Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book Forum:

Anand Pandians Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

Eduardo Kohn
McGill University

Stephen Chrisomalis
Wayne State University

Stephanie Spray
Harvard University

Brian Larkin
Barnard College

Stefan Helmreich
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Richard Baxstrom
University of Edinburgh
Edited by

Todd Meyers
Wayne State University
Anand Pandians Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation is a fascinating and truly inspired
inquiry into questions of experience and the media through which experience is rendered (word,
image, and sound) in and about Tamil cinema and beyond. Pandian walks a path where visions
are realized between seen-ness and feltness, between openness and the limits of the frame. Much
in the way Gilles Deleuze appraised Merleau-Pontys phenomenology as a way to think through
the problem of sensation in the paintings of Francis Baconwhose figures (and their creator)
struggled to make sensation within the dimensions of the canvasPandian offers a similar
appraisal of the action and trace of creation, not of the body and its excesses, but of the cinematic
scene and its making. At its core, Reel World is a fine-grained ethnography of cinema and
filmmakingof creating images, taming images, blurring them and infusing them with other
thingsthat extends the horizon of ethnographic telling. Creation is not so much techniquenot
simply the shape of content, of character and storyline, of special effectsbut a contest between
minor voices, ambitions, the parallel technologies of writing and designing sound+image, dreams,
stagings, recordings, and lost traces, and for Pandian, looping the reel of this real back through a
set of his own anthropological concerns.

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

The following is an exceptional set of commentaries. We hope you enjoy.

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

A Horizon of Possibility
Eduardo Kohn
McGill University

If modernitys defining dream is the mastery of natures contingency (7), then Reel World,
Anand Pandians exploration into what he calls An Anthropology of Creation, offers an
alternative way of living in a world that can never fully be mastered. In this book, which follows
the various paths through which Tamil films are made, another kind of dream emergesone that
allows us to re-envision the anthropological (by which I mean the human) project as one concerned
with learning to open oneself to the wild world beyond what we think we can control.
Anands anthropology of creation aims to keep the horizon of possibility alive even in the face
of accumulating knowledge (249) and thus to revitalize anthropology by going back in a new way
to what it already is: fashion[ing] anew worlds of life and thought, rather than simply reproducing
some reality that already exists (14). It does so by attending to those forces and processes that
make human beings other than what they are (270). Anand proposes doing so by learning to
think like cinema thinks (16) because cinema thinks in some of the ways the world thinks. How
can ethnographic writing learn to think like cinema? What, he asks, if this writing, this medium
of mine, could follow some of the twists and whorls through which things like cinema surface in
their newness (156)?
This, for Anand, is a way to go back into the world (19), beyond the conceits of human agency
(17). And herein lie the stakes of his project. Anands book emerges in the shadow of the
Anthropocene, the proposed name for our geological era, which, you might say, is defined by the
ways in which our attempts at mastering natures contingency have come to wreak havoc on
planetary life. Opening ourselves to Tamil film, although seemingly far removed from the
environmental politics that have informed so many of Anands scholarly interests, is a good place
to begin to think about what Bruno Latour calls ecologizing as an alternative to modernizing
(Latour 2013). That is, it is a good place to find new ways to live creatively with those creative
beings and forces that lie beyond us.

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Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

