Essays from the Master of Arts in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London 2014-15
Please find below abstracts and links to essays in pdf form, written by me at the Master of Arts program in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths University in London, in the years of 2014-15.
Jasmine - A sensory exploration of perfume culture (Final MA thesis)
Accompanying a visual ethnography film named 'Jasmine' this thesis discusses questions raised through making the film, both theoretical and practical. The film follows three young men with a strong interest in scent, both professional and personal. Covering historical shifts in how and what we might perceive through our senses, with the sense of smell in focus, the social and political implications of smelling come to the fore. Raising questions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, modernity, consumer culture and migration – and how these factor into smell experiences and interpretations. The thesis furthermore debates issues surfacing on how to create a cultural artifact such as a film, aiming to trigger a multi-sensorial experience beyond audio-visual confines. How to render smell: via memory or provocation, mild or strong? The practice of the sensorial anthropologist and of the maker of the haptic film image, suggest a heightened attention – and possibly a different involvement: embodied, immersive, curious – with the subject at hand.
Final thesis on Perfume and Sensorial Anthropology (one half of the final MA assessment, the other made up by a 20 minute ethnographic film).
Animals in art - Post-human fears and longings
Comparing the artistry of Nathalie Djurberg (with Hans Berg) and Catherine Chalmers, in relation to anthropological, psychoanalytical and philosophical debate on how the definition of the human arises in relation to animals, real or imagined. The art works referred to deal specifically with imaginings of the othered species as projection surfaces for differentiated human identities, but also, animal worlds as sites of longings for different ways of being and becoming in the world. Radical potentials of relating to animals are suggested through readings of Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Julia Kristeva and Barbara Noske. A framework for approaching the deeper potentials of Chalmers' and Djurberg's animal art and their reception is provided by Haraway's discussion of becoming with companion species - proposing an open-ended, relational self-in-the-making – in conversation with a reading of Deleuze & Guattari's flock animals' rhizome movement through the world, suggesting the self should continuously become animal in order to oppose the contained identities and thought processes which Deleuze & Guattari assign to bourgeois hierarchy. Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as a function of defining the boundaries of self, lends an understanding of why these becomings and becomings with may be met with resistance in the form of repulsion. Finally, Barbara Noske's accounts of children raised by animals provide real life examples of how animal social systems are formed, and the susceptibilities of humans to appear quite non-human. While Djurberg makes use of animals as fable infused by human imaginations, Chalmers' more scientific approach has the artist adapt to the living animals featured in her works. What these two artists share in common still, is a fascination with the simultaneous disgust and attraction provoked by encounters with the animalistic, which leads us to wonder what we might repress as humans, and as a society - and to what end?
Animals in Art and the Posthuman Condition
Object worship and Image fright - Negotiating the power of representation
Tracing anthropological thinking on objects and images and ways of engaging with these in intense relationships. Beginning with Alfred Gell's renditions of iconic, representational idols vs aniconic idols marked by their indexical relation to the divine; moving on to George Frazer defining the contagious vs the sympathetic magic performed by objects - the former working thanks to likeness to the target of magic, the latter thanks to the object having ”touched” the target, such as holding a lock of their hair or nail clippings in the belly of a magic doll. Through to Peter Pels' distinguishing between idols as being animated from the outside, and fetish objects as being discovered with life already, I then compare magical objects and images with the secular. Exploring how the power invested in objects or images of either category may take on ”a life of their own”: provoking fear, worship, movement, action, haptic and synesthetic sensation. Concluding with a discussion on the ethical implications of relating to bodies and materiality. Of how value hierarchies place judgment upon emotional involvement with objects and images, politicizing positions of proximity. Thus boundaries are being drawn between self and other, woman and man, expressions of what is deemed ”healthy” and unhealthy sexuality, aesthetic, oppressive and empathetic relationships with objects and images.
Object worship and Image fright: How to negotiate the power of representation
Ethnographic film and the Representation of the body
Looking at the representation of the body, from Laura Mulvey and Trinh T. Minh-ha's favouring of a distantiated viewing experience of the feminist cinema, via Teresa De Lauretis contextualizing, more flexible approach to the viewer's presumed reception, towards another end of a spectrum as argued by Amelia Jones and Laura U. Marks, who criticize patriarchal, Cartesian norms of detached engagement in favour of an embodied and immersive (yet often provocative) stance, coming up close to the image. The latter, however, presupposing a degree of agency on the part of the body being re-presented, in order to subvert and thus avoid complete objectification. With reference to films Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1983), Fuses (Carolee Schneeman 1965), Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston 1990) and Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger 1964).
”A political framework is set and I am suddenly distantiated as a viewer, denied the seduction of the image, pushed to consider the ethnographic history of which these types of images are part. Sound comes and goes. Without warning it strips from the image, adding to it a solemn stillness. The silence has a density. It pushes the surface beauty of the picture forward... I have the sudden sense of peeping in." (on the film 'Reassemblage' by Trinh T. Minh-ha)
Ethnographic Film and the Representation of the Body
Extra - Spaces in Flux
In the capacity of Research Executive at the London based consumer insight firm BAMM, I wrote and co-wrote several blog posts alongside debriefs, analysis etc. Since their website re-launch, however, the BAMM blog is no longer active. To provide you with a sample, then, I managed to dig out one of the final drafts for an introductory post (co-written with Nathalie Gil) in a series on "Spaces in Flux" - an investigation into the significance of spaces, and how they are being used.