Surrealism summaries anthropologists sense of amazement

[LIviaFilotico]

This is a new thought and I would really like to know what you think about it: when an anthropologist goes away to do fieldwork the initial sense is quite often of confusion, cultural displacement and excited wonder. I believe this is not being patronising. I is simply the adjustment of the individual to new stimuli, cultural patterns and ways of life. The preferred medium through which anthropologists can communicate this sense of reverent bemusement is writing and there are good reasons for this - But wouldn't you agree that, at least in theory, the most logical choice of communication for an anthropologist is art, and specifically surrealist art? Surrealism is the interpretative mode par excellence and so is anthropology. We don't really SEE the way our ethnographic subjects behave. We don;t really UNDERSTAND what they are saying to us. We interpret it, as through an optical lens. For those out there who are both visual artists and anthropologists I'd love to hear your opinion on this!

[John McCreery]

Studies of culture shock point to what has been called the "W curve." It begins with the excited wonder you describe. Then frustration and feelings of helplessness can lead to depression. Learning enough to begin to interact comfortably improves the mood again. This second peak is, however, often followed by another bout of frustration at how much remains to be learned, exacerbated when the natives no longer treat the foreigner in the benign manner appropriate for an idiot who knows nothing. Gradual acquisition of street smarts that exceed the level of a local two year-old and making a few good friends can bend the curve up again.

Would surrealist art be the best way to communicate this experience? Perhaps if one's only goal was to convey the feeling of the mixture of wonder, excitement, frustration, depression and general incomprehension that starting fieldwork for the first time can entail. Not if one wants to communicate anything useful about the specifics of particular issues in particular places, being a newcomer interrogated by Chinese neighbors versus being a newcomer ignored by Japanese neighbors, for instance. There are ways to handle both situations, but these are culturally specific. It is hard to imagine surrealist art conveying what needs to be done in a clear and useful manner,  let alone providing the data on which successful research depends. 

[Keith Hart]

Thanks for posting this intriguing thought, Livia. Surrealism is such an important historical movement across a range of the arts, politics and philosophy that I have difficulty figuring out the sense in which you offer it as a model for anthropology. It may be a transhistorical idea, but most people think of it as being rooted in a particular place and period, Europe between the wars, flourishing especially in the 1930s which have a claim to being the worst decade of a terrible century. What has always interested me is its relationship with cubism, which flourished before the First World War (from 1907) and could be said to have been killed off by that war, to be succeeded by surrealism. It is interesting that the word was invented by the cubist poet, Apollinaire. So the movements are close, but they differ in the degree of optimism or pessimism that sustained them. There is a dark side to surrealism.

As you may know, surrealism was a significant feature of French anthropology, carried by the likes of Michel Leiris and Jean Rouch, the godfather of visual anthropology. It would be good to know what you bring to this topic from figures such as these. Have you absorbed the feminist critique of surrealism or do you think that it was specific to a social situation and period that have past? A case can be made for magical realism as a successor to surrealism when the latter faded. All of these questions arise when the reader is confronted with your enthusiasm for the movement.

[LIviaFilotico]

Hi Keith! Thank you for your thoughts and comments. As I said this is a new thought and I am sure this discussion will provide me with an incentive to explore this relationship further. 

I believe Surrealism as a movement can present itself whenever, but possibly not wherever, a situation of confusion and insecurity arises (which might also be why many artists use it to talk about religious experiences). The relationship with Cubism is indeed interesting. Where Cubism interpreted a period of radical changes by emphasising speed, modernity and the possibility to ‘dissect’ experiences surrealism speaks about the utter inapproachability of meaning. It speaks about the failure of framing an unknown situation within long gone morals, ethics, values and beliefs (not so surprising if we look at what happened maybe?). 