What does it take to tap into creation? The directors and cameramen we meet are contradictory
characters. On the one hand they are cocky. They seem to own the world as they drive through the
streets and alleys of Chennai in search of the perfect shot location. But they are also able to submit
fully to this world beyond themselves. That is their great talent. Submission, then, requires being
selfless. However, it also requires a kind of selfishness. One has to be able to sever many of ones
other worldly ties to be able to open oneself in this way (the anthropologist, too, we sense, struggles
with this as he is pulled between his reel world and that of his children who were bornand
borne alongwith this project). And yet, as Anand reminds us, a creative life can never fully be a
solitary one: one never walks alone along the path of creativity (Lvi-Strauss, quoted on page
76). This extends both back and forth in time. One works in a tradition, even when one is the
origin of a new tradition: to be original means necessarily to be the origin of a lineage (Latour,
quoted on page 78).
Nonetheless, the artist (be she a scientist, anthropologist, or filmmaker) requires a certain freedom
to be that creative catalyst that can make what is there despite her presence, manifest because of
her presence. And this, Anand reminds us, is what anthropology might or could be (280).
Working with the momentum of emergence, anthropology can find ways of reflecting on
experience such that the worlds unknown forms, heretofore invisible, can come to the fore (46).
How to become a vessel for emergence? It is not enough to be open to the world, for this openness,
this ability to work with its forms and forces, to tap (or harness them, I dare say) takes skill: a
little bit of control as well as a lot of acceptance (110). It also requires being out of time. That
is, although the director must be in the moment, he must also see what might or could be: what
the director sees does not exactly belong to the present moment the rest of us share. The ordinary
span of his perception has been extended by cinema; he looks at a virtual frame yet to be
established by the film (145). This involves a sort of attunement. The filmmaker must learn to
direct his attention inward to how he is listening to the world, thinking with the cadences of his
own body, catching hold of such rhythms in order to grasp the motion of an entire world (207).
Anand is careful to remind us that cinema is not just the product of a relationship between the
filmmaker and the world. There is always an Other involved in this creative processthe
spectator. Cinema is found, according to Kurosawa, in the space between two shots (quoted on
page 32). Filmmakers need to make space for the viewers creative imagination. This has its
dangers. The viewer cannot be so easily controlled. Fans can go wild (with violent consequences).
But, more prosaically, they can grow bored. Given that these film projects are nakedly
commercial (97), this is a problem.
What do these Tamil filmsalmost always flops, not to mention also uncomfortably
misogynisticteach us? To my mind they teach us something about gambl[ing] with fate (7).
They teach us to inhabit the world of the unforeseeable in which, despite our attempts to master it,
we all willy-nilly live. They teach us that creating is vital, but also dangerous, and risky, and that
when playing seriously with those dangers and risks we expose ourselves to a sadness we need to
learn to accept. Almost all films, Anand tells us, fail to do nearly as well as their makers had
expected them to do films are fashioned with a unison of feeling in mind, but they splinter, for
the most part, into a bedlam of discordant reactions. Joy is fleeting, evanescent (262). He is, of

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

course, referring to the reel world of Tamil cinema, but he is also writing about the sadness that
arises when so many of the dreams in our other real worlds are destroyed. One of the great
strengths of this book is to be psychically attuned to how this darker side is also a necessary part
of an anthropology of creation.

References
Latour, B. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Eduardo O. Kohn is the author of How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the
Human (University of California Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Book
Prize. He teaches anthropology at McGill University.

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/a-horizon-of-possibility

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

Questions of Scope: The Reel and the Rel

Stephen Chrisomalis
Wayne State University

The new time sense of typographic man is cinematic and sequential and pictorial.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962: 241)
These virtual depths of time give each moment its openness, its potential to sustain creative
transformation.
Anand Pandian, Reel World (2015: 139)
Pandians richly detailed, exquisite set of ethnographic vignettes of Tamil filmmakers, linked
together by a chain of experiential concepts such as time, space, hope, and dream, set out a number
of claims about the nature of experience and creation. In approaching these claims, we, as his
audience, must be attentive to questions of scopethe field of our vision as we attempt to draw
out which people, on what basis, and with what degree of certainty we are to take them. These are
epistemological issues surrounding a book that never explicitly discusses epistemology, inevitably
running the risk that we will splice together perspectives that were never meant to be brought
together by the author. Yet, because it is also a book about the nature of anthropological experience
and writing, Reel World may unsettle its audiences who come from outside what he calls the
tradition of quasi-literary realist prose called ethnography (14). But here I suspect that realist
has a very different sense than I intend it. Among social scientists, then, how should the realist
understand Reel World?
At times in reading the text, we are confronted by claims of almost unimaginable vastness,
a telescopic view of the cinematic cosmos that takes for granted a universal scope of human
experience, as when drawing from Henri Bergsons thoughts on time in the quotation above (1389). Pandian asks us to take these arguments ex hypothesi, from which we might then draw

