Anthrovision Vaneasa Online Journal

4.2 | 2016 Imagination/Ineffability

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2322 DOI: 10.4000/anthrovision.2322 ISSN: 2198-6754

Publisher VANEASA - Visual Anthropology Network of European Association of Social Anthropologists

Electronic reference Anthrovision, 4.2 | 2016, « Imagination/Ineffability » [Online], Online since 31 December 2016, connection on 30 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2322 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/anthrovision.2322

This text was automatically generated on 30 December 2020.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Mining Imagination: Ethnographic Approaches Beyond the Written Word Michaela Schäuble

The Lives of Other Citizens Andrew Irving

Mapping Ararat: An Augmented Reality Walking Tour for an Imaginary Jewish Homeland Louis Kaplan and Melissa Shiff

Notes on ‘Space of Consciousness (Chidambaram, Early Morning)’ Ernst Karel

A Remarkable Convergence Paul Stoller

Images of Ecstasy and Affliction The Camera as Instrument for Researching and Reproducing Choreographies of Deviance in a Southern Italian Spider Possession Cult Michaela Schäuble

Picturing Intimacy Mediation and Self-representation in Boston’s Religious Festivals Federico De Musso and Cristina Grasseni

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Introduction. Mining Imagination: Ethnographic Approaches Beyond the Written Word

Michaela Schäuble

1 Are there ethnographic approaches that are particularly suited to elicit and communicate unarticulated experiences and concealed understandings of the world? What methods and media techniques would be most appropriate to unearth or mine such realms? Which aesthetic practices are aimed at the description or mimetic replication, and which ones at the construction or creation of (a new) reality or experience?

2 This special issue is the result of conversations initiated around these questions on occasion of a workshop held at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University (Mining Imagination: Ethnographic Approaches Beyond Knowledge Production) in April 2013.1 As the workshop convener, I had called for critical and creative explorations of anthropological ways of knowing and experiencing the world that might bring the written word to the test.2 I was particularly interested in the more-than- representational power of ethnographic inquiry and contributors were invited to “mine imagination” beyond and outside an essentially realist and mimetic paradigm.

3 Referring to imagination in an anthropological context is to either land immediately in a discussion on the ambivalent role of the concept in Western philosophy, notably in relation to phenomenological thought and method, or in suggesting alternative, experimental avenues of non-textual communication of anthropological knowledge and the sensorial dimensions of being. And although both reactions constituted a vital part of our approaches and discussions, we did not leave it at that. All participants were careful to avoid the naïve illusion of immediacy and unmediated access to hitherto hidden spheres, and to move beyond enthusiastically proclaiming the power of the sensorial and non-written world by critically assessing and reflecting on the epistemological conditions and ekphrastic limitations of the new methodologies and technologies – such as augmented reality, virtual intimacy, sound walks, the audio- visual exploration of thoughtscapes, corporeal states of trance, etc. – presented.

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4 While acutely aware of the habitual denigration of imagination in the Western tradition in philosophy and its exclusion from the pursuit of objective knowledge and/or insight (but also its reverse idealization by the German and English Romantics and French surrealists), we could not but notice the almost paradoxical essentiality of imagination’s use in philosophical methodology, especially as phenomenological technique (Sallis 2000; Casey 1977). However, the act of imagining that refers to immaterial knowledge as much as to experiential reality, and that is involved in coming to understand something about and making sense of the world, not only features prominently in art, cognitive psychology and philosophy, but is as well an important constituent of anthropological methodology; the research practices of most ethnographers does indeed presume and aim at imagining other people’s experiences.

5 Apart from the awareness that imagination is a methodological a priori in anthropology, in the workshop we also established that the practice of imagining itself is essential to human mental activity and human experience, and is embedded in our material existence.3 Taking the proposition of Edward S. Casey serious that imagining is not the mere offshoot or pale replica of perception – because we cannot regard as derivative from perception what is constitutive of perception itself –, imagination emerges as central in any appraisal that attempts to do justice to human experience in its full variety and ramifying richness.

6 Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris (Rapport and Harris 2015) have recently framed the challenge that imagination poses to anthropology. With reference to James Preston’s coupling of the imaginative and the poetic (Preston 1991), they assert that these two domains, the imaginative and the poetic, are key to understanding the human condition (Harris 2015: 6). Defining imagination as an “individually embodied capacity, ontologically transcendent of setting (other than the body), which impacts on the material world” (Rapport 2015: 7), Rapport highlights the aspect of imagination’s individual agency and practice that happens alongside others who are themselves involved in imaginative operations. As such, imagination is “foundational of our physical dwelling within environments and our intellectual-cum-emotional appreciation of them” (Rapport 2015: 20). It is this combination of embodied and mental acts and the resonance of imagination on the material world that makes imagination such an important issue for the anthropological project.

7 The currently re-invigorated interest in imagination within anthropology (Bloch 2016: 81; Severi 2015 [2007], 2004; Ingold 2014; Sneath et. al. 2009; Crapanzano 2004;)4 and its reconceptualization beyond the visual is, in my view, also owed to the rise of interpretative ethnography – or, in the words of David Graeber the prevalence of “interpretive labor” (Graeber 2012) within the discipline – and the exploration of new types of experimental texts (i.e. performance-based texts, literary journalism, ethnographic poetics, narratives of the self, etc.), as well as to further techno-scientific innovations and focal shifts towards embodied experience and perception (i.e. cross- species communication, virtual social media, “artificial“ intelligence, bioethics, etc.) reflected in the so-called “sensory turn” (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016). In an attempt to decouple imagination from the ability to create images, Vincent Crapanzano asked “But can we not “imagine“ the beyond in musical terms? In tactile or even gustatory and olfactory ones? In propriocentric ones? In varying combinations of these – and perhaps even other – senses?” (Crapanzano 2004: 23). The apparent ineffability of imagination lends itself to be approached and grasped as phenomenon or technique that involves

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the entire human sensorium. This can be traced back to a tradition – mainly based on Aristotle’s and Kant’s equation of the (internal) image as mediating representation (Casey 1974: 5) – of ascribing imagination the role of an intermediary between sensation and thought, and has also informed a number of more cognitively oriented approaches.5

8 In recent years, however, the subdiscipline “anthropology of the senses’, or “sensory ethnography“and concomitant applied approaches have gained momentum, revealing a strong interest in others’ embodied experiences and interior lives. Sarah Pink, for example, utilizes sensory ethnography to come to a “closer to understanding how other people experience, remember and imagine“ (Pink 2015: 25), while an institution such as the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University (SEL) 6 “encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with propositional prose”. Methodologically such approaches aim at combining image, sound, text and object to fathom and evoke sensory experience and/or active forms of sensory engagement where anthropological knowledge can emerge.

9 Along these lines, Tim Ingold in his recurring swansong to the use of the term “ethnographic” has recently called for reasserting the value of anthropology as a “forward-moving discipline dedicated to healing the rupture between imagination and real life” (Ingold 2014: 383). This assessment strongly resonates with Arjun Appadurai’s earlier take on imagination as a social practice where he conceptualizes imagination as central to all forms of agency, and describes its capacities, amongst other things, as “form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility” (Appadurai 1996: 31). Transferring this applied communal notion of imagination from the sphere of progressive social activism back to general anthropological theory and practice, Ingold concludes that “theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source of much havoc in the history of consciousness” (Ingold 2014: 395). Described as nourished by observational engagement with the world, imagination is therefore no longer conceptualized as an individual matter of the mind or psyche, but as an integral part of ethnographic practice that has also to be understood as an active force and shared commitment, immanent in a reality, that creatively shapes and transforms the socio-historical.

10 Already in the mid-19th century Charles Baudelaire had argued that the significance of imagination lies in the extent to which “[…] it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of newness” (Baudelaire 1981 [1859]: 156). And this sensation of newness is probably most virulent in relation to technological innovations, notably with regards the medium film as a new sensational technology that subjectively transforms human experience and imagination.7 The invention of technical images – images produced by technical media such as photographs, films, videos, etc. – revived the previous dream to make the invisible visible and provoked a reconsideration of the power of imagination. As early as in 1916 Hugo Münsterberg, a German experimental psychologist at Harvard, applied his science of perceptual techniques to the then new medium of cinema, or the photoplay as he called it, to show that the cinematic apparatus can induce mental processes. He was convinced that the photoplay had the capacity to produce new experiences of time and space. “The photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming

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the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention, memory, imagination, and emotion” (Münsterberg 2005 [1916]: 170). Münsterberg also believed that “[i]n the photoplay our imagination is projected on the screen” (2005: 45). The same year Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) praised cinema as a technology and artistic form for its ability to directly assault the viewer’s senses and to manifest pure ideas (Lindsay 2004 [1916]; cf. Moore 2000: 48-61). The effectiveness of the photoplay unburdened by mimesis or representation became a major trope in the development of film theory. In a similar vein, Béla Balázs’ works on early cinema, Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man, 1924) and Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film, 1930), refer to the huge potential of human imagination that is released by film as a new art form and technology.

11 One of the problems, of course, was that “from the beginning too much was expected of cinema”, as Scott MacDonald so aptly put it (MacDonald 2013: 314). And in the long run, as we all know, neither documentary nor fiction film focused on the medium’s “ability to signify non-referentially” (Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 120) or managed to radically break with traditional notions of representation, as early film critics had envisioned. But even if the expectations of film to produce entirely new meanings, or to generate a specific imaginative “photoknowledge” (Münsterberg 2005 [1916]: 17) might have failed, the desire to trouble commonsense perception of reality and to gain access to un- observable details of the human condition (while maintaining a space for the ineffable and inexplicable) remains – especially in contemporary social theory.

12 The special issue on hand will take this desire into account, though evidently none of the contributors claims to be able to access imagination, or other interior conditions, through empirical means. However, all assembled authors present various approaches to mining imagination, conceding that each approach and each piece can reveal something different from what gets revealed in a written text alone. While the individual inputs empirically explore the heterogeneous processes through which concrete imaginings come about, the issue as a whole is meant to further an ethnographic engagement with “technologies of the imagination” (Sneath et. al. 2009), understood as approaches by which imaginative workings and effects are mined and/or engendered.

13 With their contributions, Andrew Irving, Louis Kaplan and Melissa Shiff, and Ernst Karel take the readers on multisensory walking tours. Whether this is exploring the imaginative and inner lifeworlds of random strangers we pass every day on the street (Irving), walking through an augmented reality (Kaplan and Shiff), or a soundwalk through a Hindu temple in Tamil Nadu (Karel), all three pieces contemplate the material embeddedness and experiment with the moving dimension of imagination.

14 The Lives of Other Citizens by Andrew Irving is part of a long-term ongoing project in which he is developing and testing practical approaches to knowing, theorizing and representing the interior dimensions of being and its relationship to social life. Assuming that people’s inner expressions and imaginative lifeworld constitute an essential feature of the human condition (through which people understand themselves and others), Irving’s aim is to grasp his informant’s imaginations, their thoughtscapes, in action. Methodologically, he is drawing on his practice-based research project New York Stories in which he is recording the private monologues of strangers in the streets of New York City as they speak their thoughts to themselves, wearing a small microphone. Irving is well aware, of course, that his research question

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“what are these people thinking?” lies beyond the limits of scientific methods and anthropological knowledge; but he nevertheless attempts to consider the relationship between thought, embodied movement/walking, and the urban environment – and indeed obtains some remarkable glimpses into the invisible realms of people’s inner expression and experience. Entirely relying on random encounters and contingencies, Irving understands ethnography itself as an essentially imaginative act, thus supporting yet playfully challenging Nigel Rapport’s assessment that “I imagine alongside my informants albeit that precisely how and what they imagine is hidden from me by our discrete embodiments” (Rapport 2015:8). In his contribution, Irving presents some of his findings in various audio-visual formats and invites readers, among other things, to download and listen to a stream of strangers’ thoughts as they themselves walk down the streets.

15 In Mapping Ararat: An Augmented Reality Walking Tour for an Imaginary Jewish Homeland Louis Kaplan and Melissa Shiff invite their audiences to embark on a very different kind of imaginary journey. Using augmented reality (AR), their project animates an early 19th century plan to transform Grand Island, New York into Ararat, a “city of refuge for the Jews.” The original proposal of a Major Mordecai Noah was never realized, of course, and remained in the realm of the hypothetical and imaginary. Yet through a 3D modeling software, the authors have managed to transform Grand Island virtually into Ararat by placing augments into the landscape. The application uses geolocation software to superimpose virtual objects at precise GPS coordinates, enabling visitors to see the objects integrated into the physical location as if they existed in the real world. So with mobile devices in hand, visitors can now take an onsite walking tour and interact with augmented artifacts and monuments. The article in this special issue presents the public art project as a novel form of virtual Jewish tourism and conceptualizes it as kind of “counterfactual ethnography” engaging with both, an imaginary or virtual space (Ararat) and an actual locale (Grand Island). The contribution incorporates documentary photography and video clips exploring previous user’s social interactions with place (the real world and the virtual) and with technology. The readers are invited to imagine what it would be like had Noah’s plan to turn Grand Island into a Jewish homeland had succeeded. This approach can serve as an inspiration for further investigations into alternative histories and geographies, but also raises a number of interesting questions regarding the transformative potential and moral implications of imagined worlds and political utopias.

16 In his 17-minute stereo audio piece Space of consciousness (Chidambaram, early morning) that he specifically composed for the Mining Imagination Workshop, Ernst Karel explores sound as a complex, multifaceted experience. Projecting an early morning walk through the Hindu temple Chidabaram in Tamil Nadu, the composition focuses on “the bodily praxis and affective fabric of [...] existence”, as is stated on the programmatic self-description of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography lab (SEL)8 that Karel manages. The unfolding acoustic scenario evokes an embodied, imaginative awareness – a space of consciousness – in the perceptive audience and provides insights into how the moving body and the faculty of imagination are intertwined. The listener is hearing the environment of the temple as an embodied person, situated in a virtual (non-visible) space as the distance between her/him and the sounds of the mumblings, chants, prayers, bells, etc. constantly changes. The inner movement of the listener that happens in the sonic transmission is closely connected to the movement of the recordist and the respective position of the microphone. The short accompanying text

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contextualizes the audio piece – not by discursively adding or explaining what it “is about”, but by situating the composition in the ethnographer’s own experience. Hence, the phonographic piece offers an embodied resonating listening experience that “reflects and reflects on the actual experience of others”, including that of the ethnographer (MacDonald 2013: 315).

17 The next three articles are insofar more “conventional” as they are constructing ethnographic narratives and are primarily concerned with sense making and the discursive analysis of social imaginaries. However, their ethnographic approaches are no less experimental as the one’s in the previous contributions, as they all play with format of multimedia montage as “technique for evoking the invisible through the orchestration of different perspectives encroaching on one another,” as Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev have recently outlined with reference to phenomenological takes on radical alterity and the invisible, such as Levinas’ “infinite other” and Merlau- Ponty’s “normative ideal’ (Suhr and Willerslev 2013: 4). In these pieces, montage – whether it is a textual montage in the case of autobiographic narrative (Stoller), a mounting of different images of pathological and religious “afflictions of the imagination” (Schäuble), or reflections on filmic montage employing new archival practices (Grasseni and De Musso) – is used by interconnecting the three axes of artistic expression, scholarly imagination and social life.

18 Paul Stoller, in his text A Remarkable Convergence, couples the imaginative and the poetic as he is narrating the two life courses of himself, the ethnographer, and his Nigerien friend Yaya Harouna. Like in a dance, the two characters are intertwined; they move towards each other and take off again, yet remain existentially connected. And although not “beyond the written word” in the strict sense, Stoller’s text skillfully uses stylistic montage and, in a combination with photography, creatively performs and completes its own content, namely a remarkable convergence. Stoller’s register of writing is always that of a storyteller, revealing interrelated journeys through life. Not unlike anthropologist Michael Jackson’s approach to writing, Stoller’s ethnographies rely heavily on emotions, sensations and thoughts in response to particular situations, encounters, and others’ accounts of their own presence in the world (Denizeau 2015: 219). In this text, he sets out questioning shared experience and imaginaries, yet never ceases to strive for convergence. Along the way he encounters it in the shape of a shared struggle for being. Laurent Denizeau, in a recent discerning attempt to outline the differences in Michael Jackson’s and Albert Piette’s takes on existential anthropology encapsulates their common ground in their understanding of being as being with: “There is indeed a shared experience, that of experiencing this world together, but we also share a certain solitude – that of facing death” (Denizeau 2015: 228). And indeed, Stoller and his companion Yaya Harouna experience this shared moment of mutual recognition as they both face a cancer diagnosis and have to acknowledge their vulnerability and finitude. In this sense, Stoller’s writing is informed by and contributes to an existential anthropology that is as empirical as it is theoretical in its exploration of the human condition “through direct engagements with the lived experiences of particular human beings” (Jackson and Piette 2015: 3) – and the detail that one of these particular human beings is always himself makes his stories all the more engaging.

19 In Images of Ecstasy and Affliction I explore the experimental use of photographic and filmic technologies in establishing a visual repertory of (female) ecstatic gestures and

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postures as sites of deviation. Drawing on the well-known example of “the hysteric” as paradigmatic trope in medical photography of the 19th and early 20 th century and tracing its iconographic resemblance to images and photographs of women during the Southern Italian trance dance or trance ritual tarantella, I argue that in each case media technologies were used as instruments to visualize so-called “imaginary afflictions” (imaginariae), defined as disorders that have no physical cause but are triggered by – and potentially cured through – imagination (Hufeland 1794). By linking scientific paradigms and discourses on mental illness and images of ecstatic, trance-like religious experience, the article draws attention to the epistemic properties of visualizing technologies that operate on the basis of a pathologizing and sexualizing gaze under the pretext of providing scientific explanation. As “practices of imagination” (Kramer 2005), trance rituals connect visible and invisible realms by evoking “inner images” that manifest themselves in the gestures and embodied choreographies of the entranced – not unlike the “medical performances” of the classified hysterics. In both cases, the motion sequences and poses are continuously replicated and (re-)enacted by the afflicted women and photographers alike, thus fabricating a codified catalogue of paradigmatic images of the hysterical, the possessed, the afflicted and/or the ecstatic body as an emblem of invisible and otherwise ineffable mental states and inner experience.

20 In the final contribution, Picturing Intimacy, anthropologists and filmmakers Cristina Grasseni and Federico De Musso reflect on the notion of “virtual intimacy”, and the role of social media in the making of their ethnographic documentary Christmas in August. Boston’s St. Anthony’s Feast (2013). The film explores the social practice and cultural memory of religious processions in Boston’s “Italian quarter” North End. Taking shared communal remembrance as a starting point, the filmmakers embark on literally mining the collective imaginary of the North Enders by combing ethnographic and found archival footage of religious processions from digital archives and social networks. They take Michael Herzfeld’s well-known notion of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005) as a starting point and test its validity when transported to the Web 2.0. Reflecting on the principles of montage as a way to reintroduce non-linearity into the linear narrative of a filmic account, they explore both, how physical and virtual participants of these Bostonian religious festivals imagine and perform community, and secondly, how the sociability embodied by these participants can be pictured.

21 Some of the approaches featured in the issue entail rather risky endeavors. Irving, for example, knew from the outset that he would not be able to grasp his informants’ thoughts, just as I myself knew that it is impossible to audio-visually depict religious experience, or even come close to making it comprehensible. Nonetheless, what all contributions have in common is that the authors did not shy away from imagination’s “bad reputation” (Huppauf and Wulf 2009: 1) but have contemplated and creatively engaged with the possibilities inherent in imaginative capacity. All authors assembled make use of the radical faculty of imagination in blurring the distinction between “the real” and “the ficticious” thus consciously contributing to “healing” the aforementioned “rupture between imagination and real life” (Ingold 2014: 383). By extending the conceptual and practical handling of imagination beyond the merely representational (as conceptualized by Kant) and beyond individual consciousness and creativity (hence avoiding the trap of romantic individualism) and situating it in the realm of the personal as well as socio-historical, the contributions to this issue approach imagination as a meaningful form of agency and social practice in the

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Appaduraian sense, while testing and reflecting on appropriate methods and media techniques to capture and represent people’s lifeworlds and their lived experiences.

22 It was Edward S. Casey who has most prominently linked imagining to the entertainment as “pure possibilities” in suggesting that “[…] imagining may be regarded as a special form of self-entertainment in which the imaginer amuses himself with what he conjures and contemplates by and for himself alone…Imagining is entertaining oneself with what is purely possible” (Casey 1976: 119). Yet as the convener of the initial workshop and in assembling these pieces, I do hope, of course, that the works presented here are not just purely entertaining for their own authors, but also provide a thought-provoking and methodologically stimulating contribution to (testing) contemporary discussions on the experiential nature of anthropology and imaginative ethnography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bloch, Maurice. 2016. Imagination from the Outside and from the Inside, Current Anthropology, Vol. 57, Supplement 13, June: 80-87.

Baudelaire, Charles 1981 [1859]. The Salon of 1859 – Letters to the Editor of the Revue Francaise. In Charles Baudelaire Art in Paris: 1845-1862, Salons and other Exhibitions, translated by Jonathan Mayne, Oxford: Phaidon.

Casey. Edward S.. 1976. Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Casey, Edward S. 1977. Imagining and Remembering. The Review of Metaphysics. Vol. 31(2): 187-209.

Casey, Edward S. 2003. Imagination, Fantasy, Hallucination, and Memory. In Imagination and its Pathologies. James Phillips and JamesMorley, eds.. Pp. 65-92. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press https://philosophydocuments.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/10-fantasy-hallucination.pdf (accessed December 17, 2016)

Cox, Rupert, Andrew Irving and Christopher Wright. 2016. Beyond Text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Crapanzano, Vincent. 2004. Imaginative Horizons. An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

Denizeau, Laurent. 2015. Considering Human Existence: An Existential Reading of Michael Jackson and Albert Piette. In What is Existential Anthropology? Michael Jackson and Albert Piette (eds.). Pp. 214-236. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books

Graeber, David. 2012 [2006]. Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive Labor. The Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2006. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol. 2 (2): 105-128. http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau2.2.007 (accessed December 17, 2016)

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Harris, Mark and Nigel Rapport. 2015. Reflections on Imagination. Human Capacity and Ethnographic Method. New York, London: Routledge

Hufeland, Christian Wilhelm. 1794. Gemeinnützige Aufsätze zur Beförderung der Gesundheit des Wohlseyns und vernünftiger medicinischer Aufklärung. Band 1. Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen.

Huppauf, Bernd and Christoph Wulf. 2009. Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination. The Image between the Visible and the Invisible. New York, London: Routledge.

Ingold, Tim. 2014. That’s enough about ethnography!. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol. 4 (1): 382-395. http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.1.021/665 (accessed December 17, 2016)

Jackson, Michael and Albert Piette (eds.). 2015. What is Existential Anthropology? Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books.

Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film. Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kramer, Fritz. 2005. Praktiken der Imagination. In Schriften zur Ethnologie, Tobias Rees (ed.) .Pp. 273-289. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

MacDonald, Scott. 2013. American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. The Cambridge Turn. Berkeley, Los Angele, London: University of California Press

Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd edition. London: Sage Publications

Pink, Sarah. 2014. Digital-visual-sensory-design anthropology: ethnography, imagination and intervention. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 13(4): 412-27.

Preston, James. 1991. The Trickster Unmasked: Anthropology and the Imagination. In Anthropological Poetics. I. Brady (ed.). Pp. 69-103. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Sallis, John. Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Severi, Carlo. 2015 [2007]. The Chimera Principle. An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination. Chicago: HAU Books.

Severi, Carlo. 2004. Capturing Imagination: A Cognitive Approach to Cultural Complexity. JRAI- Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Volume 10 (4): 815-83

Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. Technologies of the Imagination. Ethnos, Vol. 74(1): 5–30.

NOTES

1. For the outline and poster of the original event, please visit http:// mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/VW%20Symposium%20- %20Michaela%20Schauble.pdf 2. I very much like to thank all participants in the workshop, including those who, for various reasons, could not contribute to this special issue. I would also like to express my gratitude to the audience/s during the two-day workshop who facilitated many lively and thought-provoking discussions. Last but not least, I am very grateful for the generous financial and ideational support of the Volkswagen Foundation and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard that enabled this event. The process of publishing this special issue has taken longer than anticipated and I would like to thank

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all contributors for their patience; I believe in the end it was worth the wait. A number of anonymous peer reviewers have given valuable feedback on individual papers as well as on the overall issue and I am very grateful for their insightful suggestions. 3. Edward S. Casey has written extensively about the eidetic differences between imagining on one hand, and memory, hallucination, and fantasy, on the other. Carefully disentangling memory and imagination, which have long been conceptualized as variations of the same thing, Casey highlights the omnitemporal qualities that are unique to imagination (in contrast to perception, hallucination, memory and anticipation). He then subsumes reveries and daydreams under the category of fantasies which borders both, hallucinations (on the verge of losing control of the experience) as well as imagination (more easily controllable), while fantasied content is neither posited as real nor experienced as purely possible (Casey 2003). 4. In a recent article Maurice Bloch proclaimed that “imagination is a key topic for all those who call themselves anthropologists” (Bloch 2016: 82), arguing with reference to cognitive science that the capacity for imagining is a prerequisite for human understanding of social roles, cohesion, and even concepts of “’life’ that extends in time way beyond the lives of human beings” (Bloch 2016: 82) 5. Especially French anthropologists engaged in cognitive anthropology such as Pascal Boyer, Dan Sperber or/and Carlo Severi persistently research the cultural transmission of knowledge and meaning via various modes of representations and iconographic as well as acoustic technologies and make a (arguably highly contested) case for seeing imagination – in relation to mnemonic technologies – as ubiquitous in human reasoning. With his elaboration on the concept of “chimeric imagination“ (Severi 2015 [2007] that has recently been translated into English, Severi contrived a form, both visual and linguistic, that oscillates between perception and projection, iconic representation and indexical indication, through which meaning is produced within ritual actions. In this context, he argues that myths, ritual chants, drawings, picture- writings, or body-decorations, for example, are variations of a “conceptual imagination“ that point towards the invisible aspects of reality. 6. See https://sel.fas.harvard.edu 7. In poststructuralist and psychoanalytic thought the imaginary has habitually been linked with the technology of film. German media theorist Friedrich Kittler has pointed out that Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror image – a child’s experience of its imperfect, fragmented body as a perfect, complete reflection in the mirror – corresponds to the sequential processing of single frames into a cinematic continuity, arguing that “the imaginary implements precisely those optical illusions that were being researched in the early days of cinema” (Kittler 1999:15). Kittler went as far as to claim that it is no coincidence that Lacan recorded children´s reactions to their mirror reflection in the form of documentary footage (1999:15). 8. See https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/

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AUTHOR

MICHAELA SCHÄUBLE Department of Social Anthropology, University of Berne (Switzerland) [email protected]

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The Lives of Other Citizens

Andrew Irving

Taking a Journey into New York's Thoughtscape

All Photos by Andrew Irving

1 I would like to begin with a question about the above photograph of New York street life that I took while waiting on a street corner for a friend. Although the question is easy to ask, it is extremely difficult to answer, for it not only places us beyond anthropological knowledge and understanding but beyond the limits of science itself.

2 The question is what are these people thinking?

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3 What, for example, is the man in sunglasses in the foreground thinking? Or either of the two men walking behind him? Or the woman and child on the right? Or in fact any of the people in the photograph? What is the empirical content and character of their thoughts?

4 As with any crowded street, the people seen in the photographs dispersed throughout this text are likely to be engaged with a wide a range of internally expressed thoughts and emotions. One person might be debating what to have for lunch or silently singing the lyrics of a pop song, while others are reminiscing about their childhood, fretting about money or fantasising about a work colleague. Out of the thousands and thousands of thoughts simultaneously being expressed inside people’s heads on the streets of New York in any given moment, it is likely many will concern people’s everyday social life, relations and activities, alongside shared themes, topics and interests, such as the weather, current events, news stories and so forth. Other people’s inner dialogues might be directly responding to the life of the street, including the observation and interpretation of the people, buildings, adverts and shops that surround them. Or perhaps more accurately, given the multifaceted and stream-like character of inner dialogue, with its rapid shifts in subject matter and characteristic patterns of free association, persons can be found continually switching between different topics and registers of interest and attention as they move around the city. On the one hand, this reveals the shared social, cultural and historical basis of people’s internalised modes of expression—which provides inner expression with some form of collective content, shape and structure—but on the other hand it simultaneously discloses a person’s specific interests, idiosyncratic worldview and ongoing existential concerns.

5 As documented in Ethnography, Art and Death (Irving 2007), a person might be walking around a city looking for a place to commit suicide or alternatively might be contemplating the radical uncertainty of being while sitting in a café or walking down a crowded street having recently been diagnosed with a serious or terminal illness (see Irving 2010, 2011). In such cases, the person remains a social being and is required to act in a communal public space, but their thoughts and concerns are not necessarily externalised or apparent to the wider world. From negotiating illness or thinking about suicide to deciding what shoes to buy or daydreaming about being a superhero: a city’s streets, cafes, parks, squares and trains contain everything that life has to offer—from the mundane and commonplace to the tragic and the taboo—only we do not have access to it. Together this vast diversity and multiplicity of thought, freely ranging across time, space and subject matter, combines to produce the collective underlying thoughtscape of contemporary urban life.

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6 It is a thoughtscape that consists of the continuous streams of inner dialogue, memory and imagination that comprise people’s everyday lives and practices and mediate their engagement with their social and material surroundings. Although we ourselves are part of it, we are mostly unaware of the thoughtscape that unfolds around us. For while human beings are highly skilled at looking at, reading and interpreting other persons, there is no direct access to other people’s thoughts and it is far from straightforward to discern the inner dialogues of the people we see in public places by their external appearance alone. Nowhere is this made more apparent than in Eric Steel’s documentary about the Golden Gate Bridge, The Bridge (2006) for which Steel and his twelve-person film crew turned up every morning for an entire year to document a year in the life of the iconic bridge. The film captures 23 of the 24 known suicides that occurred on the bridge that year, alongside numerous other persons who were talked down or otherwise dissuaded from jumping. The film crew themselves managed to intervene on six occasions to prevent people committing suicide but it was noticeable that there was often little indication about who was contemplating ending their life from people’s behaviours and appearances. As such, the very first suicide captured by the film crew’s telephoto lenses was not acting in the manner that the camera operators expected. He was not crying, looking agitated or anguished or showing any extraneous signs of distress but rather was jogging and talking and laughing on his cell phone. Then all of a sudden he climbed the barrier, made the sign of the crucifix and leapt to his death.

