Professor of Anthropology and the Humanities, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Address: 5.29 Chrystal Macmillan Building 15a George Square Edinburgh UK EH8 9LD
Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “na... more Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “nature” weave into the fabric of the human in the recent work of three important filmmakers. For Werner Herzog, the salience of prehistory links new cinematic formulations to a long Western tradition of metaphysics, marking man’s break with nature, his fall into consciousness and history, and his impossible effort to grasp the violence of his descent. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the display of seemingly “unrepresentable” violence rendered through reenactments of killings – performed by the original perpetrators against Indonesian “communists” in 1965–66 – operates according to logics of trauma and shame, advancing a troubling ontotheology that seeks to neutralize politics and ethics in favor of a vague, curative transcendence. And finally, the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor offer a picture of nature as a radically open, colossally empty present – nature not as a domain of redemption or restoration for us, but something that overwhelms us, evades us, and crushes us in its path.
Benjamin Christensen’s 'Häxan' (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of ... more Benjamin Christensen’s 'Häxan' (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, 'Häxan' creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female “hysterics” and the mentally ill.
In 'Realizing the Witch,' Baxstrom and Meyers show how 'Häxan' opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. 'Häxan' is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of “documentary” and “fiction.” Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen’s attempt to tame the irrationality of “the witch” risked validating the very “nonsense” that such an effort sought to master and dispel. 'Häxan' is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless “know” to be there.
Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia is about th... more Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. Baxstrom offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world. The book combines classic methods of anthropological research and an engagement with the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Lefebvre, and moves beyond previous studies of Southeast Asian cities by linking larger conceptual issues of ethics, belief, and experience to the concrete trajectories of everyday urban life in the region.
[from the Introduction]
The title “anthropologies” is equal parts connection, camouflage, and in... more [from the Introduction]
The title “anthropologies” is equal parts connection, camouflage, and invention. The goal of the volume is to concretely engage both the bodies of knowledge regarding the world produced through ethnography and the expressive, affective potentials found within various forms of visual art. Traditionally, these domains are held apart from one another; the works found within this volume trouble this separation and find themselves within the epistemological rift between production and expression. Like Aby Warburg and others before us, we ask the question "why separate the experience of the world from the forms of knowledge and expression that arise out of this world"? In this spirit, each contribution is informative and expressive, empirical and aesthetic, ethnographic and artistic; by refusing to choose between expression and interpretation, these works speak to the complex, unclassified, essential, and yet approachable aspects of the world around us.
Introduction to book symposium for History of European Ideas on William Pietz's The Problem of th... more Introduction to book symposium for History of European Ideas on William Pietz's The Problem of the Fetish. Contributors: Richard Baxstrom, Jon Bialecki, Gili Kliger, Anne Lafont, Tomoko Masuzawa, J. Lorand Matory, Miranda Spieler.
Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan... more Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan United Kingdom, the Warburg Institute of the University of London hosted a star-studded and well-at...
Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “na... more Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “nature” weave into the fabric of the human in the recent work of three important filmmakers. For Werner Herzog, the salience of prehistory links new cinematic formulations to a long Western tradition of metaphysics, marking man’s break with nature, his fall into consciousness and history, and his impossible effort to grasp the violence of his descent. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the display of seemingly “unrepresentable” violence rendered through reenactments of killings – performed by the original perpetrators against Indonesian “communists” in 1965–66 – operates according to logics of trauma and shame, advancing a troubling ontotheology that seeks to neutralize politics and ethics in favor of a vague, curative transcendence. And finally, the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor offer a picture of nature as a radically open, colossally empty present – nature not as a domain of redemption or restoration for us, but something that overwhelms us, evades us, and crushes us in its path.
Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan... more Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan United Kingdom, the Warburg Institute of the University of London hosted a star-studded and well-at...
Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “na... more Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “nature” weave into the fabric of the human in the recent work of three important filmmakers. For Werner Herzog, the salience of prehistory links new cinematic formulations to a long Western tradition of metaphysics, marking man’s break with nature, his fall into consciousness and history, and his impossible effort to grasp the violence of his descent. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the display of seemingly “unrepresentable” violence rendered through reenactments of killings – performed by the original perpetrators against Indonesian “communists” in 1965–66 – operates according to logics of trauma and shame, advancing a troubling ontotheology that seeks to neutralize politics and ethics in favor of a vague, curative transcendence. And finally, the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor offer a picture of nature as a radically open, colossally empty present – nature not as a domain of redemption or restoration for us, but something that overwhelms us, evades us, and crushes us in its path.
Benjamin Christensen’s 'Häxan' (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of ... more Benjamin Christensen’s 'Häxan' (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, 'Häxan' creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female “hysterics” and the mentally ill.
In 'Realizing the Witch,' Baxstrom and Meyers show how 'Häxan' opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. 'Häxan' is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of “documentary” and “fiction.” Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen’s attempt to tame the irrationality of “the witch” risked validating the very “nonsense” that such an effort sought to master and dispel. 'Häxan' is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless “know” to be there.
Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia is about th... more Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. Baxstrom offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world. The book combines classic methods of anthropological research and an engagement with the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Lefebvre, and moves beyond previous studies of Southeast Asian cities by linking larger conceptual issues of ethics, belief, and experience to the concrete trajectories of everyday urban life in the region.
[from the Introduction]
The title “anthropologies” is equal parts connection, camouflage, and in... more [from the Introduction]
The title “anthropologies” is equal parts connection, camouflage, and invention. The goal of the volume is to concretely engage both the bodies of knowledge regarding the world produced through ethnography and the expressive, affective potentials found within various forms of visual art. Traditionally, these domains are held apart from one another; the works found within this volume trouble this separation and find themselves within the epistemological rift between production and expression. Like Aby Warburg and others before us, we ask the question "why separate the experience of the world from the forms of knowledge and expression that arise out of this world"? In this spirit, each contribution is informative and expressive, empirical and aesthetic, ethnographic and artistic; by refusing to choose between expression and interpretation, these works speak to the complex, unclassified, essential, and yet approachable aspects of the world around us.
Introduction to book symposium for History of European Ideas on William Pietz's The Problem of th... more Introduction to book symposium for History of European Ideas on William Pietz's The Problem of the Fetish. Contributors: Richard Baxstrom, Jon Bialecki, Gili Kliger, Anne Lafont, Tomoko Masuzawa, J. Lorand Matory, Miranda Spieler.
Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan... more Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan United Kingdom, the Warburg Institute of the University of London hosted a star-studded and well-at...
Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “na... more Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “nature” weave into the fabric of the human in the recent work of three important filmmakers. For Werner Herzog, the salience of prehistory links new cinematic formulations to a long Western tradition of metaphysics, marking man’s break with nature, his fall into consciousness and history, and his impossible effort to grasp the violence of his descent. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the display of seemingly “unrepresentable” violence rendered through reenactments of killings – performed by the original perpetrators against Indonesian “communists” in 1965–66 – operates according to logics of trauma and shame, advancing a troubling ontotheology that seeks to neutralize politics and ethics in favor of a vague, curative transcendence. And finally, the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor offer a picture of nature as a radically open, colossally empty present – nature not as a domain of redemption or restoration for us, but something that overwhelms us, evades us, and crushes us in its path.
Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan... more Between June 13 and 15, 2016, in what were perhaps the last days of an affirmatively cosmopolitan United Kingdom, the Warburg Institute of the University of London hosted a star-studded and well-at...