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

deductive inferences from the Tamil case. These European and essentially pre-cinematic axioms
deserve our critical attention, when their scope is drawn so broadly. Gells (1992) more broadly
anthropological perspective outlining non-human, social, and personal time, equally experiential
and hardly less universal, would have the advantage of comparative breadth. On what basis ought
we to prefer Bergsons axioms over any other? In places the lens is vast, very far indeed from
Pandians stated intention to write from someplace closer to things (279).
Or, rather, are we meant to take Reel World chiefly as a particularistic and inductive account,
a microscopic vision of a narrowly defined (yet fluid) set of agents in a complex and rapidly
transforming socio-technical setting, from which patterns and explanations emerge? Here, too,
questions emerge. In the deeply hierarchical, deeply gendered context of Tamil cinematic creation,
where belligerent masculinity is a trope of nakedly commercial films (97), it is hardly a
surprise that among the audience for these films, men outnumber women by a greater than two-toone ratio (43). Faced with these stark realities, we must ask whether the local world of creation
Pandian describes can possibly support the generalizing, almost nomothetic claims brought forth
about the agency of concepts in their creators work. Alternately, from these patterns we might
draw a very different conclusion, one where exclusion and hierarchy construct an industry of
experience far-removed from its potential audience, where the filmmakers sensation is wrongly
taken as proxies for the likely reactions of their eventual audiences (7). Does The Reel World do
the same to some of its potential audiences?
Yet a third possibility is that we are meant to take the scope of the claims as something in between
these extremes, as a set of assertions about the particular ways in which living in a cinematized
world of mediated experience shapes the human creative process. This would be McLuhans view,
in the quotation above, or in anthropology, Edmund Carpenters (1974). Without seeking to make
a specious technological deterministic argument, this mediated perspective of intermediate scope
links reality, technology, and individual perception. While it is not the tradition from which
Pandian draws his insights, the text invites questions along these lines. To what degree, and in
what ways, does the technology of film transform perception and cognition, not only in the Tamilspeaking world, but among the contemporary filmmaking community of practice? In what ways
do changing media and the attitudes about film interplay? And how might we show this to be the
case in a way that convinces the reader that this is not a mirage? One sees the potential for an
argument that filmmaking constitutes an activity system integrating individuals, activities, and
technology. How might Edwin Hutchins (1995) regard the complex ways in which the filmmakers
of Reel World think through things, live, and perceive time and space through situated, extended,
and distributed cognition, parallel to the action of navigation teams? How might we draw
inferences from this abundantly chaotic ethnographic material? To those of us who find realist
perspectives grounding, Reel World is unsettlingbut the choice to ignore it seems deeply
unsatisfactory.
All of these are ultimately epistemologically-grounded issues concerning how we plausibly,
convincingly, verifiably, or refutably use evidence to draw conclusions. Too often, realist and nonrealist traditions in anthropology are not in conversation with one another about how we do what

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

we do, and why. Pandian is rightly aware (6-7) of the importance of Reel World as one of the first
anthropological engagements with filmmaking since Powdermaker (1950). This importance makes
it all the more urgent that we take seriously the question of whether we are evaluating philosophical
premises using ethnographic evidence, using evidence to draw generalizations, or something else
entirely. If we as an audience are dissatisfied at the end of the creation, let it not be because either
party was unaware or uncaring about the underpinnings of our perceptual and cognitive
experience.

References
Carpenter, E. 1974. Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! New York: Bantam Books.
Gell, A. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images.
Oxford: Berg.
Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLuhan, M. 1963. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Powdermaker, H. 1950. Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the MovieMakers. Boston: Little, Brown.

Stephen Chrisomalis is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State

University. He is the author of Numerical Notation: A Comparative History (Cambridge, 2010)
and the co-editor of Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger (Toronto, 2013). He blogs on
anthropology and linguistics at Glossographia.

