The sixth sense

Contents viii List of Figures Acknowledgements x Introduction. Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff 1 Part I. Experiencing and Conceptualizing the Exceptional Chapter 1. To Be Stunned: Uncanny Experiences and Uncertainty in ‘Ordinary’ Fieldwork Deborah Reed-Danahay 15 Chapter 2. Looking at the African Masks at Musée du Trocadéro – He Understood … Thomas Fillitz 32 Chapter 3. Art and Anthropology in Graphic Form: Exceptional Experience and Extraordinary Collaboration in the Making of Light in Dark Times Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden Exceptional Experiences Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork Edited by Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/RethmannExceptional Not for resale 47 vi Contents Chapter 4. Exceptional Experiences in Academic Life Moshe Shokeid 69 Chapter 5. The Exceptionalism of Art as Disclosure of Deepest Truth: Stanley Spencer and the Look of Love Nigel Rapport 89 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 Capture the Cultural Value of Live Arts-Based Experiences Ellen Wiles 109 123 138 Part III. Exceptional Visual and Practice Experiences Chapter 9. Lighting Praxis: Lighting Aesthetics and Creativity Narratives in Professional Cinematography Cathy Greenhalgh 155 Chapter 10. ‘Hammered by the Image’: Exceptional Experiences of Art as Aesthetic Impact Helena Wulff 172 Chapter 11. Shaking up Worlds, Opening up Horizons: Contemporary Dance Experiences in Ramallah and Beyond Ana Laura Rodríguez Quiñones 189 Exceptional Experiences Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork Edited by Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/RethmannExceptional Not for resale vii Contents Chapter 12. Participant Growing-Places in and of the World: Rendering the Transformative Atmosphere of a Contemporary Opera in the Making Maxime Le Calvé 205 Afterword. The Sixth Sense Thomas Hylland Eriksen 225 Index 231 Exceptional Experiences Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork Edited by Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/RethmannExceptional Not for resale Afterword The Sixth Sense Thomas Hylland Eriksen I had spent many hours reading about serendipitous coincidences during fieldwork – chance meetings in airplanes, the young Pablo Picasso’s artistic epiphany, a river goddess in Igboland, a literary East German refugee in the West, people who had to dance it since they couldn’t say it, uncanniness and glimmers of hope, forays into art by anthropologists and into anthropology by artists. At the end of the evening, my mind was positively humming with thoughts about Kant’s third critique, Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, William James and pragmatism, and the implications of the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk for the project unfolding in this book – finally, I had no option but to go to bed. My last fully conscious act that evening consisted in looking up the unfamiliar word proprioception on my phone, to be informed promptly by the internet that it amounts to the awareness of one’s own body’s location and movement. Intriguingly, the same source adds that proprioception is sometimes spoken of as ‘the sixth sense’. In all its apparent sprawl, this book is held together by a thematic unity, which can be described not only as a focus on ‘the exceptional’ in fieldwork and elsewhere, but which also entails testing the strength of the walls of the ethnographic enterprise: where does ethnography end, and when it does, how can that which begins (whatever it is) be designated? Similar questions were asked earlier: Marcus, Fischer and Clifford are mentioned by the editors, and several of the contributors have previously raised probing questions about the ultimate subject-matter of anthropology. However, the emphasis on the exceptional, as opposed to the everyday and routine, enables the authors to ask questions not just about 226 Thomas Hylland Eriksen representation and its ostensible crisis, but also about the significance of affect and the senses for intellectual projects – the ultimate question being not so much what is the nature of the world as how the mind works, to cite the title of a popular book on the subject. It is also worth noting that the authors are determined to approach exceptional beauty, inexplicably moving experiences and the sublime without being animated by an ambition to deconstruct or explain them critically. Readers are allowed to partake in these exceptional experiences on their own terms. Ethnography is by default and definition ‘close up and personal’, yet events of existential significance (and thus methodological interest) to the ethnographer are rarely taken up in publications. Yet that is exactly what this book does, thereby probing the limits of ethnography in more than one respect. It is often during fieldwork that anthropologists have their exceptional experiences, but not invariably. Several of the chapters deal with literary texts, performative arts or paintings, and at least one combines visual art with anthropological reflections on the state of the world. Some write about dance in ways attempting to transcend the boundary between bodily movement and disembodied text. It is not without relevance that one of the editors was a dancer herself, subsequently carrying out research among dancers and embarking on the extraordinarily difficult task of translating the language of dance into that of anthropology. Occasionally, the life-changing experiences described by the authors are shared by their local interlocutors, but this is not necessarily the case. It is easy to imagine situations which have a strong impact on the ethnographer, but are banal and pedestrian to others, and vice versa. Habit and routine may dampen the experience of the unusual. When I went out fishing at dawn in a dinghy with a couple of Mauritian men, I was awestruck by the serenity, the changing colours of the imposing Morne mountain at sunrise and the salty, tangy smell of the turquoise sea. To my fellows, this was unexceptional. To them, the extraordinary might consist in an unusually