Transcultural Montage

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).

“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

• Introduction: Montage as an Amplifier of InvisibilityRane Willerslev and Christian SuhrPart I: Montage as an AnalyticChapter 1. Montage and Time: Deleuze, Cinema and a Buddhist Sorcery RiteBruce KapfererChapter 2. Temporal Aesthetics: On Deleuzian Montage in AnthropologyMorten Nielsen   Chapter 3. All the Difference in the World: Liminality, Montage and the Re-Invention of Comparative AnthropologyStuart McLeanChapter 4. Into the Gloaming: A Montage of the SensesAndrew IrvingPart II: Montage in WritingChapter 5. Being a MontageAnne Line DalsgaardChapter 6. Smith’s Tour FavelaPaul AntickChapter 7. Labour days: a non-linear narrative of developmentNina VohnsenChapter 8. Mind the GapKaren Lisa SalamonPart III: Montage in FilmChapter 9. Women in Cities: Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930sCatherine RussellChapter 10. Radioglaz and the Global City: Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental MontageJulia T. S. BinterChapter 11. Filming in the Light of MemoryAlyssa GrossmanChapter 12. Montage as analysis in ethnographic and documentary filmmaking: From hunting for plots towards weaving baskets of dataJakob Kirstein HøgelChapter 13. In Defense of Observational Cinema: The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic FilmmakingAnna GrimshawPart IV: Montage in Museum ExhibitionsChapter 14. Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects: Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond CorrespondencePeter BjerregaardChapter 15. Assembling Bodies: Cuts, Clusters and JuxtapositionsRebecca EmpsonChapter 16. Project Villa Sovietica: Clashing Images, Expectations, and ReceptionsAlexandra Schüssler and Willem MesAfterword: The Traffic in Montage, Then and NowGeorge E. Marcus