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/questions-of-scope-the-reel-andthe-reel

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

Anand Pandians Anthropology of Creation

Stephanie Spray
Harvard University

Anything can happen at any time, says Anand Pandian, echoing one of the Tamil film directors
depicted in his book Reel World: An Ethnography of Creation. This sense of radical potential and
immediacy infuses and enlivens Pandians writing, which passionately conveys the wonder, hope,
pleasure, and dreams given form in the world of Tamil cinema. Although critical of its male-centric
gaze and violent tendencies, Pandian writes with affection for the subject as he argues that a
sustained engagement with cinema, whether it originates from Hollywood or Kollywood, lends us
insights into creative processes and perceptions. The cinematic reel world is a metonym for the
creative potential that surrounds us as embodied and sentient beings in any given moment, if we
would cultivate the perception of a maker. To the eye of an active perceiver, the moment is
pregnant with possibility, where light, color, sound, love, pleasure, and the imagination collide to
bring us to our senses.
Immersed in this metacinema, Pandian is not a detached observer, but an active creator for whom
a conversation with his young son about Carlos Cruz-Diezs installation Chromosaturation yields
insights equal to those with colorists in Chennai, for his chapter Color. Frequently exposing the
seams of his own process to show how the time of fieldwork, memory, and writing become
compressed on a single page, Pandian inspires us to consider what written ethnography can do;
how style, form, and structure are not ancillary to content. For example, he asks, What would it
mean to write musically, to write with rhythm, to be sure, but also with pitch, melody? This very
chapter, Sound, contains sections with a rolling heteroglossia of descriptive passages and quoted
song lyrics that dip and bend, up, down, and across the page, to an implied melody. This is one of
many instances where Pandians writing simulates the formal properties of cinema, conjuring the
sounds and sights of films many of us may never see, but feel as though we have seen through his
writing, while intimating that much of our apprehension of the world is already irrevocably
cinematic.

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Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

10

That Pandian is not himself a filmmaker becomes somewhat contentious amongst his filmmakersubjects. Several ask when he will finally make his own film, while one director goes so far as to
tell him that he cannot fully understand what he and other filmmakers do until he joins them in
their craft. Pandian proclaims to these would-be cinvangelicals that his medium is the word, and
it is clear from the introduction that he can imagine skeptics on the flipside of the ethnography,
amongst scholars, when he asks, Why tether an enterprise as serious as critical reflection to things
as fickle as images, feelings, and sensory impressions? He quotes Lucien Taylors proclamation
in the nineties that iconophobia drives anthropologys dismissal of the moving image as a
legitimate means for the production of knowledge. Given the book as a whole, it is clear that
Pandians question about the irreconcilability of critical thought with images, feelings, and sensory
impressions is rhetorical, and, yet, that the question arises speaks to a continued, deep-seated
discomfort among many about the place of cinema and new media in academia, especially when
it is not overtly educational or informational. That said, Pandians writing beautifully speaks to the
importance of cinema as an ethnographic subject. As to his participation, Pandian willingly
contributes where he can, assisting with the construction of a makeshift bridge over a ravine for
the set of the Telegu film Vikramarkudu and somewhat reluctantly lending his voice to the part of
Barak Obama for the film Tamil Padam. His lines are, Mr. Shiva, you gotta do this job. Only you
can kill Pan Parag Ravi and Swarnakka. Followed by a plea in Tamil, Americave ungalai than
nambiku: All of America is counting on you. Although Pandian feels alienated when he first hears
these lines with a live audience in Chennai, his mother is so moved during a screening of the film
in Los Angeles that she shouts, Thats my son!
One of many remarkable qualities of Reel World is the vulnerability Pandian reveals as an
ethnographer and writer. He isnt sure if the fragments he describes will come together as a
coherent book. Likewise, his fieldwork is broken up and strung out in fitful spurts, so he misses
out on a number of events. In the end, all of this is to the benefit of the text, because it gives us
glimpses into the laborious process of making and re-making, akin to what it is to edit a film,
where the structure may not always be apparent until the material has been worked and re-worked.
In this way, Pandians self-described methodology for Reel World is akin to wildlife
photography, where rich ethnographic vignettes stand in for a world teeming with life. In Reel
World, images, feelings, and sensory impressions are allowed to run freewild things that they
areon their own islands, as conceptually diverse as space, rhythm, speed, and fate. Pandians
writing evokes the formal properties of cinema, employing cuts to splice through time, intercutting
ethnographic scenes with theory and reflections, to convey the expansive world of Tamil cinema,
one that extends beyond the plots or images of particular films, and reaches outward to an entire
world of experience and affects as they move us through motion pictures. Through this lens,
Pandian asks us to consider what it is to see the world from the inside of things, to adopt an
inquisitive, child-like gaze and lend an open ear to the world, toward an anthropology of creation.

