of a railroad bridge, of empty streets and of closed homes. They stride back and forth across the park, study inscriptions of statues like hieroglyphs, ambush lovers and give themselves the creeps at a ghostly bridge, which later became famous as a suicide bridge.
<37> This surrealist practice of "déambulation" has inspired the 20th century avant-gardes of urban research. While it led Lefèbvre towards the psychosocial aspects of wandering around, it was Michel de Certeau who developed the idea of "walking in the city" (de Certeau 1988) further in the direction of a subversive practice. For him, the texture of the city is re-made in the ordinary practices of walking and storytelling. Walking is seen metaphorically as a form of language, its routes and traces telling us something about both the idiosyncratric preferences and the social forces imprinted on individual behavior. The French sociologist Raymond Ledrut (1973) goes in the same direction, when he points out that through walking we get the feeling of the lived spatial ensemble of topography, architecture and the scène expressive. Metaphors of circulation, pulsation, rhythm and movement are setting the tone for this strand of French urban anthropology (Raulin 2007). Colette Petonnet (1982) - the grande dame of this anthropologie urbaine - advocates "floating observation" as a method of urban research. Walking through the city becomes an ethnographic method to get hold of the ephemeral of the city. If the city is a floating ensemble, marked by the circulation of people, things and technologies, the ethnographer must be mobile himself, he virtually has to abandon fixed positions.
<38> In the last decades attempts were made in German and US cultural anthropology to further develop the technique of wandering into an ethnographic research method. In German urban anthropology the technique of "Wahrnehmungsspaziergang" (perception-walk) was gaining popularity in the 1980s. Ina-Maria Greverus, one of the advocates of this approach, was inspired by theoretical and artistic developments in France as well as by David Lynch's thinking on "The Image of the City" (1960). Lynch proposed the "walk around the block" (Lynch/Rivkin 1959) as a method to find out about the image of the city in the sense of subjectively lived structures. According to him, these walks make accessible a relevant but often overlooked dimension of reality: the individual perception of environment, movement in space, the influence of architecture and the interconnection of room and biography. In the USA, this impulse was recently taken up and further elaborated by the urban anthropologist Margarete Kusenbach (2003). Kusenbach has systematized the "go along" into a "street phenomenology", which focuses attention on the interconnections of environmental perception, spatial practices, biographies, social architecture and social realms. Seen as a mixture of participant observation and interviewing this method aims at "capturing the stream of perceptions, emotions and interpretations that informants usually keep to themselves" (Ibid. 464). The ethnographer is led by the informants with as little guidance as possible, which gives room for surprises and divergences. What might be missing in this helpful attempt of systematization is a surrealist sense for the rhythm, tone, mood or atmosphere of a place. In order to grasp and write about them, the researcher needs not only tools but also some intuition, he must not only be a solid craftsman but also a little bit of an inventive artist.
<39> Spatial practices are full experiences and emotions - walking routines and traffic patterns, stories and rumors, fears and attachments have been written into places and mark the deeper affective structure of the urban. Something that is hidden in the "imaginary of the city" (Lindner 1999), which impregnates urban practices as well as social and economic structures of the city. Imaginations have settled into space, and going through space with a Surrealist perspective means walking through this emotional topography. "Déambulation" is rather a style and a sensitivity than a ready-made tool or method, an experimental attempt at opening up the mysteries of the everyday.
Conclusion
<40> The Surrealist Style adapts smoothly to its subject matters without doing violence to them, but is also resolutely telling a story, which is not obvious. It is an approach which is paradoxically focused and fluid at the same time - fascinated with details, accurate in its depictions, courageous in its claims, but also amenable to confusions, ruptures and surprising turns. This playful style can in its worst moments turn into pathetic exaltations and narcissism, but in its best moments profane observations can gain an extraordinary, aesthetic dimension. Subjectivity is not omitted, but emphasized in this approach, often the sensual experience of fieldwork is the starting point of the writing. The authors discussed here, make this subjective impulse in different ways productive for their ethnographic work. Michael Sheringham (2006: 61) defines the Surrealist style as follows: "Supple yet striking enough to adapt itself to the lyric movements of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the somersaults of conscious. Switches of mood, attention, focus and feeling that mark the everyday experience of those who frequent the big city and expose themselves to (its various stories)."
<41> To show the wideness, variety and strength of Ethnographic Surrealism, we have presented a variety of approaches, both historical and contemporary, stemming from different national traditions of Ethnographic Surrealism and orientated at diverse fields of research. What connected them was an interest for the sensual, the irrational, the ghostly and the ephemeral of the everyday. Borders between the ordinary and the extraordinary proved to be rather fluid and borderline experiences not restricted to seemingly exotic places. More than that: the surreal is found in the everyday, which means that the everyday always has a surrealist dimension. Ethnographic Surrealism thus does not mean to make things stranger and obscurer than they are, the ordinary proves itself to be surreal when looked at with a keen eye for ethnographic detail. Indeed, Surrealist inspired approaches are more accurate about certain aspects of human experience than traditional science. Its avant-garde inspired means of representation like collage and montage might be seen as the most effective form of anthropological critique after "Writing Culture", as a kind of "post-criticism" (Ulmer 1983) replacing "realist" or "modern" forms of criticism based on narrow notions of truth and progress.
<42> Capturing the Surrealist dimension of the everyday means leaving behind traditional forms of ethnographic authority and opening up ethnographic methods towards literature, art and film. There can be no fixed method or authoritative guidebook for this, what is needed is foremost a renewed openness for a Surrealist perspective and its alternative styles of research. The word "style" might sound like something artificial, but every research strand has its style, even for those who claim to only report facts and data. And every research project can profit from a Surrealist sensibility, though one could distinguish between "strong" versions of Ethnographic Surrealism like the ones presented here, and "weaker" versions, in which only certain aspects are looked at in this light. Whoever claims that Ethnographic Surrealism is unscientific, might check again, what he or she has left behind on the way.
Notes
[1] For encouragement and comments on the text we thank Franka Schneider, Jens Wietschorke, Moritz Ege, Rolf Lindner, Bernd Jürgen Warneken, Klaus Peter Koepping, Werner Schiffauer, Stefan Klinker, Anne Dorowski, Claudia Marais, Vincent Dabaene and Kathleen Stewart, as well as the participants of our seminar on Ethnographic Surrealism at the European University Viadrina in fall 2012/13.
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