7 Without the ability for internalised forms of expression that exist beneath the surface of people’s public activities and utterances, many aspects of social life and interaction would be severely compromised, including people’s abilities to plan, reflect upon and understand their actions in the world or to make interpretations about other persons and situations. It would mean that social relations, parenting, board games, negotiating, bartering and simple acts of secrecy, lying and deception would be rendered impossible, as persons would be unable to simultaneously hold private intentions, information and motives in their mind that differ from those that are publicly articulated.

8 The critical role and significance of inner speech and expression to human experience — or what William James’s described as ‘the mind’s conversations with itself’ (James 1890: 239)—is widely recognised in brain science, neurology and linguistics (Ward 2006, Hurlburt 2009, Fernyhough 2013) as outlined by Peter Carruthers in the journal Behavioural and Brain

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9 Sciences:

10 ‘Although proportions vary, many people seem to spend a good deal of their waking activity engaged in ‘‘inner-speech,’’ with imaged natural language sentences occupying a significant proportion of the stream of their conscious mentality’ (Carruthers 2002: 657).

11 Inner expression is a shared phylogenetic capacity that is fundamental to a wide range of human experiences—from routine and mundane practices to highly charged events and extraordinary moments of existential crisis—and is a key means through which people negotiate social life and social relations. Simply put, without inner expression there would be no self-understanding or social existence, at least not in a form we would recognise. However, despite the centrality of inner expression to many, if not most, forms of social activity, it is a subject that is largely uncharted across the social sciences and is rarely, if ever, the subject of ethnographic research or anthropological monographs. For the most part people’s inner expressions are seen as irrelevant or intangible—rather than as empirical phenomena that are directly constitutive of people’s lived experiences and actions—meaning that anthropology, the quintessential study of humanity, risks telling only half the story of human life.

12 Following Crapanzano (2004), I argue the problem is less to do with social- scientific measures and methods per se but with the narrow historical and disciplinary definitions of what constitutes ‘reality’ and what is considered empirically admissible or worthy of anthropological and social scientific investigation. An anthropological approach to inner expression in social life needs to be grounded in empirical and ethnographic data across a range of contexts, practices and experiences rather than addressed or argued about at remote levels of theoretical abstraction and speculation. This presents a number of significant epistemological and ethnographic challenges, first, because there is no independent, objective access to another person’s consciousness or experience: more colloquially put as there being no way of looking inside someone else’s head; second, because understanding the content and character of inner dialogue and expression is primarily a practical, ethnographic and methodological problem, to be researched in the field; and third, because conventional social-scientific approaches are often too static to understand or represent the transient, stream-like and ever- changing character of people’s interior expressions and experiences as they emerge in situ from moment to moment.

13 In response, this article combines the idea of ‘walking fieldwork’, early modernist literature and the use of digital media to explore and offer ethnographic insights into the complex layers of inner expression, imagery and emotion that constitute New York’s thoughtscape. Walking Fieldwork 1 is a technique, inspired by writers such as Robert Walser, alongside film-makers such as Jean Cocteau and Jean Rouch, that I originally developed to try to understand the experience of living with illnesses, such as cancer and HIV/AIDS, and the effect of illness on the moving body in relation to the challenge of carrying out daily routines, roles and practices when living with an unstable body (see Irving 2005, 2007). Walser was among the very first writers to explicitly suggest the necessity of walking to thought, consciousness and writing and his work influenced Kafka, Benjamin and Sebald’s own meditations about walking. Walser was a compulsive walker who often took extended forays throughout the night into unfamiliar parts of the city. His short story, The Walk (1917) recounts an attempt by the police to arrest him for unpaid taxes. Walser pleads for clemency as an

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impoverished pen-pusher and homme de letters with only a dubious income, to which the inspector declares that he cannot possibly be a writer by exclaiming: “But you're always to be seen out for a walk!'”. Walser replies:

14 ‘“Walk”, was my answer, “I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could not write the half of one more single word, or produce the tiniest poem in verse or prose. Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed.” Also, without walking and gathering reports, I would not be able to render one single further report, or the tiniest of essays, let alone a real long story. Without walking, I would not be able to make any observations or studies at all. On a lovely and far- wandering walk a thousand usable and useful thoughts occur to me. Shut in at home, I would miserably decay and dry up.”’ (Walser 1992).

15 Countless writers have subsequently described the close relationship between thinking and walking, while the idea of explicitly combining walking, performance and photography in urban space stretches at least as far back as Picasso’s walking tour of Paris as staged and photographed by Jean Cocteau during the First World War on 12 August 1916. It was further developed in Rouch and Morin’s film Chronicle of a Summer in the summer of 1960 where the new technology of synchronous sound opened up new creative possibilities for combining film, walking and narration. Rouch and Morin used a combination of participatory film practice, interviewing, life history and performance in order to reveal aspects of their subjects’ lives that would otherwise remain dormant (see Irving 2007, Henley 2009).

16 Building on this, the aim of the current project is to engage with the thinking, moving body, as it interacts with different parts of the city, in an attempt to consider how urban experience is mediated by streams of inner dialogue, memory and imagination that emerge in situ and are often rooted in a person’s current existential situation and concerns.

17 Accordingly, the following video and sound recordings derive from an experimental ethnographic research project, New York Stories for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers encountered as they moved around the city. The first stage involved dividing New York into different zones of thought, namely streets, bridges, cafes, squares, in order to recognise the potential for different kinds of urban space to generate different modes of cognition and experience that are played out in public but are not necessarily externalised. The method was very simple. I approached random persons I encountered in these areas and asked then what they were thinking about in the moment immediately before I approached them. I then explained the project and invited them to wear a small microphone and speak out loud the stream of their thoughts as they continued with activities. I found it surprising not just the level of interest in the nature of the project but the amount of people, from all walks of life, who said yes.

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18 The recordings can only ever offer the merest of glimpses into those realms of inner expression and experience that can be articulated and approximated in language within a public and highly performative encounter, and so cannot claim to provide anything more than a partial and passing instance of the complexity and diversity of people’s inner lifeworlds. People’s inner lifeworlds simultaneously encompass many different modes of thinking and being—ranging from vague, barely graspable and transitory experiences that exist on the periphery of our consciousness and bodily awareness—to more purposeful and defined forms that enable us to establish a continuous sense of self. Certain aspects remain inchoate and beyond the reach of language, while others coalesce and become articulated into stable symbolic forms for particular purposes, including intentional, descriptive, analytical and communicative purposes, thereby forming a basis for narrative expression to oneself and/or others. As such, by focusing on interior dialogue, as one particular mode of inner expression among others, the article attempts to position itself as a methodological contribution to the anthropology of interiority by exploring how complex trajectories of thinking and being are played out in public spaces but are not necessarily externalised.

19 We are obviously not hearing people’s thoughts in themselves but their verbal articulation in a public context, and as such they are not only subject to varying levels of personal disclosure, self-censorship and the act of recording but also by the limits of linguistic expression. Importantly, not all thought processes take place in language and thought routinely incorporates various non-linguistic, imagistic, and non-symbolic modes of thinking that operate close to the threshold or beyond the realm of language. In other words, the inner dialogues that accompany this article are best regarded as performative instantiations of the type of inner voice and linguistic representation through which people self-consciously understand, negotiate and re-imagine their surroundings, themselves and others. It is a process that involves a rendering of perception and experience into speech in a way that can be likened to the kinds of ekphrastic description used to describe art. Coming from the Greek Ek (out) and phrasis (to speak), ekphrasis, relies upon the translation of one form into another, for example when offering a verbal description of a visual phenomenon, such as when describing a work of art and having to translate it into words to someone who has never seen it (Irving 2013).

20 The reader is now invited to watch some short video excerpts online, or they can download sounds clips onto their phone or MP3 player and walk around their own neighbourhood with someone else’s thoughts in their heads: or sit in a café or cross a bridge or ride a train. Each clip contains 3 inner dialogues of about 3 or 4 minutes duration but are taken from the full-length recordings that range from 15 minutes to 1.5 hours. They are also presented without background information, akin to the way that people mostly encounter each other in public spaces as strangers and to provide an experiential affinity with the way persons dwelling alongside each other in cities are often unaware of the expressive inner lives of the people that surround them.

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New York Stories (sound documents)

Load “New York Stories” sound files onto MP3 player or smart phone: https://soundcloud.com/ irving2000/sets/anthrovision-the-lives-of-other-citizens Recorded by Andrew Irving

21 Or watch the video excerpts here:

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 22 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2390

Video link: https://vimeo.com/64922792

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 23 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2390

Video link: https://vimeo.com/64922800

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 24 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2390

Video link: https://vimeo.com/64922797

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 25 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2390

Video link: https://vimeo.com/64922801

Ekphrastic Adventures

26 Meredith debating the tragic irony of thinking her friend’s cat was dying and then finding out her friend had cancer; Thomas thinking about Depression-era Detroit, the

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soup kitchen and the future of the automobile industry; Jim crossing the ocean and many years to remember a night in 1964 at a cinema in Birmingham, England; Sara imagining herself flying above the water and thinking about the personality of the man who designed the bridge she had waited so long to walk on; Tony contemplating what might happen if a close friend has a baby; Keith sitting outside a café fictionalising and narrating the people around him, Terrence sitting outside the same café being made aware of his black skin when a cop looks at him; Laura waiting for her partner and questioning their relationship and so on. It soon becomes apparent that there are as many ways of thinking as there are of speaking. By listening in to the thoughts of strangers in their daily life as they walk around the city and across bridges or sit in squares and cafés, we are offered a glimpse into the different modes of inner dialogue, imagery and memory that constitute the thoughtscape of the city.

27 To be in the city is to be located at all times within a meshwork of intersecting thoughts and to be part of a continuous and collective interaction with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and textures which impress themselves onto the collective nervous system. As one moves around and engages with the city, the eye and ear pick up far more information than can be effectively described in words as part of an internal or external narrative. Moreover, whereas our being-in-the-world is experienced as a complex assemblage of perception and sensation – in which the simultaneous co- presence of emotion, mood, and memory mix with movement to constitute our embodied lived experience of the moment – language is largely linear in its structure and expression and unfolds over time. As such what is experienced simultaneously across different perceptual and sensory modalities, including those of sight, sound, smell, and so forth, can only be expressed verbally in a sequential, linear fashion. We need to recognise, therefore, that the fragments of spoken thought that accompany this paper, like all speech, involves a distortion, reduction, and linearisation of the simultaneity of people’s lived and sensory experience (many aspects of which are impossible to articulate to oneself or others). When understood as part of a wider range of corporeal and sensory effects that constitute someone’s lived experience, it becomes apparent that what is present to and is constitutive of being in any particular moment far exceeds that which can be articulated through linear forms of speech or text.

28 This reinforces how lived experience is a whole-body phenomena that intertwines inner expression with nerve-based activity and that interiority does not imply a bounded person or sterile dichotomy of inner⁄outer. People’s thinking and being are not contained by the boundaries of the physical body but are an emergent property of the interaction between body and world in which both the perceiving organism and the world are in constant process. This is not a new idea and recalls Marx’s (1988) discussion of the effects of labour and capitalism upon the sensory body in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, as well Bateson’s ecological anthropology (1972) in which persons are seen as constituted via a complex set of interactions with the environment. This illustrates how people’s inner expressions are neither bounded nor fixed but are continuously generated within the interaction between person and world, and thereby challenging any assumed opposition of inner/ outer in which interiority is seen as directed ‘inwards’ and sociality ‘outwards’.

29 The recordings make apparent that New York’s streets, cafes, bridges and squares are complex sites of experience and expression that at times can be highly dramatic or theatrical and at other times predictable or routine, except we cannot see or hear the

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myriad inner dialogues that are going on underneath the surfaces of people’s public activity. Meredith’s inner dialogue, for example, stretches from the routine to great emotional density over a few short steps as she begins by looking for a Staples stationary store to buy CD covers, then shortly after is dwelling on a friend’s cancer diagnosis that she learnt about the previous night. Meanwhile, she looks over the road and notices a cafe she likes to watch people in. The associative chain of thought constantly moves between different modalities.

30 By contrast, Thomas is concerned with people’s prospects in the current social and economic climate and his thoughts are organised as a sustained social analysis and argument about the position of working people and the historical migration of black workers from the agricultural south to the industrial north. His inner dialogue reveals much about the historical constitution of thought and consciousness. Tellingly, out of the 100 or more inner dialogues I recorded, a significant proportion were explicitly linked to global economic uncertainty and/or national security issues that have over- shadowed many people’s social lives since 9/11 and the banking crisis. If the project was undertaken in the relative economic and political stability prior to 9/11, the collective and social constitution of thought would have had a markedly different character, thus highlighting how inner dialogues are historical and articulated in a particular social, political and economic moment.

31 Tony and Laura’s thoughts, as with many other inner dialogues I recorded, concerns the centrality of personal relations to everyday life. Tony is a writer and video artist who is walking to his house, his thoughts emerging in staccato bursts: as he walks quicker and his blood circulates faster he begins to get more argumentative with himself as he negotiates a significant life event and keeps returning to the same words suck it up or let it go. Laura, meanwhile waits anxiously in a café for a message from her partner, wondering where he is and imagining a range of different scenarios from spending the night with a one night stand to a bus crash.

32 Jim, a retired doctor from Manchester, England, habitually spends afternoons roaming New York exploring the ambience and architecture of different Manhattan neighbourhoods: a passing car playing The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” transports him from the immediacy of Manhattan to an evening in 1964 in Birmingham, England, and begins a trajectory of thought concerning a friend he has not seen for more than forty years.

33 Venturing onto Manhattan Bridge for the first time in many decades, Joyce looks down onto the buildings in her neighbourhood that she normally looks up at. Her memories of crossing the bridge with her father as a young girl are intertwined with the vertiginous sensation of being high above the ground and the sheer noise and vibration of the trains going by. For Joyce this generates a unique experience of the bridge that combines nervous uncertainty, a meditation on her childhood and more recent past, and a reassuring recourse to religious faith.

34 In explicit contrast to Joyce, when Yuri walks on the bridge, he experiences “a calming sense” that is not always readily available or easy to achieve in other areas of his daily life. Conceived as a succession of trials and tests, day-to-day life continues to be overshadowed by the suicide of his former partner. Yuri describes how he is able to establish a sense of calm and freedom while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge that is often denied to him elsewhere. This not only demarcates a key difference between his and Joyce’s experience of being on a bridge but emphasises how each bridge has a

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different character that helps establish someone’s lived experience of the moment. Both Yuri and Joyce’s thoughts turn to the suicide of others, however, while for Yuri the Brooklyn Bridge affords a sense of calmness that is made manifest in his body, Joyce experiences the Manhattan Bridge as a site of nervous anxiety.

35 In Sara’s inner dialogue, her words describe a kind of magic that is contained in the bridge itself, something miraculous and something magnetic that is “not seen with regular eyes” or “easy to express” but which generates feelings that combine flying on water and something like “wishes.” Sara had travelled all the way from Israel to walk across the very same bridge whose photograph adorns her wall at home. At times her words resort to metaphor in an attempt to overcome the difficulty in expressing how she feels and describes her experience as like flying on water. However, she is not always using metaphor and when she declares that there must be something in the bridge; this is a statement of fact and not similitude.

36 The different modalities through which each of these citizens encounters the city not only gives weight to Heidegger’s argument that people’s interactions with, and understandings of, the world are never free floating insofar as they are always disclosed through a specific state of mind (1962), but also William James’s notion that while experience and consciousness are fluid properties generated through action they are also partially constituted by various modes of thinking and being that repeat or persist over time so as to create an experience of a world seemingly “shot through with regularities” and “essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments” (James 2000:90).

37 Importantly the fragments of inner dialogues presented here demonstrate how human beings are never fully in control of their own thoughts. Sometimes an event, memory or phrase repetitively comes into consciousness unwanted and unbidden. The person may desperately want to be thinking about something else but the subject or memory keeps coming back. A bad day at work that one keeps trying to forget, a hurtful comment that keeps getting replayed, a sexual obsession, a friend being diagnosed with cancer, a song’s refrain repeating, fearing for one’s job or someone having a baby: we may want to change the subject but find ourselves, like Tony or Yuri or Meredith, repeatedly coming back to the same topic, thinking about something that we only have partial agency over. At the same time, the environment impinges on the content and character of thought, as is made apparent in Jim’s inner dialogue in which he observes and comments on his fellow citizens and the architecture that surrounds him in the street before being led by his nose to thinking about Italy and by his ears to Beatle-era England and his friends at the time.

38 Heidegger employs the term Ausserlichkeit (outwardness, externality) to describe the superficial appearances of routine actions and concerns, and “everydayness” to describe “the pallid lack of mood that dominates the ‘grey everyday’ through and through” (1962: 395). Heidegger is not assigning a negative character to everyday life but arguing that people’s interactions with familiar objects and places are always accompanied by a specific state of mind. However, the 100 inner dialogues that were collected for New York Stories, suggests Heidegger mistakenly conflates the exterior expression of ordinary, everyday activities with ascribing content to people’s lived, experiential interior. By making inferences and assertions based on outward appearances, people’s ongoing activities are accorded a pallid lack of mood rather than

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the complexity and diversity of emotions, feelings, and dilemmas that constitute the underlying thoughtscape of social life.

39 In this we can discern a problem common to all fieldwork and ethnography, namely how

40 to establish the epistemological and evidential grounds for making claims about people’s perceptions and experiences based upon the observation of daily practice and other forms of extrinsic expression that are present to the eye and ear and make social life open to anthropological observation and theorisation. The problem of perception, subjectivity and how to read and understand people’s observable or audible actions remains one of the most enduring epistemological and methodological problems encountered by anthropologists in the field. From Evans-Pritchard’s declaration that individual perceptions have ‘no wider collective validity’ and the ‘subject bristles with difficulties’ (1969: 107), through Geertz’s (1973) long-standing commitment to external, publicly observable symbols as the primary realm of anthropological study, to Bourdieu’s dismissal of interest in lived experience as a complacent form of ‘flabby humanism’ (1990: 5), the potential problem with making anthropological claims about people’s interior dialogues and imaginative lifeworlds means they remain unrepresented within many ethnographic accounts.

41 The lack of ethnographic attention to inner speech and expression is perhaps unsurprising given its transitory and sometimes ungraspable character, as well as its potential to invalidate anthropological truth claims concerning people’s intentions, actions and moral worldviews. At times, the constitution and character of people’s inner expressions might even be diametrically opposed to their public expressions—an experience no doubt familiar to many anthropologists in the field and their own social lives—thereby threatening to undermine the evidential grounds for making claims based upon the observation and interpretation of extrinsic forms. The resulting epistemological privilege frequently granted to the exterior within contemporary philosophy and social science (Johnson 1999) has allowed social theorists to claim knowledge about people’s lived experiences and worldviews through the erroneous, yet epistemologically convenient, practice of inferring people’s experiences and worldviews from the surrounding social context or via the postulation of abstract theoretical or social structures, rather than providing empirical evidence about the content and possibly oppositional character of people’s private expressions. However, as Jackson (1996) has pointed out, anthropological theory and explanation are not determining agents and it is a mistake to confuse the metaphorical abstractions used to theorise and analyse people’s lives and actions with the reality of their lived experiences. Indeed, I would argue it is virtually impossible to offer an empirically reliable and grounded account of people’s perception, experience and understanding of the world without accounting for the diverse combinations of inner speech, intentionality and emotion that mediate people’s social lives or from theoretical or contextual analysis alone.

42 For anthropology, this might be as much a question of disciplinary authority and epistemological convenience, as it is puppetry and ventriloquism (Appadurai 1988). In response a practice-based ethnographic approach to people’s internal expressive activities not only provides empirical insights into social life, experience and the human condition but generates data for analysis that helps ensure the debate about interiority is not conducted at levels of theoretical generalisation and assertion and has

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the potential to generate more realistic ethnographies and representations of social life in which anthropological subjects can recognise the qualities of their own subjectivity and lived experience.

43 By bringing an anthropological focus to the field of inner expression, my aim here has thus been to offer a critical rethinking of the ontological and evidential status accorded to people’s experiential interior within the social sciences and open up the debate about the role (or otherwise) of interiority across different social and cultural contexts, as well as develop new practical ways of researching how people’s inner lifeworlds might relate to extrinsic, audible and observable expressions, principally in relation to interior dialogue and urban experience but also in terms of understanding social life more generally. Although, the material presented here, cannot provide anything more than a partial and flawed instance of people’s inner dialogues and the thoughtscape of New York, rather than avoiding or simply disregarding people’s thoughts and perceptions or subjecting them to ungrounded theoretical speculation and assertion, it nevertheless allows us to take the practices of inner speech and imagery that brain scientists argue are fundamental to human life—but do not ascribe ethnographic content to—and show the process at work within a practical fieldwork context whereby the content emerges in ‘real time’ in the moment and location of its original articulation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and articles

Appadurai, A. 1988. Introduction: Place and voice in anthropological theory. Cultural Anthropology 3.1: 16–20.

Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1990. In other words: Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Carruthers, P. 2002. The cognitive functions of language. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 25: 657– 726.

Crapanzano, V. 2004. Imaginative horizons: An essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. 1969. The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon.

Fernyhough, C 2013. The voices within: The power of talking to yourself. New Scientist, June 3, number 2919.

Geertz, C. 1973. Interpretation of cultures: New York: Basic Books.

Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and time. Oxford Blackwell.

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Hurlburt, R. 2009 Descriptive experience sampling. In Oxford companion to consciousness, T. Baynes, A. Cleermans & P Wilken, eds. Pp. 225–227. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Irving, A. 2005. Life made strange: An essay on the reinhabitation of bodies and landscapes. In Qualities of Time, W. James, D. Mills, eds. Pp. 317–331. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Irving, A. 2007 Ethnography, art and death” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute n.s.13(1), pages 185-208

Irving, A. 2009 The color of pain. Public Culture. 21: 2. 293-319.

Irving, A. 2010. Dangerous substances and visible evidence: Tears, blood, alcohol, pills. Visual Studies 25.1: 24–35.

Irving, A. 2011. Strange distance: Towards an anthropology of interior dialogue. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 25:1.

Irving, A. 2013. Into the gloaming: A montage of the senses. In Transcultural Montage. R. Willerslev and C. Suhr, eds. Pp.76-96. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Irving, A. 2016. The art of life and death: Radical aesthetics and ethnographic practice. HAU Malinowski Monograph Series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jackson, M. 1996. Phenomenology, radical empiricism, and anthropological critique. In Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, M. Jackson ed. Pp. 1–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

James, W. 1890. Principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Holt.

James, W. 2000. Pragmatism and other writings. London: Penguin.

Johnson, G. 1999. Inside and outside: Ontological considerations. In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and exteriority, psychic life and the world. D. Olkowski and J. Morley, eds. Pp. 25–35. New York: SUNY Press.

Marx, K. 1988. The economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Walser, R. 1992. The walk and other stories. London: Serpent’s Tail.

Ward, J. 2006. The student’s guide to cognitive neuroscience. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.

Films

Irving, A. 2013. (dir). New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens. Granada Centre.

Steel, E. 2006. (dir.). The Bridge. Koch Lorber Films.

NOTES

1. Walking Fieldwork consisted of accompanying people as they carried out their everyday activities and asking them to narrate out loud the stream of their thoughts, emotions and experiences as they emerged in real time in order to grasp the phenomenology of the body-in- action, including the experience of living with bodily uncertainty. By listening to and recording people’s spontaneous comments and narratives as they walked in their neighbourhoods, carried out daily chores and interacted with familiar objects and places, my correspondents offered glimpses into the ‘real-time’ streams of thought, mood and emotion that comprised their everyday life and experience but which were not usually publicly expressed. In doing so,

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movement and narrative were used to understand the phenomenology of the unwell body-in- action by crafting an ethnographic context for the narration of experiences, which are already lived in a person’s daily life but otherwise might not be articulated or made public. For more general accounts of how experiences of terminal illness, death and dying are mediated by complex streams of interior dialogue and imagination, see Irving (2016).

ABSTRACTS

The capacity for a complex inner lifeworld that encompasses ongoing streams of inner dialogue and reverie, as well as non-linguistic or image based forms of thought, is an essential component of being human and central to many everyday actions and practices. Simply put, without inner expression there would be no self-understanding or social existence in any recognisable form. Despite this, it is largely a terra incognita for anthropology or is seen as irrelevant or intangible, rather than an empirical phenomenon that is directly constitutive of people’s lived experiences and actions and therefore worthy of investigation. As such anthropology is at risk of only telling half the story of human life. This presents a deep-seated problem for disciplines like anthropology that are based on empirical evidence insofar as it is primarily a methodological and practical problem rather than a conceptual one, especially with regard to how to research and represent the transient, stream- like and ever-changing character of people’s interior expressions and experiences as they emerge in the moment. In response, this article attempts to offer an ethnographically grounded account of how people’s lived experiences of the city are mediated by complex amalgams of inner expression, memory and imagination that largely remain beneath the surface of their public activities. The accompanying video and sound recordings derive from an experimental practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. The reader is invited to download sounds clips onto their phone or MP3 player and walk around their own city with someone else’s thoughts in their head.

La capacité d'accéder à un mode de vie intérieure complexe, incluant des flots incessants de dialogues intérieurs ainsi qu'à des modes de pensées ni verbales ni visuelles, est une composante essentielle de l'être humain. Ce phénomène est central dans le cadre de nombreuses activités et pratiques. Clairement, sans expression intime il n'y a pas d'auto-compréhension ou d'existence sociale sous aucune forme reconnue. Malgré cette situation, nous sommes face à une "terra incognita" en anthropologie, face à un phénomène perçu comme non-pertinent ou abstrait plutôt que comme un phénomène empirique qui constitue à part entière l' expérience de vie des gens et de leurs actions et mérite donc toute notre attention. Ainsi, l'anthropologie prend le risque de ne rendre compte que de la moitié de la vie. Cela représente en fait, un problème de fond pour les disciplines comme l'anthropologie, organisées autour d'évidences empiriques. Cette situation relève d'un problème méthodologique et pratique plutôt que d'un problème conceptuel. Cette question est cruciale spécialement dans le cadre des recherches et des représentations de l'éphémère, des expressions intérieures en constante évolution qui affluent dans l'instantanéité.

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Face à cette situation, cet article propose d'offrir un travail ethnographique fondé sur la manière dont les expériences de vies des gens en ville sont composées d'amalgames complexes d'expressions intérieures, de mémoires et d'imaginations, largement enfouies lors de leurs activités publiques. Les vidéos et les sons qui accompagnent cet article sont issus d'un terrain de recherche " Histoires de New-York" durant lequel j'ai enregistré plus d'une centaine de dialogues intérieurs de passants étrangers qui se déplaçaient dans la ville. Le lecteur est invité à télécharger des extraits sonores sur leur téléphone ou leur lecteur MP3 et de marcher dans leur propre ville avec les réflexions d'une autre personne dans sa tête.

La capacidad para un complejo mundo vital interior que abarca permanentes flujos de diálogo interior y ensueño, así como formas de pensamiento no lingüísticas o basadas en imágenes, es un componente esencial del ser humano y central para muchas acciones y prácticas cotidianas. En pocas palabras, sin expresión interna no habría auto-entendimiento o existencia social en ninguna forma reconocible. A pesar de esto, es en gran parte una tierra incógnita para la antropología o se considera como algo irrelevante o intangible, más que como un fenómeno empírico que es directamente constitutivo de las experiencias y acciones vividas de las personas y por lo tanto digno de investigación. Por consiguiente, antropología corre el riesgo de rendir cuentas solamente de la mitad de la historia de la vida humana. Esto plantea un problema profundamente arraigado para disciplinas como la antropología que se basan en evidencia empírica en la medida en que se trata principalmente de un problema metodológico y práctico, más que conceptual, especialmente en cuanto a cómo investigar y representar las expresiones internas de la gente (transitorias, fluidas y siempre cambiantes) a medida que van surgiendo. En respuesta, este artículo intenta ofrecer una explicación basada en una etnografía sobre cómo las experiencias vividas por la gente de la ciudad están mediadas por complejos amalgamas de expresión interna, memoria e imaginación que en gran medida permanecen bajo la superficie de sus actividades públicas. Las grabaciones de video y sonido que se acompañan son el resultado de un proyecto de investigación experimental basado en la práctica, New York Stories, para el cual grabé más de cien diálogos interiores de individuos desconocidos elegidos al azar mientras paseaban por la ciudad. Se invita al lector a descargar clips de sonidos en su teléfono o reproductor de MP3 y caminar alrededor de su propia ciudad con los pensamientos de otra persona en la cabeza.

INDEX

Keywords: New York City, cognitive anthropology, inner dialogue, thoughtscape, experimental methods Palabras claves: New York City, cognitive anthropology, inner dialogue, thoughtscape, experimental methods Mots-clés: Ville de New York, anthropologie cognitive, dialogue intérieur, espace, methodes expériementales

AUTHOR

ANDREW IRVING University of Manchester [email protected]

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Mapping Ararat: An Augmented Reality Walking Tour for an Imaginary Jewish Homeland

Louis Kaplan and Melissa Shiff

Introduction

Mapping Ararat port of entry augment

Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

1 Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project animates Major Mordecai Noah’s bold plan of 1825 to transform Grand Island, New York into Ararat, a city of refuge for the Jews. Utilizing the new technology of augmented reality, this project gives Ararat the chance to become the Jewish homeland that its founder had envisioned but never

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realized nearly two centuries later. Mapping Ararat exposes viewers to the contingencies of history by plotting a counterfactual history that plays out this “what if” scenario on the Ararat path not taken. In illuminating this alternative trajectory of modern Jewish history, we are recalling that history is a construct of competing political desires and wills which could have turned out quite differently. This collaborative research- creation project is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant. The team consists of multimedia artist Melissa Shiff who serves as principal investigator and project director; Louis Kaplan who serves as the chief historian and theorist; and, new media artist John Craig Freeman (Emerson College, Boston) who specializes in augmented reality in his creative practice.

