Category Archives: Art and Visual Anthropology

Michaela Schäuble: Ecstasy: A review of two recent exhibitions on consciousness-expanding experience

In his classic Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, I. M. Lewis (1971) contends that ritual, belief, and spiritual experience are the three cornerstones of religion, with the third certainly being the most important. Although disputed, this thesis strongly resonates with trends and themes currently taken up by gallerists and exhibition curators. […]

Plácido Muñoz Morán: Writing on “Walking in Barcelona”

The planning of fieldwork in anthropology is always shaped by a combination of expectation, uncertainty, and adventure. Before I began my own fieldwork in Barcelona in 2013, I imagined it as a kind of organic process in which my relationship with the participants would flow through the application of particular methods. This idea made me […]

Vicki Squire: 12 days in Lampedusa: The potential and perils of a photo essay

This post is also part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University). I visited Lampedusa from 24 September to 5 October 2015 to commence fieldwork research for my new project, Human Dignity and Biophysical Violence: Migrant Deaths across the Mediterranean Sea. This photo essay documents […]

John Levack Drever: Sublime-sound-of-the-one-hand [Ryōan-ji]

My soundscape composition Sublime-sound-of-the-one-hand [Ryōan-ji] sounds out the acoustic ecology of the “quintessential … karesansui dry landscape garden” (UNESCO 1993: 41) Or, put another way, to limit “idiosyncratic and ambiguous” (BSI 2014: v) concepts spilling across interrelated disciplines, by implementing the new British International Standard’s definition of “soundscape,” the question is: how is “the acoustic […]

Chiara Ambrosio & Caterina Pasqualino: Tending to the Garden

Caterina Pasqualino is an anthropologist whose research within the realm of Gypsy flamenco for the past twenty years has culminated in her seminal book Flamenco Gitan. Her interest in performance and ritual and their relationships with experimental film—explored in the book she co-edited with Arnd Schneider, Experimental Film and Anthropology—has led her to begin exploring […]

Dave Lewis: “Field Work”

My engagement with the ideas and practices of fieldwork stems from my interest in anthropology and the classification of human “types” through the “science” of anthropometry in the mid-nineteenth century, which began when I was a photography undergraduate student. “Field Work” (2010) was my attempt to address visual ethnographic practice from the position of a […]

Andrea Luka Zimmerman: Estates of being: Thoughts on the place of living and working

“Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense of that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.” —John Berger Estate: a reverie Estate: one’s home and money Estate: a mansion or a plantation Estate: order or class of […]

Martin Webb: Contemporary Indian anti-corruption movements and political aesthetics

To appreciate the role of aesthetics in politics, we might look to the recent resurgence of popular anti-corruption movements in India. In 2011 and 2012, mass protests by supporters of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement focused around spectacular fasts by the social activist Anna Hazare. Hazare’s projection of moral authority draws upon a well-established […]

Massimiliano Mollona: Ethnographic filmmaking and the political imagination: A review of “Desert People” by Ian Dunlop (1967)

In the opening sequences of Desert People (1967, 49 minutes, Australian National Film Board), we read, “This is a film on two families of the western Australian desert.” But in fact the film’s real subject is the wonderful Gibson Desert—whose textural surface is magically rendered by black and white 35mm film—and the relationship with “its” […]

Massimiliano Mollona: Art and Visual Anthropology: An Introduction

The Art and Visual Anthropology (AVA) section of the FocaalBlog is a conceptual and discursive space in which artists, anthropologists, and art scholars are invited to reflect on how films and images can be used for social analysis and political struggle, as well as on broader debates on economic and social change.