Stephanie Spray is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and phonographer working in the Sensory

Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. Her films have screened around the world in film

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Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

11

festivals and art exhibition contexts, including MoMA, the Whitney, the New York Film Festival,
Viennale, and the Locarno International Film Festival.

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/anand-pandians-anthropology-ofcreation

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Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

12

Colors
Brian Larkin
Barnard College

Anand Pandian opens his chapter on color by describing his pupils dilating during an eye
examination and the world dissolving into indistinct dabs and streams of color. For Pandian, the
eye exam distills a basic truth about cinemathat it operates at a pre-conscious level stimulating
new forms of sensate experience. Cinema, for him, is not a set of texts, an economic institution, or
part of the human-oriented, discursive world but operates on a more primary level. What is this
world beyond us and the sociocultural worlds we construct? he asks, citing Eduardo Kohn (17).
Pandians larger focus is not really on cinema at all. Cinema is of interest because it is a sensationinducing machine that gives rise to new experiences that germinate in unplanned ways.
Reel World is indebted both conceptually and formally to the rich literature on affect and
posthumanism. Pandian tacks between intense, close description of events unfolding and
discussions of philosophical thinkersMerleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Simondon, Freud, Chakrabarty,
Taussig, Heidegger, etc.that loosely frame those events. He seeks not just to describe creation
but to enact it through his own literary form. In filmic terms, it means he switches between extreme
close-up and wide establishing shots, eschewing all the film grammar that lies in between. There
is little to no discussion of the literature on South Asia, on Indian film, or on the other markers of
the middle ground that might provide context and texture to the world he is describing. This is the
literature that (lets face it) dominates most of the texts that we read and write in anthropology,
and it means that Reel World is a sustained attempt to write differentlyone that I found
compelling. But it raises questions about what it means to do without the middle ground and what
this might mean for an anthropology of creation. There is a productive tension in the text that
pushes us (me, at least) to think about how it is we might take conceptual insights from
posthumanism and combine them with other approaches less antagonistic to the historical.
The tension emerges because, as much as Pandian wishes to focus on the affectual operation of
cinema occurring before the onset of consciousness, he also realizes that cinema is deeply social,