Mapping Ararat synagogue augment

Video still of synagogue on the augmented reality walking tour. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

2 It is possible to think about the Mapping Ararat project as performing a type of counterfactual ethnography for an imaginary community -- a group of inhabitants (“Araratians”) that might have been if history had gone in another direction. At a moment when there is a great deal of interest in emerging practices of visual anthropology such as sensory ethnography (with its emphasis on art and “aesthetic- sensual immersion”1 as well as on an embodied practice interested in mobility and the art of walking) and imaginative ethnography (with its emphasis on the “recognition of imagination and creativity as central and significant in human social relations”2), Mapping Ararat in its creation of an imaginary Jewish homeland and its construction of an augmented reality walking tour resonates with these two ethnographic currents even though its roots are found in site-specific installation and locative media art. Similar to Mapping Ararat, these ethnographic practices use performance, video, text, as well as embodied and sensory experience in order to “lead us to a way of understanding the multilayered nature of how place is constituted and the conflicting but entangled perspectives from which places might be understood and experienced” (Pink 2008: 11). Nevertheless, while these ethnographic practices focus in particular on how actual places are constituted, the introduction of augmented reality involves the

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superimposition or the blending of an imaginary or virtual space (Ararat) with an actual locale (Grand Island) to generate a hybrid reality.

Phantasmatic Jewish Tourism

Mapping Ararat flag augment

Video still of flagpole on the augmented reality walking tour. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

3 Mapping Ararat constructs an augmented reality walking tour that embeds 3D computer graphics modeled in the Maya and Rhino software programs into the everyday landscape at the very sites where Mordecai Noah plotted and projected his Jewish homeland on the banks of the Niagara River outside of Buffalo, New York. With smart phones in hand, visitors are able to divine, locate, and navigate architectural landmarks (e.g. synagogue) and symbols (e.g. flag) that are built to scale. These so- called assets are viewed on the screen of a mobile phone or a tablet device using the publicly available Layar application that relies on the use of geo-locational technology (GPS) to enable a site-specific mapping of Ararat with exact cartographic coordinates. These assets are not in the physical landscape; instead they are housed on a server and inserted into the landscape, so that our fictive Jewish homeland unfolds onscreen at these very sites. The result is an excursion in media geography that highlights the mediated aspects of AR tourism (Döring and Thielmann, 2008).

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Mapping Ararat gravestone augments

Video still of gravestones on the augmented reality walking tour. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

4 In this way, augmented reality provides a window into an imaginary dreamscape (as seen through the iPad or the iPhone) where counterfactual visions are superimposed over reality. In posing this parallel universe and hybrid reality, Ararat’s electronic monuments conjure the Jewish phantoms that are haunting the contemporary landscape of Grand Island. We take the view that augmented reality is a fantastic and phantasmatic medium -- one that opens up alternatives through which we encounter the ghosts and specters of things that might have been or that still might be yet to come. Here, the mobile camera phone functions not as a transparent window on the world or as a magic mirror reflection but rather as a spectral refraction that points to paths that were not taken but that are still haunting the scene. The exposure of such Jewish ghosts on Grand Island through the construction of these electronic monuments parallels Sarah Pink’s study of “place making” and her astute observation that attending to different routes and mobilities in local visual culture “can reveal important ethnographic insights in how urban places are constituted and contested” (2008: 11).

5 In the description for the workshop “Mining Imagination: Ethnographic Approaches Beyond Knowledge Production,” convener Michaela Schäuble (2013) reminded the participants that the filmic medium has “from its inception been used to explore the invisible and imagined dimensions of human life ‘as if real.’”3 The exact same thing can be said of the new media technology of augmented reality as it has been deployed in the Mapping Ararat project. What a peculiar phenomenon it is to behold the “augmented reality effect” and then to have this effect exposed in a way that pierces the veil of Maya and reveals that it is an illusion.

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https://vimeo.com/95792460

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7 In other words, one invests in the illusionism of the augment that has been inserted into the space of the real only to have the carpet pulled out from under one’s mobile electronic device. One is left hanging in the space that has been abandoned by the computer graphics rendered (appropriately enough) in the software program Maya. The augments split the scene of visual representation and vanish into invisibility. Indeed, the exploration of imagined dimensions as if they were real is at the core of this augmented reality project given that Mapping Ararat plots and superimposes the imaginary Jewish homeland of Ararat onto Grand Island, New York as if it were real.

Mapping Ararat Sochi Olympic augment

Screen shot of Sochi Olympic billboard with Ararat tourist on the augmented reality walking tour. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

8 The AR walking tour transports tourists to the nondescript “non-place” of Grand Island for a participatory and interactive experience where one playfully activates and conjures the imaginary Jewish homeland of Ararat. Each augment (or asset) that one encounters on the walking tour may be viewed as an electronic monument, building, or landmark. Here, Mapping Ararat draws upon the work of the digital cultural theorist Gregory Ulmer (2005) who invokes the idea of electronic monumentality that has been made possible by the internet and by digital media in general. For Ulmer, electronic monuments are the way by which commemoration reemerges in contemporary society and they do this by constructing a virtual public sphere. As Ulmer puts it in the “Introduction” to this book: “The hypothesis of electronic monumentality is that commemoration is a fundamental experience joining individual and collective identity, which must be adapted in any case to the emerging apparatus of electracy. […] Electronic monumentality provides the basis for a virtual public sphere.” (xxi). In a more recent article by Ulmer written in collaboration with John Craig Freeman (2014),

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they discuss how accessing the virtual public sphere is crucial to augmented reality art interventions in particular. “Public discourse has been relocated to a novel space: a virtual space that encourages exploration of mobile location-based art in public” (61). Whether taking the form of a virtual synagogue or a port of entry, each of the augments constructed for our project bear witness to and fulfill the need for both public recognition and commemoration of the Ararat alternative. Such a walking tour with its reliance on locative media allows for a site-specific use of AR technology to advance the pedagogical and artistic ends of the project.

Mapping Ararat augmented reality walking tour map

Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

9 The site-specific nature of the tour also resembles a treasure hunt as participants receive a map that marks the places where they must search for and find the augments. Each thumbnail-sized icon has been created from a birds-eye view render of the 3D Maya model. The augmented reality walking tour consists of twenty-four visual attractions in total. Each point of interest has an accompanying audio file that provides the virtual tourist with information about that particular site mixing fact and fiction in a multi-layered soundscape.

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Burr’s Atlas 1829

Detail of the County of Erie showing “Arrarat” as an actual geographic location, 1829. David H. Burr ; engd. by Rawdon, Clark & Co., Albany, & Rawdon, Wright & Co., New York (1829).

10 This tourist map also alludes to an important historical artifact that is pivotal to Mapping Ararat and its goal of remembering an imaginary Jewish homeland on Grand Island and that also underscores an important cartographic aspect of the project. It shows us the archival map of Grand Island that was published in David H. Burr’s Atlas of the State of New York in 1829. Grounding our project in a specific geographical location, Burr’s Atlas lists Arrarat -- spelled with 3 r’s -- as an actual place. This map and its placement of Ararat on the north east side of the Island has enabled us to root our imaginary Jewish homeland and augmented reality walking tour in a specific physical site. In this way, our locative media project uses the area on the map now known as Whitehaven as the precise location for the AR walking tour.

11 Augmented reality generates a new form of virtual tourism that brings cyberspace back into real space. On the augmented reality walking tour, tourists often “divine” for the augments by waving their I-phones or I-pads in the figure-8 motion of calibration until they are tracked down and appear on the screen when they are fully registered. The screenshot function of the Layar program also enables a type of virtual photography that allows users to pose with the augments as they are superimposed onto real space. In this way, they are able to document their interactions with the Ararat artifacts or monuments that have been inserted into the Grand Island landscape. This screenshot function also allows for the circulation and distribution of these tourist shots to both friends and family via e-mail or posting them to social media websites. In this regard, they follow the model of photographic digitization sketched by John Urry and Jonas Larsen in their informative study The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011). As the authors write, “Many personal photographic images are now destined to live virtual, digital lives

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without material substance, in cameras, computers and on the internet. Emails, blogs and social networking sites dislocate photographic memories from the fixed physical home and object-ness, distributing them to desktops, folders, printers, photo paper, frames – or trash bins” (156). It is interesting to note how these authors stress the dislocation of such touristic images and their removal from a “fixed physical home and object-ness” as a hallmark of digital photographic memories. This characterization is most applicable for a description of the virtually mediated tourist mementos that are taken in the imaginary and deterritorialized Jewish homeland of Ararat.

12 The virtual tourist photographs that are shot in “Ararat” are linked to the countless images of tourists documenting their visits to exotic places, heritage sites, and historical landmarks around the world using snapshot photography. However, they also display a major difference from conventional tourist photographs in that they illustrate how humans increasingly inhabit their world at a distance in the digital era. In offering an example of virtual tourism, Mapping Ararat illustrates how mediation and distanciation overtake the space of immediacy and presence in terms of a touristic experience. This is reflected not only in terms of the technological mediations that one encounters on the AR walking tour (the experience of the tour as mediated via the screen of the mobile phone or tablet) but also in terms of these screenshots generating a new type of virtual photography. These aspects conform to and confirm Urry and Larsen’s reflections on digital photographs as “a crucial component of mobile- networked societies of distanciated ties and screened sociality” (Urry and Larsen 2011: 186).

13 The Ararat screenshots are also closely akin to the tradition of humorous fabricated photographs staged in photo studios where people playfully pose with props “as if” they are flying in an airplane or driving a car. It is important to recall that this playful “as if” element is at the root of the positing of any counterfactual history. The superimposition at the crux of the screenshot also bears a direct relationship to the practice of photomontage and its contestation of photographic truth and it also recalls photomontage’s often biting sense of humor. For instance, one recalls the comic series of postcards (ca. 1906) that depict London as if it were Venice. Again, the principle played out here is similar to our own imaginary Jewish homeland that sees Grand Island as if it were Ararat. The AR walking tour transforms participants into actors, photographers, and directors who become immersed in getting just the right shot and in framing their screenshots in order to give the illusion of realism and to capture the (augmented) reality effect.

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Cornerstone Monument

Screenshot of tourist “reading’ Cornerstone Monument. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

14 For example, the photographer asks the tourist in this particular screenshot to pose in a way so that it seems “as if” he is reading the inscription on the Ararat cornerstone monument when he is actually looking at nothing at all. The result is a virtual photograph that serves as a visual enactment of what history looks like when it has been written in an alternative universe.

Contested Memories

15 There is a large culture industry in memory tourism that has grown up around Jewish heritage sites over the past years and all of them are designed to promote Jewish cultural memory. While there are different destinations for these tours, they share the common goal of strengthening Jewish identity and they enable diasporic Jews to remember the formerly rich cultures from which they came or the victimized grounds from where they were forced to leave. One might situate these tours as a form of amateur sensory ethnography to some extent. Some tours are designed to introduce North American Jews to those places in Eastern or Central Europe from which their ancestors immigrated or where there was a vibrant Jewish cultural and religious life before the Holocaust. The ghosts invoked in these pre-packaged tours review the nostalgic traces of major Jewish diasporic cultures in European centers (e.g, the ghettos of Prague or Venice) or in the Eastern European shtetls. In addition, there are also sobering and somber Holocaust tours of concentration camps that offer pilgrimages to highly charged sites of death and horror haunted with evil spirits that serve a memorializing function. These tours often help to define Jewish identity in terms of

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past victimhood and they set up a narrative where the ultimate destination and destiny is identification with the land of Israel and Zionist nationhood.4 Other Jewish heritage tours go to Israel directly in order to affirm the holy land as Jewish place of origin, homeland, and nation-state. In contrast, our Ararat augmented reality walking tour stands at the dawn of a new era of Jewish virtual tourism as the Ararat tourists engage with these apparitional augments in a site-specific and an embodied way.

16 This image mimes the typical Tourist Information Centre that one finds on any road trip but while there is a big blue and gold sign, there is no actual referent here.

Ararat Welcome Sign augment

Screenshot of visitors on the augmented reality walking tour. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

17 Freeman and Sheller (2015) stress the importance of the production of affect in digital public art projects. They refer to “affective atmospheres” that “are elicited by concrete assemblages of digitally mediated encounters in diverse physical spaces, at once private and public.” (5). As a digitally mediated encounter, the Mapping Ararat augmented reality walking tour generates an affective atmosphere that thrives on ambivalence as it induces a self-ironic sense of nostalgia in its participants/users as well as a “provocative awareness” of how this space could be imagined otherwise. This mode of Jewish virtual tourism helps people to identify Jewishly and even feel a strong sense of nostalgia but for a place that they or their ancestors never left, a place that never was but might have been. (This virtual initiative can be referred to as “Birthright Ararat.”5) Indeed, the AR walking tour is founded on an ironic type of nostalgia -– namely, the remorse and regrets felt over the loss of a Jewish homeland that might have been but that never was. Experiencing these apparitional augments in such a site-specific and an embodied way exposes the affective power of the project as well as its poignancy. In

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this way, the Mapping Ararat mobile app stages both a sentimental journey and a moving experience. Nevertheless, it is also important to recall that the “non-place” of Ararat -- set up as this visual mirage -- is also the self-ironic source of the humor that pervades this project in contested memories. Thus, the nostalgia for home is offset by the deterritorializing plays opened up by plotting this Jewish homeland in cyberspace reminding us that the impossibility of utopia (as no place) is often a cause for laughter as the mobile device is pulled away to reveal that nothing is really there.

Ararat Port of Entry augment

Screenshot of Rabbi Tanenbaum at the Ararat Port of Entry. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

18 In another humorous interaction between real and virtual space, this image shows local Rabbi Irwin Tannenbaum smiling after having just “entered” the Ararat port of entry. This playful even game-like activity where the interactive tourist imagines himself an alternate world stands in stark contrast to the morbidity invoked by the Holocaust concentration camp tour that subjects tourists to the passive absorption of the horror. In “Pilgrimage, Reenactment, and Souvenirs: Modes of Memory Tourism,” Marita Sturken (2013) defines memory tourism as “a rite of mediated return through which tourists […] create an experience of memory” (281). In Mapping Ararat, we also encounter a case study in memory tourism but one of a virtually mediated kind. While Sturken talks about how “architectural designs, memorials, and museum displays deploy reenactment strategies to evoke memories (281),” our project generates electronic monuments on the AR walking tour to create experiences of contested memory that transforms the contours of the past. As you can see from this image juxtaposition on the AR walking tour the Sovereign Nation of Ararat counter-monument and its

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alternative history shadows the actual marker for tourists on Grand Island who can learn about the Whitehaven Settlement (1834-1849).

Ararat Sovereignty Marker Augment

Screenshot of Sovereignty Marker augment juxtaposed with actual Whitehaven Settlement Historical Marker Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

19 This historical episode occurred immediately after Major Noah and his associates sold off the land to a company from East Boston who built a large timber mill on the former site of Ararat.

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Ga-We-Not Sovereignty Marker

Screenshot of Ga-We-Not Sovereignty Marker augment marking the restoration of Grand Island to the Seneca Nation. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

20 On the other hand, we have constructed another augment on the walking tour to introduce the more troubling aspects of the aboriginal question and to raise the Native American ghosts haunting Grand Island as well. In this case, we have placed a second plaque next to the actual historical one in Whitehaven that commemorates Noah’s Ararat plan placed by the Town of Grand Island in 1978. This Seneca nation augment functions as an electronic counter-monument that tells the story of the same island as a Native American settlement and in line with another historical claim. In this way, visitors can begin to conjure a parallel aboriginal world in another alternative universe. The construction of this augment takes us into the heart of the contested cartographies and memories raised by Mapping Ararat. It is fascinating to recall in this context that the Seneca nation actually filed a land claim in United States District Court as recent as 1993 to reclaim Grand Island and several smaller islands in the Niagara River on the grounds that they were taken illegally from the tribe by the State of New York. The legal wrangling would occupy the next dozen years until the Supreme Court refused to hear the final Seneca appeal on June 5, 2006. To imagine the Seneca nation’s counterfactual history of what they called Ga-we-Not or the Great Island troubles the unconscious of Ararat and contests any utopian fantasy of it as a tabula rasa. The plaque reads: “Ga-We-Not Restoration Act Declaration of National Sovereignty June 22, 2002. We the Seneca Nation Reclaim Ga-We-Not From the American Occupiers and Restore These Ancient Hunting and Burial Grounds on our Native Land.”

Further Ethnographic and Artistic Implications

21 Our project possesses certain affinities with the practice of sensory ethnography with its focus on such aspects as emplacement, embodied activities (e.g. walking and eating),

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sensory perception, and a type of affective “knowing” that cannot be expressed in words. It is also interesting to note in this context that one of the innovative and favorite multi-sensorial research methods of sensory ethnography is “walking with others” (Pink 2009: 76). While many recent ethnographic case studies involve taking walks with inhabitants or sound walks in an immersive environment, our project consists of taking walks with mobile media in hand and on ear in order to locate and recover the imaginary realm of Ararat via augmented reality. In this regard, augmented reality can be viewed as one of many “medial manipulations as means of tracing, evoking, and (re)presenting embodied experiences” (Schäuble 2013). It might be said that Mapping Ararat affords another “way of walking.” On the AR walking tour, the “actual ground of lived experience” (Ingold and Vergunst 2008: 2) has been augmented by an interactive experience that contains oneiric visions of what this ground might have yielded if it had taken shape as Ararat. These walks also allow for a great degree of social interaction and bonding as people share their experiences and as the tour stimulates conversation and debate about the political and social issues that are raised by the project and their contemporary relevance.

Noah’s Ark Theme Park Augment

Screenshot of University at Buffalo students posing next to the Noah’s Ark Theme Park Augment. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

22 We also have conducted successful on-site tours with different classes from the University at Buffalo. These guided experiences show the viability of AR walking tours as a pedagogical device that plays to the mobile technological habits of a generation of digital natives who have been raised on adventurous software applications and video games.

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Cornerstone Monument Augment

Video still of Cornerstone Monument as seen on the augmented reality walking tour. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

23 Furthermore, the Mapping Ararat augmented reality walking tour as guided by GPS technology also resonates with that genre of art that features walking and mapping as central to their interactive performance and that turns contemporary artists into digital cartographers. As Karen O’Rourke (2013) writes, “When GPS technology came of age in the mid-1990’s, artists had been using trajectories down here on earth to trace maps for many years. Today the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for location-based mapping coincides with a renewed interest in walking as an art form” (xvii). As the location-based augments come into view on our tourists’ I- phones and tablets, our project turns walking Grand Island into the art form of Mapping Ararat. There are many parallels in particular between Mapping Ararat and the work of Canadian artist as cartographer Janet Cardiff who is well known for devising site- specific audio walks such as Her Long Black Hair (2004) designed for a walk through New York’s Central Park. This forty-six minute audio tour gives the participant a CD audio player, a map, and a set of snapshots by which to navigate a particular route and to engage with its sites, sounds, and memories. The Mapping Ararat AR walking tour shares some of the same techniques and objectives as Cardiff’s project but now the hand-held mobile device that features the insertion of augments into real space has supplanted the photographic snapshots in opening up new interactive possibilities. All in all, the AR walking tour offers the way by which site-specific and interactive installation art enters into the digital era. As Christine Ross (2009) remarks, “In the field of art, AR environments are, effectively, a derivative of site-specificity installation art in which site is de/un/respecified by the activation of computer generated data.”

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Title page, Where To? Exhibition

Mapping Ararat Synagogue Augment as seen on the title page of Where To? exhibition website. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

24 Given that the thrust of this project is the playful positing of an alternative Jewish homeland in Ararat, it was selected (while it was still a work in progress) to be part of the Where To? exhibition curated by Udi Edelman at the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon in spring 2012. This group exhibition (featuring Michael Blum, Ariella Azoulay, and Yael Bartana among others) allowed artists and historians to tap into modern Jewish cultural memory and Israeli state archives in order to imagine possible roads not taken for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in light of the contested circumstances of the present. The curatorial statement reads: “Through the exhibited works and the historical materials gathered for the exhibition, we suggest reintroducing these forgotten currents and ideas to the public discourse, bringing the ‘losers’ of history to the center of the stage, and once again presenting the question of Jewish existence as a current problem that remains unsolved” (Edelman, Danon, Kasmy-Ilan, 2012). One can see how this statement supports artistic and historical work that questions officially sanctioned memory and that poses alternatives that have been subjugated. In a political landscape full of anxieties about the sustainability of Zionism based in the holy land or critical of its abuses of power in relation to the Palestinian population, it is easy to see why the Mapping Ararat project would resonate in Israel among post-Zionists and others seeking political and aesthetic alternatives. Thus, the curators selected the Ararat virtual synagogue as the on-line banner for the entire exhibition. By recalling the 1825 plan for the Jewish habitation of this space on the border between the United States and Canada, Mapping Ararat reopens the debate over the proper/improper place for the Jews to be at home.

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Tour Highlights

25 Let us review in this final section four points of interest as highlights on the augmented reality walking tour in order to see how the ambulatory participants on Grand Island navigate and interact with traces, evocations, and representations of the imaginary realm of Ararat. These four audio-visual clips demonstrate how, with I-pads and tablets in hands, we are using the technology of augmented reality to chart an imaginary Jewish homeland and to engage the public with a fascinating chapter of modern history in a sensory, embodied, and interactive manner. In summation, they illuminate how Mapping Ararat can be understood as part of a larger discourse suggesting that there is more to the touristic gaze than what meets the eye alone. In other words, the Ararat AR walking tour with its multi-media and multi-sensorial components rethinks “the concept of the tourist gaze as performative, embodied practices, highlighting how each gaze depends upon practices and material relations as upon discourses and signs” (Urry and Larsen, 2011: 14-15).

26 1. Cornerstone Monument. Grounded in a weighty piece of actual history, Mapping Ararat begins with the three hundred pound cornerstone that Noah ordered from Cleveland Ohio and that played a pivotal role in the Ararat Proclamation Ceremony held at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Buffalo on September 15th, 1825. It is the only relic that remains from Mordecai Noah’s ambitious endeavor to create a Jewish homeland on Grand Island, and the artifact is currently housed at the Buffalo History Museum where our team made a pilgrimage at the beginning of the project. During our archival research, we discovered an illustration that was published in a book dated from 1841 that depicts the brick and wooden obelisk constructed to house the cornerstone as a mid-nineteenth century tourist attraction.6 We also know from historical evidence that President John Q. Adams disembarked to see the cornerstone monument on a sightseeing trip in 1843.7 That 1841 drawing was then rendered using the 3D modeling program Maya and uploaded to a server. In this way, the Mapping Ararat project has restored the cornerstone and reanimated it for a touristic use such that it has become a virtual tourist attraction for a digital era.

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https://vimeo.com/59058539

28 2. Flag. The Ararat flag is one of the simulations of statehood that has been created for the project in order to mime the emblematic symbols and trappings of national authority. (Other material artifacts include the production of stamps and money.) The design of the flag foregrounds a white dove as the symbol of peace on a blue background and with the Star of David in its mouth as the symbol of Jewish community. It also references the Biblical story of the ark that so fascinated Mordecai Noah. One recalls that Noah sent out a dove during the flood when seeking dry land and that the dove returned to him with an olive branch from Mount Ararat where the ark landed (Genesis, Chapter 8, Verse 11). In this way, the flag also maintains the associations of refuge that are keeping with Noah’s vision of Ararat. The flag exists in two different visual registers as it moves between a material artifact and a virtual augment. We have

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placed the flag in its augmented form on the flagpole that is near the port of entry where it proudly waves and welcomes visitors to the shores of the island.

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https://vimeo.com/59004320

30 3. Synagogue. This video clip documents the long approach to the Ararat synagogue augment on the walking tour. Like the other augments on the tour, this three- dimensional synagogue is built to scale so that one can navigate around it or even go “inside” this particular virtual structure. Mapping Ararat is quite different from most academic uses of augmented reality that involve the reenactment of events or the reconstruction of historic buildings having their basis in things that actually existed.8 In contrast, Mapping Ararat occupies a more hypothetical space given that it speculates and extrapolates from an actual proposal that never came to fruition. The construction of the Ararat synagogue offers a good case study of this mode of extrapolation in that it is based on architectural designs in upstate New York as well as synagogue designs in New York City from the same foundational period during the first half of the nineteenth century. Jumping to the present, the synagogue and the virtual contours of Ararat contest the contemporary use of this particular site. The Ararat synagogue is sited at the edge of the eighteenth green of the River Oaks Golf course in Grand Island. This means that worshippers have to watch out for flying golf balls if they want to go “inside” the virtual structure. This real life hazard provides an excellent example of the surreal juxtapositions that ensue when creating tourist attractions on the augmented reality walking tour.

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https://vimeo.com/59005199

32 4. Gravestones. The next example parallels the cornerstone monument given that it has a basis in actual history as well. Based on the actual 1875 drawing of Mordecai Noah’s gravestone by artist A.H. Nieto (Karp 1987), it has been inserted into Grand Island’s Whitehaven Cemetery. This is a decidedly Christian cemetery at the epicenter of where Ararat would have been according to Burr’s Atlas of 1829. With this transplantation, we have repatriated Noah’s gravesite relocating it from the Shearith Israel Cemetery in New York to the imaginary Jewish homeland of Ararat.9 In so doing, we also have converted an actual monument into an electronic monument. In addition to the founder’s gravestone, there are two others of this type on the AR walking tour. These are the gravestone augments constructed for Noah’s wife Rebecca and for his youngest son Lionel. The tombstone for Lionel Noah poses genealogical questions along the path of Ararat’s counterfactual history. These alternative possibilities are raised in the audio track for Lionel Noah’s gravestone on the walking tour as it moves between historical fact and fantasy. The text alludes to the fact that Lionel named his son Lionel Jr. in an act of assimilation directly opposed to the Jewish practice of naming one’s children only after deceased ancestors and thereby honoring their memories. Coincidentally, it turns out that Lionel Jr. repeated the same gesture in the next generation by naming

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his son Lionel Jr. too. In divining the Jewish ghosts of Grand Island, the placement of this tombstone in Ararat imagines an alternative history where Jewish naming practices would have foreclosed this possibility leading to a very different outcome.

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https://vimeo.com/112770976

34 The visit of some of the descendants of Noah’s youngest son Lionel to Grand Island in May 2014 captures the poignancy of our project. In this field trip to “Ararat”, Mordecai Noah’s great-great-great-great grandchildren (both of whom are Christian) pose in front of their ancestors’ virtual graves. In this speculative manner, Noah’s actual descendants occupy the space of contested memories and imagine an alternative history for themselves. Such an image raises the counterfactual question of “what if?” directly and allows us to peer into the contingencies of history. One senses the affective power and the emotional quality involved in bringing Noah’s descendants on the augmented reality walking tour as well as their uncanny and haunting presence on Grand Island. In a sense, this family functions as the ethnographic subjects of Ararat in the subjunctive mood.

Screenshot of Noah Family Descendants with Gravestone Augment

Visit to Rebecca Noah’s gravestone augment by Mordecai Noah’s great great great great grandchildren. Shiff, Kaplan, Freeman, Mapping Ararat, 2012

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and articles

Barber John W. and Henry Howe. 1841. Historical Collections of the State of New York. New York: S. Tuttle.

Bonnett, John. 2003. Following in Rabelais’ Footsteps: Immersive History and the 3D Virtual Building Project, History and Computing 13 (2): 107-150.

Döring, Jörg and Tristan Thielmann. eds. 2009. Mediengeographie: Theorie – Analyse- Diskussion. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag.

Edelman, Udi, Eyal Danon, and Ran Kasmy-Ilan. 2012. “Where to?,” The Israel Center for Digital Art. http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/ExhibitionPage.asp?id=676&path=level_1 (accessed October 31, 2014).

Freeman, John Craig and Mimi Sheller. 2015. Hybrid Space and Public Art, Public Art Dialogue 5 (1): 1-8.

Ingold Tim and Jo Lee Vergunst. 2008. Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

Karp, Abraham. 1987. Mordecai Manuel Noah: The First American Jew. New York: Yeshiva University Museum.

Nakamura, Karen. 2013. Making Sense of Sensory Ethnography and the Multisensory. American Anthropologist, 115 (1): 132-136.

Nevins, John. ed. 1951. The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794-1845. New York: Scribner, 1951.

O’Rourke, Karen. 2013. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Pink, Sarah. 2008. Mobilizing Visual Ethnography: Making Routes, Making Place, and Making Images [27 paragraphs]. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9 (3), Art. 36. http://www.qualitative- research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1166 (accessed February 7, 2017).

Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage Publications.

Ross, Christine. 2009. Augmented Reality Art: A Matter of (non) Destination. UC Irvine: Digital Arts and Culture 2009. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6q71j0zh (accessed October 31, 2014).

Schäuble, Michaela. 2013. Mining Imagination: Ethnographic Approaches Beyond Knowledge Production. http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/mining-imagination (accessed October 17, 2014).

Shiff, Melissa, Louis Kaplan, and John Craig Freeman. 2011. Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project. http://www.mappingararat.com (accessed October 31, 2014).

Sturken, Marita. 2013. Pilgrimage, Reenactment, and Souvenirs: Modes of Memory Tourism. In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, eds. pp. 280-294. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ulmer, Gregory. 2005. Electronic Monuments. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Ulmer, Gregory L. and John Craig Freeman. 2014. Beyond the Virtual Public Square: Ubiquitous Computing and the New Politics of Well-Being, In Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging

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Technology to a Novel Creative Medium. Vladimir Geroimenko, ed. Pp. 61-79. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Urry, John and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Los Angeles and London: SAGE, 3rd ed.

Wolf, Simon. 1897. Mordecai Noah: A Biographical Sketch. Philadelphia: The Levytype Company.

Films

Cardiff, Janet. 2004. Her Long Black Hair. Audio Walk with Photographs, Central Park, New York, 46 min. http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/longhair.html (accessed October 31, 2014).

Websites

Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. 2014. www.imaginativeethnography.org (accessed October 31, 2014).

Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project http://www.mappingararat.com/ (accessed February 7, 2017).

March of the Living http://marchoftheliving.org/ (accessed February 7, 2017).

