Vol. 3, Issue 1. (Summer, 2020)

ISSN 2516-5860

Editorial
Can you hear me?		1-6
Sevasti-Melissa Nolas and Christos Varvantakis	pdf	HTML
Récits
Drawn in the field		7-30
Kyra Sacks	pdf	HTML
abstract As a visual artist, I am used to drawing ‘in the field’, although I never called it that before studying anthropology. Before anthropology, it meant leaving my studio carrying a sketchbook and pencils, to wander through and participate in the world outside, in search of inspiration. Whenever colors, lines and shadows, but also encounters and interactions grasped my attention I would draw them on paper. After getting acquainted with ethnographic fieldwork my drawing practice gained a new twist and more systematic attention and reflection. I started using it as an innocent but powerful tool for connection and reciprocity, leaving behind portraits as gifts in return for people’s time and stories. But as I witnessed how the precarious situation on Lesvos reached a new level in terms of protests and violence mid-February 2020, drawing ‘in the field’ took on a new form and meaning.
Multiple me, the unfolding ethnographer: Multiple becomings and entanglements as a more-than-human ethnographer		31-42
Donna Carlyle	pdf	HTML
abstract
abstract This recit describes the use of visual-material methods in animating, re-enacting and highlighting the significance of human-animal interactions to well-being and flourishing. In employing creative methods and sensory ethnography, the researcher’s body is emergent as a vector of knowledge and site of multiple unfolding identities and entanglements. It therefore reveals the embodied and intra-corporeal nature of experience that is often unknown, unthought and invisible. In doing so, new insights and ways of ‘knowing’ manifest in exciting and original means. Through sketching using a multi-layered technique akin to what is known as “pentimento” brings forth the concept that we are all constantly “becoming” something other and something more through our rhythms of relating.
Expériences
Voice over: archived narratives and silent heirlooms		43-54
Chris Dorsett	pdf	HTML
abstract Contemporary artists often apply experimental art practices to the museum environment. Examples abound, the idea is not new. However, in this paper my long artistic association with the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, now a matter of history, sits provocatively in the background of a recent engagement with the archives of London’s Tavistock Institute, a project triggered by some family heirlooms dating from the 1940s. In response, I experiment with some short audio-visual artworks and give theoretical consideration to that which is conserved, and that which has been displaced.
Collapsing Scales: Entering Relations		55-61
Ezekiel Morgan	pdf	HTML
abstract The author proposes the development of scale-collapsing methods as a way to destabilise an analytical and interpretive habit of division in ethnography and, in so, advance an approach to ethnography concerned with intra-relatedness. This paper explores the development of such methods and takes examples from the author’s project, “•”, an audiovisual work involving a dead octopus in a washing machine cycle with a reimagined 360º camera and algorithms that manipulate the resulting footage. This exploration challenges Tim Ingold’s call for anthropology to separate itself from ethnography due to, what Ingold perceives to be, ethnography’s inability to enter into the relations and processes of the world.
Ultrashort, Low-resolution and Anonymous: Designing Anthropological Films for Smartphone Viewers		62-80
Sanderien Verstappen	pdf	HTML
abstract A new kind of film has come into being, meant to be viewed on a smartphone: low-resolution, ultrashort, and often anonymous. The distribution of these ultrashort videos has become a topic of concern in India, where they are discussed as a venue of promoting violence against minorities. In this experience I consider the form of the smartphone film from the perspective of an anthropological filmmaker. I share three downloadable films of forty seconds each, which I created to engage the smartphone as an alternative venue of knowledge sharing about research, during a period of temporary immersion in the world of Graphic Design.
Re-views
Ilektra Kyriazidou ‘[Review] Tradition in the frame: photography, power and imagination in Sfakia, Crete by Konstantinos Kalantzis’		81-84
Ilektra Kyriazidou	pdf	HTML
abstract This review discusses Kalantzis’ Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete, an innovative ethnography of the visual planes and frames of imageries and performances of tradition in Sfakia, Crete. The book studies the visual in the composition of its representations, imaginations, sensations, embodiments, histories and ideologies.
James Hundley [Review] Tradition in the frame: photography, power and imagination in Sfakia, Crete by Konstantinos Kalantzis		85-87
James Hundley	pdf	HTML
Juliet Davies-Horn ‘[Review] Descending with Angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry. A film monograph. By Christian Suhr.’		88-90
Juliet Davies-Horn	pdf	HTML
abstract A compelling filmography of therapeutic encounters with the invisible of interest to those pursuing comparative approaches to thinking through agency and perception in the face of suffering. Here we follow residents of a housing estate in Denmark who seek healing for anguish and aberrant behaviours through supplication to the Islamic practice of ruqya alongside psychiatric treatment with psychotropic medication.
Paola Esposito ‘[Review] Descending with Angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry. A film monograph. By Christian Suhr.’		91-94
Paola Esposito	pdf	HTML
abstract This review discusses the film monograph Descending with Angels by Christian Suhr, a study of the invisible in the contexts of Islamic exorcism and Danish psychiatry in Arhus, Denmark. The author explores notions, experiences and epistemologies of the invisible, and its role in participants’ afflictions and capacity for healing.
Maria Vivod ‘[Review] Decending with Angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry. A film monograph. By Christian Suhr.’		95-98
Maria Vivod	pdf	HTML
abstract If the raindrops are carried down by angels, our souls are also taken care of. Or they should be. Suhr’s book is about souls who were not taken care of properly and who were possessed by harmful spirits. While using phenomenological methods, the author takes the reader into the depths of anthropological enquiry.