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13

enmeshed in human-centered relations and, to a great degree, any concept of creation has to take
this into account. Pandian has always had a sophisticated take on the slippage between cinema and
real life, how ordinary people standing in fields, sitting in offices, and waiting for buses play in
their minds and bodies with the worlds that cinema gives to them, slipping between one and other.
Cinema bends toward ordinary life, he writes elegantly, while ordinary life hankers after
cinema to the point where these domains become hard to distinguish (28). This is a world fully
enmeshed within, not beyond, the human, and Pandian wanders a little between his desire to focus
on the pre-conscious, affectual side of cinema and his understanding of its deeply emotive place
in Indian worlds.
The medium Pandian writes about is a popular cinema, what we once described as mass culture,
intimately tied to the ideologies, structures, and aesthetics of modern capitalism, and once analyzed
through the lens of determination. Pandian, though, wants to show how Tamil cinema gives rise
to new forms of emergence, openness, and possibility. He cites Andr Bazin on Picasso to
emphasize this point: Each of Picassos strokes is a creation that leads to further creation not as a
cause leads to an effect but as one living thing engenders another (274). Pandian is eloquent and
insightful on film as process and the coming to be of the experiences it creates. But this is, of
course, about as far from a discussion of mass culture as you can get. The mass has long been
recognized as being dominated by repetition, repressing individual creativity, being too emotive,
and lacking reason. In non-Western worlds these qualities of massness are mapped onto the ritual
and traditional, and leaving one vulnerable to the taunt of failing to be properly modern. To make
his argument about emergence and possibility, then, Pandian has to place an entire way of thinking
about the mass to one side, excising it from an anthropology of creation. Creation, here, takes place
before and beyond the human rather than in full dialogic relation to it. So much seems to turn,
both ethically and politically, Pandian tells us, on learning to see beyond the conceits of human
agency and its sometimes murderous consequences (17). Can we fold the mass back into an idea
of creation and emergence? If politics is defined as taking place only when we can move beyond
human-centered meaning, then a politics based on examining the operation of a form of capital or
how that form becomes transduced into excessive, fantastical creationsand how they become
part of creationbecomes harder to understand.
Some of these issues can be seen in the chapter on color, whichalong with chapters on light,
sound, rhythm, etc.reveal for Pandian the sensory unexpectedness that film provokes. He tracks
the production of the film Quarter Cutting, and focuses in particular on the surreal hues and
saturated colors that the filmmakers fabricate. He is less interested in what these colors mean or
why filmmakers adopt specific aesthetic strategies but focuses on the affective intensity of being
subject to color at a level prior to the sensible (when the object-like quality of objects dissolves
into dabs and streams of color). The chapter thus focuses most on how it is that directors,
colorists, set directors, and cameramen produce a tinted, saturated world, thereby evoking that
sense of color in its readers.
On another level, acting as counterpoint to his main argument, Pandian realizes these colors have
histories. Christopher Pinney (2004) has argued that British colonialists saw control of

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14

representational techniques and color as a way of dismantling a Hindu worldview and making
religious subjects secular and modern. The excessive Indian attachment to color, in this light,
prevented the adoption of the realist sensibility of modernity. Moreover, as Jordanna Bailkin
(2014), Natasha Eaton (2012), Amiya Rao (1992), and Michael Taussig (2009) have shown, the
palette of colors available to India and Western art was itself structured by imperial histories of
labor and technology. Indigo or Indian yellow were specific pigments made available through
empire and the very notion of color as we know it now is inseparable from the technical histories
of pigment production themselves woven into colonial rule.
Funnily enough, Pandian gives us a modern update on this technical history, focusing on the
introduction of a film stock, Fujifilm Eterna Vivid 500, created for its ability to produce intense
colors. Pandian also describes the painstaking editing of scenes wherein the film is scanned and
edited, scene by scene, to increase the saturation of colors in a modern updating of handtinting.
Pandian presents the engagement with color but not what its consequences might be or the
admixture of pleasure and shame that might attend to it.
We can gain a sense of what the stakes are in Kajri Jains (2007) wonderful study of the
contemporary Indian calendar art (chromolithograph) industry, which provided many of the
templates of iconography and color upon which Tamil cinema is based. Jain shows that for artists
and printers within the industry, color is deeply metareflexive in that all realize its importance,
particularly in south India, but many feel deep ambivalence about this. The entire industry in the
south is set up to mix mechanical and hand production techniques to create deep saturation but this
effect is used to rank, hierarchize, and divide people. Unlike south Indians, Jain tells us Bengalis
favor softer more refined colors, the north and west of India prefer lighter colors, and it is the
most intense and contrasting color schemes [that] are used in calendars intended for the south.
The artists themselves refer to these cheap, shouting, gaudy colors (2007: 178), used to
attract a distracted gaze, pulling it to the deities image, appealing to emotion and sensation. As is
familiar in discussions of the mass, these artists felt confined by having to depict colors in this
way, seeing oversaturation as inferior. In their own private art, Jain tells us, they used a muted,
more realistic palette identifying softer colors as more artistic (2007: 186).
While he does not directly address this, Pandians filmmakers seem similar to Jains artists, always
hinting at the bonds of massness, suggesting that they are beyond it (even if the rest of the industry
is in its thrall). One enfant terrible director decorates his office with images of auteur directors. He
forces Pandian to consume a reading list of ten books (including Ibsen, Garcia Marquez, and
Hesse) before he will meet with him. He parades his familiarity with Marcel Mauss and Claude
Levi-Strauss. Meanwhile, an art director laments the crap that they are making in the industry.
A special effects wizard decorates his house with reproductions of Picasso and Matisse, while
another effects manager laments, We havent done any innovative work in India. Zero (241).
These comments point to the sense that color in Tamil film is not a neutral space. When one filters
a light to produce a green glow, edits a scene to saturate the colors, or watches that scene unfold
and feels the play of light upon the eye, one engages with a tactile world that has already been