large catch (for which they would be inclined to thank God or their ancestors). As ethnographers, we are trained to apply role distance consciously in the field, having learned from Geertz’s famous essay ‘From The Native’s Point of View’ that you don’t have to be one to know one, self-consciously shifting between deep and shallow play, affect and reflexivity, presumably unlike the people we work with, who are not social scientists studying their own society. In many of the stories narrated in this book, this formula is turned on its head. It is the ethnographer rather than their interlocutors who is taken aback by the sublime or uncanny. Only with the hindsight of temporal and physical distance is it possible to reflect on the implications of such affective responses, which seep Afterword 227 unmarked into ethnographies. Going native, if only for a few fleeting moments, creates a bond between ethnographer and field which opens the possibility, in the words of a chapter author, of ‘a transcendence of what is merely traditional by what is true’, thereby moving beyond the distortions of culture to a distilled co-presence not only with other people, but with the broader environment. The personal encounter with the Lake Goddess, integrated with a novelist’s account, similarly suggests an expansion of the ethnographic field into that which cannot be observed directly or spoken of explicitly, where affect is not merely an object of study, but also a subjective experience. The very fact that these questions can be raised, signals that ethnographic methods differ from all other research methods. We teach students that in ethnographic fieldwork, the researcher is the main instrument of enquiry, unlike in a laboratory experiment or a quantitative survey. As subjects, we influence the field and our engagement with it; this book reminds us of some of the ways in which the influence goes in both directions. In the Introduction, the editors describe certain ‘exceptional experiences as transformative, as life changing [events] that stay with us forever’. Since anthropologists have long challenged the subject–object boundary, which is so important in the scientific tradition, it is necessary to think systematically through the implications of these experiences. They need not even always be ‘exceptional’ in the sense of being dramatic or strongly affective. My own early fieldwork in Mauritius, in the mid1980s, changed my gaze on society permanently, in that the year-long experience of an ethnically diverse plantation society, struggling with the tension between boundaries and creolization, has impregnated my work and life ever since. The mere smell of biryani still triggers memories of an encounter in a cafe at the Rose-Hill bus station in October 1986, when I was given an impromptu lecture, over a plate of fragrant biryani, about the difficulties of entering into a mixed marriage by someone whose experience with the phenomenon was first hand; the mere mention of Queen Victoria still produces a mental image of the statue in front of the Mauritian parliament and some palm trees, signifying an attempt to instil a sense of national identity in a diverse population by drawing on the one past that all the ethnic groups share, namely colonialism. As the editors and several of the contributors mention, there exists a growing anthropology of the senses, which includes not only vision and hearing, but also smell, touch and taste. Reading the chapters, I was struck time and time again by the visceral landslide of affect and recall that can be triggered by sudden sensory input. During a recent conversation with a drummer who has played on more than a hundred albums, 228 Thomas Hylland Eriksen ranging from folk-pop and rock to jazz-rock and acoustic improvisation, we reminisced about our childhood experiences with music. A few years older than me, he mentioned that even today, whenever he listened to The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’, he could immediately recall the smell and texture of the dinner he had eaten with his family following the exceptional experience of hearing the song and seeing a photo of the band for the first time in the early 1960s. Returning home, I felt an inexplicable but irresistible urge to listen to a record by the jazz singer Radka Toneff, featuring the guitarist who had played with this drummer on many albums. It had been decades since I last heard the album, and confirming the drummer’s observation, Radka’s melancholic, vulnerable voice enabled time travel back to 1979, the year in which the album was recorded. Closing my eyes, I was catapulted back to the basement where my friends and I had been horsing around with instruments we were learning to play, wearing flea market clothes and letting our hair grow, smoking rollups and drinking coffee like grown men – we were coming of age, exhilarated by the sheer beauty of jazz and excited to be alive and on the move. Never before had this particular chronotope come alive so vividly to me. Three or four of my friends became professional musicians, while I left for university. The bittersweet memory of a path not taken then led me to dig out Soft Machine’s second album, which features Brian Hopper on the saxophone. Unlike his brother Hugh, Brian left the group to study biochemistry at the University of Manchester, soon to be replaced by Elton Dean, a free spirit whose first name was nicked by a certain Reginald Dwight, later to find fame under the sobriquet of Elton John. This is how memory works in practice. It can be triggered by a smell, a chord, a face; and like bricolage in Lévi-Strauss’s science of the concrete, it produces new configurations every time. Without affect and the senses, memory dries out. The exceptional experiences described by several chapter authors with reference to the arts challenge the boundaries of ethnographic methodology and writing as usually taught, but may yet bring us close to an essence of being which is always relational, and which is a reminder that nothing is ‘not only’ this, that or the other. There is a surplus of meaning in human worlds, just as in any