Academic literature on the topic 'Ethnographic Surrealism'

The review Tropiques, founded in Martinique by Aimé Césaire and colleagues in 1941, was heavily influenced by French surrealism, both for its emphasis on political liberation and its investment in primitivism and the revalorization of non-European cultures. But Tropiques's attitude to primitivism was far more ambivalent and contradictory than is usually assumed. While the editors and contributors sometimes do indeed claim to have, as Martinican intellectuals, a close identificatory connection to primitivist sensibility (and are encouraged in this by French surrealists), elsewhere their attitude to such supposed examples of primitivism as African-American poetry and Caribbean folklore is extremely distanced and rather patronizing. Moreover, their claims to an ‘authentic’ relation to primitive culture, especially where this is defined as African, are complicated by the fact that they have to rely on European ethnographic sources in order to make these claims; and the writing in Tropiques shows them grappling with this contradiction.

AbstractThe “exquisite corpse” in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller’s domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book’s construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA’s earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism—an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book’s construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book’s intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA’s earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum’s curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists.

This article examines the marvellous realism of two Haitian writers, past and present. Building on earlier schools of literary and socio-ethnographic thought, including Haitian indigenism, French surrealism and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s ‘marvellous real’, Jacques Stephen Alexis theorized marvellous realism at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956. Some 60 years later, James Noël published Belle merveille, a novel that depicts a refugee who survives the earthquake of 2010 and embarks on a journey to understand his place among international aid groups that proliferate in the aftermath. The article suggests that Noël’s novel is both a tribute to and a creative rethinking of Alexis’s ideological commitment to the intersection of literary and social realism. It argues that by filtering events through the imaginary of the refugee, Noël interrogates the very categories of the marvellous and the real undergirding Alexis’s aesthetic and political project. After providing theoretical and historical context for Noël’s work, the article carries out close readings of Belle merveille to illuminate the ways in which its redeployment of marvellous realism delivers a critique of humanitarian aid.

L’ethnographie, dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, a influencé l’écriture des poètes surréalistes, ou proches du mouvement de Breton, et ceux de la Beat Generation. Comme les ethnographes, Michaux, Césaire et Ginsberg ont rejeté la tentation de l’exotisme, et ont tenté, chacun à leur façon, de décrire des phénomènes culturels, de chercher “l’âme” d’un peuple, et de “traduire le monde” par la poésie. Nourris de lectures ethnographiques, ils ont voyagé, utilisé des documents dans leurs journaux et leurs poèmes, et ils ont exploré des cultures différentes à partir des marges sociales. Inspirés par l’ethnographie, ils l’ont aussi parodiée, en montrant ses limites, ses ambitions et ses ambiguïtés, en proposant aussi des ethnographies imaginaires, satiriques, pour inventer d’autres mœurs, d’autres logiques, d’autres possibilités de vivre ensemble. En interrogeant les méthodes et les enjeux éthiques et politiques de l’ethnographie dans l’écriture des poètes, nous posons aussi la question de l’existence d’un genre littéraire : peut-on parler de “poésie ethnographique” ?
That thesis examines the influence of anthropology on the poetics of Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire and Allen Ginsberg. In studying their writing methods, I question their poetic insights and the limits of their observations to “translate a world” so far and different from “ours.” Surrealist and Beat poets shared common ethical and political views with many ethnographers, placing value on cultures (and cultural margins) often denigrated by industrialized western countries. Like ethnographers, poets work with metaphors and documents to interpret their experience and understanding of the world. Their interest in (and parodies of) ethnography not only propose a healthy way to criticize ethnographers’ ambitions, but also can help us understand each other’s cultures: poetic license and relative brevity of form sometimes reveal accurately or more vividly a cultural pattern that researchers struggle to explain. In the midst of an interconnected world where cultural misunderstandings escalate frequently and sometimes violently, poetry can help us gain or cultivate an awareness of social and cultural prejudice, and at the same time reveal the beauty in things once thought to be irrelevant, ignoble, or even despicable