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Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

15

marked and that marking is brought to bear in uneven ways. When Pandian describes Tamil film
as unfolding as though it is happening within one of the vivid chromolithographic prints of
goddesses, it means that this entire history, with its admixtures of racism, class, aesthetics,
excessiveness, inferiority, fantasy, and condescension, is brought along with it. Tejaswini Ganti
(2010) argues that Hindi filmmakers deride their southern Indian counterparts as making garish,
excessive films whose colors are too intense and acting too histrionic. They show tremendous
disdain toward their counterpartsa disdain one suspects is felt hard by those subject to it. Just as
Jains calendar artists are well aware their work is deemed as inferior within the vast and
formidable panopoly of Indian culture (2007:176) it seems that this metareflexive sensibility
haunts the edges of Pandians text.
Color is thus both affectual and historical. It lies beyond a realm of meaning and is thoroughly
immanent to that realm. That Pandian is aware of this haunts the book, and leads to his desire to
write a text that pushes beyond the human and his constant stumbling back into it. The opening
section of the color chapter cites Goethes famous argument that only savages and the uneducated
have a predilection for bright colors. People of refinement (and Bengalis, evidently) are free from
this kind of sickness. Citing such a powerful quote at the beginning of the chapter creates a
frame, a set of emotional reactions suffusing our reading of the colors that we are to read about
after. Pandian raises these historical stakes, but then does not follow through with them. What
Goethe means for those editors, set directors, and directors of photography we do not know. Color
as meaning is raised, but color as affect follows on.
My question is whether this history, which soaks into cinema and weighs down its use of color, its
shot selection, and its tempo and rhythm, influences its sensation-creating abilities. Or, more
properly, why do we have to create an account of cinema that does not allow us to discuss it? One
can imagine at times the technical and artistic personnel may simply craft their film in relation to
the demands of the market without having any metareflexive sensibility brought to bear. But at
other times those self-same actions become marked, either defensively protected against
accusations of inferiority or bitterly criticized for forcing a commercial imperative on artists with
larger ambitions. As Pandian notes, this is particularly fraught in modernizing societies where
artists often labor under the accusation that they are not modern enough, that they have to catch
up with a more proper art that exists somewhere else (74). Knowing this history can help us return
to the phenomenological scenes described by Pandian and rethink how it is that the sensate
experience of film unfolds. When the director Gayathri demands that a scene have a specific color
tone, or when Nirav, the director of photography, instructs the colorist to enrich the saturation of
reds and yellows (129) these commitments to intensity and excess become more complex, striated
with competing meanings and feelings. What might it mean to stand in a film set bathed in green
light, or to watch a film suffused with eerie reds and lurid greens when those colors and their
intensity have come to metareflexively define a particular taste, aesthetic, region, and temporality?
How does it help account for the peculiar admixture of attraction and repulsion that colors invoke?
When color shouts, Kajri Jain asks, what does it say?