ENDNOTES

1. For a review of this “emerging trend within visual anthropology” (132), see Nakamura (2013). 2. This is taken from the “Welcome” page to the cyber-collective Centre for Imaginative Ethnography’s website at www.imaginativeethnography.org. 3. The symposium took place at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University on 5-6 April 2013. 4. This is the exact itinerary taken by the sombre Holocaust tour that is known as the “March of the Living” that starts in the European concentration camps and that finishes in Jerusalem. See http://marchoftheliving.org/ 5. We thank Jonathan Katz of the University at Buffalo for this astute observation. 6. The following text in John W. Barber and Henry Howe (1841) provided our team with the specifications necessary to construct the augment. “The monument erected by Major Noah is now standing. It is about 14 feet in height. The lower part is built of brick – the upper or pyramidal portion is of wood, and the whole painted white (154). 7. Adams wrote the following entry in his diary: “Buffalo, July 26, [1843]. The passage from Schlosser to Buffalo occupied four hours, the banks of the river on both sides presenting a succession of beautiful landscapes. Some of us landed on Grand Island and inspected the pyramid announcing in Hebrew and in English the city of Ararat, founded by Mordecai M. Noah” (552). See Nevins 1951. 8. The work of John Bonnett (2003) and the three-dimensional virtual building project in Ottawa is quite relevant in the Canadian context. 9. According to the biography of Noah written by Simon Wolf (1897), he was “the last Jew buried within the limits of New York City, in March 1851 at the Shearith Israel cemetery on Twenty-First Street” (25).

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ABSTRACTS

This article reviews Mapping Ararat: An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project that utilizes augmented reality (AR) to create a walking tour that envisions what would have happened if Mordecai Noah’s 1825 plan to transform Grand Island, New York into a city of refuge had succeeded. Using mobile devices, tourists interact with Ararat artifacts and monuments created using 3D modeling software and inserted into the Grand Island landscape. The article reviews Mapping Ararat as a new form of mediated and virtual Jewish tourism and its implications for such fields as sensory ethnography, counterfactual history, and Jewish cultural studies. It also contextualizes the project in terms of augmented reality art and its extension of site-specific installation using locative media. The final section highlights four electronic monuments on the AR walking tour (flag, cornerstone, gravestones, and synagogue) with documentary video clips.

Cet article analyse Cartographier Ararat: projet d'une patrie juive imaginaire qui utilise la réalité virtuelle pour créer une visite qui permette de visualiser ce qui aurait pu arriver si le projet de Mordecai Noah de transformer Grand Island à New York en ville de refuge avait abouti dans les années 1825. Equipés de téléphones mobiles, les touristes interagissent avec les objets et les monuments de Ararat créés en 3D et insérés dans le paysage naturel de Grand Island. Cet article examine ce projet "Cartographier Ararat" comme une forme de tourisme juif virtuel et son apport pour les recherches en ethnographie sensorielle, en histoire contre factuel et dans le domaine des études culturelles juives. Le projet se situe dans le contexte des recherches menées dans le domaine de l'art de la réalité augmentée ainsi que dans le cadre d'installations géo-localisée. La dernière partie de l'article est consacrée aux quatre monuments électroniques accessibles sur le chemin virtuel (drapeau, piliers, pierres tombales et synagogue) avec des vidéos clips.

Este artículo revisa Mapping Ararat: Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project que utiliza la realidad aumentada (AR) para crear un tour a pie que visualiza lo que habría sucedido si el plan de 1825 de Mordecai Noah para transformar Grand Island, Nueva York, en una ciudad de refugio hubiera tenido éxito. Usando dispositivos móviles, los turistas interactúan con los artefactos y monumentos de Ararat creados utilizando un software de modelado 3D e insertados en el paisaje de Grand Island. El artículo analiza Mapping Ararat como una nueva forma de turismo judío mediado y virtual, y sus implicaciones para campos como la etnografía sensorial, la historia contrafactual y los estudios culturales judíos. También contextualiza el proyecto en términos de arte de realidad aumentada y su extensión como instalación situada utilizando medios locativos. La sección final destaca cuatro monumentos electrónicos en el recorrido de la realidad aumentada (la bandera, la piedra angular, las lápidas y la sinagoga) con videoclips documentales.

INDEX

Keywords: Ararat, augmented reality, contested memories, counterfactual, digital art, homeland, Mapping Ararat, Jewish history, Mordecai Noah, virtual tourism Mots-clés: Ararat, réalité augmentée, mémoires contestées, contrefactuel, art numérique, patrie, cartographier Ararat, histoire juive, Mordecai Noah, tourisme virtuel Palabras claves: Ararat, realidad aumentada, memorias críticas, contra-factual, arte digital, patria, mapeando Ararat, historia judía, Mordecai Noah, turismo virtual

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AUTHORS

LOUIS KAPLAN University of Toronto, Departments of Art and Visual Studies [email protected]

MELISSA SHIFF York University, Sensorium Research Centre [email protected]

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Notes on ‘Space of Consciousness (Chidambaram, Early Morning)’

Ernst Karel

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 1 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2383

2 https://archive.org/help/audio.php?identifier=spaceofconsciousness

3 For the Mining Imagination workshop, I took the opportunity to compose a piece that revisits some older recordings of mine, recordings I made while doing ethnographic research at the Hindu temple of Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, in South India (Karel 1997). Over a period of several months, I spent much of my time in this temple, participating in the multisensory nature of Hindu ritual or puja, talking with people I met there, and seeking to understand something of the lived experience of sound for participants, especially with respect to the overwhelming resonances of the two large bells rung during the six daily pujas at the main shrine. For Mining Imagination, I presented this sound piece first thing in the morning, as an introduction to our day together; I hoped it might allow us to enter an imaginative space, a space of relation, of semiotic play, of devotion, of connectedness, of wholeness, of engagement, of repetition, of wellness, of coolness.

4 Meaningful experience is firmly emplaced and embodied at the temple of Chidambaram. The temple is most famous as the site where Śiva, as Naṭarāja, the Lord of the Dance, performs the Cosmic Dance of Bliss, the ānanda tāṇḍava. Here, in the tradition of Śaiva Siddhānta philosophy reflected in the Tirumantiram of Tirumūlar, a Tamil text from about the 11th century CE (cf. Weiss 2009:58), Śiva is identified with nāda, or primordial sound. He is Supreme Light of Cit [consciousness] He dances the Dance of Bliss; He is Nada that is ‘Aum’ [Om] He dances the Dance of Beauty; He dances in the Golden Hall; He dances in Golden Tillai [Chidambaram];

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He dances the Dance Wondrous; Who can ever know him? (Tirumantiram verse 2723)1

5 Chidambaram is also one of the five major Śiva temples in South India which are each associated with one of the five elements; Chidambaram represents ākāśa (aether, space, or sky).2 The five elements are associated with the five senses, and act as the gross medium for the experience of sensations. The basest element, earth, created using all the other elements, can be perceived by all five senses — hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. The next higher element, water, has no odor but can be heard, felt, seen and tasted. Next comes fire, which can be heard, felt and seen. Air can be heard and felt. The fifth and most subtle element, ākāśa, is the medium of sound, but is inaccessible to all other senses. "Siva is Nada (Sound). Sound (Nada) is the attribute of Akasa (ether). Of the five elements, the fifth element, ether (Akasa) is the medium through which sound is transmitted. So the determined goal of Nada – Nadanta – is the Cosmic Dance of Nataraja, who represents ether, among the five elements. He dances in the universe and in the Cit akasa (soul)." [Natarajan 1994:253]

6 The five elements are further each associated with a material of the body, as I was told (without even having to ask) on my first evening in the temple by a group of young men who would become my friends: earth is flesh, water is blood and fluids, fire is body heat, air is breath, and ākāśa, being empty space, is all the openings and pores of the body. As blood flows through one’s veins, so does ākāśa pervade one’s body and the whole of the universe – and one is never more aware of this permeability as when sound fills all of space and all of one’s being.

7 There are two etymologies to the name Chidambaram, not mutually exclusive. One is that it comes from the Tamiḻl ciṟṟampalam, meaning ‘Little Hall’, after its humble beginnings probably before the beginning of the last millenium as a thatched hut near a sacred pool in a dense forest of Tillai trees. The name of Chidambaram is also interpreted as the Sanskrit cit (consciousness) and ambara (space or sky): the Space of Consciousness. As Margaret Trawick puts it in her poetic 1978 dissertation from the University of Chicago, The sacred spell and other conceptions of life in Tamil culture, “All of this has merged over the centuries to mean the space within the heart, which is the space of consciousness, and which also is a small place, but open and ‘empty’ like the sky, and common to all creatures” (Trawick Egnor 1978:14). The famous central shrine of the temple has come to be known as the Cit Sabha, or Hall of Consciousness; it is the site of Śiva’s dance.

8 Siva too, capable of taking the form of ākāśa, is all-pervasive, infinitely subtle, becoming manifest only when invoked through sound, as into the murti [image/form] with the recitation of mantras, or as sound, as Om, as Om nama śivāya, indeed as the sound of the great bells. The Lord is in our heart, As Om is He there, As Fire is He there, As Order is He there, As Space [ākāśa] in body is He there, He, the One Being. (Tirumantiram verse 2804)

9 The body symbolism/iconicity of the physical structure of the Naṭarāja temple is widely known among devotees and was frequently mentioned to me during my research. R.N.

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Natarajarathina Deekshithar, a hereditary temple priest who served as my main teacher that summer, has written that the 20,600 golden tiles of the roof are the breaths that a person takes in a day, the 72,000 iron threads with which they are attached are the veins in the body, and the nine stūpas atop the Golden Roof are either the nine bodily orifices, or nine goddesses (śaktis or mātrikas), or both (cf. Deekshithar 1997:20). The five pillars on the front of the Cit Sabha “are identified as the five senses” (Natarajan 1994:133). The five silver-covered steps which lead to the feet of Naṭarāja are known as the pancāksara (five-syllable) steps, because it is by chanting the five- syllable mantra nama śivāya that one can attain to the Lord Śiva (cf. Deekshithar 1996:70) – and the pancāksara is often to be heard. Letters ‘Na’ and ‘Ma’ to commence, Letter ‘Si’ in centre, Letter ‘Va’ intoned in breath regulated, Together with ‘OM’ at beginning of all, If you even once chant thus, The Lord of ‘Ma’ (Maya) Will in your heart be. (Tirumantiram verse 976)

10 In talking with people about their experience of sound, my fieldwork came to focus on the sound of two very large bells rung during the main puja or worship ceremony, five times per day. In the accompanying sound piece, we approach an experience of the bell sound, but mediated as this experience is, we do not arrive there. We might start to think about this sound by taking up the physicality of it, the emergent resonances of certain overtones, and the architectural space of the huge stone temple in which it reverberates – and this piece momentarily hones in on the most prominent resonances through filtering, using sharp band-pass EQs, reducing.

11 But through my daily visits to the temple and conversations with devotees, priests, musicians, and others, it quickly became apparent that for worshippers, the sound is multivalent and exists in a highly elaborate, and widely-shared, network of significations which strongly influence the ways in which it is experienced at a phenomenological level, and which had to do more with place than with space. Priests told me that first of all the bell sound serves to summon and to establish a connection with the deity; in a favored metaphor, it was like a telephone line over which their chanted mantras travel; or like an electrical line, which when switched on activates the deity. For devotees, at the most basic level hearing the bells is an indexical sign of the deity’s presence, calling them from other parts of the vast temple complex. Once at the main shrine, the bell sound blocks or masks outside sounds, the hectic sounds of the street – air horns, motors, and so on – which can be considered harmful, disturbing, ‘heating’ the body; the bell sounds, in contrast, are calming, ‘cooling’ the body. A physician in the Siddha system of Tamil medicine described this in holistic terms, saying that the bell sound is at once “cooling the brain, cooling the ātma [soul], cooling the mind, cooling the organs.” Others talked about how the great sound can defuse ‘hot’ emotions such as anger; it can displace one’s own thoughts of mundane problems, and focus the mind on the deity.

12 Simultaneously and at another level, the immense sound one is immersed in and pervaded by is identical with the deity. Echoing the equivalence between Śiva and nāda, people spoke of the bell sound as equivalent to Omkara, to the syllable Om. It’s not that

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it resembles Om; in Susanne Langer’s terms, it’s doesn’t represent Omkara, but rather actually presents it. Emplaced in the temple of ākāśa, the bell sound is Om is Śiva.

13 This sound piece, ‘Space of consciousness (Chidambaram, early morning)’, is a single-take recording (with the exception of the aforementioned transformational intervention, near the end) which represents an early morning walk from the Star Lodge, at the corner of East Car Street and South Car Street, up East Car Street and and left onto East Sannadhi, towards the temple entrance. I pause (2:30) to slip off my sandals in front of the home of the priest R.N. Natarajarathina Deekshithar, and continue on down the street and through the Eastern gopuram, or tower-gateway (3:45). After crossing the open temple courtyard, I enter the massive stone temple complex (4:30), the voices of human visitors and of resident bats echoing in the long, reverberant passageways (6:00), and make my way through to the central Cit Sabha, open to the sky. Here I stop to listen to the daily devotional singing of the widow, dressed in white, who has sung to Śiva nearly every morning for twenty years. Her singing ends, and then begins the morning puja or worship ceremony for Śiva Naṭarāja begins: an awakening. At the signal of a silver bell ringing out from the central sanctum as silver lamps alight with flaming camphor are brought before the murti, the woman pulls a chain to shake a rack of bells which jangles, and devotees – usually young men, perhaps students from Annamalai University across town – begin to rock the large temple bells, tugging with all their strength at the ropes, and the clappers inside them swing and begin to strike more and more steadily. The interplay of the strikes of the two bells remains rhythmically indeterminate, each swinging and striking independently, although the upper harmonic partials that are sounded by the combination of the two bells remain constant, emerging, it seems, from empty space. The central stone temple area open to the sky is filled with sound – the sound is Om – which then displaces all other sounds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Deekshithar, R. N. Natarajarathina. 1996. Chidambaram -- The home of Nataraja. Tattvaloka 19.2:68-72 [Reprinting of original, published in 1992].

Deekshithar, R. N. Natarajarathina. 1997. The hidden treasure in the City of Ether: A passage to the Akasha Lingam. Chennai: Inspiration.

Egnor, Margaret Trawick. 1978. The sacred spell and other conceptions of life in Tamil culture. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago.

Karel, Ernst. 1997. Ringing Omkara: Sonic significations in the Hall of Consciousness (Chidambaram, Tamilnadu). M.A. Thesis, Committee on Human Development, The University of Chicago.

Tirumantiram: A Tamil spiritual classic. 1991. (By Tirumular. Translated by B. Natajaran) Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math.

Natarajan, B. 1994. Tillai and Nataraja. Madras: Mudgala Trust.

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Weiss, Richard S. 2009. Recipes for immortality: medicine, religion, and community in South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

NOTES

1. Translations from B. Natarajan (1991). 2. Four of these are in Tamilnadu, and one is in Andhra Pradesh. In addition to the Tillai Naṭarāja Temple in Chidambaram, the other four pancabhūtasthalas are Ekāmbareswara Temple (earth) in Kanchipuram, Jambukeswara Temple (water) in Thiruvanaikaval, Arunāchaleswara Temple (fire) in Thiruvaṇṇāmalai, and Sri Kalahasthīswara Temple (air) in Kalahasthi, Andhra Pradesh.

ABSTRACTS

The small city of Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, is home to an ancient and massive temple complex, at the center of which is the famous site where Śiva, as Naṭarāja, the Lord of the Dance, performs the Cosmic Dance of Bliss, the ānanda tāṇḍava, in the Hall of Consciousness. The temple is specifically associated with ākāśa (aether, space, or sky), the fifth of the five elements which is known as the medium of sound, and Śiva Naṭarāja is celebrated here with sonorous practices that include the ringing of two large temple bells. The sound piece published here, ‘Space of consciousness (Chidambaram, early morning)’, represents the situatedness of the temple complex within the city, the main shrine at the center of the temple, and finally the immersive sonic and semiotic resonances of the large bells. The accompanying text describes a network of embodied meanings implicated experientially in sound.

La petite ville de Chidambaram, Tamilnadu, abrite un groupement de temples anciens et imposants, au centre duquel siège Siva, ou Naṭarāja, le maître de la danse cosmique du bliss, le ānanda tāṇḍava, dans l'espace de la conscience. Le temple est exclusivement associé avec ākāśa (l'éther, l'espace ou le ciel) le cinquième des éléments connu comme le dispositif sonore et Śiva Naṭarāja est célébré avec des pratiques sonores et le retentissement de deux immenses cloches appartenant au temple. L'extrait sonore publié ici " Notes sur l'espace de conscience, (Chidambaram, à l'aube)" révèle le positionnement exact des temples par rapport à la ville, à l'autel principal en lien avec le centre du temple et finalement la résonance de l'immersion sonique et sémiotique des grandes cloches. Le texte d'accompagnement décrit un réseau de sens matérialisés expérimentalement en ondes sonores.

La pequeña ciudad de Chidambram, Tamilnadu, acoge un antiguo templo, en el centro del cual se halla el famoso sitio donde Śiva, como Naṭarāja, el Señor de la Danza, performa la Danza Cósmica de la Felicidad, el ānanda tāṇḍava, en el Salón de la Conciencia. El templo está específicamente asociado con ākāśa (éter, espacio o cielo), el quinto de los cinco elementos que se conoce como el medio del sonido, y Śiva Naṭarāja es venerada aquí con prácticas sonoras que incluyen el sonido de dos grandes campanas del templo. La pieza sonora publicada aquí, "Espacio de la conciencia (Chidambaram, temprano en la mañana)", representa la ubicación del templo dentro de la ciudad, el santuario principal en el centro del templo y finalmente las resonancias sonoras y

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semióticas inmersivas de las grandes campanas. El texto adjunto describe una red de significados corporalizados implicados en la experiencia del sonido.

INDEX

Mots-clés: ethnographie sonique, hindouisme, Inde, son, audio Palabras claves: etnografía sónica, Hinduismo, India, sonido, audio Keywords: sonic ethnography, Hinduism, India, sound, audio

AUTHOR

ERNST KAREL Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard University [email protected]

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A Remarkable Convergence 1

Paul Stoller

1 In my years as an anthropologist I have long held the assumption, which is perhaps a tad naïve, that anthropologists could transcend the cultural gulf of difference that separates them from their others. I assumed that if you learned to speak the other’s language fluently, your linguistic competence would be a strong indication of deep cultural respect, which could, in time, foster profound understanding and friendship between peoples defined by difference. That assumption compelled me to deepen my knowledge of the Songhay language. I studied proverbs and learned to talk about little discussed cultural matters—the names of plants, the use of spices in Songhay cooking, expressions associated with farming and healing. The use of these specialized elements of the Songhay language usually impressed my interlocutors. They praised my command of the Songhay language. In markets the anomaly of a white man speaking “old” Songhay attracted crowds of on-lookers.

2 “Where did you learn Songhay? a few people would ask.

3 “You speak Songhay better than me,” some would say with not a small degree of exaggeration.

4 When I “did” the famous market of Ayorou on the banks of the Niger River not far from the border between Niger and Mali, crowds of young people would come to listen me bargain for a beautiful hand-woven Songhay blanket. One day a man from Mehanna, the Songhay town where I conducted my early fieldwork, joined the crowd of Ayorou onlookers.

5 “Who is this white man who speaks Songhay? someone asked.

6 “He’s our white man,” the Mehanna man chimed in.

7 The long-term relationships I established in the field also reinforced this assumption. I studied with my teacher Adamu Jenitongo for more than 17 years. During that time I felt that we had developed an intimate bond—the loving ties of a father to his son. We had, or so I thought, bridged the wide cultural gulf that had separated us.

8 In 1988, I mourned his death, which not only brought to an end the life of a wise man, but also changed my life as a field anthropologist. After his death, how could I go on with my work in Niger? Who could replace my mentor? I tried to do new fieldwork but

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the situation in Tillaberi, the town where he had lived and I had done fieldwork, quickly deteriorated.

9 Despite my disappointments in Niger, I carried the same assumption with me to New York City the site of my fieldwork on West African immigrants. Although I never developed a relationship there that resembled the deep bonds I had shared with Adamu Jenitongo, I still felt that my linguistic and cultural knowledge of things Songhay might enable me to establish friendships that bridged the gulf of social and cultural difference. I liked the fact that in New York City my Nigerien friends called me “brother,” and said that I spoke Songhay like a native. I especially liked it when they bragged about me to their customers.

10 “He’s lived in my village.”

11 “He knows our history.”

12 “He’s a boro hano (a pure/good person)

13 When my friends said: “He’s really a Songhay.”

14 I would respond: “Even if a log has been in the river for 100 years, it can never become a crocodile.” I’d follow that proverb, which would invariably provoke much appreciative laughter, with affirmations that I was and would always be an American.

15 My friends would disagree, which would quietly reaffirm the premise that I was somehow different from other white people. One day in 2004 a conversation weakened the foundation of that assumption. I phoned Issifi Mayaki who had been one of my longstanding Nigerien friends in New York. Issifi and I shared a passion for political discussion, but also had enjoyed long and intense debates about religion and culture. We often talked about racism and the general American ignorance about Africa and Africans. He liked to call me his “brother.”

16 After several rings, Isiifi’s real brother, whom I hadn’t met, picked up the phone.

17 I introduced myself.

18 In the background I heard Issifi ask who was on the phone.

19 His brother said, “Paul.”

20 “Oh, that’s the white man,” Issifi said, not knowing he had been overheard. Moments later, he picked up the phone and said: “Paul! How are you, my brother?”

21 For me that incident underscored powerfully that the relationship of non-native anthropologists to their others is vexingly complex. In a short essay in 2005 I wrote about my immediate reaction to the incident, coming to the conclusion that

22 …my particular capacities as a fieldworker or as a human being could not alter an always already set of racially-defined sociological boundaries—of pre-colonial and colonial culture—established and solidified years before I had set foot in Niger…How disappointing it is for ethnographers to admit, and in my case it was a grudging admission, that the relationships that they develop in the field, while close, are, in fact, not usually as special as they might think… 2

23 One phone conversation did not dispel the feeling that my experiences in the Songhay worlds of sorcery and trade nonetheless had put me in a different category, a category in which a set of common understandings gave me insights into the social realities of my friends. And yet, the applicability of the aforementioned proverb never seemed stronger:

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24 “Even if a log floats in the river for 100 years, it can never become a crocodile.”

25 This new set of clear-sighted field expectations didn’t alter the texture of social relations with my Nigerien friends in New York City. We liked one another and we shared much laughter and pleasantry. Our ties continued to be mostly instrumental. They wanted me to buy things from them or send them clients. Sometimes they asked me to write them letters or find them an honest immigration attorney or a first rate French-speaking physician. Like any anthropologist doing research, I, of course, wanted to hear their stories so I might try to try to represent their experiences in America. In that way I could not only enhance my academic profile, but also help to create the space for an edified conversation about African immigrants in America.

26 My grudging realizations neither diminished the richness of my ethnographic experiences nor altered the sensuous texture of my ethnographic stories. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my longstanding relationships with my Nigerien friends in New York, I believed that there were distant existential boundaries that we would never cross.

27 This essay is about how we how we expand our imaginative horizons to approach those distant existential boundaries. It is also about how, through a perfect storm of circumstances, we can sometimes cross such an existential boundary—if only for a brief, but intensely meaningful moment. I never thought El Hajj Yaya Harouna, an African Art trader based in New York City and Niamey, Niger and I would enter into that special space. How could two men, defined by difference, experience a remarkable convergence?

El Hajj Yaya’s World

28 A characteristic West African market town Belayara is not only multiethnic, but multilingual as well. Accordingly, many of the market-savvy residents in Belayara speak not only Songhay, but Hausa, the major trade language in West Africa, and Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg nomads. Put another way the size and reputation of the market makes the small town of Belayara, which is 65 kilometers northeast of Niamey, Niger’s capital, a cosmopolitan space. Many of its inhabitants have traveled far and wide following long established as well as more recent trading routes.

29 If, like El Hajj Yaya, you grew up in Belayara, the market and its ethos would have had a deep impact on your worldview. From an early age Yaya and his brothers, Abdou, and Daouda learned that the trading life was an honorable one, a life that could bring a person both money and social prestige. They learned that truly prosperous merchants not only enjoyed material prosperity, but possessed “wealth in people,” a person with a wide network of people whom you could trust 3.

30 From talking with senior traders, the young Yaya learned that Islam is central to trading practices. The key to successful trading, according to the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, devolved from relations based upon mutual trust. If a trader extended credit to trading partner, he or she would expect that the credit to be repaid. If a trader purchased goods from a partner, he or she would expect that partner to ship those goods.

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A blanket trader in the Belayara Market, 2009

Photo by Paul Stoller

31 And so growing up in Belayara exposed Yaya and his brothers to the West African culture of trade, the lure of the good sale, the adventure of travel but also to the considerable comforts of home. When traders returned to the market from long trips to Niamey, Niger’s capital, to Lagos, Nigeria, or Lome, Togo and most especially the thriving metropolis of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, they would recount their adventures in distant worlds of wonder--the food of youthful imagination gave young men the appetite for travel. But they also stressed how good it was to return to the familiar smells and sights of home. What could be better than to return to the warm embrace of their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters?

32 Abdou, Yaya’s older brother, left Belayara in the late 1950s. A fraternal relative invited him to work in Abidjan, which, at that time, was a fabled commercial city. The young Abdou sold watches and bracelets in Abidjan markets and following the instructions of his elders, saved as much money as he could. In time, he had the capital to buy and sell his own goods—soap, hard candy, chewing gum, homespun cloth, bracelets, and cheap watches. Because of his entrepreneurial talents, he gradually expanded his network of suppliers and clients. By the time he was in his early twenties Abdou had fashioned himself a place in Abidjan’s economic life. He had become a trader of nyama-nyama, a little bit of everything.

33 Although Abdou had learned to speak, read and write French in elementary school, he saw his future along the path of commerce. Yaya, too, attended primary school and did well enough to become a student at the middle school in Fillingue, the provincial capital. There, he boarded with a family that housed and fed him—not always so well. Despite being far from kith and kin, Yaya liked studying French, math and science, and also took to the study of English, which was required in middle school. Like his father and older brother, he made sure to recite his prayers five times a day, and when the

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month of Ramadan occurred during the school year, he fasted from sun up to sun down.

34 By the end of middle school, in 1970, Yaya, now a teenager, decided to forgo his formal studies. At the invitation of his brother, who by now had married and had become a successful Abidjan trader and the head of a growing household, Yaya traveled to Abidjan to join his brother. It was his first step on the path of trade. Despite these adventures, he admitted to me during our conversations at The Warehouse or at the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market, that he always looked forward to return visits to Belayara.

35 For his part, Daouda excelled in school. Yaya’s younger brother was among the best students at the Belayara primary school. He won entry into the Fillingue middle school, where he impressed the teachers. In his last year of middle school, Daouda received high marks on his brevet, the exam you must pass to enter a lycee or a normal school. Because he wanted to be a primary school teacher, Daouda decided to attend an Ecole Normale. By the time Yaya had begun to buy and sell Tuareg jewelry in Abidjan--silver Agadez crosses and beautifully etched silver rings--Daouda had graduated from normal school. He found some temporary positions in isolated villages, but couldn’t find a more permanent position in a larger town. Eventually, he, too, decided on a life in commerce. He left Niger and joined his brothers in Abidjan. Like his brothers, he, too, looked forward to return visits to Belayara.

36 The brothers eventually extended their business to New York City, where they became art traders at a six-story warehouse on the west side of Manhattan just a block from the Hudson River. Abdou specialized in the masks and statues of the Baule and Guro peoples, who reside in Cote d’Ivoire. Daouda sold antique weapons from West and Central Africa. Yaya, for his part, traded very old terra cotta figures from the Bura region of Niger. He also continued to sell various versions of the Agadez Cross—all inspired by the Southern Cross constellation.

One version of the Agadez Cross

Photo by Paul Stoller

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An Old Bura Reliquary Figure

Photo by Paul Stoller

Paul Stoller’s World

37 My beginnings could not have been more different from those of Yaya. Unlike the young Yaya who lived in Belayara, Niger in a small mud brick house that lacked running water and interior plumbing, I spent my childhood and adolescence in a modest three-bedroom house in a middle class neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland, which is a close-in suburb of Washington D.C. We had a bathroom, a powder room, a basement and lots of space in a grassy backyard where I played with my childhood friends.

38 My parents, Sidney Stoller and Goldie Berman, came from thoroughly Jewish households. My great grandfather, Joe Stoller, was a carpenter who built and repaired houses in small villages in Belorussia. He trained his son, Mack, in the trade. But the early years of the 20th century brought turmoil to Belorussia—especially for Jews. Seeking refuge from Cossack pogroms and from eventual conscription into the Czar’s World War I Army, father and son slipped out of Belorussia and landed in Windsor, Canada. They eventually established themselves in Detroit, where, when resources permitted, they brought over other members of the family.

39 My grandfather, Mack Stoller, married Rose Swartz, the oldest child of the inimitable Swartz family. They had three children: Sidney, my father, Raymond and Beverly. My father was born in Detroit in 1920. A few years later the family moved to Washington DC where some of their landsmann (people from the same village) had settled. At that time Washington D.C. seemed to be a city of limitless opportunity. My grandfather left

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the bulk of the family, including my great-grandfather, back in Detroit, where Joe Stoller had a modest business. For his part, my grandfather used his meager savings to open a small grocery store in Southwest Washington D.C. The store was not a great success. Struggling in the grocery business, my grandfather’s landsmann encouraged him to go into the building business. Working hard in a trade business that he had known since childhood, he made enough money to provide my father and his siblings a comfortable home and a relatively prosperous life. In 1938 my father and his brother Raymond shared a car—with a rumble seat no less!

40 My father attended law school but did not find the law to his liking. As World War II unfolded he and his brother joined the armed forces. My father was a sharp shooter and sniper in places like Guadalcanal. After the war, Raymond went to medical school and Sidney went to work for my grandfather, which marked the birth of an enterprise called Stoller and Son, Inc. Carpentry Contractors. My father and grandfather’s company helped to build suburban houses in Silver Spring, Maryland. Indeed, we lived in one of the houses that my father and grandfather had built. Stoller and Son also did the carpentry work for many of the high-rise and garden apartments in the Washington DC Metropolitan area.

