berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork
Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff

Part I: Experiencing and Conceptualizing the Exceptional

Chapter 1. To Be Stunned: Uncanny Experiences and Uncertainty in ‘Ordinary’ Fieldwork
Deborah Reed-Danahay

Chapter 2. Looking at the African Masks at Musée du Trocadéro – He Understood….
Thomas Fillitz

Chapter 3. Art and Anthropology in Graphic Form: Exceptional Experience andExtraordinary Collaboration in the Making of ‘Light in Dark Times’
Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden (images)

Chapter 4. Exceptional Experiences in Academic Life
Moshe Shokeid

Chapter 5. The Exceptionalism of Art as Disclosure of Deepest Truth: Stanley Spencer and the Look of Love
Nigel Rapport

Part II: Literary Realms of the Exceptional

Chapter 6. Haunted Reading/Haunting Johnson
Petra Rethmann

Chapter 7. Sacred Muses: The Lake Goddess in Flora Nwapa’s Literary Worldmaking
Paula Uimonen

Chapter 8. Experiential Literary Ethnography: How Creative Writing Techniques Can Capturethe Cultural Value of Live Arts-Based Experiences
Ellen Wiles

Part III: Exceptional Visual and Practice Experiences

Chapter 9. Lighting Praxis: Lighting Aesthetics and Creativity Narratives in Professional Cinematography
Cathy Greenhalgh

Chapter 10. ‘Hammered by the Image’: Exceptional Experiences of Art as Aesthetic Impact
Helena Wulff

Chapter 11. Shaking up Worlds, Opening up Horizons: Contemporary Dance Experiences in Ramallah and Beyond
Ana Laura Rodriguez Quinones

Chapter 12. Participant Growing-Places in and of the World: Rendering the Transformative Atmosphere of a Contemporary Opera in the Making
Maxime Le Calvé

Afterword: The Sixth Sense
Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Exceptional Experiences

Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork

Edited by Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff

Afterword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen

246 pages, 18 color ills, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-020-6 Hb Published (July 2023)

eISBN 978-1-80539-021-3 eBook

Details

“This is a very well-conceived, multiangled volume, one sure to generate lively discussion and experiment – and that maintains the distinctiveness of each authorial voice while also bringing them into generative conversation with each other.” • Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing – including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images – Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.

Petra Rethmann is Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario and Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition. She is the author or editor of three books and has held guest professorships at the University of St. Petersburg, University of Cape Town, and Aleksanteri Institute/Helsinki.

Helena Wulff is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Among her publications are three monographs, most recently Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (Routledge, 2017) and several edited volumes including The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn, 2016).

Subject: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

LC: N72.A56 E94 2023

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC019000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Methodology; SOC041000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Essays