[Table of Contents] @fmct: Contents @toc4: Acknowledgments @toc2: Introduction @toc1: I. HISTORIC... more [Table of Contents] @fmct: Contents @toc4: Acknowledgments @toc2: Introduction @toc1: I. HISTORICAL CONTEXT @toc2: 1. The Founding of Brickfields and the Prewar Development of Kuala Lumpur 2. The Malayan Emergency, Islamic Reform, and the Trajectory of Urban Governmentality in Kuala Lumpur @toc1: II. LAW, JUSTICE, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN BRICKFIELDS, 2000'2002 @toc2: 3. Law, Justice, Disappearance: the Experience of Place in a Time of Radical Transformation 4. Strangers, Counterfeiters, and Gangsters: Figures of Belonging and the Problem of Belief 5. Ambivalent Encounters in the City: Islam, Hinduism, and Urban Governmentality Conclusion @toc4: Notes Bibliography Index
This article considers the complexity of contemporary urban life in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, throu... more This article considers the complexity of contemporary urban life in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through an analysis of planning and the plan itself as a thing in this environment of multiplicity. It argues that the plan functions as a vehicle for action in the present that does not require a singular vision of the future in order to succeed. Plans in the context of governance and urban development gesture to “the future,” but this gesture does not require “a future” in order to function in a highly effective manner. The evidence presented indicates that the primary effectiveness of the plan largely relates to its status as a virtual object in the present. Such virtual objects (plans) bind subjects to the conditions of the present within the desires and limits asserted by the institutions seeking to dominate contemporary life in the city, but this domination is never absolute, singular, or complete.
Review of Georges Didi-Huberman's The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby... more Review of Georges Didi-Huberman's The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art.
The film was created as the result of the workshop “Rhythm of the Everyday: Tbilisi Migrant Stori... more The film was created as the result of the workshop “Rhythm of the Everyday: Tbilisi Migrant Stories” by GeoAIR and Dr Richard Baxstrom. Based in part on principles outlined by Henri Lefebvre in 'Rhythmanalysis'.
A complete stab in the dark as to the force and mobility of Lucy Skear's 'Sticks and Stones' exhi... more A complete stab in the dark as to the force and mobility of Lucy Skear's 'Sticks and Stones' exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. Part of the creative writing project 'Backwood and Boulders' which took place at Talbot Rice in October 2018.
Clandestine Talk | Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 11:15am
Hephzibah Israel, James Harrison, Killian ... more Clandestine Talk | Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 11:15am Hephzibah Israel, James Harrison, Killian O' Dochartaigh, and Richard Baxstrom
Thinking Head (2017–2019) realised by Lara Favaretto for Ralph Rugoff’s 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, is the continuation of a project and artwork commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary in 2017, as part of the solo show Absolutely Nothing curated by the Museum’s director, Sam Thorne. Thinking Head is a nod to Alighiero Boetti’s sculpture Mi fuma il cervello (1993), an electrically heated bronze self-portrait whose head literally fumes.
This talk is part of the Clandestine Talks element of the work. Each talk includes a number of 3 to 7 participants and will take place in the course of a day behind closed doors and without a public audience, with their duration at the discretion of the participants. They are rigorously selected from various disciplines and backgrounds, encouraging a coming together of various ramifications in the understanding of each individual word, where different disciplines converge in the analysis of a common meaning or in perpetual pursuit of its redefinition.
Dylan and Will are joined by Nick Wolfe to discuss the haunting silent films that emerged from Sw... more Dylan and Will are joined by Nick Wolfe to discuss the haunting silent films that emerged from Sweden and Denmark between 1917 and 1922, including Häxan and The Phantom Carriage. Featuring interviews with film professor Anne Bachmann, theologian Patrik Hagman, and Häxan-expert Richard Baxstrom, we also explore the world that produced these movies, discussing Lutheranism, Satan, the history of Sweden's Golden Age of silent film, and the lives of the remarkable filmmakers behind these chilling visions from a lost era.
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s Violence’s Fabled Experiment (2018) is a superb account of the... more Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers’s Violence’s Fabled Experiment (2018) is a superb account of the relationship between images, violence, and history. It is also an anthropological engagement—an engagement with how certain currents of thought are posited imagistically—with three filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The book moves through an in-between space where creative thought and the moving image meet, where cinematic experiments are forged. Baxstrom and Meyers dwell with and assess these experiments as they pull us into a quest for human origins, enfold us in historical reenactments, and turn us into receptors of planetary crisis.
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, interview on Violence's Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018)... more Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, interview on Violence's Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018), New Books Network
David Sterritt (2017): Experimental Cinema Old and New, Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Revie... more David Sterritt (2017): Experimental Cinema Old and New, Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Review of Realizing the Witch (Baxstrom and Meyers) and On The Eve of the Future (Michelson).