41 My mother came from more modest circumstances. Her Jewish parents escaped from Latvia and made their way to Montreal, Canada. Eventually they moved from Montreal to Cambridge, Massachusetts. When his business prospects turned sour there, my maternal grandfather moved the family—two boys and three girls, including, of course my mother Goldie, to Washington DC. On the streets of the Nation’s capital, my grandfather, Morris, became a fruit peddler. Unfortunately, he had a taste for gambling. He worked hard work and earned money, which, he squandered on pinochle and poker. Scrambling for income, my maternal grandmother, Leah, turned her home into a boarding house. My mother, then, grew up in a relatively poor Jewish home in which scant resources were reserved for the two boys in the household who, it was hoped, would eventually end the family’s economic plight.

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Goldie Berman on the eve of her marriage to Sidney Stoller in 1943

photo from Stoller family archive

42 My parents met and fell in love during the hard times of the late 1930s. The uncertainties precipitated by the onslaught of World War II compelled them to postpone their wedding. When my father received his orders to ship out to the Pacific, they decided to get married. My mother went with him to Brownsville, Texas where he suffered through basic training. My father came back from World War II unscathed— physically at least. He never talked about what he had experienced in the sniper’s perch or on the battlefield.

43 The business was very much a family-run enterprise. My uncle, who was, in fact, my father’s sister’s husband, did the books. My father’s brother, Raymond, now a surgeon, provided some timely loans. There were many ups and downs in the construction business. Although Stoller and Son, Inc. was far from producing astronomical profits in the late 1950s, the business provided a good life for our family. Even so, it did not afford us a style of living that satisfied my parents.

44 Through talk at frequent family gatherings at the large home of my paternal grandparents, family members continuously cultivated in me a strong will to succeed, which for them meant the accumulation of wealth. They liked to tell me that you could find fortune through hard work or through marriage. My mother would always talk about young men from relative modest means who married “rich girls,” and lived “happily ever after.” Everyone looked to my Uncle Ray, “The Doctor,” as the great success story in the family. By the time I was 10 years old, my uncle, who was my godfather, had moved back to the family digs in Detroit, and had built a private medical clinic. It was said that Uncle Ray was a millionaire. In the eyes of the family, he had become the model of and for success.

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45 Contrast my beginnings to those of El Hajj Yaya. When Yaya was a young boy, he learned how to sell products at the Belayara market. In addition to going to the local elementary and secondary school, he spent the early evening hours memorizing the Koran under the guidance of a local cleric. My parents sent me to Hebrew School where, during three early evening classes each week, I learned to read and write Hebrew—all in preparation for my bar mitzvah.

46 As I neared 13 my parents planned a large celebration to fete the emergent “manhood” of their firstborn son. They invited hundreds of people, rented the auditorium of our synagogue, bought many cases of vodka, arranged for a catered sit-down dinner, and hired the Guy Davis orchestra, featuring Jose Vargas on maracas and vocals. They also sent me off to dance school, where the inestimable Groggy Gurwitz taught me how to foxtrot, cha-cha, polka, jitterbug, and rhumba. For almost a year my mother dropped me off at Groggy’s studio, where the slender, permanently tanned, peroxided and pompadoured dance instructor, who sometimes practiced law, showed us his moves. Even though I didn’t particularly like my dance partners, 12-year-old Jewish girls in training for their bat-mitzvah, who, in retrospect, didn’t care very much for me, Groggy’s lessons gave me a ballroom dancing foundation. By February 6, 1960, I was ready to dance—and dance well—with my mother, grandmother, and aunts—all part of the grand design to use my bar-mitzvah to kvell (beam with pride) about my family’s relative prosperity.

47 During my childhood and adolescence you also received accolades for “being smart,” something highly valued in urban Jewish culture of the 1950s and 1960s. This atmosphere compelled me to work very hard in high school. I received fairly good grades and joined the debate team. If I could get accepted to an Ivy League university, I’d feel like a success. Alas, my academic record put that dream pretty much out of reach. What’s more, no one in my family was a Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Penn alumnus, which meant that I had no chance of being admitted as a “legacy” student. Several select liberal arts colleges also rejected my application for admission. Finally, The University of Pittsburgh, which was a fine institution of higher learning, accepted me and off I went to college.

48 When my father drove me from Silver Spring to Pittsburgh the fear that pulsed through my body had little do to with leaving home for the first time. In fact, I had long looked forward to being more on my own. No, I feared the challenge of a higher education. Could I cut it? Would I prove wanting in the competition for grades at Pitt? Would they kick me out?

49 When I arrived on campus, unpacked and wandered into what was for me a brave new world, I steeled my resolve to do well. Unlike my roommate and many of the students on my dorm floor, I spent much of my spare time studying. I thought that if I spent enough time reading and taking notes, the effort might make up for my self-perceived intellectual deficiencies.

50 In college I majored in philosophy and political science and found passion in journalism. During my senior year, a variety of circumstances, including the War in Vietnam compelled me to join the US Peace Corps. Given my many of years of studying French, they assigned me to Niger, a dry, arid and poor West African nation. I immediately fell in love with the land and its people. I learned the Songhay language and forged friendships that endure to the present. Several months before the end of my

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Peace Corps tenure, I met Adamu Jenitongo, a spirit possession priest and great healer. Upon my departure he looked at me and said: “You’ll be back.”

51 Five years later his prediction came to pass. Upon my return to the United States, I wanted to find a way back to Niger. First, I studied linguistics and then social anthropology. In time, I received a grant to conduct doctoral research on the religion of the Songhay people of Niger. Eventually, my path led me back to Tillaberi, the town where I had met Adamu Jenitongo. He invited me to be his apprentice. Thus began a 17- year apprenticeship during which he conveyed to me much of his wisdom about plants, magic, and living in the world. When he died in 1988, I knew that my days of fieldwork in Niger would soon be over. His death precipitated much turmoil in his family and well as among rival practitioners. I did return to Niger 1990-91 to consult with my mentor’s sons, but three weeks into my visit, I contracted “malaria” that wasn’t malaria, a “sickness” that isn’t a sickness. My Nigerien friends, who felt that I had been the target of a magical attack, feared for my life and insisted that I be evacuated. When I returned to the US, it took three months of burning special incense and ingesting special teas for me to return to “normal.” Fearing another magical attack, it took 18 years for me to gather the courage to return.

52 And so I began fieldwork among West African traders in New York City. After several years of that fieldwork I met El Hajj Harouna at the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem, the principal site of my New York fieldwork. When El Hajj Abdou said he came from Belayara, I wondered if he were a Sugi, a sub-ethnic group of that region. “They say that the Sugi,” I said, “is the cross-cousin of the sohanci (sorcerer).”

53 “I’m a Sugi,” he admitted, smiling at me.

54 “That means I should begin insulting you,” I stated, a smile creasing my face.

55 Laughter shook El Hajj Abdou’s body. He slapped me playfully on the shoulder. “Okay, let’s hear one.” “You mother,” I began, “is so….”

56 He slapped his knee. “Please,” he pleaded. “No more….no more.”

57 “Are you sure?”

58 He looked at me intently. “Why are you wasting your time here at this market? Come with me to The Warehouse. We have real merchandise there—wood (masks and statuettes) and mud (terra cotta figurines).”

59 “So I’ve heard,” I said. “But my work is here.”

60 “Come and see a real market,” he insisted.

61 I resisted, but weakly because I wanted to see The Warehouse.

62 “I’m going to The Warehouse right now. Let’s go.”

63 We took the subway to Penn Station and then walked another mile or so to The Warehouse. El Hajj Abdou introduced me to his colleagues. On each subsequent visit, the art traders there welcomed me warmly. They invited me to sit, drink coffee and talk. On one such visit in February 1998, El Hajj Abdou introduced me to his brother El Hajj Yaya.

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Moving Toward an Existential Boundary

64 Over the years, Yaya and I constructed an instrumental relationship. We exchanged services. I might steer a potential client to his stall. He would talk to me about his life and his experience as an African Art trader. Over the years he spent large chunks of time in Niger and Cote-d’Ivoire. When we were both in New York, we would see each other. I would also phone him from time to time.

65 When I began chemotherapy treatments in 2001, my world changed fundamentally. Confronted with mortality, I tried to live each and every day as fully as possible. What’s more, my orientation to anthropology shifted. I wanted to concentrate more on the use narrative link anthropological insight with a larger audience of readers.

66 When El Hajj Yaya told me he was undergoing treatment for colorectal cancer in 2007, I was at first surprised that the nature of our relationship hadn’t changed. Given my personal experience in the world of cancer I knew first hand that fellow patients often experienced a silent bond. On further reflection, I understood that the effects—both physical and psychological--of ongoing cancer treatment probably compelled him to isolate himself. I strongly believe that no matter the extent of your network of social support—and in my case the network was substantial and strong--cancer patients ultimately confront their disease alone. No one can feel your physical or existential pain. Sometimes it is simply better to retreat into the solace of solitude. And yet such solitude creates its own version of emotional pain. You want the love and support of family, but such love and support can often be unbearable. I sent him information on clinical trails, and phoned him regularly. He thanked me for sending him information, but rarely answered his phone or responded to my messages. Such are the conundrums of the cancer experience.

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El Hajj Yaya Harouna at the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market in 2009

Photo by Paul Stoller

67 In October 2010 I once again visited my West African friends at the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem market in New York City. Because he spent so much time alone in his apartment, I didn’t expect to see El Hajj Yaya that day. And yet, there he was sitting on a metal chair in front of Boube Mounkaila’s “leather” handbag shop.

68 He looked tired. He mentioned that the chemotherapy drugs had reduced the size of his tumor and that his physicians had been cautiously optimistic about his prognosis. After almost three years of on-again-off-again chemotherapy, they wanted El Hajj Yaya to continue treatment to “manage” the cancer. That day we spoke vigorously about politics in the US and Niger as well as about the twists and turns of the global economy. As always, I found El Hajj Yaya an admirable man. In the face of what seemed like terminal cancer, I admired his dignity and stoic persistence.

69 When the other traders in our discussion group moved away to tend to their shops, El Hajj Yaya beckoned me closer. He looked deeply into my eyes and touched my hand.

70 “Paul,” he said solemnly, “I’m going home.”

71 Given our recent history, this intimate statement provoked a surprise that quickly dissipated into a profound silence of mutual recognition. Like two cats perched on a wall, we sat motionlessly and let the statement sink in. He nodded his head and we sat for a few moments holding hands, a sign of deep friendship in West Africa. People strolled by. The din of conversations hung in the background. The sweet smell of Bint al Sudan perfume filled the air.

72 That moment was just a spark of time, a perfect instant of profound mutual comprehension and experiential convergence. For just that moment, I knew what he knew and he knew what I knew. We had crossed a distant existential boundary and

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entered a new space of awareness. It was what Martin Buber had brilliantly called an I- Thou moment of deep dialogue.4

73 We savored the moment. We knew it would be the last time we would see one another. In that moment of resignation, I felt a profound sadness. I don’t know if El Hajj Yaya felt the same sadness and resignation.

74 He stood up and walked toward the market exit. A few paces from me, he turned around. “I leave in two weeks,” he said in an even tone. He walked away--back to a life lived with pride and dignity.

75 So Yaya returned to Niger. I departed for my home in Wilmington, Delaware. He went back to his family and local businesses. I soon found myself once again among family, friends and colleagues.

76 Boube filled me in on what happened to El Hajj Yaya after his return to Niger. In the absence of chemotherapy treatments, cancer quickly took hold of his body. He found it difficult to eat. He found it increasingly painful to walk. A month after his arrival he took to his bed. Friends and relatives came to the family compound to pay their respects. They talked about wonderful things—travel, El Hajj Yaya’s life in Abidjan and New York, his considerable success in the world of trade. In this way, people bestowed upon him the cultural honor that befits a traveler, a restless taker of risks.

77 He died on January 1, 2011.

78 At our last meeting El Hajj Yaya and I experienced a rare point of existential convergence, a perfect storm of mutual comprehension. Like all peak experiences in life, this one lasted only a few moments, which, for me least, have been unforgettable. Those moments changed me. They reaffirmed in me the belief that human beings from different backgrounds can overcome substantial difference and establish deep bonds of mutual comprehension.

79 Those last instants with El Hajj Yaya also gave me the imaginative courage to understand more fully what Adamu Jenitongo had taught me a long time go: “illness is a great teacher.” For a long period of time, I thought that his statement referred to how sorcerers move forward on their path. It is through illness--sometimes natural, sometimes brought on through sorcerous acts--that the apprentice moves forward on her or his path of power. If you respond to illness with respect and dignity, you are ready to learn about more powerful rites and more profound truths. If you are not up to the challenge that illness presents, your journey ends at the fork in the road where your teacher guides you to another path. After the last meeting with El Hajj Yaya, I knew that illness was not only a great teacher, but also a great leveler. When I sat in treatment rooms with fellow cancer patients, I realized that illness could wash away social differences. If you are a cancer patient hooked up to an IV, it makes no difference if you are a professor or a sanitation worker. From the patient’s perspective, cancer does not draw boundaries of social class. In the treatment room cancer obliterates class distinctions, for everyone there is in the same situation--experiencing an unsentimental face-to-face confrontation with mortality. What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the experience of serious illness also makes it possible for two people, defined by social, cultural, linguistic and historical difference, to transcend their deep disparities, if only for a few intense moments, to experience a profound existential convergence. That convergence may have brought some existential closure to both of our lives. It may have given El Hajj Yaya a measure of comfort on his journey to a

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dignified death. It gave me a sharpened appreciation of the vicissitudes of life on a path toward an uncertain future. 5

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babou, Cheik Anta. 2007. Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853-1913 (New African Histories). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

Buber, Martin. 2000. I and Thou. New York: Scribners.

Ebin, Victoria. 1990. Commercants et missionaries: Une confrerie musulmane senegalaise a New York. Hommes et Migrations 1132:25-31.

Mennan, M.A. 1986. Islamic Economics: Theory and Practice. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Stoller, Paul. 2002. Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Stoller, Paul. 2005. The Presence of the Ethnographic Present. Qualitative Sociology 28.2: 197-99.

Stoller, Paul. 2014. Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

NOTES

1. This text is adapted from my recently published book, Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 2. Paul Stoller 2005: 197-98. 3. For studies of Muslim conceptions of trade see Ebin 1990; Babou 2007; Mennan 1986; Stoller 2002. 4. See Martin Buber 2000. 5. See Paul Stoller 2004.

ABSTRACTS

This essay is about an ethnographic epiphany. It is a story of two men, who, separated by ethnicity, language, culture, profession, and personal circumstance, bridged their considerable differences to reach a remarkable point of existential convergence, a deep dialogue that brought on a moving moment of profound mutual understanding. Our stories recount adventures experienced along two distinct life paths. El Hajj Yaya’s path followed the twists and turns of contemporary commerce. My path followed the sinuous trails of anthropology. In time our

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winding paths finally crossed in New York City, where we met and built a friendship. Our mutual experience of cancer gradually transcended the profound differences that separated us. Through the telling of these stories, I attempt to reflect on themes—love and hate, health and illness, courage and fear, fidelity and betrayal—that form the foundation of the anthropological enterprise and define human condition, [ethnography, representation, epistemology]

Cet essai est une révélation ethnographique. C'est l'histoire de deux hommes, séparés par leur identité ethnique, leur langue, leur culture, leur profession et leur contexte de vie personnelle, qui ont réussi à combler ces différences considérables pour parvenir à une exceptionnelle rencontre existentielle, à un dialogue fécond qui nous donne accès à un moment émouvant de compréhension mutuelle. Nos histoires racontent des aventures vécues le long de deux chemins de vie distincts. El Hajj Yaya’s suit les aléas des tours et détours propres au commerce actuel. Mon parcours personnel suit celui des pistes sinueuses de l'anthropologie. Avec le temps, nos parcours se sont croisés à New York où nous nous sommes rencontrés et où nous sommes devenus amis. Notre expérience mutuelle du cancer nous a permis progressivement de dépasser les profondes différences qui nous séparaient. En racontant ces histoires, j'essaye de réfléchir aux thèmes de la haine-de la vie, de la santé et de la maladie, du courage et de la peur, de la fidélité et de la trahison, qui forment les fondements mêmes de l'entreprise anthropologique et définit la condition humaine.

Este ensayo trata de una epifanía etnográfica. Es la historia de dos hombres que, separados por la etnicidad, el idioma, la cultura, la profesión y las circunstancias personales, superaron sus considerables diferencias para alcanzar un punto remarcable de convergencia existencial, un diálogo profundo que conllevó un momento emotivo de profunda comprensión mutua . Nuestras historias cuentan aventuras experimentadas a lo largo de dos caminos de vida distintos. El camino de El Hajj Yaya siguió los giros del comercio contemporáneo. Mi camino siguió los sinuosos senderos de la antropología. Con el tiempo nuestros sinuosos caminos finalmente se cruzaron en Nueva York, donde nos conocimos y construimos una amistad. Nuestra experiencia mutua del cáncer transcendió gradualmente las profundas diferencias que nos separaban. A través del relato de estas historias, intento reflexionar sobre temas -amor y odio, salud y enfermedad, coraje y temor, fidelidad y traición- que forman el fundamento del proyecto antropológico y definen la condición humana [etnografía, representación, epistemología]

INDEX

Mots-clés: ethnographie, représentation, épistémologie, bien-être Keywords: ethnography, representation, epistemology, well-being Palabras claves: etnografía, representación, epistemología, bienestar

AUTHOR

PAUL STOLLER West Chester University [email protected]

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Images of Ecstasy and Affliction The Camera as Instrument for Researching and Reproducing Choreographies of Deviance in a Southern Italian Spider Possession Cult

Michaela Schäuble

1 “This symbol [of the taranta] offers a perspective for imagining, hearing and watching what we lack imagination for and are deaf and blind to, and which nevertheless peremptorily asks to be imagined, heard and seen.”

2 (Ernesto De Martino, The Land of Remorse 2005 [1961]: 36)1

“Afflictions of the Imagination”

3 In the 1950s the Italian philosopher, anthropologist and historian of religion Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) undertook his famous journeys to the south of Italy, mainly the regions of Apulia and the Basilicata.2 He studied Lucanian funeral rituals and tarantism, a rural possession cult that is believed to cause a nervous disorder through the (imaginary) bite of the tarantula spider and is cured through music and trance-dancing by the afflicted women. Although De Martino himself never filmed and could not take photographs, his writings inspired a whole generation of Italian filmmakers as well as photo- and phonographers to explore magic practices and ritual exorcism exercised through dance and music in their native Italy. Documentarians such as Gianfranco Mingozzi (1932-2009), Diego Carpitella (1924-1990), Cecilia Mangini (*1927), Vittoria de Seta (1923-2011), Michele Gandin (1914-1994) and Luigi di Gianni (*1926) captured innumerable photographs, films, and sound recordings of religious ecstasy, states of possession and trance, and exalted ritual lament. Today, these recordings are often acclaimed as the founding classics of Italian audiovisual anthropology, yet they were not produced in a vacuum.

4 In the following, I will shed some light on the significance of the historical ethnographic context within which photographic and filmed images of seemingly possessed women were produced; in doing so I am less concerned with the photographic/filmic image as a document, but rather as a tool and catalyst for the exploration of reality. Starting with the assumptions that states of ecstasy and

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lamentations for the dead both share performative as well as mimetic qualities, and secondly, that the visual representation of these states are (almost) always achieved through artificial evocation and reconstruction, I argue, that the affected ‘acting’ persons actively wish to be seen. Trance possession, and ecstatic states do not occur without audiences, which make them ideal situations in which to examine audiovisual recording and research techniques, as well as to experiment with staging and reconstruction in collaboration with those in front of the lens.

5 As in all cases of “imaginary afflictions” (imaginariae), which have physical and psychological symptoms but no identifiable biological causes, rational explanation is sought in the visual, or visible: that which can be seen and photographically captured or represented.3 Not unlike the photographers and filmmakers with whom he worked, De Martino was obsessed with the realist dream that scientifically inexplicable ‘other’, ‘deviant’ internal states could be made accessible and comprehensible via their visible symptoms and manifestations; he sought for an ontological representation of visible bodies and symptoms, whereby the felt and embodied experiences of the afflicted themselves naturally remained invisible.

6 I propose that the images of ecstasy and affliction of Apulian tarantati (mainly “tarantuled” women and a few men) produced in the context of De Martino’s expeditions were actually strongly inspired by the scientific and medical photography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is by no means my intention to pathologize tarantism or other religiously-induced phenomena, or to liken them with outmoded medical diagnoses such as hysteria or dancing mania. Early photographs of hysterics and the mentally ill were taken in order to capture and illustrate deviance. The same cannot be said of the images of religious ecstasy and trance states produced in Southern Italy – even though in both cases real crises, personal or social, were believed to be what provoked the exalted states that were publicly performed. Nonetheless, considering the role that visual media played in the study and categorization of hysteria and mental illness can bring a fruitful perspective from which to examine De Martino’s use of film and photography, his approach to research, and his understanding of audiovisual media.

7 Ethnographic depictions of the phenomenon of Apulian tarantism draw on turn-of-the- century scientific paradigms (i.e. experimental use of photography to detect choreographic patterns of ecstatic episodes) and also link visual manifestations of mental illness to religious imagery. It is the spectacular visibility of somatic expressions that make both 19th-century concepts of hysteria and Apulian tarantism “theatrical illnesses” (Hustvedt 2011). While not contending that the tarantuled women (tarantate) in Apulia have directly drawn on the existing visual lexicon of hysterical postures, this article explores and compares (mainly photographic) representations of expressive contractures and poses of the convulsive female body, arguing that 19th- century physicians and 20th-century anthropologists alike used (audio-)visual media to register and “preserve the durable trace of […] pathological manifestations” (Londe 1893: 64) with the aim of creating a repertory of characteristic images of ecstasy and affliction.

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Audio-Visual Recordings and Reenactments in Ernesto de Martino´s 1950s expeditions to Southern Italy

8 Although he himself drew attention to similarities between tarantism and hysterical symptoms, De Martino always maintained that tarantism should not be demoted to an illness (De Martino 2005 [1961]: 22); instead the phenomenon’s cultural autonomy should be key to its analysis. First and foremost, he was determined to break down the static image of Apulian tarantism and to avoid its interpretation as a “relic” or “survival” and its “reduction to antecedents” (De Martino 2005 [1961]: 7; 177) by all means. Instead of looking for relics or traces of the past in tarantism and other forms of religious ecstasy, he compared it to similar contemporary phenomena (including, among others, Haitian Vodou), without neglecting the significance of tarantism’s own specific historical background. His first goal, as I see it, was to counter the static nature of preceding representations and analyses and to outline a stylized choreography or codified catalogue of ecstatic gestures; and images – sketches, photographs, and moving images, i.e., film – were to play a key role in his efforts to achieve this (see also Pisapia 2013a; 2013b).

9 De Martino’s intentions for commissioning audio-visual recordings during his field research were manifold. First of all, he wanted to highlight the performative characteristics of ancient lamentations, ritual choreography, and ecstatic states. By evoking the sensory aspects of the movements, the body techniques, the cries, the mourning, he meant to make the “spectacle of the crisis” comprehensible and bring it to life. “When he set out on his first field trip to Lucania, he knew he was to encounter a world of shadows and charged atmospheres, and in order to catch its spirit it would be necessary to capture the sounds, the gestures, the feel of those places“, as Daniela Cascella writes (Cascella 2012). For De Martino, the images and recordings were also useful documents that he could keep hold of and also use to study the ecstatic and ritualized gestures and movements in more detail and/or slow motion. Last but not least, De Martino feared that the religious practices he was studying were being transformed or disappearing, and his endeavor to document them could also be seen as a form of salvage anthropology.

10 In the introduction to La terra del rimorso [The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, 1961] De Martino states that the initial idea of carrying out fieldwork on tarantism came to him when looking at photographs that French photographer André Martin had taken of ‘possessed’ women (and a few men) in the small town of Galatina in 1957.

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Afflicted tarantate in Galatina

Photos by André Martin in 1957

11 He writes that the historiographic coherence of these photographic images constituted “a knot of extreme contradictions” (De Martino 2005 [1961]: 11) and calls them a stimulus for his method to study the religious history of the South through exemplary singular episodes. His interest in audio-visual media would also break down the incoherent isolation of Apulian tarantism to which it was relegated by “fieldwork and the analysis of historical literature” (De Martino 2005 [1961]: 177). Therefore, I argue that his main incentive was to dissolve the static in the representation and the analysis of tarantism as well as of ritual lamentation.

12 However, De Martino remained highly skeptical of the epistemological significance of images and did not trust that photographs could transport ethnographic knowledge by themselves. To him, photography was hence no analytical tool but a kind of ‘auxiliary science’ that he did not consider capable of generating data. Consequently, the collaboration between the ethnographer and the photographers, phonographers and filmmakers was not always an easy one. Like during earlier expeditions, the photographers in 1959 were meticulously instructed by him; they held regular team meetings and had detailed contracts that specified what exactly they had to research and take pictures of, and how (Signorelli and Panza 2011).4 Only later, when it transpired that the images were much more than just an illustration of De Martino’s written work, the photographers were credited as individual authors. In the case of the cinematographers, the nature of the cooperation differed. And although De Martino is listed as scientific adviser in many documentary films, he was never personally present on a set during shooting and sometimes he did not even know that a film was being made in one of his research locations.5

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13 In this context, it is of interest to note that De Martino appreciated performances and re-enactments as effective ethnological research methods and he continually emphasized that reconstructed performances were scientifically as valuable as ‘authentic’ data. In Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico [Death and Ritual Lament in the Ancient World, 1958], for example, he writes that an “artificial lament” was as “dramatic and demonstrative” as a real one (De Martino 2000 [1958]: 377); and in I Lamenti funebri e l’esperienza arcaica della morte [Funeral laments and the archaic experience of death, 1954] he states “the lamenter undergoes a gradual self-suggestion and, after hesitating a few times, immerses herself so deeply in her role that she really cries, perhaps remembering her own dead loved ones” (De Martino 2002 [1954]: 69; see also Forgacs 2014: 148).6 For this reason, and in addition to classic ethnographic methods such as participant observation and interviews, De Martino also made use of reconstructions and re-enactments. Unlike other leading international anthropologists of his time he always understood that all ‘authentic rituals’ are performances – and that is the reason why he did not see it as falsification or distortion to ask his informants to stage certain poses, trances and dances for the purpose of the recordings. De Martino, with reference to medical literature on tarantism, also referred to tarantella as “women’s little carnival”, thus highlighting the performative and mimetic aspects of the phenomenon (De Martino 2005 [1961]: 112; 128). In fact, staged situations suited his purposes better, because they pointed towards the constructed nature of ‘authentic’ episodes and because they allowed him to focus more clearly upon relevant details and motion sequences.

14 For him, magic and ecstatic ritual practices were manifestations of historicized cultural patterns that helped subalterns to deal with existential crises and to express their feeling of not belonging to the contemporary world, a state that De Martino referred to as loss of or crisis of presence,“ crisi della presenza” (De Martino 1947). It was within this conceptual framework that De Martino went about to study and expound Apulian tarantism as a culturally loaded and historically infused phenomenon; as part of a ritual therapy through dance, music and color symbolism – also referred to as a “musical-choreutic-chromatic exorcism” – the afflicted persons (mainly women on the social margins) are commonly surrounded by a band of musicians playing drums and violins in an attempt to cure them. During these so-called “home therapies” (terapie domiciliari) they would publicly perform uncontrolled dances, scream and move in convulsive ways simulating possession by (and eventually the trampling on) a spider. During their wild, often obscene gestures these “tarantuled” persons (tarantati) would hold an imaginary dialogue with St. Paul, the patron saint against spider and snake bites. And on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, on June 29, they are traditionally brought to the St. Paul’s chapel of Galatina to plea for grace and healing.

15 During their 1959 expedition, Ernesto De Martino, the photographer Franco Pinna and the ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella pursued their intention to record and study motion sequences and ‘choreographies’ of ecstatic states, notably of tarantism (Signorelli and Panza 2011). They witnessed an ‘authentic’ home therapy in Nardò and visited the chapel in Galatina on the occasion of the feast-day of Saints Peter and Paul (De Martino 2005 [1961]).

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Photograph of a re-enacted home therapy in Nardò

Photo by Franco Pinna in 1959

16 Between June 26th and July 3rd 1959 Franco Pinna took over seventy photographs, some of which are reproduced in De Martino’s monograph The Land of Remorse (2005: 135-174); the printed illustrations include the series “The choreutic cycle of Maria of Nardò” (fig. 1-20), “The choreutic cycle of Rosaria of Nardò“ (fig. 21-26), “The symbolic reconstruction of the scene of the ‘first bite’” (fig. 27-29), “Scenes in the Chapel and in the Street” (fig. 30-39), which are partly ‘authentic’ and partly based on reconstructions. The last series, Plate 46, which contains 15 photographs, is entitled “The choreutic modes of tarantism.” To study the “choreutic modes” in more detail, de Martino, Pinna and Carpitella had constructed a setting in a hotel room where ‘authentic’ tarantati and mourners were asked to perform (and relive) their afflictions in a staged context (Pisapia 2013a).7 This photographic series, Reconstruction of tarantism (Raccolta 38 - Ricostruzione del tarantismo), pays “special attention to bodily motions and break down those movements analytically”, as social anthropologist Jasmine Pisapia notes (Pisapia 2013a: 16). De Martino was particularly interested in documenting dance sequences and serial expressions of crises as he was convinced that by analyzing movement sequences he would be able to isolate formulistic gestures, from which he could then infer the dancers’ inner states. Some of these photographs, however, were either never published or only printed much later (Gallini and Faeta 1999: 289-353) – in particular those which show the anthropologist at work and/or provide a self- referential look ‘behind the scenes’, exposing the reconstructed nature of the images.

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Anthropologists at Work

Accompanied by a technician of RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana), Carpitella recorded the sound, while De Martino took notes and mimicked or emulated the movements of some of the tarantate to better understand their choreographies. Photos by Franco Pinna in 1959.

17 From the outset, the use of staged performances and reconstructions was a contested topic in De Martino’s team. During a conversation in which De Martino’s lifelong research assistant Clara Gallini and his fiancée and co-field-researcher Vittoria di Palma discussed the difficulties they encountered during the expeditions in Salento, Di Palma jokingly referred to the staged recordings as “uno spettacolo”, (“a spectacle”) (Gallini and Faeta 1999: 30). Clara Gallini, however, was skeptical about the experimental side of working in this way, and replied seriously: “But not everything can become a spectacle” [“Ma non tutto può diventare spettacolo”] (Gallini and Faeta 1999: 30).