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O presente trabalho trata da presença de homens vestidos de mulher na cena pública soteropolitana: o transvestismo como oportunidade para desconstruir polaridades de Gênero. Trata-se de uma abordagem etnográfica, misturando reflexões sobre etnografia e transformismo, para pulverizar e re-significar as apresentações cênicas ditas marginais no âmbito das revisões de perspectivas e de assuntos nas artes cênicas no Brasil. Sendo uma autoetnografia transformista, onde a escritura encontra a performance, este estudo comporta trejeitos da escrita performativa, para tentar atender o “ser” da performance, assim como a sua ontologia, ou seja, a representação sem reprodução. Considera ainda as encenações do desaparecer e, ao escrever sobre o indocumentável evento da performance, tem consciência de que altera o próprio evento. Assim, também compreende: os Rastros do Desaparecimento, a Presença do Corpo em Performance, o Cross-dressing ou Transvestismo ou Transformismo, a Política/Poética Camp, Alteridade, ou as representações transnacionais do feminino coreográfico, uma grafia acerca dos Global Queerscapes, a drag queen na atualidade soteropolitana, em uma Epistemologia Drag, assim como, Nacionalidade, Transformismo e Homocultura nos cortejos e movimentos políticos públicos, em Salvador, e sua aproximação com a figura icônica da Carmem Miranda, que tem sido apropriada por homossexuais transvestidos, em todas as latitudes, como o epítome camp do excesso e da frescura internacionais.
What a Drag!: Ethnography, Performance and Female Impersonation by Fernando Antonio de Paula Passos examines the performative presence of cross-dressed men in Salvador’s public scenes: cross-dressing as the opportunity for the deconstruction of gender polarities. It consists of an approach that blends self-reflexive ethnography with issues of female impersonation and cross-dressing in order to study the multiplicity of their performances, their re-signification, their relatively recent arrival in the context of revisionist perspectives and subject matters in the academic field of the performing arts in Brazil. Incorporating concepts of auto-ethnography and theoretical transvestism, it brings together writing and performance in what is now known as performative writing, as it struggles to uncover what the “being” of performance is all about. In dealing with the ontology of performance as representation without reproduction, it is particularly focused on issues of disappearance. It is also aware that writing about the undocumentable event of the performance alters that same event. It also deals with: traces of disappearance, the presence of the body in performance, cross-dressing, camp, alterity, feminine choreography, Global Queerscapes, drag epistemology, nation, surrealism, pastoral, allegory, political resistance and Carmen Miranda, as the epitome of inter/national camp.

v. 1 Cloud village, a novel: Major work -- v. 2 Ethnographic surrealism and the New World baroque: Exegesis
This thesis examines the moments in which the differences between cultures create new systems of meaning, the moments in which people reinvent themselves and their values, and in which a new language or expression is created. James Clifford calls these moments “Ethnographic Surrealism”, particularly when ethnography provides a critical distance from one’s own culture in order to subvert its assumptions. The creative part of this thesis may be seen as a work of ethnographic surrealism, because it places its main characters, a North American family, on a commune in an isolated mountain in Colombia where their cultural assumptions are denaturalised. Their endeavour is what Mary Louise Pratt called an “anti-conquest”. Instead of wishing to convert others, they wish to be converted by the local tribe. The family is unaware that they survey others with “imperial eyes”. This exegesis focuses specifically on the New World Baroque, an exuberant and inclusive style appropriate to a mestizo culture. It first discusses the Latin American neo-baroque, later expanding the category to certain North American works. Then it looks at the genre of magical realism as a subcategory of the neo-baroque. It uses Clifford’s conception of Ethnographic Surrealism’s juncture between cultures and the notion of a magical realist clash of paradigms to examine fiction about the Other, in particular The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier (the story of an anti-conquest) and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez. It examines moments of ethnographically surrealist collage in which images of the culturally familiar and the strange are juxtaposed. Then it discusses North American works which contain an inclusive baroque spirit: the work of Henry Miller and the invented worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. Ethnographic surrealism shares with the neo-baroque a sense of inclusiveness, proliferation, expansiveness and syncretism.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2014.

Scholarship on Dada and Surrealism has established that psychology was a major intellectual source for artists in both groups. However, a burgeoning amount of recent work in both the history of art and of science indicates that types of psychology other than psychoanalysis permeated the historical context of the avant-garde. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, physiological psychology, for example, was the dominant science of the body and mind, which grounded psychic phenomena in structures of conduction in the nervous system. Modern artists saw within this discourse a fascinating and new theory of experience. In my selective history of the avant-garde’s reception and response to physiological psychology, I will argue that artists worked within and partially according to the basic tenets of this discourse, but that they reshaped its superstructural projections away from formations and taxonomies of normalcy in consciousness and action.
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In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.

The taxonomic difficulties generated by the essay film are rooted in its in-between positioning vis-à-vis genres, which facilitates the subversion of their conventions and the uncovering of their ideological underpinnings. The chapter works through these ideas by engaging with a particular type of essayistic ethnofiction, as represented by Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1933), Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971), and Ben Rivers’s Slow Action (2011). Located somewhere between documentary and fiction, surrealism and ethnography, science fiction and anthropology, these texts create generic interstices from within which the project of ethnography is satirized and deconstructed—and discourses of otherness, nature, culture, power, imperialism, ecology, and sustainability are both foregrounded and called into question.