As you mention Surrealism glimpses into the imponderable and provides a hazed representation of what words cannot put into a pragmatic explanation. What is it left then when all logical line of thoughts don’t apply? In my opinion, this is where Surrealism comes into it, and in particular Surrealism as influenced by body studies and affect such as in the research done by Manning or Blackman. In this sense, it is interesting that you quote Leiris as my comment on this platform sprung from a reading I was doing a few days ago in which Levi Strauss’s rational anthropology is compared to Leiries’ interest in the haphazard messiness which comes from ‘unlikely’ relationships and ‘clashes’ (going back to what I was saying before about Cubism and Surrealism, do you think we could say Levi Strauss and Leiris are respectively the perfect exponents for both: two faces of the same coin?). When Leiris states that if he tortures those who love him, the fault rests not on himself (or his loved ones) but on this rotted out society, desperately clinging to its outworn values, there is a sense of guilt and inadequacy which I personally wouldn’t want to perpetuate in anthropological research. We have done enough of that. Conversely, (and here I go back to your point concerning feminism) even though I don’t agree with many of the points Xaviere Gautier and her legacy make (mostly because I know of many fantastic avant guard artists who also happen to be women and are not ostracised from the cultural circuit because of their prominent bosom. http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2009/03/14/fata-morgana-the-new-female-fantasists/) I do find myself on a similar line of thought with some more post feminist ideas which are heralded by body and affect studies. I would use these tools to give more importance to what is felt, perceived, touched, tasted and so on. Hybrids are interesting and Surrealism can speak of those better than anything else (through visual art but also, I believe, through the written text). When two people meet and they don’t know anything about each other, initial feelings of discomfort are bound to arise. If those two people meet in a context in which one of the two is convince of being in the position of the scientist, things are bound to go either incredibly wrong or at best they can produce partial understanding. But if the ‘observer’ focuses on what he/she feels, sees, touches, eats, I believe Surrealism is already in place. 

[Keith Hart]

Thanks for this rich and nuanced response, Livia. I now understand better where you are coming from on a number of issues.

If we don't want to get caught up in the specific history of cubism and surrealism, perhaps the main point you raise takes us back to the enlightenment and romanticism, reason vs intuition. I like very much Anna Grimshaw's take on Jean Rouch's cinema in The Ethnographer's Eye. She starts with a quote from Rimbaud: "The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and reasoned disordering of all the senses." By this account, romanticism is a part of enlightenment reason while constituting its dialectical negation, "the shadow around the light". Rouch, she says, disrupts the boundaries between self and the world, mind and body, the mind's eye and the surveying eye. He is a visionary, a seer, whose cinema generates moments of revelation. I take something like this from what you say about surrealism. Rouch draws on romanticism and its 20th century offshoot surrealism and African trance and possession to reach for a new expanded humanism.

Yes Leiris and Levi-Strauss might stand for anthropological opposites, but Rouch goes beyond both is a more modern medium.

[Tomás Sánchez Criado]

Hi there,
very interesting threads, indeed! Maybe this book by Ben Highmore 'Everyday life and cultural theory' could be of some interest to you, as it includes several chapters on Surrealism and its influence in French and British social sciences of the 'everyday' and their interventions.

Cheers,

T

[Toby Austin Locke]

Hi all,

This is a great thread. Thanks so much for posting this Livia, and everyone else for their responses. 

 

We studied the relationship between surrealism and anthropology briefly in an anthropology of art course I did. I think it's a fascinating area. The surrealist preoccupation with the uncanny is a great satirical reflection of anthropology and the very idea of doing ethnography, especially the more traditional approach of the colonial anthropologist traveling to dark corners of the world in order to make sense of the nonsensical. Also, the making familiar unfamiliar or the unfamiliar familiar is common to both and demonstrates an almost incomprehensible understanding of the world and reality.

 

I think Bataille is work mentioning here for numerous reasons. Being the cofounder of Contre-Attaque with Andre Breton, as well as them both being friends, Bataille's work was very much influenced by, and often concerning, the surrealists and their conceptual frameworks. Much of Bataille's more anthropological writings show his tendency towards surrealism and his response to Levi-Strauss in the Accursed Share is partially based on the transcendence of the logical, the possible and the human. When he considers that eroticism reminds humanity of their non-humanity, their animality, an existence before introduction 'the world of things' and a now lost subjective sovereignty, he is looking at the transcendence of the boundaries of prohibition and equally the boundaries of humanity and what it means to be human. Both anthropology and surrealism (and Bataille) address these areas of what it means to be human, the boundaries of our humanity, our notions of the logical and rational, and our notions of the familiar.

 

There's lots I want to write here but I fear I am already rambling so I'd better cut it of. Thanks again.

[LIviaFilotico]

Thank you Tomas!The book is fantastic. I particularly liked the idea of 'commitment to research' expressed by surrealism which Ades points out. 

Tomás Sánchez Criado said:

Hi there,
very interesting threads, indeed! Maybe this book by Ben Highmore 'Everyday life and cultural theory' could be of some interest to you, as it includes several chapters on Surrealism and its influence in French and British social sciences of the 'everyday' and their interventions.

Cheers,

T