The “Absolute Eye” in 19th Century Medicine

18 Interestingly, French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman also takes the term “spectacle” as his starting point in his classic Invention de l’hystérie [Invention of Hysteria] in which he analyzes in detail photography’s historical role in research on the phenomenon of hystero-epileptic fits (Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]). Asking what the word “spectacle” might have meant in the expression “spectacle of pain” he traces the reciprocal relationship between photography and madness (Didi-Huberman 2003: 3).

19 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, photography was used in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. A pioneer of this approach, the English psychiatrist and photographer Hugh W. Diamond, was convinced that he could cure his mainly female patients simply by showing them photographic images of themselves (Gilman 1993: 353; Regener 2000; 2010).8 In 1852 Diamond presented his photographs as part of a lecture

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entitled “Types of Insanity”, and in 1856 he read a presentation on “The Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity” before the Royal Society in London (Gilman 2014 [1976]: 17-24). Now held to be the earliest example of the systematic use of photography in clinical psychiatry, at the time the series of images facilitated the establishment of a typology of individual illnesses, such as “chronic mania”, “suicidal melancholy”, or “religious melancholy” (Gilman 2014 [1976]: 17-24). Already at that early stage, producing the images required staging and collaboration because even with the new wet plate process those photographed had to keep still for exposure times of several minutes. In some photographs Diamond added props such as peacock feathers, floral wreaths, or animals, which were supposed to symbolize the particular illness depicted.

Photographs of Patients

Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. Photos by Hugh Welch Diamond. Albumen silver print from glass, about 1855.

20 The portraits were meant to illustrate illnesses, not ill women – all of whom were impoverished inmates of an asylum in southern England. The pictures made them objects of the scientific gaze. The representation of the patient becomes the product of a doctor’s creative diagnosis, and the supposedly sick imagination of the patient is confronted by a real image, to which healing powers are attributed.

21 The camera also became a key instrument in research on hysteria. In his description of the Salpêtrière, the Parisian psychiatric institution where neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot established the clinical definition of ‘hysteria’, Didi-Huberman also refers to the institution as Charcot’s “photographic clinic” (Didi-Hubermann 2003 [1982]: 283).9 Photography and vision were integral to the positivist scientific search for truth at that time, as is also demonstrated in Pasteur’s need for the microscope to prove the existence of the microorganisms it made visible.

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22 Under Charcot, the Salpêtrière maintained its own photography department, which was led by chrono- and x-ray-photographer Albert Londe. Londe’s task was to record manifestations of the illness known as ‘hysteria’ and to document and classify its visible effects upon patients’ postures, gestures, facial expressions, actions, and physiognomy (Londe 1893; see also Gilman 1993: 352; Didi-Huberman 2003: 44ff). By 1882 Albert Londe had developed a system by which patients’ physical, or more specifically, muscular, movements could be recorded, even during epileptic or ‘hysterical’ fits. He achieved this by using a camera with nine lenses, each linked to electromagnetically operated shutters that were released one after another with the aid of a metronome. The chrono-photographic instrument was able to take individual shots at intervals ranging from a tenth of a second to several seconds.

Photographic series of a patient diagnosed with ‘hysteria’

At the La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Photo by Albert Londe in 1885.

23 The key issue here is the way in which the photographic and graphical recording of sequences of movement was approached. The aim of these systematic recordings was – not unlike de Martino’s attempts to portray movement sequences and choreographies of ecstatic behavior and states of trance in Southern Italy in the late 1950’s – to discern patterns, or rather, to reveal a standardized choreography, through which it was believed that the illness itself could be decoded.

24 Between 1876 and 1880, the Salpêtrière even founded its own journal with photographs taken by Londe and others, notably Charcot’s student Paul Régnard, entitled L’Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière [The Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière] to document and further Charcot’s methodological approach concerning visual manifestations of hysteria. The journal was later published in a multivolume

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album of the same title with the objective to produce a kind of illustrated inventory of the moment of crisis (Bourneville and Régnard 1878). The visual catalogue of the photographs included poses, attacks, screams, deliriousness, and, last but not least, states of ecstasy (Gilman 1982: 194-204). The journal issues also featured direct comparisons of the hysterics’ photographs with images from classical art, e.g., Renaissance and Baroque paintings, depicting religious bliss and/or spiritual possession. The inclusion of these comparisons, authored by Paul Régnard, suggests that the photographic style adopted was influenced by artistic depictions, so that the presentation of ‘hysterics’ followed archetypal portrayals of religious mania in art history (Bourneville and Régnard 1880 [1878]; Poggi 2005).

25 But it was Charcot himself who forged a connection between religious melancholy, rapture, mystic visions, spirit possession and forms of mental illness (especially hysteria), by retrospectively applying his modern conceptualization of illness to depictions and reports of witch-hunts, as well as to antique artworks (Charcot and Richer 1887; for an analysis thereof see also Bronfen 1998; Didi-Huberman 2003). In so doing, he offered a secular explanation for phenomena that had been hitherto interpreted religiously. He sought visual evidence to support his conjecture that modern hysterics’ symptoms were equivalent to those that had been experienced by Catholic mystics since medieval times, and claimed to have found such evidence in the hysterics’ poses, which he interpreted as mimicry or parodies of religious experiences including worship, religious ecstasy, possession and even crucifixion (Charcot and Richer 1887; see also Schmaus 2009: 425).10

Période Terminale - Extase (Final Phase – Ecstasy)

Photo by Paul Régnard in 1876, Albumen Print.

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26 In the foreword to their 1887 publication Les demoniaques dans l’art [The Demoniacs in Art], in which Jean-Martin Charcot developed and elaborately illustrated this theory, he and his colleague Paul Richer relate how their use of plaster casting, pencil, paintbrush, and photography aids the “notation of all bodily postures and physiognomic differences, since text alone cannot capture all the visible effects of this alienating and horrendous illness.” (Charcot and Richer 1887: XII, translation M.S.).11 Richer produced sketches (from live ‘models’ and from photographs) showing the different poses and stages of hysterical fits, and drew up a “synoptic table” in which he collated them systematically into categories entitled “attitudes passionelles” [“passionate postures”]. Describing the hysterical women, Charcot and Richer wrote that their “gaze is so honest that even the most talented actresses could barely offer a more convincing portrayal, nor could the greatest artist find a more worthy model.” (Charcot and Richer 1887: 109).12

27 The digitized collection Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière entailing 119 images has been put online by the Harvey Cushing and John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University and can be viewed here: http://whitney.med.yale.edu/gsdl/collect/ salpetre/ (accessed December 17, 2016).

28 The highly sexualized nature of the images is conspicuous and many of the depicted poses are quasi-pornographic, mingling sexual and neurotic delirium. The camera turns into a tool for a play of gazes, in which the female patients are presented as vulnerable objects of (male and medical) desire yet simultaneously gaze seductively back into the camera using it as a tool of self-representation and hence (potential) empowerment.

Début D'Une Attaque Cri (Start of a Scream Attack)

Photo by Paul Régnard in 1878

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“Attitudes Passionelles”: Theatricicality and Public Performances of Deviance

29 One pose that appears repeatedly in the photographs is the so-called arc-de-cercle; a position in which the depicted woman lies on her back and raises her pelvis, arching her back.

Attaque Hystéro-Épileptique Arc De Cercle (Hysteric-Epileptic Attack, Arc-de-Cercle)

Photolithograph Photo by Paul Régnard in 1880

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Contortion Phase (Arc-de-cercle)

Drawing by Paul Richer in 1885

30 It is well known that Charcot publicly presented his patients to photographers and lecture audiences, and artificially induced their fits – by means of touch, olfactory stimuli, sounds or colors – for spectators to watch. According to Charcot, hysterics were particularly susceptible to suggestive influence and were therefore particularly easy to hypnotize.

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Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière [A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière]

depicting Jean-Martin Charcot presenting the renowned hysteric “Blanche” (Marie Wittman) in a clinical lecture. On the rear wall of the lecture room Brouillet reproduces a charcoal drawing entitled Periode de contortions [During the contortions], by Paul Richer (1878) depicting a convulsing woman. The pose in the drawing signifies the classic arc-en-cercle posture that Richer in turned reproduced from the photographs taken of “hysterics” in the Salpêtrière. The person depicted in a prominent position the front on the left dressed in a white apron, is the photographer Albert Londe. Peinture à l'huile by André Brouillet in 1887

31 The public presentations and photography sessions also offered the patients themselves a platform where they could finally express their suffering and symptoms (Hustvedt 2011). In her apt summary of Didi-Huberman’s arguments on the role photographic iconography in the “invention of hysteria”, Elisabeth Bronfen highlights the “reciprocity of fascination” that characterized the Salpêtrière: Doctors, insatiably seeking images of hysteria (be these live performances or photographic representations) and hysteric patients, complying with this spectacle, outmatching each other with the theatricality of their body poses, came together to stage a scene where hysterical suffering could be invented and fabricated as an art form, both as a spectacle and as an image (Bronfen 1998: 190).

32 The clinic and lecture halls in which the women were “presented” to medical offspring and the interested public turned into stages for theatrical performances in which the women enacted the (imitations of) poses and contractures that were perceived as typical for ‘hysteric’ patients at the time.

33 News of Charcot’s studies also reached Italy, and in 1885 his lectures were translated by Dr. Domenico Meliotti and published as Lezioni cliniche dell'anno scolastico 1883–84 sulle Malattie del Sistema Nervoso [Clinical lectures of the 1883-84 academic year on Diseases of the Nervous System] (Meliotti 1885; Poggi 2005: 54). Like the Salpêtrière, Venice’s San Clemente Hospital also commissioned the production of thousands of photographs of mentally ill women. In 1884 Augusto Tebaldi, Professor of Psychiatry in Padua, published a study on physiognomy and deviation, which included an appendix that showed numerous images of delirium in art. Then, in 1890, Gaetano Rummo (one of

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Charcot’s translators) published the book Iconografia fotografica del Grande Isterismo— Istero-Epilessia [Photographic Iconography of the Great Hysteria—Hysteric Epilepsy], which was dedicated to Charcot and included series of photographs presented in the style of Régnard’s Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Rummo 1890; see also Poggi 1995: 55).13

Iconografia fotografica del Grande Isterismo—Istero-Epilessia (Photographic Iconography of the Great Hysteria—Hysteric Epilepsy)

Photos by Gaetano Rummo in 1890

34 Eighteen years later, in 1908, the world premiere of Roberto Omegna’s film La nevropatologia [Neuropathology] was screened to an audience of medical doctors and a general academic audience in Turin. The 108-minute film documents twenty-four neuropsychiatric case studies and was made for the teaching purposes of neurology professor Camillo Negro. Transforming the white cinema screen into a “vertical anatomic table”, a reviewer in the local press praised the film as “a living sample book of the best neuropathic cases” (Dall’Olio 1908, quoted in Strauven 2008: 278). La nevropatologia was the first Italian scientific film to achieve international fame and it is hardly surprising that the film was also screened at the Salpêtrière. Shortly after its premiere in Turin in February 1908 the New York Times dedicated an article to the film, entitled “Moving Pictures of Clinics. Prof. Negro Successfully Uses Them to Demonstrate Nervous Diseases”.

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 35 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2409

Url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7pYS-cQJxA

36 Treating the film as a demonstration, or visualization ‘proof’ of neurological disease, the critics seem to commend the medial shift within the medical-theatrical tradition from the public spectacle of anatomy theatres – going back to the Italian Renaissance where anatomic anomalies, autopsies and body sections were openly displayed – to the public realm of the cinema screen in the early 20th century (Holl 2005: 218). 14 Interestingly, the New York Times review also favorably remarks on the technological

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innovation of capturing the corporeal language of gesture and movement. Stating “[w]hile the professor is explaining each case the cinematograph is at the same time reproducing the peculiar movements of which it is impossible to give an idea by a simple photographic plate”, the reviewer highlights the superiority of the cinematograph in comparison to Albert Londe’s chronophotographies (New York Times 1908; see also Strauven 2008: 279). 15

37 Analyzing the development of the medical gaze through various media technologies, German media scientist Ute Holl draws attention to the difficulty of translating the film images into language and written text: … if the film NEUROPATOLOGIA [sic] is classified in historical medical terms, it can be viewed as the presentation of a hysterical fit. From the perspective of film dramaturgy, however, it could be just as well described as an expressionistic drama, a love triangle: a masked woman stands between two men, gazes and gestures are exchanged, the masked character is thrown, fighting, onto a bed; writhing, she tries to resist the force of one of the men; later she relaxes. The two aspects of this film cannot be separated. The medical content could not be made visible without the theatrical, the medical stage on which it is performed” (Holl 2005: 217)

38 The female patient, whose fit was provoked by pressure applied to her lower abdomen, wears a mask to hide her identity. Yet the mask also serves to direct viewers’ attention to her, and adds a carnivalesque sense of absurdity to the scene. It is at this point that science becomes part of an entertainment industry. Another thing that is new, is that in La nevropatologia the medium of film is not used as a diagnostic or organizing tool or even for illustrating an affliction, but becomes in itself a means of evidence that replaces conventional anamnesis. It is safe to say that chronophotography and cinematography paved the way for the filmic mise-en-scène of neurophathologies and/ or (neuropathological) ecstasy as “imaginary afflictions.”

De Martino’s Atlas of Corporeal Postures and Gestures

39 It is very likely that Ernesto De Martino was at least aware of, if not familiar with, the French and Italian medical photographs described above. Certainly, extraordinary iconographic parallels emerge between both, the catalogue of photographed and hand- drawn “attitudes passionelles” produced in the Salpêtrière and De Martino’s efforts to compile a visual encyclopedia of ritualized poses and emotional states during Southern Italian tarantella trance dancing and ecstatic saint veneration as well as ritual lament in Griko (ethnic Greek) communities in the Salento (Grecìa Salentina).16

40 De Martino’s ethnographic research focused upon techniques of the (female) body and the body as a mediator between internal feelings and their external expression, between the psyche and the body’s corporeality. His personal notebooks from the time before his first Salento excursion contain drawings and sketches of possessed states and lamentations for the dead (Signorelli and Panza 2011; Pisapia 2013a; 2013b). The images consist of stick-figures, some of whom are kneeling with open arms, as well as detailed mimetic typologies of lamenting women. The sketches of gestures are labeled with terms such as “Anger”, “Hunger”, “Libido”, and “Amnesia”; some of the drawings have been drawn over and corrected, while others precisely illustrate ritual poses that De Martino had not yet seen for himself (Pisapia 2013a: 17).

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41 These were not drawings produced during research, but rather reproductions that he had reproduced by copying illustrations in books by then-contemporary German works on classical antiquity or from illustrations of ancient Greek vases. It is not entirely clear whether these sketches were De Martino’s way of preparing himself for that which awaited him in the field, or whether they were early studies of a catalogue of movements. In any case, these hand-drawn studies portraying formulaic gestures and expressions of emotion, which De Martino presumed were universal, do exhibit remarkable similarities to Paul Richer’s sketches and the series of images produced by Paul Régnard in his quest to catalog the “attitudes passionelles” (Bourneville and Régnard 1878; Charcot and Richer 1887).

42 In his 1958 classic study of “techniques of lament” (tecnica del piangere) Death and Ritual Lament in the Ancient World, De Martino appended a “Figurative Atlas of Mourning” (Atlante figurato del pianto) comprising sixty-six images, including photographs, film stills drawn from film strips, reproductions of pottery, etc. of lamentations (Pisapia 2013: 18).17 This visual appendix brings together examples of modern ritual lament in the form of “folkloric” photographs (i.e. photographs of Southern Italian women performing and reenacting classic gestures and poses of mourning that De Martino considers as directly linked to antiquity) with images from ancient and medieval art, in order to highlight the mimetic quality in ancient gestures and as well as in ecstatic states (Amelang 2005: 10).18 His intention in assembling an archive of gestures depicting contemporary ‘artificial’, staged performances as continuations of ancient ritual lament was not only to bring ancient rites back to life or to highlight the performative and resilient character if these practices, but to establish a genealogy of ritual mimicry. “Folkloric documentation”, he argues, “allows us to see, in all its dramatic obviousness, what the ancient documents only allow us to glimpse or imagine, i.e. the lamentation as an active rite.” (De Martino 2000 [1958] 58-59, translation Pisapia 2013a: 18).19 Using reenactments as an aid to the imagination, De Martino developed an intuitive appreciation of the sensorial aspects of ritual performance and of what, in Foucauldian terminology, would later be coined as “aesthetics of existence” or “technologies of the self.”

43 The first short films produced in this way are 16mm recordings by Franco Pinna entitled Dalla culla alla bara [From Gradle to Grave] dating from 1952 (which is now considered to be lost), as well as the 3-minute documentary Lamento funebre [Funerary Lament] by Michele Gandin.20 In 1954, four years before the publication of Death and Ritual Lament in the Ancient World (De Martino 2000 [1958]), Michele Gandin had already staged a lament with the two performers Grazia Prudente and Carmina Di Giulio in the Lucanian village of Pisticci. Although such lamentations traditionally took place indoors, in closed spaces – usually in the home of the deceased – Gandin chose to record outside; not only for better lighting but also because the bare, moon-like Lucanian landscape added to the drama of the lament (cf. Marano 2007). A formalized and aestheticized mise-en-scène of a mourning ritual, these recordings focus on body techniques, facial expressions and gestures - the “expressive codes” (Gallini 1999: 18) – of the presenters. The short film sequence was originally intended to be the opening piece of the “Cinematographic Encyclopedia of Knowledge” that De Martino planned, but never completed.21

44 Jasmine Pisapia has highlighted the importance of “living documents” in the study of funerary lamentations in Death and Ritual Lament in the Ancient World, “which, thanks to

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their visual and corporeal presence, gave the researcher the enargeia […] to fully understand the phenomenon” (Pisapia 2013a: 19). The crucial role played by reconstruction and reenactment in the De Martino’s research practice was not limited to studying gestures and poses of ecstatic ritual mourning, but also comprised of the study of choreographies during trance-like expression of personal crisis such as in Apulian tarantism. A year after their research trips, in the summer of 1960, renowned music anthropologist and filmmaker Diego Carpitella returned to Galatina on his own and filmed an ‘authentic’ home therapy by Maria of Nardò, one of the most famous tarantate, along with another episode, the “artificial reconstruction” of music therapy. These recordings to which Carpitella added his own on-site sound recordings later on, were published under the title Meloterapia el tarantismo. The 16-mm material has recently been restored and is the first cinematographic documentation of Apulian tarantism ever.

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 45 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2409

Url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs2jI5VZWz8).

46 In the same year, Gianfranco Mingozzi filmed the 18-minute documentary La Taranta in Nardò and Galantina that was released in 1962.22 Once again, the subject is the reconstruction of a so-called “home therapy”, in which musicians gather in the home of a possessed tarantata to perform a therapeutic cycle of choreographed dances known as a ciclo coreutico. 23

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 47 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2409

Url: https://vimeo.com/175932237

Nachleben of De Martino’s Images

48 The manifold images that were produced during De Martino’s expeditions to the South, developed a remarkable Nachleben (“afterlife”) – also in the sense of a “survival”, but mainly in Warburg’s original sense as recurring symbolic and corporeal iconographies (Didi-Huberman 2016 [2002]). The decades that followed De Martino’s original expeditions to the South saw numerous rivisitazioni, or re-visitations, mainly by Italian researchers, who intended to follow the footsteps of the master. These revisits, which also initiated a ‘revival’ of the fascination with the Mezzogiorno as imaginary land of ‘pure’ passions where ancient traditions were still genuinely lived, resulted in the production and circulation of the paradigmatic images of tarantuled women, curled up in arc-de-cercle positions (Chiriatti 1995; Chiriatti and Nocera 2005; Pizza 2015).24

49 In my own improvised rivisitazioni, I am mainly interested in the circulation or Nachleben of the images produced in the context of De Martino’s research, as well as in the performative and mimetic qualities not only of the staged phenomena itself, but of the recording devices and media technologies involved. In the summers of 2012, 2015 and 2016, I had the chance to experience at first hand tarantella possession dances in the piazza in front of Galatina’s chapel of St. Paul as well as “rievocazioni storice

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dell’antico rito del trarantismo” (“historical reenactments of the ancient rite of tarantism”) in semi-private courtyards in town. The performances themselves are best described as embodied reenactments; young women, amongst them Vincenza Magnolo and Simona Indracollo, (and at occasion also a few men) re-enacted the screams, movements, and facial expressions of Maria of Nardò, the tarantata who, all those years ago, had been interviewed by De Martino, photographed by Franco Pinna, and filmed by Gianfranco Mingozzi and Diego Carpitella. Dressed in white nightdresses, they writhed on the ground before me in time with the pizzica rhythm, crawled on all fours, arched their backs, twisted, stamped, moaned, and danced, and span ever faster, until, with eyes rolled, finally collapsed… and then began to dance again. The musicians and the ‘performers’ were surrounded by dozens of onlookers, who compared their judgments of the performance’s authenticity.

The performer’s arc-de-cercle

The performer’s arc-de-cercle shown here is unmistakable, highlighting the “circulation of images” that has continued over several decades, across a diverse range of media. Photos by Michaela Schäuble and Anja Dreschke in 2012 and 2016

50 In the background, next to the chapel, Mingozzi’s Film La Taranta was screened; and it was obvious how the photographers whom I observed in 2012, 2015 and 2016 did their best to cite earlier photographs and to capture the same scenes and poses that had

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been photographed by Franco Pinna, André Martin and others before them – thus contributing to the stylized iconographic catalogue of Apulian tarantism.

51 The women who imitate(d) the tarantate had to and have to study the available images of ecstasy in order to deliver a performance that is as ‘authentic’ as possible. In so doing, they follow (and uphold) the tradition of the visual and performative reproduction of existing images and poses. Like the performances of the female ‘hysterics’ in 19th century Paris, the tarantate use their trances to make their crises and their subjective suffering public; through “practices of imagination” (Kramer 2005) that manifest in their body movements and postures they create a connection between invisible, or imaginary and visible realms. While Marie Wittmann alias “Blanche” became an iconic figure of hysterical femininity, Maria of Nardò became the iconic tarantata, who is now in turn mimicked by contemporary performers such as Simona Indracollo, who consciously reproduce the iconographic patterns of Apulian tarantism.

Poster advertising the “Historical Reenactment of the Ancient Rite of Tarantism”

organized by the UNESCO Club Galatina. The painting by Apulian artist Luigi Cailuli (*1940) is entitled Tarantate in tensione [Tarantate in tension] Poster by UNESCO 2016

52 I propose that in these performances the largely invisible suffering and the imaginary realm of spider possession are transferred to a virtual level, where the corporeal and sensuous experiences of an ‘authentic’ tarantata is simulated. But more is at stake here than in the case of a simulacrum, where the distinction between original and copy, signified and sign, has become indistinguishable. The ‘original’ spider exorcism recorded by De Martino’s team was, even then, largely a re-enactment, as were the dances and choreographies, screams and facial expressions of the possessed women who were filmed by Diego Carpitella, Gianfranco Mingozzi and photographed by Franco

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Pinna and many others. Apulian tarantism itself can be seen as a repeatedly duplicated, stylized image that has begun to take on a life of its own.

53 Just like the enactment of symptoms that established a canon of hysterical poses and attitudes in 19th century Paris did not render the symptoms themselves and the suffering of the afflicted women imaginary or unreal, the mimicking and the formation of certain stylized poses in Apulian tarantism and ritual lament as visible manifestation of the condition or suffering does not make the phenomenon itself fabricated. Rather, it could be shown by means of these examples that neither ‘hysteria’ nor Apulian ritual mourning nor tarantism demonstrate the ahistorical, fundamentally unchanging nature of “imaginary afflictions.” The photographic depictions and drawings – images of ecstasy and affliction – can neither provide the ultimate proof for, nor an exhaustive explanation of these phenomena. Hence, to dance the tarantella is not to strive for the best possible replication of a template, just as the staged presentations do not primarily serve the documentation or reconstruction of a seemingly defunct phenomenon. Instead, the dances and rievocazione are enactments and performances in their own right that exhaust the creative potential of tarantism’s expressive form and “offer [...] a perspective for imagining, hearing and watching what we lack imagination for”, as stated by De Martino and quoted in this article’s epigraph (De Martino 2005 [1961]: 36).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and articles

Agosti, Giovanni and Maurizio Sciuto. 1990, “L’Atlante del pianto di Ernesto De Martino,” in Riccardo Di Donato (ed.), La contraddizione felice? Ernesto De Martino e gli altri. Edizioni ETS, 185-195.

Amelang, James S.. 2005. Mourning Becomes Eclectic: Ritual Lament of the Problem of Continuity. Past & Present 187: 3-31.

Bourneville, Désiré- Magloire et Paul Régnard. 1880 [1877, 1878, 1879-1880]. L’Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Delahaye https://archive.org/details/ iconographiepho00regngoog (accessed December 17, 2016)

Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1998. The Knotted Subject. Hysteria and its Discontents. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Cascella, Daniela. 2012. Magic, Ritual, Lament: Ernesto de Martino. In En abîme, the Blog, Archive for July. https://enabime.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/magic-ritual-lament-ernesto-de-martino/ (accessed December 17, 2016)

Charcot, Jean-Martin and Paul Richer. 1887. Les demoniaques dans l’art. Avec 67 figures intergalées dans le texte. Paris: A. Delahaye et E. Lescrosnier.

Chiriatti, Luigi e Maurizio Nocera (eds.). 2005. Immagini del tarantismo. Galatina: il luogo del culto. Lecce: Capone Editore.

Chiriatti, Luigi. 1995. Morso d’amore. Viaggo nel tarantismo salentino. Lecce: Capone Editore

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Dall’Olio, Mario.1908. La neuropatologia al cinematografo. La gazzetta di Torino (18. Feb. 1908)

De Martino, Ernesto. 1947. Inchiesta di «Quarto Stato» sul mezzogiorno. Terra di Bari (in collaborazione con M. Potenza). Quarto Stato, 25-26, 30 gennaio-15 febbraio: 32-36.

De Martino, Ernesto. 2000 [1958] Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo. Dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di Maria. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

De Martino, Ernesto. 2002 [1954].“I Lamenti funebri e l’esperienza arcaica della morte. in Panorami e Spedizioni. Le trasmissioni radiofoniche del 1953-54 di Ernesto de Martino. Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani and Letizia Bindi (eds.). pp. 68-75. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri,

De Martino, Ernesto. 2005 [1961]. The Land of Remorse , [La terra del rimorso. Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud]. London: Free Association Books.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003 [1982]. Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière Cambridge: MIT Press

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2012. Peuples exposés, peuples figurants: l'oeil de l'histoire, 4. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2016 [2002]. The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art. Translated by Harvey Mendelsohn. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.

Faeta, Francesco. 2003. Strategie dell’occhio: Saggi di etnografia visiva. Milano: FrancoAngeli,

Flaherty, Gloria. 1992. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Forgacs, David. 2014. Italy’s Margins. Social Exclusion and National Formation since 1861. Cambridge: University Press: Cambridge.

Gallini, Clara. 1983. La sonnambula meravigliosa: Magnetismo e ipnotismo nell'Ottocento italiano. Milano: Feltrinelli

Gallini, Clara. 1999. Percorsi, immagini, scritture. In I viaggi nel Sud di Ernesto de Martino, Clara Gallini and Francesco Faeta (eds.). pp.9-48. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Gallini, Clara and Francesco Faeta (eds.). 1999. I viaggi nel Sud di Ernesto De Martino. Fotografie di Arturo Zavattini, Franco Pinna e Ando Gilardi. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Gilman, Sander L. 1982. Seeing the Insane. Lincoln, London: Nebraska University Press.

Gilman, Sander L. 1993. The Image of the Hysteric. In Hysteria Beyond Freud. Sander L Gilman. et al (eds.):. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 345-452.

Gilman, Sander L. 2014 [1976]. The Face of Madness. Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography. Brattleboro, Vermont: Echo Points & Media.

Gisi, Lucas Marco. 2007. Einbildungskraft und Mythologie. Die Verschränkung von Anthropologie und Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Holl, Ute, 2006. Neuropathologie als filmische Inszenierung. In Konstruierte Sichtbarkeiten. Wissenschafts- und Technikbilder seit der frühen Neuzeit. Martina Heßler (ed..) Pp. 217–240. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag

Hufeland, Christian Wilhelm. 1794. Gemeinnützige Aufsätze zur Beförderung der Gesundheit des Wohlseyns und vernünftiger medicinischer Aufklärung. Band 1. Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschen.

Hustvedt, Asti. 2011. Medical Muses. Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. London et al.: Bloomsbury

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Kramer, Fritz. 2005. Schriften zur Ethnologie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main

Londe, Albert. 1893. La photographie médicale. Application aux science médicales et physiologiques. Pref. by Charcot. Paris: Gauthier-Villars.

Marano, Francesco, 2007. Il film etnografico in Italia. Bari: Edzioni di Pagina.

Meliotti, Domenico. 1885. Lezioni cliniche dell'anno scolastico 1883-84 sulle malattie del sistema nervoso. Milano: Francesco Vallardi.

New York Times. (1908). Moving Pictures of Clinics.; Prof. Negro Successfully Uses Them in Demonstrating Nervous Diseases. The New York Times. February 23, 1908 http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C05E4D81F3EE233A25750C2A9649C-946997D6CF (accessed December 17, 2016)

Panza, Valerio. 2006. Comparare antico e moderno: l’atlante del pianto di Ernesto De Martino. In Comparatisimi e filosofia. Mario Donzelli (ed.). Pp. 197-217. Napoli: Luguori.

Pisapia, Jasmine. 2013a. Archives of Pathos. Image and Survival in Ernesto De Martino’s Interdisciplinary Ethnography. Visual Ethnography, Vol. 2 (1): 1-26.

Pisapia. Jasmine. 2013b. Image et survivance en anthropologie visuelle. Ernesto De Martino et l’ethnographie interdisciplinaire. In : Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des Arts et des Sciences en vue de l’obtention du grade de M.A. en Littérature comparée, Université de Montréal http:// hdl.handle.net/1866/10628 (accessed December 17, 2016)

Pizza, Giovanni. 2015. Il tarantismo oggi. Antropologia, politica, cultura. Roma: Carocci editore

Poggi, Christine. 2005. Picturing Madness in 1905: Giacomo Balla's "La pazza" and the Cycle "I viventi". Res Anthropology and Aesthetics. Vol. 47 (Spring): 39-68.