In 'Towards a City Observatory: Constellations of art, collaboration, and locality' (Collective G... more In 'Towards a City Observatory: Constellations of art, collaboration, and locality' (Collective Gallery, 2017).
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, interview on their book Realzing the Witch: Science, Cinema, an... more Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, interview on their book Realzing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (Fordham University Press, 2016) with Joel Tscherne of the New Books Network, March 2017.
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In 'Realizing the Witch,' Baxstrom and Meyers show how 'Häxan' opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. 'Häxan' is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of “documentary” and “fiction.” Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen’s attempt to tame the irrationality of “the witch” risked validating the very “nonsense” that such an effort sought to master and dispel. 'Häxan' is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless “know” to be there.
(Fordham University Press Fall 2015 catalog)
The title “anthropologies” is equal parts connection, camouflage, and invention. The goal of the volume is to concretely engage both the bodies of knowledge regarding the world produced through ethnography and the expressive, affective potentials found within various forms of visual art. Traditionally, these domains are held apart from one another; the works found within this volume trouble this separation and find themselves within the epistemological rift between production and expression. Like Aby Warburg and others before us, we ask the question "why separate the experience of the world from the forms of knowledge and expression that arise out of this world"? In this spirit, each contribution is informative and expressive, empirical and aesthetic, ethnographic and artistic; by refusing to choose between expression and interpretation, these works speak to the complex, unclassified, essential, and yet approachable aspects of the world around us.
baxstrom + meyers
In 'Realizing the Witch,' Baxstrom and Meyers show how 'Häxan' opens a window onto wider debates in the 1920s regarding the relationship of film to scientific evidence, the evolving study of religion from historical and anthropological perspectives, and the complex relations between popular culture, artistic expression, and concepts in medicine and psychology. 'Häxan' is a film that travels along the winding path of art and science rather than between the narrow division of “documentary” and “fiction.” Baxstrom and Meyers reveal how Christensen’s attempt to tame the irrationality of “the witch” risked validating the very “nonsense” that such an effort sought to master and dispel. 'Häxan' is a notorious, genre-bending, excessive cinematic account of the witch in early modern Europe. Realizing the Witch not only illustrates the underrated importance of the film within the canons of classic cinema, it lays bare the relation of the invisible to that which we cannot prove but nevertheless “know” to be there.
(Fordham University Press Fall 2015 catalog)
The title “anthropologies” is equal parts connection, camouflage, and invention. The goal of the volume is to concretely engage both the bodies of knowledge regarding the world produced through ethnography and the expressive, affective potentials found within various forms of visual art. Traditionally, these domains are held apart from one another; the works found within this volume trouble this separation and find themselves within the epistemological rift between production and expression. Like Aby Warburg and others before us, we ask the question "why separate the experience of the world from the forms of knowledge and expression that arise out of this world"? In this spirit, each contribution is informative and expressive, empirical and aesthetic, ethnographic and artistic; by refusing to choose between expression and interpretation, these works speak to the complex, unclassified, essential, and yet approachable aspects of the world around us.
baxstrom + meyers
Hephzibah Israel, James Harrison, Killian O' Dochartaigh, and Richard Baxstrom
Thinking Head (2017–2019) realised by Lara Favaretto for Ralph Rugoff’s 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, is the continuation of a project and artwork commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary in 2017, as part of the solo show Absolutely Nothing curated by the Museum’s director, Sam Thorne. Thinking Head is a nod to Alighiero Boetti’s sculpture Mi fuma il cervello (1993), an electrically heated bronze self-portrait whose head literally fumes.
This talk is part of the Clandestine Talks element of the work. Each talk includes a number of 3 to 7 participants and will take place in the course of a day behind closed doors and without a public audience, with their duration at the discretion of the participants. They are rigorously selected from various disciplines and backgrounds, encouraging a coming together of various ramifications in the understanding of each individual word, where different disciplines converge in the analysis of a common meaning or in perpetual pursuit of its redefinition.