great work of art. Human lives are serendipitous, they share a narrative structure with fiction (and ethnography), and even the most unusual, powerful experience ultimately loses much of its value if it cannot be communicated. This is why it is necessary to pay greater attention to the art of writing. ‘Saying something about something’, as Geertz sums up his ambition in one of his programmatic articles, is a starting point; but exactly what should be said, and how, requires careful deliberation. Afterword 229 All knowledge is a form of simplification. By communicating their exceptional experiences to an unknown readership, the authors of this book carry out translations which are enlightening and enriching, telling stories that would otherwise not have made it into the purview of anthropology. What makes these often personal and unique stories relevant for social science is their embeddedness in a larger social fabric. One finds it helpful to collaborate with a visual artist; another integrates drawings and watercolours into her field notes; a third discovers potential for conviviality between humans and the environment, while a fourth finds inspiration for a genuinely cosmopolitan anthropology in Kant’s admonition ‘to study how a human cosmos and an individual polis informed one another’. These intellectual and existential projects do not just challenge subject–object distinctions in a methodological sense but raise questions about the boundaries of the discipline and indeed of language: ‘If I could say it, I would not have to dance it.’ As it is described in this book, which foregrounds the senses, affect and moments of existential significance, the human life begins to resemble a Gesamtkunstwerk, neither fish nor fowl but with elements of both. Life exudes an aura in Walter Benjamin’s sense, a radiance which cannot be scaled up, cloned or replicated. The semiosis of life is multipronged, and the intellectual’s reliance on language is both a blessing and a curse, a means to achieve order and comprehension but also a recipe for simplification and reductionism. ‘The artistic miracle was to see everything and to join with everything’, as Rapport sums up Stanley Spencer’s artistic vision. Similarly, Uwe Johnson experimented with fictional forms, applying multiple perspectives, dialectical juxtapositions, intertextuality and montage in an attempt to capture as many facets as possible of the world. Social anthropologists have always opposed reductive generalizations about the human condition, and are acquainted with different ways to make sense of the world. Anthropologists react warily to any statement containing the clause ‘nothing but’, and are aware that verbal communication between researcher and interlocutor has its limitations since the unsaid is a vital part of the human world of communication. The present endeavour may thus come across as a logical extension of the classic virtues of anthropology, harking back to Boas’s historical particularism and Malinowski’s emphasis on the small community and its local knowledge. A quotation from the Roman playwright Terence, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (‘I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me’), has often been invoked by anthropologists. It may well serve as a motto for this volume too. *** 230 Thomas Hylland Eriksen One of the most striking contributions of this book is the ambition not only to transcend ethnographic conventions (some would say straitjackets), but also the wish to move beyond critique. Researchers and theorists who study the good life, the good society or the positive effects of mind-altering experiences have rarely made it into the canon. The social scientist who tells his audience that all is fine and that there is really nothing to worry about, seems to belong to a Monty Python skit rather than the academy. Actually, when I was doing research for a book about well-being (not published in English) a decade and a half ago, I soon discovered that anthropologists and other social scientists did not have much to say about the subject. They were obsessed by problems, conflicts and contradictions. It is a brave act, which easily lends itself to unfair criticism, to investigate the wonderful and the sublime without relying on the drama of conflict, contradiction and hidden scripts. Having looked up the uncommon word proprioception on the internet, I fell into a slumber, and in that liminal state between the conscious and the subconscious, an avalanche of fragmented memories and images meandered across my tired brain, some of them involving all five senses. In quick succession, my mind was host to the image of an old American car adorned with tail fins, a small tin of salty anchovies, a pair of hardboiled eggs, the main principles of regenerative agriculture, a walk to the local grocery three kilometres away, and an unsuccessful attempt to play ‘Giant Steps’ on the saxophone. I have played live many times, but lack confidence in my own skills (with good reason); I needed to go to the shop to buy some sugar-free fizzy drinks; I try my hand at regenerative growth whenever in the countryside; I was already looking forward to breakfast and had eggs and anchovies waiting in the fridge; and yes, I was in the market for a small car, having seen a few on the internet; and this particular, fictional seller had no clue as to whether his old Cadillac had a market value of two thousand or forty thousand Euros – was it a rusty wreck or a prized veteran car? Had I ventured to spell out all the connections in detail, the result would have been a poor man’s Molly Bloom, eventually – as sleep took command – merging into the first chapter of Finnegans Wake. Such are the filigree connections that make up a life. And such are the realities of which we are invited to take part through the unexpected connections and lightning bolts that animate this rich and wondrous book. Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His many publications include Overheating (2016), Boomtown (2018), Small Places, Large Issues, 5th edition (2023) and, in Norwegian, ‘Seven Meanings of Life’ (2022).