Regener, Susanne. 2000. “Zwischen Dokumentation und Voyeurismus. Fotografien psychiatrischer Patienten“, in Fotogeschichte, Jg. 20, Heft 76: 13-24.

Regener, Susanne. 2010. Visuelle Gewalt. Menschenbilder aus der Psychiatrie des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Rummo, Gaetano. 1890. Iconografia fotografica des Grande isterismo-Istero-Epilessia, omaggio al Prof. J.- M. Charcot. Napoli: Clinica Medica Propedeutica di Pisa.

Schmaus, Marion. 2009. Psychosomatik. Literarische, philosophische und medizinische Geschichten zur Entsteung eines Diskurses (1778-1936). Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag.

Signorelli, Amalia and Valerio Panza (eds.). 2011. Ernesto de Martino. Etnografia Del Tarantismo Pugliese. I Materiali Della Spedizione Nel Salento Del 1959. Lecce: Argo.

Stimilli, Davide. 2015. The Luxury of Tears: Warburg and De Martino on Klage and Lamento. Lecture presented at the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung, Berlin, Germany, 11 July 2015.

Strauven, Wanda. 2008. “S/M”. In: Mind the Screen; Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser. Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters and Wanda Strauven (eds.). Pp 276-287. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Films

Carpitella, Diego.1960. Meloterapia el tarantismo.

Carpitella, Diego. Tarantismo nel Salento.

Gandin, Michele. 1954. Death and Ritual Lament in the Ancient World. 4,5 min.

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Gandin, Michele. 1954. Lamento funebre [Funerary Lament] 4,5 min.

Gordon, Douglas. 1994-95. Hysterical. Video installation.

Koester, Joachim. 2007. Tarantism. 6,5 min. Film installation

Mangini, Cecilia. 1960 Stendali https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8u0FGWgTpE (accessed December 17, 2016)

Mingozzi, Gianfranco. 1962. La Taranta. 18 min.

Negro, Camillo (dir.) and Roberto Omegna, (camera). 1908. La nevropatologia [Neuropathology]

Negro, Camillo (dir.) and Roberto Omegna, (camera). 1918. Shell shock filmati all’Ospedale militare di Torino. 8 min. https://vimeo.com/119547503 and https://vimeo.com/119547502 (accessed December 17, 2016)

Pinna, Franco. 1952. Dalla culla alla bara [From Gradle to Grave]

NOTES

1. A much shorter version of this article was first presented at the German-Italian symposium “L’altra condizione dell’Italia. Il ‘sud posseduto’: antropologie dei fenomeni di possessione tra Ernesto de Martino e Friedrich Nietzsche“ [“Italy’s other condition. Anthropologies of ‘possessed South’ from Friedrich Nietzsche to Ernesto De Martino”] at Villa Vigoni, organized by Ulrich van Loyen. I would like to wholeheartedly thank Ulrich van Loyen and Stefano De Matteis for their valuable comments and their encouragement to elaborate on the argument. I am also particularly thankful to Anja Dreschke for her companionship and inspiring discussions during several research trips to Puglia as well as to Thomas Hauschild, Alexandra Rieder, Antonio Roselli and Jasmine Pisapia for their expertly feedback on my work and for sharing my fascination for the work of the registi demartiniani. I am also very grateful to Pip Hare for her translation from German. 2. The very first “spedizione etnografica” (ethnographic expedition) to Lucania in the early summer of 1952, during which Ernesto De Martino was accompanied by photographer Arturo Zavattini, resulted in the production of a corpus of 150 black and white photographs. This expedition was supported by the Centre for popular music of the Santa Cecilia Academy and of RAI television and preceded Alan Lomax’s journey to Calabria and his photographs and recordings in August 1954 by two years (Cascella 2012). Later the same year, De Martino undertook a second expedition to more remote villages in Lucania, this time accompanied by photographer Franco Pinna, ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella (who did sound recordings of songs and magic practices) as well as by his fiancé Vittoria de Palma, who enabled the team’s access to women’s lifeworlds. During this trip Pinna actually filmed some funeral laments on 16mm, but the footage did not survive (Forgacs 2014: 144). Between 1953 and 1956 the anthropologist conducted five more journeys to Southern Italy, mainly researching ritual lamentations and popular songs, during which his team refined their audio-visual research methods. On their last trip, in August 1956, Franco Pinna shot 341 photographs (only 12 out of which were in color). In May/June 1957 De Martino assembled his first interdisciplinary equip to study the “psychological misery” of the Southerners, and this time it was Ando Gilardi who took the pictures. For an annotated collection of these photographs, see Gallini and Faeta 1999. 3. The term “imaginary afflictions“ or “afflictions of the imagination” refers to what the German physician Christian Wilhelm Hufeland termed as “Krankheiten der Einbildungskraft” in 1794. According to Hufeland, so-called “nervous illnesses” such as hypochondria, the vapors, and nerves – which he called “Imaginations- und Modekrankheiten” (afflictions of the imagination

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and popular afflictions) – share the same source and symptoms as states of bewitchment and possession. Hufeland assessed these afflictions as medically comprehensible and stated “[i]ndeed, I do not know a more frightful and a more real illness” (Hufeland 1794: 101, cited in Flaherty 1992: 107). He further suggested that these afflictions did not have a physical cause but were triggered by the imagination and could therefore only be cured through the imagination (Gisi 2007: 160). In contrast to psychologists such as Pierre Janet, Hippolyte Bernheim, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot, who all emphasized the role of the unconscious in mental illness and the susceptibility of the mentally ill to suggestion (and hypnosis), Hufeland explicitly refers to the imagination as both, the source and the potential cure for mental afflictions. 4. A contract, signed by both, Ernesto De Martino and Franco Pinna, dated June 15, 1959 clearly and meticulously states working conditions and sites, areas of responsibility, copyright issues and the payment oft he photographer. A similar “agreement of collaboration“, stating her duties and limitations as photographer, was made out for and signed by Annabella Rossi on June 19, 1959 (Archive of the Associazione Internazionale Ernesto de Martino at the Bibliomediateca Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Box 18, Folder 7, personal archival research). 5. This was, for example, the case for Cecilia Mangini’s film Stendali (1960) which De Martino only saw after its completion. Mangini had read De Martino’s Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico on ritual lament and was strongly moved by it. She then travelled to Martano, a village in Grecia Salentina, where De Martino had previously conducted fieldwork and staged the scenes for her film in which she reconstructs the death of a young man and the ritual lament by his mother and the village women. The full film can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=W8u0FGWgTpE 6. What should not be forgotten in this context is that women were usually paid for their mourning services – so the ritual lament is per se a performance and not necessarily an expression of individual, emotional crisis. “One of de Martino’s points in Death and Ritual Lament is to show how the personal dimension of mourning is regained within the ‘protected’ and codified environment of the lamentation ritual. It is a constantly de-historicised and re- historicised gesture, in transit between truth and fiction, between being there and being possessed” (Cascella 2012). 7. In her excellent analysis of the use of images in De Martino’s expeditions, Jasmine Pisapia states that the shoot “was conducted in the ethnographer’s room at the Cavallino bianco hotel, and the ritual performed was described by De Martino as having being done ‘in vitro’” (Pisapia 2013a: 10). 8. Diamond’s assumption shows some significant parallels to Hufeland’s hypothesis that “imaginary afflictions” could best be cured through the imagination and his use of photography is a progression of Hufeland’s prior experimenting with musical stimuli and “the flashing of mirrors” to induce, intensify and modify the symptoms of ecstatics and convulsives (Flaherty 1992: 108). 9. The German edition of Didi-Huberman’s Invention de l’hystérie. Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1982) is entitled Die Erfindung der Hysterie. Die photographische Klinik von Jean-Martin Charcot (1997) – “The photographic clinic of Jean-Martin Charcot.” 10. Christine Poggi notes that mimicry was a central element in the representation of hysteria (Poggi 2005: 52). 11. In the original version they write: “Au démoniaque hystérique, au possédé convulsionnaire pour lequel le médecin ne soupçonnait nul remède, et dont le prêtre ou le juge s’ emparaient, convaincus qu’ils opéraient sure une âme hantée, a succédé un malade dont le crayon, le pinceau et la photographie notent toutes les attitudes, toutes les nuances de physionomie, venant ainsi au secours de la plume, qui ne peut tout décrire dans les effets extérieurs de cette étrange et cruelle maladie” (Charcot and Richter 1887: XII

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12. The French original speaks of “une expression si vraie et si intense que les actuers les plus consommées ne sauraient mieux faire et que les plus grandes artistes ne sauraient trouver des modèles plus dignes de leur pinceau“ (Charcot and Richer 1887: 109). 13. Notably, it was De Martino’s research assistant Clara Gallini who put together a bibliography of Italian treatises on hysteria, hypnosis, and related phenomena (Gallini 1983; see also Poggi 2005: 54). 14. During the war years Negro continued his scientific film project at the Military Hospital in Torino, filming shell-shocked soldiers. The film „shell shock“ was released in 1918 and can be viewed online: https://vimeo.com/119547503 (part 1) and https://vimeo.com/119547502 (part 2) In autumn 2011, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, in partnership with the Faculty of Neurosciences of the University of Turin, presented a new critical edition of the neuropathological films directed by Negro. 15. In his installation Hysterical (1994-95) video artist Douglas Gordon used scenes from La nevropatologia, projecting them on a double screen in loops, one performing in slow motion and one partly reversed to obtain a mirror effect. The projection on two tilted screens created a three-dimensional space for spectators to move through. 16. The Griko are believed to be remnants of the ancient Greek communities in Southern Italy, although there is dispute among scholars as to whether the Griko community is directly descended from ancient Greeks or from more recent medieval migrations during the Byzantine domination. 17. For more comparative work on De Martino´s “Figurative Atlas of Mourning” see Agosti and Sciuto 1990, as well as, more recently, Panza 2006. 18. The atlas of gestures is reminiscent of Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne project, in which Warburg tried to identify and map what he believed were universal Pathosformeln (formulaic gestures and expressions of emotion). Although De Martino never directly referred to Warburg’s last project, a number of scholars have drawn attention to strong parallels between the two atlases (Agosti and Sciuto 1990, Faeta 2003, Didi-Huberman 2012, Pisapia 2013a, 2013b among others). The connection was also discussed at an international conference entitled Mourning, Magic, Ecstatic Healing. Ernesto de Martino held at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin, Germany (9.-10.07.2015), especially in the paper by Davide Stimilli.“The Luxury of Tears: Warburg and De Martino on Klage and Lamento”, 11 July 2015. 19. In the original it says: “[...] È ciò che la documentazione antica ci lascia soltanto intravedere o immaginare, cioè il lamento come rito in azione, la documentazione folklorica ce lo pone sotto gli occhi in tutta la sua evidenza drammatica [...],” (De Martino 2000 [1958] 58-59). 20. In addition to his numerous photographies, Franco Pinna also shot 300 meters of film footage of everyday practices and religious rituals in Salento. The recordings were originally to be exhibited together with the photographs of Pinna and audio recordings of Carpitella. But after the research, the recordings seem to have been lost and are still regarded as missing (Forgacs 2014: 144). 21. The laments that Franco Pinna photographed during his travels with De Martino between 1952 and 1956 have also been reconstructed and were performed especially for the anthropologist and his photographers. Only once, in August 1956 did the two witness an ‘authentic’ lament for the late Carolina Latronico in Castelsaraceno (cf Gallini 1999: 24). 22. Gianfranco Mingozzi’s La Taranta (1962) is the best-known filmic depiction of tarantism and was nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary section in 1963. It is eighteen minutes long and its dramaturgic and narrative structure closely follows the structure of De Martino’s written ethnography La terra del Rimorso (Land of Remorse, 2005 [1961]). 23. Not unlike Douglas Gordon’s appropriation of medical footage of hysterical patients in his performance art piece Hysterical, conceptual artist Joachim Koester referred to historical recordings of tarantism in his 16mm film installation Tarantism (2007). And although Koester is

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not directly using archival footage, in Tarantism dancers improvise spasms of tarantuled persons thus reenacting and mimicking the reenactments in the films made in the course of De Martino´s Apulian expeditions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_uz_-YnauM). In 2008, an exhibition at the Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart entitled Trances, brought this two art works together. The curators argued that “[…] Joachim Koester’s Tarantism shows actors imitating the trance-like states witnessed in primitive dance rituals, faking convulsions not unlike those seen in Douglas Gordon’s Hysterical. The title Tarantism refers to the folk dance from Southern Italy thought to have its origins in the spasms caused by the tarantula spider’s bite. In a predominently Catholic country, the dance survives, some claim, as a remnant of ancient Dionysian practices” (http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38838/trances/). And although speaking of “faking” the symptoms is a crude simplification of the phenomena, the exhibition- makers highlighted an interesting parallel in these two cases with a clear reference to states of trance. 24. These iconographic images consist of photographs by several researchers and journalists, including Luigi Chiriatti, who annually photographed the spectacle of tarantism in Galatina from1970-1992, as well as photographs by Chiara Samugheo (1954), Angelo Colazzo (1972), Fernando Ladiana (1974), Paolo Longo (1976), Salvatore Congedo (1979), Carmelo Caroppo (1983), Fernando Bevilacqua (1994-2004), as well as the photographs by the psychiatrist-sociologist team Paolo Albanese and Paola Chiari from 1980 (Chiriatti and Nocera 2005: 67-119).

ABSTRACTS

This article analyzes the production of visual stereotypes of so-called “imaginary afflictions” (Hufeland 1794), defined as disorders that have no physical cause but are triggered by – and potentially cured through – imagination. Drawing on the well-known example of ‘the hysteric’ as paradigmatic trope in medical photography of the 19th and early 20th century, I detect and trace iconographies that are based on the assumption that mental states (and deviance) are revealed through the corporeal language of gesture and movement, and correlate them with (reenacted) ethnographic photographs and filmic depictions of ‘possessed’ women in mid-20th century Southern Italy. In each case, the camera is used as an instrument for researching and visualizing ‘expressions of the passions’, thereby reproducing highly sexualized images of “imaginary afflictions” as expressive correlates of mental states.

Cet article analyse la production de stéréotypes visuels dénommés " maladies imaginaires" (Hufeland 1794), définies comme des désordres qui n'ont aucune origine physique mais qui sont liés et potentiellement traités grâce à l'imagination. A partir de l'exemple très connu de "l'hystérie" comme un cliché paradigmatique dans la photographie médicale du XIX et du XXème siècle, je trouve et j'analyse des iconographies qui sont produites autour de l'assomption que les états mentaux (et les déviances) sont révélés à travers le langage corporel des gestes et des mouvements. Je les mets en corrélation avec des photographies ethnographiques (mises en scène) et des descriptions filmiques de femmes possédées durant le milieu du XXème siècle en Italie du Sud. Dans chaque cas, la caméra est utilisée comme un instrument permettant la recherche et la visualisation des "expressions des passions", reproduisant donc des images extrêmement séxualisées des "maladies imaginaires" expressions correspondant à des états mentaux.

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Este artículo analiza la producción de estereotipos visuales de las llamadas "aflicciones imaginarias" (Hufeland 1794), definidas como trastornos que no tienen causa física, sino que son provocados por - y potencialmente curados gracias a - la imaginación. Basándome en el conocido ejemplo del "histérico" como tropo paradigmático en la fotografía médica del siglo XIX y principios del XX, detecto y rastreo iconografías basadas en la suposición de que los estados mentales (y la desviación) se revelan a través del lenguaje corpóreo del gesto y del movimiento, y las relaciono con fotografías etnográficas (recreadas) y representaciones fílmicas de mujeres "poseídas" en el sur de Italia a mediados del siglo XX. En cada caso, la cámara se utiliza como instrumento para investigar y visualizar "expresiones de las pasiones", reproduciendo así imágenes altamente sexualizadas de "aflicciones imaginarias" como correlatos expresivos de estados mentales.

INDEX

Keywords: medical photography, audio-visual ethnography, possession rituals, reenactment, mimesis, performativity, imaginary afflictions Palabras claves: antropología médica, etnografía audiovisual, rituales de posesión, recreación, mimesis, performatividad, aflicciones imaginarias Mots-clés: photographie médicale, ethnographie audio-visuelle, rituels de possession, mise en scène, mimesis, performativité, maladies imaginaires

AUTHOR

MICHAELA SCHÄUBLE Department of Social Anthropology, University of Berne (Switzerland) [email protected]

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Picturing Intimacy Mediation and Self-representation in Boston’s Religious Festivals

Federico De Musso and Cristina Grasseni

Introduction

1 Traditionally, several "societies of the saints" exist in Boston's Little Italy, as in many other American cities with an Italian American immigrant community (Ferraiuolo 2009). Taking collective remembrance as a point of departure, we engage with it moving beyond the canon of observational cinema, addressing the limits and potential of montage, and incorporating the multi-vocality that social networks afford back into the linearity of a largely narrated film. In this article, we discuss how editing found footage into the film Christmas in August. Boston's St. Anthony's Feast (2013, http:// christmasinaugust.altervista.org/) was a way to explore the assemblages of diasporic identity and cultural intimacy for Boston’s Italian Americans. Based on fieldwork by Cristina Grasseni in Boston's North End (Grasseni 2014) and edited by Federico De Musso, the film is about the social practice and the cultural memory of religious processions in the North End. In "The Atlas and the Film", Grasseni proposes the Atlas and Montage as two modes of representation, both de-constructing the observational canon of ethnographic filmmaking. Atlas and Montage work collaboratively as two complementary strategies that allow for in depth-analysis, cross-referencing, and annotation on the one hand (the Atlas), as well as the contamination of the different voices, viewpoints and temporalities that can be derived from the analytical treatment of disparate materials, on the other hand (Montage). This joint article positions itself in an ideal continuity with the arguments proposed there. While Grasseni (2014) focusses on her ethnographic fieldwork around the Boston’s Feast and on her exploration of a digital annotation software in order to dissect and arrange the wealth of multi-media sources that pertain to a cultural analysis of St. Anthony's Feast, here we focus specifically on the significance of social networks´ mediation, and of montage to capture and represent the virtual narratives of St. Anthony’s Feast Facebook Group Page, rendering them in cinematic way.

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2 Video-recording Saint Anthony’s Feast in Boston, reveals one of the most numerous group of participants, namely those who were busy taking pictures (see figure 1).

Photographing the Saint

Figure 1. Boston, North End, August 2011. Photo by Cristina Grasseni

3 The fact that people were taking pictures while participating in the feast might look like a trivial aspect of the event, especially if compared with the colourful grandiosity of the parade. However, it raises a question that is pertinent to this special issue: where do these images go? What sociocultural function do they exercise? And how can they be used to analyse and narrate the sociability that they embody?

4 First, we argue that in order to understand the stratified landscape of affection that envelops the North End, one has to consider the layers of sociability that compose the online community of the Feast’s followers. Specifically, we consider videos of affinity (Lange 2009) and online groups as repository of community affiliation. Then we explain how we integrated those layers, represented by video material gathered on the social network pages of the Feast, through montage. We consider montage as the most suited editing technique to reproduce the intimacy and irony expressed by the protagonists. If Grimshaw and Ravetz (2009: 539) claim that observational cinema favors “seeing over assertion, wholeness over parts, matter over symbolic meaning, specificity over abstraction”, the self-conscious exercise in this film was to play parts against each other, to voice symbolic dissonance, thus allowing disparate sources to speak for themselves while also making space for our own authorship.

5 Finally, we discuss the performance of Italian-ness itself, by looking at acts of commemoration and remembering. Throughout the paper we relate to the Internet as both an archive source and a field of performance.

Digital Boston

6 The circulation of social imaginaries about heritage and ethnicity is a typical configuration of contemporary urban ecologies of belonging. The public performance

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of religious devotion has been studied as an ethnic and territorial marker for the Italian-American communities of the East Coast (Posen & Sciorra 1999, Sciorra 1985). In fact, the collective performance of musical processions in the streets of the North End epitomizes their “ephemeral identity” (Ferraiuolo 2009). According to anthropologist Augusto Ferraiuolo, in other words, the Italian identity associated with these religious festivals exists only insofar as it is collectively performed. The community performing the feast is no longer physically located for the most part in the North End, and the religious and social performativity plays up to a conspicuous absence of Italian residents in the contemporary North End – if one does not count the omnipresent restaurants, cafés, gourmet shops, souvenir kiosks etc. of a largely "touristified" location.

7 Studying festive practices in Boston as a form of ‘Ecology of Belonging’ is aimed to produce a complex understanding of place and belonging, applying the skilled visions approach to collective strategies of self-representation. Categorising self and other through reference to place-identity is common, but the sense of being ‘in’ or ‘of’ a place can acquire an inward-looking tinge (sometimes even a xenophobic tone) as a result of a social training of perception that recognizes the ‘other’ at first sight, classifying them according to a value-laden aesthetics of emplacement (Herzfeld 2012, Grasseni 2007).

8 The project Skilled Visions. Critical Ecologies of Belonging, which resulted in the film Christmas in August1 , responded to the theoretical need of finding a visual anthropological method for interrogating identity as a relational process rather than as a substantive mode, wishing to make a film about how people look at themselves and peers. Considering that visual competence is invisible in itself, montage is the best tool to make the viewer think about looking. While it is impossible to acquire ‘skilled vision’ without undergoing the specific training that each and every one of us receives as part of our life-history, it is however possible to analyze cultural and collective modes of looking and to evoke them in film, by focusing on the social schoolings of the eye, and on the visual stereotypes about one’s own and other people’s outlook and social performances.

9 The capacity to read complex cultural cues around oneself depends on timescapes as well as multiple sense-scapes, and both are historically embedded – in the case of Boston's North End, in a heavily layered urban landscape. Such "layers" should be thought of in an archeological sense, as the resulting collective signification of places and practices through living together, but also, more pertinently in the contemporary era, by using and sharing picturing devices of one's places and practices.

10 The massive presence of media recording and publishing devices in everyday life is by now incontrovertible and has generated much cultural analysis as well as criticism (see for example Turkle 2012). The affordable price of consumer and prosumer digital cameras, the growing access to the internet and the incorporation of cameras in cell phones and smartphones allowed in the past decade a proliferation of images and videos that enhanced home-made production and at the same time superseded the more intimate consumption of photo albums, VHS tapes, super8 and slide projections within restricted circles of physically present friends.

11 Internet blogging and platforms such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, as well as subsequent applications for smartphone image-sharing (such as Instagram, Flickr, Snapchat, WhatsApp,…) has shaped a new social way of conceiving of personal memories and presence. As Daniel Miller and Don Slater (2000) state about Trinidad and Tobago, the Internet is not another place, dis-embedded from the social reality, but

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rather a part in this continuum of relations. To make sense of these relatively new aspects of community making, we incorporated found footage in our documentary as a way of rendering visible the social construction of a common digital memory.

12 Within this social and cultural framework, filming, producing selfies, or sharing clips amount to as many acts of memory that deal not so much with the epistemic ambition of representing facts or events, but rather produce relations through the practical means of recalling: asserting that such relations and communities indeed exist. Patricia Lange defines as videos of affinity those social media that aim to generate and maintain connections with other people on the web. They can “include feelings of membership in a social network, or feelings of attraction to people, things or ideas” (Lange 2009: 71). What brings together a community around specific topics is social interest in certain practices – in our case, what attracts the members of St. Anthony’s Feast Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/StAnthonysFeast) could be one’s Italian-American origins, or a personal link to Boston's North End, or devotion to St. Anthony, or a combination of such and other factors. Membership of an on-line group grants access to a discussion space in which everybody is entitled to participate and volunteer appreciation, comments, and sometimes debate. By uploading and liking, one experiences new ways of belonging and relating to others which, Lange argues, “have a present focus and communicative orientation” in contrast to the reminiscent prerogative of the home-mode media, characterized by spatial proximity (Lange 2009: 74). The affiliation on-line works in a synchronic manner, building a sense of community between the intended viewers and the video-makers, rather than building a relation to the video itself.

Editing Intimacy

13 As Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr (2013) have recently argued, “montage provides a technique for evoking the invisible through the orchestration of different perspectives encroaching upon one another” (2013:298). The film Christmas in August explores montage as a device that exposes paradox rather than illustrating it, unraveling intimate memories and performative enactments by linking narration (verbal recollection) with visual and sonic records of the Feast (digital souvenirs). Firstly, Christmas in August attempts to recreate the friendly atmosphere of intimate recollection that characterises the narration of the Feast. For the interviewees, intimacy is signalled by their vivid recalling of childhood memories, kinship ties, and family devotion. The Feast obviously has an emotional and symbolic relevance in the narration of their lives, tying together religious symbols, cultural displays, places and people. The religious festival is portrayed as keeping together the neighbourhood and the migrants, those who came and those who went away, Italians, Irish, and Jewish... Contemporary images from YouTube counterpoint their proud description of its organisation and popular success: marching bands, joyful viva!, children smiling. The images intentionally bridge phatic breaks and syntactical inconsistences in the raw footage. The pauses and the lingering on allow for visual repetition, which delivers consistency both to their narration and to the feast itself. Little by little, the Feast transforms from a coral to a personal event, as details of family history are disclosed to the audience. It is at this point that sequences of vintage family memories posted on Facebook and You Tube begin to populate the narration, such as the following one.

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This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 14 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2359

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydW5yJFVB_Y

15 The film is narrated by two prominent members of the St. Anthony's Society2, Jason and Paul. The two protagonists, as in a duet, refer to the same practice and neighbourhood. Yet, their stories do not always run parallel, but overlap and diverge according to their personal reconstruction of collective memory. The slight inconsistences are played up by montage-like juxtaposition with YouTube videos – representing yet other viewpoints in and on the Feast. The protagonists themselves call into play the authority of distinguished guests, and in the same breath undermine such authority by telling humorous anecdotes about them. So it is with the coming of the Archbishop from Padua to bring the relic of the Saint, the visit of Pope John Paul II to Boston, and the performance of fascist marches in front of Bill Clinton. Grasseni (2014) comments on the uncanny experience of witnessing the procession band playing a fascist motive while petitioning the Saint. This footage is in the film, as well as the elicited reaction of the interviewee, who explains that this is one of the requested songs by one of the families that greet the statue of St. Anthony with votive offerings. He then proceeds to "tell a story" to Grasseni, to deflate the political significance of this nostalgic tune. Even "to the future president of the United States" did "they" play "fascist music", as this has by now become part of a nondescript folk repertoire: "old- timers know", but "it was so long ago", and nowadays this tune has no political undertone for this community – claims Jason in the film (Christmas in August, minute 15). The irony they convey is represented through the montage-juxtaposition of ethnographic and social networks footage: contrasting the intimate and the public, the understated and the boasted. Beyond plain banter, the overall ironic effect is that of narrating by untold contradictions, which are nonetheless held together by affection.

16 Juxtaposition also highlights the important issue of changes and differences between the American and the Italian tradition of the Feast. The Feast in Italy is represented as pious and solemn. The soundscape of the procession includes only church bells and a megaphone-enhanced rosary recitation. Boston’s Feast, on the other hand, is all but meditative. A sense of loud enjoyment characterises most on-line videos (as well as Grasseni's footage of two editions of the event). Looking back to a model Feast as recalled from childhood contextually opens up a space of self-determination, defining a different Feast practice and a different way of being Italian today in Boston. Being "a real Italian" emerges as an ironic counterpoint in both conversations. Paul’s comment on the difference between "a real Italian, and someone who thinks they are Italian" hinges on the (self)perception of having an innate capacity for stylishness: "on their worst day, they'll look like they are going somewhere important – any they may be going nowhere!" (Christmas in August, minute 15). This notion is also echoed in the Facebook comments to a photo taken in the Thirties, recalling specifically the days in which the marching band "looked Italian" because they were so rigorously well-dressed

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This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 17 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2359

Link: https://www.facebook.com/StAnthonysFeast/photos/a. 208247612543994.49054.208237425878346/470323193003100/?type=3&theater (accessed February 6, 2017)

18 Being Italian is a mixture of performance and paraphernalia, identification and rooting. Jason noticeably points out that “I don’t know if it is a show we put on or a part of us that comes out” (Christmas in August: 19’). Anthropologist Augusto Ferraiuolo, who features in the film, responds that on the basis of his own ethnographic research, one identifies with Montefalcione with regard to St. Anthony's devotion, but with Italy altogether for example on occasion of a World Cup football match. The You Tube clip that De Musso chose to follow this remark shows a cheering young crowd in the North End during the Football World Cup, which Italy won in 2006. The clip blends Italian flags and the easily recognisable blue shirts of the national team over a drum and base surge that sounds more like Jersey Shore than St. Anthony’s Feast. Such performance is (self)recorded, posted and shared. It feeds on habits as well as on active idealization of what an Italian is or should not be. Thus social networks carry out the function of technologies of identity, sustaining an imagined community in a similar way to what Benedict Anderson describes as the seminal work of the press and mass media in the diffusion and acceptance of national identities (Anderson 1983).

19 The abundant visual and musical materials circulating in social networks tell a different story than the Jersey-Shore or Soprano-like stereotypes of Italian Americans, while at the same time surprisingly confirm some forms of indulgent self- categorization. We enter the sensitive grounds of what Michael Herzfeld has called “cultural Intimacy”, namely “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (Herzfeld, 2005: 3). Following Herzfeld, here active self-stereotyping amounts to a social poetics, a performance constantly challenging the borders between invention and convention, where selective forgetting and remembrance coexist, and collective narrations are woven to build future and make sense of the past. These are competing, contestable and constructed narratives. However, by entering the dimension of collective storytelling, they play an active part in apprenticing to and the social performance of self-stereotypes.

20 Gestures represent an important source for storytelling. They constitute an important part of cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2009). Through the cultural competence of the body we access proper identity performances. In order to render such performative embodiment in the film, we coupled gestures in the footage with same gestures in You Tube clips. For example, Jason mimics the blessing gesture of the Pope and of the Archbishop during his interview. These gestures are visual shorthand with which the interviewee, actually an accomplished storyteller, evokes images to the mind of the viewer in order to better recreate the atmosphere of the events. Finding these events independently posted in the cloud - and editing them into the ‘talking head’ interview with Jason - allowed us to couple his gesture with the actual archival footage, almost to visualize his intimate recollection of the very gesture that the Archbishop performed. Being captured on camera, the Archbishop’s blessing was then posted on the web, and Jason mimicked it in front of our camera to picture the intimacy of his memories. This

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makes an important counterpoint to the widespread conviction that ethnographic film- making should be a naturalist mimicry of unfolding activities. These activities themselves mimic deeply layered recollections and models of action, an increasing portion of which comes already ‘mediated’ by the circulation of images on social media.