With this book, Rachel Afi Quinn makes the case for a transnational feminist cultural studies lens of analysis and an ethnographic approach to the study of race, gender, and visual culture in the Dominican Republic. This book provides a new window into contemporary life in Santo Domingo through which surrealist cultural productions reflect the social climate. Quinn theorizes the ways that the racial meaning of Dominican women’s mixed-race bodies “see/saw” in the viewing moment, as they are read visually in relation to others and informed by particular narratives of identity. Drawing on some forty interviews conducted by the author, this text centers these voices as it reveals the ways that the mixed-race bodies of Dominican women and girls signify within a racial schema tied to an economy in which they are commodified. Queer identities and fluid sexualities intersect with racial ambiguity and Dominican whiteness, Quinn argues, while incorporating public art, digital images, and Dominican film and music videos that are circulated transnationally, including performances by Rita Indiana Hernández and Michelle Rodriguez. Numerous other works by Dominican women artists and activists including print and online publications, documented live performances, photographic images, and social media discourse compose this text. Transnational political organizing is also considered here as part of a legacy of Dominican feminist activism against patriarchal oppression

Ein Ghetto im Osten: Wilna (A ghetto in the East – Vilna) is a 1931 photobook by the Bauhaus-trained photographer Moyshe Vorobeichic (better known for his book Paris, under the name Moï Ver). His Vilna book is a striking example of Jewish primitivism, which offers an alternative to the dominant form of Jewish visual art in the period, dismissed as sentimental “Chagallism” by Henryk Berlewi. Deploying a form of what James Clifford has called “ethnographic surrealism,” Vorobeichic portrayed subjects usually depicted sentimentally with the techniques (including montage and distorted perspective) of avant-garde photography. Vorobeichic’s skepticism toward notions of primitive authenticity diverged strikingly from the mainstream of Jewish art in the period. Vorobeichic’s photobook critiques the trope of the primitive Jew and the idea of authenticity while valorizing the humanity of his subjects.

This chapter examines the surrealists’ deployment of the verbal or photographic document as a model that is simultaneously poetic and anti-literary. The surrealists eventually depart from their initial understanding of automatic writing as a “snapshot” that captures uncensored thought. Instead, their writings of the late 1920s and 1930s increasingly frame a range of poetic and visual documents within a multi-layered ethnographic discourse, whether in prose texts that attend to urban experience (Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, Breton’s Nadja), or, on the margins of the official surrealist group, in the work of Bataille’s Documents magazine. Finally, Michel Leiris’s reflections on ethnographic display simultaneously reveal the importance of contextualizing evidence and highlight the problematic collection practices that transform indigenous artifacts into cultural “documents.”

Resumen: El reciente interés académico en el Movimiento surrealista constituye una revisión de largo alcance, habiéndose ampliado el campo de análisis con evidente ambición multidisciplinar. Su estratégica relación con otras disciplinas, la impostación de sus derivas urbanas como prácticas sociales y etnográficas, la profundización en las técnicas de manipulación de la fotografía y la escritura, la naturalización de la fragmentación asociada al montaje y, finalmente, la revisión de la imprecisa naturaleza del objeto surrealista en sus distintas versiones (objet trouvé, objet à réaction poétique, objet-type, ready-made, etc.) y su función seminal en lo contemporáneo, facilitan un escenario de investigación complejo y abierto. Un escenario en el que la obra de Le Corbusier se dibuja en una nueva perspectiva. Le Corbusier adoptó técnicas afines al surrealismo, como la fotografía, el montaje y el caligrama, con el objeto de ampliar el significado de los paradigmas asociados a la racionalidad productiva y tecnológica, en particular los que construyen el espacio doméstico. El uso tales medios discursivos y de divulgación asociados con el surrealismo facilitó la contaminación de su discurso con las estrategias desestabilizadoras y conflictivas características del Movimiento. Abstract: The recent academic interest in the surrealist movement is a far-reaching review, having widened the scope of analysis with evident multidisciplinary ambition. Its strategic relationship with other disciplines, the imposture of their urban drifts as social and ethnographic practices, the deepening on the manipulation techniques of photography and writing, the naturalization of fragmentation associated with montage and, finally, the review of the imprecise nature of the Surrealist object in its different versions (objet trouvé, objet à réaction poétique, objet-type, ready-made, etc.) and its seminal role in the contemporary facilitate an open and complex research scenario. A scenario within which the work of Le Corbusier is perceived in a new perspective. Le Corbusier adopted techniques related to surrealism, such as photography, montage, automatism and the calligram, in order to expand as well as undermine the meaning of canonical paradigms associated to productive and technological rationality, in particular those related to the domestic milieu. The use of such display of discursive instruments facilitated the contamination of his editorial and architectural work with the destabilizing and conflicting strategies that characterize the Movement. Palabras Clave: Surrealismo, metáforas obsesivas, montaje, automatismo, analogía, arbitrariedad. Keywords: Surrealism, obsessive metaphors, montage, automatism, analogy, arbitrariness. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.591