21 The rhythm of montage follows the beats of drums and brass bands accompanying the Saint's procession, switching from talking heads to the Feast footage, to the archival material. The band´s procession leads and connects a cartography of soundscapes. As Grasseni (2014) notes, the marching bands’ itinerary acknowledges and confirms the liminal boundaries of the community, petitioning the saint with certain specific songs that each of the families living (or once living) on that specific street corner (used to) like. As long as one neighbour is left down a narrow alley, wishing to pin a dollar bill on the Saint, the march will pursue that door (Christmas in August, 21’). The North-End relives at the sound of "Number One". The Marcia Reale sanctions that the dollar bills are being pinned on the saint. The marching bands and the motives they play to petition for the saint are the main soundtracks of the photo-souvenirs posted on the web (Monte Boston13, 2013; Tsmeriglio 2013). Local film-makers reconstruct the history of the North End based on this unprecedented reservoir of part home-movies, part digital oral history (North End Water Front 2012)3. Together, these productions congeal into a collective stereophonic, cinematic memory and play an important role in the dialectic between tradition and innovation.

22 In the final weekend of August, in Boston’s North End, a broad musical repertoire resounds. "Feast music" (an expression that Jason uses in Christmas in August) includes romantic folk Italian songs but also the Italian rendition of the Brazilian motif “A Banda” (Mina/ Chico Buarque de Hollanda /Antonio Amurri 1967). This is the music score of a YouTube edit of 1960s, super8 sources (MonteBoston13 2008). To adopt this song in Christmas in August meant to evoke the association with Italian pop culture but also to document the unusually wide musical repertoire that embodies devotional tradition. “Feast music” charts a comprehensive taxonomy of affection – ranging from the fascist songs that "they played even to the future president of the United States" to 1960s international pop. Tradition is thus not fixated in a national repertoire, it is liminal and dynamic, just as the Feast itself: it encompasses both Sirtaki and “Never on Sunday”. Eventually, contemporary drum and base might well become a cultural reference, side by side with the catchy melodies of “Feast’s music”.

23 This holds true for images as well. On the St. Anthony's Feast Facebook page, tailor- made suits and flower-carts coexist with sunglasses and t-shirts in the same way super8 footage accompanies high-definition, wide-angle deformations. The Feast is an audio- visual sediment of urban material culture as it evolved in the North End, stacked in many layers on YouTube. Italian-ness is nowhere to be pin-pointed, but everywhere to be seen and heard. A core repertoire of domestic scenes, sacred icons, and food incorporated heterogeneous new traits over time, including clothes and hair-does. People’s appearance is shaped both by bodily features and video formats. The images shake and pan, distorting more than once. Formats can be boxed or stretched. Actual film grain and post-production filters (typically sepia colour correction or film-stock effects) visually gloss together nostalgia and the contemporary Feast.

24 Central to the Feast is its relation to the Saint. This relation of devotion is differently but clearly articulated by the two interviewees to the sceptical anthropologist (De Musso and Grasseni: 8’): they insist that it is Saint Anthony the main attraction. People

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come to the North End to see the saint: “After they see St. Anthony they do what they feel… whatever is in their heart. Then they’ll eat something, they listen to some music and then they see St. Anthony again. The rule is St. Anthony” says Paul. The Saint is carried in good sight throughout the neighbourhood, embedding the Italian-American sociality into actual streets, yards and balconies, emotionally drawing together the devotees. The Archbishop captured on vintage footage also underlines the visual activity on and around the saint, when he urges the crowd to “look how beautiful he is! Look at St. Anthony!4” (De Musso and Grasseni:13’). In fact, icons of the saint can be found everywhere. They embellish houses, restaurants and the hats of the marching bands’ members. Badges of St. Anthony and of St. Lucy are offered to the devotees who pin their dollar bills. The badges mark the bearing of a very local identity and testify to the offer made. Once the red bricks are left behind though, beyond Hanover street, they become embarrassingly exotic, perhaps passé.

Devotional badges, Festival of St. Cosmas and Damian

Figure 3, East Cambridge September 2011. Festival of St. Cosmas and Damian. Photo by Cristina Grasseni

25 In these moments of heightened collective performance, lineages and attachment to one’s village of origin are eagerly self-ascribed – and attempts are made at speaking a language or dialect mostly forgotten or unknown to the new generations. Iconic images or pictures taken at the procession inhabit the Facebook page. The success of the feast is symbolised by the statue of the saint, fully covered in dollars, following a traditional devotional practice of offerings to the saint that is documented well beyond the Italian South (Ferraiuolo 2009; Zanotelli 2006). Not only dollars, but prayers, names and images of deceased people are attached to the saint. Families double pin their memory to the saint and posting images to the online board. However, the relation with the saint goes beyond contemplation and symbolization. The corporeal performance of devotion is something as intimate as a bodily practice. The saint is a close and familial figure. One kisses the relics, one kisses the statue. One raises one's child to kiss the statue. For the male members of St. Anthony society, "he is one of the guys" – but not just for those who organise the Feast. He is touched, grabbed and kissed by anyone in the neighbourhood. They wait for him on their balconies; they line up and follow him

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in the procession. This physical attachment to the Saint strongly connects the Feast with catholic traditions of devotion that are to be found in Italy and beyond (Bonato 2005, Ballacchino 2009, Bindi 2009). It entails a highly somatic participation – both of the attendees and of the saint. This dimension is well depicted by the amateur cameras aimed, like everybody’s attention, at the devotional money-pinning. The movement of the camera “sets the rhythm of images and sounds and delineate a trajectory” (Manoukian 2009: 249), which we can follow to find the focal point of the Feast: the statue of the saint

26 The Feast warps the urban landscape of the North End around the Saint's statue. Confetti, ribbons, and red brocade welcome the resting statue... together with stages, food stands and souvenir vendors, the statues’ stand is a paramount feature of the festive sensorial landscape. These ephemeral markers blend in with more permanent elements such as restaurants, signs, bakeries, bars, and banners that remind one that the North End is an Italian neighbourhood – for tourist reasons and all-year-round. The local shops are among the sponsors of the Feast. At the time of filming, the president of St. Anthony of Padua from Montefalcione Inc. was the owner of a popular restaurant located just next to the society’s headquarters; footage of one of the most lively celebrations take place in a famous pizzeria where, among the viva!, alongside the name of St. Anthony and St. Lucy5 we hear the name of the restaurant over the clash of cymbals (De Musso and Grasseni: 20’). Italian-ness and St. Anthony are local resources and important symbolic assets for the success of North End entrepreneurs who, together with the other commercial sponsors (mainly food-related and with important associations with Italian-American heritage), shape the feast by metaphorically pinning their sponsorship.

27 The identification of the neighbourhood and the community around the feast follows a centripetal dynamic by which diversities and alterities are composed by pledging interest and participation. Different origins and generations connect to the core and thus claim belonging: as the people of Montefalcione “were getting less and less” (De Musso and Grasseni 2013: 3’), the Feast incorporated people from different Italian regions, which in the North End translated in different street corners6, eventually incorporating some Irishmen and the “good Jewish guy” who are now part of the St. Anthony society. We propose the notion of the stew in alternative to the melting pot7 to describe the continuing relation of the Feast to the Italian diaspora, while evidently moving on from being a “Monti” affair to representing the North End, to Boston itself. The Feast won the Best Festival of Boston award in 2014, in an urban context that encourages rather than dwarfing cultural events predicated on heritage or ethnic affiliation, also for evident commercial reasons.

Virtual Intimacy

28 With limited connections remaining to the native village in Italy, Boston’s many Societies of the Saints recurrently and symbolically organize sizeable displays of ethnicity in the form of theatrical devotion (Ferraiuolo 2009). The festival of St. Anthony, involving thousands of people, catalyzes shared memories that have already developed over generations as part of a fully American kaleidoscope. The procession with the Saint and the band reproduces the relationship between collective (self)narration, stereotypical performance of Italian-ness, and religious devotion as an

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urban practice of place-making. There are also other occasions during which St. Anthony’s society makes its voice heard, for example to post commemorative comments on specific religious festivities such as Easter, to publicize the society's accomplishments, to disseminate news about cultural activities about the North End, or to acknowledge support from prominent politicians (such as the current Boston Mayor who participated in the 2014 Feast).

29 The Boston Marathon Bombing of 15 April 2013 was an ominously unique occasion on which the Facebook group posted, firstly a brief informative message about the city- wide lockdown8 and, a few days after, a call to a candle-light vigil in the North End in collaboration with the other "societies of the saints". Grasseni attended the vigil of Sunday 21 April 2013, a somber and dignified procession concluded by brief ceremonial speeches and a candle-laying ceremony at the Prado, under the statue of Paul Revere – a landmark in the North End and in the history of the American Independence. The event was well documented,9 with 46 named group members participating (as recorded on Facebook) and perhaps a few more physically attending in person – no more than one hundred perhaps. Overall, considering that the two million inhabitants were stirring after a truly shocking lockdown and that vigils and "Boston Strong" T-shirts were emotionally multiplying in the streets and on-line, the scarce attendance could only be telling of the dwindling numbers of actual Boston residents who could, at a day's notice, mobilize and come in attendance.

30 Beyond the actual physical gathering in the streets, though, the increasingly popular Facebook page (currently "liked" by 6109 people)10 and the exchange of vintage footage, songs and carefully edited tributes online contribute to the all-year-round self- portraiture as a community, when hardly any residential rooting is left in this now gentrified neighbourhood. This ´virtual´ community is in fact, following Miller a ‘real’ community. Although these relations exist thanks to digital and remote modes of interaction, they are invested with importance (2000: 7; 67-68). They also are sometimes preferred to attending the physical procession – as proven by the scarce attendance of the vigil. They signify participation to the procession in a place that is other than the one of one’s physical abode, but not detached from it. We thus maintain the expression ‘virtual intimacy’ here, rather than ‘digital intimacy’ for example, because we do not simply wish to comment on how the digital dimension enables and is conducive to cultural intimacy in characteristic ways. We want to stress the elective character The virtual intimacy of the Facebook page also feeds off the physical attendance and the pervasive camera presence at the actual Feast, in a recursive loop of mimicry and recollection as indicated above.

31 By looking at the St. Anthony’s Feast Facebook community, we are confronted with a diverse corpus of materials – mostly videos and photographs of the latest Feast or event. A large number of members use them as "videos of affinity" as defined above, especially in relation to the Italian diaspora and the notion of Italian-ness. This is in fact a notion that we debate in the film, when Paul offers a complex and colourful palette of personal experience, family remembrances, and stereotypical expectations about what "a real Italian" should look like.

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33 Minute 15.30 Link: https://vimeo.com/63213733 (accessed February 6, 2017)

34 Yet, the majority of viewers want to see what happened: they want to find themselves and their neighbours in there. The web content allows one to see again and again the Feast. Consequently, Christmas in August combines footage filmed by Grasseni in the 2011 and 2012 editions of the Feast but also several "videos of affection" that De Musso and Grasseni found in the social networks used by the Feast devotees. We might even call them videos of affiliation, as posting, liking or commenting consists in performing membership11. Thus the film combines interviews filmed on location with ethnographic footage, but also the community videos –from authorized sources, and acknowledged in the end titles and on the film website. We tracked authorship of these materials by matching You Tube nicknames with Facebook identities, as well as asking for help directly from the Society to identify the authors. This added a tassel to the ethnography, tracing the pervasive on-line presence of the Society, perceived and portrayed as a potentially infinite community, down to a finite pool of individuals that are closely associated with the Society of the Saint. Asking, emailing informed consent forms, meeting or calling these authors on the phone went hand in hand with building a social meaning around such ‘found footage’. Using these materials, the film mimics the maze of links one encounters on line, and underlines the many temporalities and voices at play in these sources.

35 As a focal centre of the community, the Feast and its kaleidoscopic manifestations gather, in the viewers’ eyes, a wider network of people than the actual residents for sure, but also than the online users (a claimed 300,000-strong street presence). The community that is thus symbolized online comes together as a practice or performance, regardless of whether everyone participates in it. Across multiple social networks, photos, videos and comments create a meta-network that complicates the ecology of belonging around the Feast. As pointed out by Martin Wahlberg in his work about virtual memorials, videos and comments aim to tell a story, evoking a private narration in which the opinions and values of the community are embedded (Wahlberg 2009). By participating ethnographically in the practice of the Feast, and by incorporating in the film the videos of affinity and of affiliation that precede, accompany and follow its three-day long performance, we intended to represent both the practice (the Feast in the flesh) and the community itself, whose intimacy is both real and virtual, and certainly digitally mediated.

36 Being present – however vicariously - is fundamental. Access to these pictures allows participating in the many activities that would be impossible to attend in person. This is of course not only true of festive events. Analysing video of political demonstrations in Iran, Setrag Manoukian underlines the importance of YouTube videos for connecting political activists engaged in demonstrations and their diaspora spectators (Manoukian 2009). The event is both documented (thus rendered real) and made relevant (through the experience of closeness) by watching the video. Although evidence is not at stake here, participation and proximity are a highly valued component of the Feast. In the online community just as much as in a real one, not everybody has the same visibility and prominence. One's record of online participation and one's actual involvement in the Feast shape one's position and charisma. For example, participating in the Feast and then posting and commenting back constitute a fuller, on-line meta-experience that integrates the actual attendance of the event. This holds true especially for those

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networks that meet both on and offline (as in the case of the alternative food networks investigated by Grasseni 2013 and De Musso 2013). Besides the authority established by regularly posting and commenting, however, peripheral characters may also smuggle peripheral materials and ideas into the conversation. These too become part of the "metadata" of the entire community: a common pool of imaginary resources. This veritable corpus of representation follows and augments the Feast over the years. It is this corpus, together with the community of practice, that constitutes the field-site for our documentary work.

37 The identity of the Feast is heavily dependent on the notion of an Italian American neighbourhood party, thrown out of religious devotion in honor of the local patron saint. St. Anthony's Feast mimics and appropriates the original devotion of St. Anthony of Padua in Montefalcione, Italy. Its import to Boston – together with that of several others patron saints and "societies of the saints" – helped shaping the identity of the North End and of several other neighbourhoods, often reproducing and mapping the initial geographical provenance of many Italian migrant communities, including their internal differentiations and competitions (Ferraiuolo 2009). Changes are constantly referred to by the two interviewees in the film: not only the evolution of the feast itself, but also the transformations in the social composition of the neighbourhood. As Jason, the procession leader, explains: “The family is not at the building anymore. But I play that song. Cause it's always been played here. So it's something in my head – oh, we have to play that song” (De Musso and Grasseni 2013: 26’). Thus a process of ongoing belonging – ideally reaching beyond the boundaries of life itself – links close and far away people, especially those who used to go to the Feast in their childhood. Videos compensate the relative lack of participation with online relationships and mutual support – and such power of intimacy is maintained even when the Feast is actually extremely well-attended: St. Anthony's attracts up to 300,000 people according to its organizers. However, the online presence of the "society of the saint" is just as important. It compounds the Feast’s performance with the collective remembrance of a community that is as much virtual as it is "real" (as explored by Boellstorff 2008 in the case of Second Life users).

38 On YouTube and Facebook, photos and videos allow people to get together trying to identify people in the images, connecting faces to (possibly departed) relatives, and guessing who could have possibly have taken the pictures.

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Link: https://www.facebook.com/StAnthonysFeast/photos/pb. 208237425878346.-2207520000.1416341392./412357708799649/?type=3&theater (accessed February 6, 2017)

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Link: https://www.facebook.com/StAnthonysFeast/photos/pb. 208237425878346.-2207520000.1416341392./412357742132979/?type=3&theater (accessed February 6, 2017)

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Link: https://www.facebook.com/StAnthonysFeast/photos/pb. 208237425878346.-2207520000.1416341392./416457081723045/?type=3&theater (accessed February 6, 2017)

42 The socialization of photographs on Facebook is part of a collective effort to trace back relations while it consolidates interest around the Feast. In this way, it works as an interactive archive. Pelle Snickars discusses how Web 2.0 gave birth to a new social understanding of archival practices (Snickars 2009). Access to social networks has changed the way in which people approach photographic archives, and thus the way in which they conceptualize archives altogether. Archives are no longer buildings with limited access to collections, explored by lonely researchers (Prelinger 2009). Rather, they are now epitomised by companies such as Google and Yahoo, which consolidate (corporate-controlled) access to “the world’s largest repository collection for digital photos and videos” (Bianco 2009: 307). Despite blatant issues of corporate control of collective and private memories as well as of use (and privacy) of public and private data, their socialization implies that images on Facebook and YouTube function as the private-public archive of the community, easily accessible and constantly open to updates. The images are shared and hence saved, both in the cloud and in the actual re- collections of the Facebook Group members. They re-create sense of belonging through a practice of mediated remembrance. Thus the changes in the neighbourhood, namely the gentrification and dispersal of the original migrant community that is one of the recurrent motives in the documentary interviews, are acknowledged and accommodated in personal narratives. The Feast provides a reliable "common place" in which people’s lives and identities become objects of recollection and reverie.

Conclusion

43 We have dwelt on the dialectic and dynamic nature of the sources juxtaposed in Christmas in August, which we obtained by literally mining a collective imaginary: combining ethnographic and found footage, from digital archives and social networks. Montage is the formal principle through which non linearity is allowed back into the narrative, allowing for the contamination of different voices, viewpoints and temporalities. Our ambition was to achieve both an overview (the Übersichtlichkeit of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance) and an ironic distance from the dominating narrative of observation.

44 Michaela Schäuble's workshop, convened in 2013 at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities of Harvard University, prompted us to “mine imagination” beyond and “outside an essentially realist and mimetic paradigm” of ethnographic approaches to visual production.12 “Medial manipulation” was one of the expressions used in the call, and we find it an apt term to characterize the making of this film. “Manipulation” also expresses our own initial disquiet and ambivalence about using footage from social networks, consequently finding ourselves tracking and charting, emboldened by the task of matching nicknames on YouTube with other Facebook nicknames, and tracing them to personal identities through the society or associated web sites. While the

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different degree of graininess of the clips plundered from You Tube functions as a device for pictorial quotation, their juxtaposition with own ethnographic footage and talking-heads poses new interrogations. The result is hopefully a dynamic assemblage of personal and collective imaginaries, illuminating their cohesive and conflicting nature while contributing to the emergence of a collective self-representation.

45 Being Italian, being a North Ender, being American and Bostonian are self- identification practices that overlap in the performance of the Feast - all of which are present in the self-representations that Feast-goers craft and collect on the web. Corporeal and virtual, visible and invisible, soundscape and landscape concur in they ways of inhabiting the Feast. The latter gathers thousands of people, few of whom regularly access the online group. Nonetheless, both physical and virtual participants imagine and perform a community. Belonging is pinned at multiple levels - we hope to have shed some light on this complexity, as well as on potential interaction between media archaeology and ethnographic filmmaking.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and articles

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Ballacchino, K. 2009. (ed.) La Festa. Dinamiche Socio-Culturali e Patrimonio Immateriale. Nola: L'arcael'arco Edizioni.

Bianco, J. S. 2009. Social Networking and Cloud Computing: Precarious Affordances for the “Prosumer.” Women's Studies Quarterly, 37 (1-2) pag. 303-312.

Bindi, L. 2009. Volatili Misteri. Festa e Città a Campobasso e Altre Divagazioni Immateriali. Roma: Armando Editore.

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton University Press.

Bonato, L. 2005 (ed.) Festa Viva. Continuità Mutamento Innovazione. Torino: Omega Edizioni.

De Musso, F. 2013. Orange Landings. Networks and relations. MA Thesis, University of Bologna.

Ferraiuolo, A. 2009. Religious festive practices in Boston's North End : Ephemeral identities in an Italian American community. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Grasseni, C. 2013. Beyond Alternative Food Networks. Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups. London: Bloomsbury.

Grasseni, C. .2014. "The Atlas and the Film", AnthroVision [Online], 2.2 | 2014, Online since 29 December 2014, connection on 30 December 2014. URL http://anthrovision.revues.org/1355.

Grimshaw, A., Ravetz, A., 2009. "Rethinking Observational Cinema", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(3): 538-556.

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Herzfeld, M. 2005. Cultural Intimacy. Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge.

Herzfeld, M. 2009. "The cultural politics of gesture. Reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice", Ethnography 10(2):131-152.

Herzfeld, M. 2012. “Radici antiche, razzismi recenti: passato, stirpe e lignaggio negli stati nazionali dell’Europa meridionale”, in A. Cnnas, T. Cossu and M. Giuman (eds.) XENOI. Immagine e parola tra razzismi antichi e moderni. Napoli: Liguori, pp. 253-266.

Lange P.G. 2009. “Videos of Affinity on YouTube.” In Snickars, P and P. Vonderau (eds.) The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, pp. 70-88.

Lave, J. 2011. Apprenticeship in critical ethnographic practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Manoukian, S. 2010. “Where Is This Place? Crowds, Audio-vision, and Poetry in Postelection Iran.” Public Culture 22 (2): 237-263.

Marcus, G.E., 1994. “The modernist sensibility in recent ethnographic writing and the cinematic metaphor of montage” in: L. Taylor (ed.) Visualising Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 37-53.

Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. 2000. The Internet: an ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg.

Niezen, R. 2013. “Internet Suicide: Communities of Affirmation and the Lethality of Communication”. Transcultural Psychiatry 50 (2): 303–22. doi:10.1177/1363461512473733.

Posen, S.I., and Sciorra, J. 1999. “‘We go where the Italians live’. Religious processions as ethnic and territorial markers in a multi-ethnic Brooklyn neighborhood”, in Orsi, R., (ed.), Gods of the city: religion and the American urban landscape, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Prelinger, R. 2009. “The Appearance of Archives”. In Snickars, P and P. Vonderau (eds.) The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, pp. 268-274.

Sciorra, J. 1985. “Religious Processions in Italian Williamsburg”, in The Drama Review, Volume 29, No. 3, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Snickars, P. 2009. “The Archival Cloud.” In Snickars, P and P. Vonderau (eds.) The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, pp. 292-313.

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Films

Albence, A. 2012 St. Anthony's Italian Festival-Feast Day Procession 1977. Yotube, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydW5yJFVB_Y (accessed January 6, 2015)

Ballacchino, K. 2007 La Festa Migrante. I Gigli di Nola a New York. Video, 14'.

De Musso, Federico and Grasseni, Cristina 2013. Christmas in August. Boston's St. Anthony's Feast. Video, 30 mins https://vimeo.com/63213733 (accessed February 6, 2017)

Grasseni, C. and F. De Musso 2013 Christmas in August. Boston’s St. Anthony’s Feast. Video 30’

MonteBoston13 (uploaded by) 2008 St. Anthony's Feast North End, Boston 1973.Youtube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcqxhMx3uG0 (accessed January 6, 2015)

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Mina, “La banda” 1967 by Antonio Amurri. Translation of “A banda” by Chico Buarque de Hollanda 1966.

MonteBoston13 (uploaded by) 2013 PATRON SAINT: The Montefalcione devotion to Saint Anthony. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhiaVhdy3jY (accessed January 6, 2015)

North End Water Front (uploaded by) 2012 Film Preview - Boston's North End: America's Italian Neighborhood. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4w8FgqnHPA (accessed January 6, 2015 )

Tsmeriglio (uploaded by) 2013 New 1996 Boston St Anthony Feast. Youtube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfC-FvWGyzo (accessed January 6, 2015)

Webistes

De Musso, Federico and Grasseni, Cristina 2013. Christmas in August. Boston's St. Anthony's Feast. http://christmasinaugust.altervista.org/ (accessed February 6, 2017)

St. Anthony’s Feast Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/StAnthonysFeast) (accessed February 6, 2017)

NOTES

1. A special thanks goes to the Film Study Center at Harvard University, Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, which made this project possible with a joint fellowship as David and Roberta Logie and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center fellow, 2011/2012. 2. We refer here to San Antonio Di Padova Da Montefalcione, Inc. 3. For a comparative case, see Ballacchino 2007. In this film, the author sourced 1960s footage of returning migrant families illustrating how the Gigli feast migrated from Nola to Williamsburg, NY. In our case, we first "found" the footage on line and then traced it back to known authors. In the case of Ballacchino, the footage was not in the public domain and was entrusted to her by the informants. However, our contribution is only one of the many voices within an already crowded public space of (self)representation. 4. In Italian in the video: “Vedete com’è bello! Guardate Sant’Antonio!” 5. In Italian in the video: Sant’Antonio and Santa Lucia. 6. See North End Water Front 2012. 7. As in the salad bowl, in the stew each ingredient is identifiable, but they slowly become more permeable and finally season each other. 8. "We hope that all of our family and friends are safe this afternoon. Please evacuate the Copley Square area if you are nearby and can leave. Many buildings are in lock- down mode as a result of the explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Our thoughts and prayers are with those that have been affected by this senseless tragedy" posted 15 April 2013 at 15.40. The message was followed by a Keep Running, Boston sympathy flier to share and reuse, on 15 April 2013 at 17.27. They day after a further post with a link to a 2008 video on You Tube: the Defenders Alumni Corps performing America and Maybe at The Old North Church as part of the 2008 St. Anthony's Feast. The

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post reminded the community that "The members of Saint Anthony and Saint Lucy Societies are proud Americans and proud Bostonians." 9. See the event description and photographs on https://www.facebook.com/media/ set/?set=a.10151339489566179.1073741833.117093491178&type=1 (accessed February 6, 2017) 10. On 24 May 2016, St. Anthony’s Feast records 6,109 ‘likes’. On 2 January 2014, it recorded 4,235. In September 2011, when the group was ‘closed’, Grasseni was group subscriber number 2,003. 11. For a different approach to online community building, see Niezen 2013. Niezen´s definition of online ‘communities of affirmation’ also stresses the enabling function of the digital medium, but for identities that exist online because they would be perceived as pathological in face-to-face interactions. 12. Mining Imagination. Ethnographic Approaches Beyond Knowledge Production, Volkswagen Fellows Symposium convened by Michaela Schäuble, Mahindra Center for the Humanities, Harvard University, April 5-6 2013.

ABSTRACTS

Taking as a point of departure the Italian American community in Boston and its process of collective remembrance surrounding Saint Anthony’s Feast, we addressing the limits and potential of montage. We argue that the multi-vocality and multi-temporality of social networks can be incorporated into the linearity of a narrated film. We discuss how editing found footage into the film Christmas in August (2013, http://christmasinaugust.altervista.org/) was a way to explore the assemblages of diasporic identity and cultural intimacy for Boston’s Italian Americans. We focus specifically on the significance of social networks as mediators, and of montage as a tool to capture the virtual narratives and identities performed in the Facebook Group Page of St. Anthony’s Feast. We look at the Internet as both an archive source and a field of performance for acts of commemoration and remembering, and argue that montage is the most suited editing technique to reproduce the intimacy and irony expressed by the protagonists in their performance of Italian-ness.

Prenant comme point de départ la communauté italo-américaine à Boston et les techniques de mémoire collective déployées autour de la fête de Saint Antoine, nous abordons les limites et les potentiels des techniques de montage. Nous prétendons que la multi-vocalité et la multi- temporalité des réseaux sociaux peuvent être inclus dans la linéarité d'un film. Nous discutons de la manière dont le montage de film récupéré/ détourné comme dans le film Noël, au mois d'Aout (2013 http://christmasinaugust.altervista.org/) est une façon d'explorer les modalités de recomposition d'une identité diasporique et d'une intimité culturelle pour les italo-américains de Boston. Nous nous concentrons plus spécifiquement sur l'importance des réseaux sociaux comme de possibles médiateurs et du montage comme d'un outil pour capturer les récits et identités virtuels mises en scène sur la page Facebook des fêtes de Saint Antoine. Nous avons considéré internet comme sources d'archives et un terrain de performance propice aux inscriptions de

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souvenirs et de mémoires. Nous démontrons que le montage est la technique la plus adaptée pour rendre compte de l'intimité et de l'ironie exprimées par les protagonistes pour exprimer leur "italianité".

Tomando como punto de partida a la comunidad italiana americana en Boston y su proceso de recuerdo colectivo alrededor de la Fiesta de San Antonio, abordamos los límites y potencialidades del montaje. Argumentamos que la multi-vocalidad y la multi-temporalidad de las redes sociales pueden ser incorporadas en la linealidad de una película narrativa. Discutimos cómo la edición de archivos encontrados para la película La Navidad de agosto (2013, http:// christmasinaugust.altervista.org/) fue una manera, para los italianos de Boston, de explorar las recomposiciones de la identidad diaspórica y de la intimidad cultural. Nos centramos específicamente en la importancia de las redes sociales como mediadores y del montaje como una herramienta para capturar las narrativas e identidades virtuales representadas en la página del grupo de Facebook de la Fiesta de San Antonio. Consideramos Internet a la vez como fuente de archivo y como campo de actuación para los actos de conmemoración y recuedo, y argumentamos que el montaje es la técnica de edición más adecuada para reproducir la intimidad y la ironía expresadas por los protagonistas en su representación de la “italianidad”.

INDEX

Keywords: religion, diaspora, Facebook, soundscape, film editing, montage Palabras claves: religión, diáspora, Facebook, paisaje sonoro, edición fílmica, montaje Mots-clés: religion, diaspora, Facebook, espace sonore, montage filmique, montage

AUTHORS

FEDERICO DE MUSSO McGill University Federico De Musso is an anthropologist and filmmaker. As a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University (Montréal, Québec) his current research focuses on the politics, production and aesthetics of food in alternative economies. [email protected]

CRISTINA GRASSENI Leiden University Cristina Grasseni is Professor of Anthropology at Leiden University (the Netherlands). Following her seminal work on Skilled Visions (Berghahn 2007), her research interests include visual and sensory ethnography and the processes of mediation of ethnographic knowledge. [email protected] Together, De Musso and Grasseni have co-authored the film Christmas in August (http:// christmasinaugust.altervista.org/, 2013).

Anthrovision, 4.2 | 2016