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References
Bailkin, J. 2014. Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette. In Martin Jay and
Sumathi Ramaswamy eds., Empires of Vision: A Reader, 91-110. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Eaton, N. 2012. Nomadism of Colour: Painting, Technology and waste in the Chromo-Zones of
Colonial India c.1765-c1860. Journal of Material Culture17(1): 61-81.
Ganti, T. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Jain, K. 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Pinney, C. 2004. Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in
India. London: Reaktion Books.
Rao, A. 1992. The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taussig, M. 2009. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Brian Larkin writes on issues such as the materiality of media and their breakdown and failure,
piracy and intellectual property, infrastructure, religious mediation, and the circulation of cultural
forms. His research focuses on Nigeria and he is completing the manuscript, Secular Machines:
Media and the Materiality of Islamic Revival in Nigeria.

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/colors

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Reel Waves
Stefan Helmreich
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

These are the files open on my computer screen: a PDF of Anand Pandians Reel World, a digital
video of the 2011 Japan tsunami, and a Word document filling up with notes on fieldwork I am
right this minute conducting at a wave lab at Oregon State University. Here at this laboratory,
scientists generate scaled down tsunamis in a 300,000-gallon, swimming pool-sized basin of
water, hoping to understand real-world wave propagation and inundation. I watch as a small video
crew gathers footage for a short web documentary about this research center. They shuttle lights
around this airplane-hangar-sized facility, setting themselves up to film the half-meter waves
speeding across the wave tank. They zoom in on the mechanical paddles that generate waves,
paddles set in motion by a person at a computer in a control room perched above the shore side
of the basin. As this person looks down out of a small window, he reminds me of nothing so much
as a movie projectionist peeking out from his booth. The scientists on the lab floor communicate
with him via walkie-talkies, asking him to run some waves. He clicks a computer mouse to send
an impulse to be transduced into a water wave.
When a member of the visiting film crew is given control of the walkie-talkie, she shifts the jargon:
roll em! I cant help but think, now, of these artificially generated water waves as 3D movies,
movies in a materialwaterthat, like that once-upon-a-time illuminated celluloid, has its own
affordances and resistances. The coincidence between real waves and reel waves makes me look
back down at my computer screen. I scroll through Pandians manuscript for prompts about what
he names as image and sensation, rhythm and tempo, structures of anticipation and displacement
(15), all phenomena that apply as well to waves as they do to film.
I land on Pandians chapter on time. He shares Bergsons skepticism about time understood as a
steady, linear unrolling. He favors instead a time of emergent and transformative potential (141).
Though I would quibble with the implication that potential is an immanent ontological feature
of the world rather than a situated cultural value (see Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013), I

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agree that linear notions of time need to be queriedincluding, possibly, here at the wave
laboratory, where waves are engineered, mostly, to hold some things linear so others might be
revealed. I press pause on the Japanese tsunami video, which I have been using as a point of
comparison with the lab waves. Though the video is frozen, I know that its narrative unfolds with
a brutal linearity, primarily since its outcome is knownthough, skimming Pandians thoughts on
time, it occurs to me that the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima did indeed summon time as a terrible
emergent and transformative potential. Scientific laboratories hope to unfurl time differently
than this, more deterministically, less improvisatorially.
And, yet, I am beginning to suspect that all is not linear reason here in the lab. There is something
unusual, hidden from the untrained eye, about time as it exists in the scale model wave tank.
When wave scientists make a 1:100 scale model of a tsunami, space, I learn, scales down at a
different rate than time. This is because the molecular structure of water and the force of gravity
are not themselves miniaturized in such models. And so, modeling a 10-meter-tall tsunami by
generating a lab wave that is 100 times smaller (10-centimeters tall) does not yield dynamics that
unfold 100 times faster, as one might think. Rather, the temporal unfolding of such a wave will be
described by the ratio
velocity
gravitational acceleration x water depth
which accounts for those aspects of water that are notand, mostly cannot bescaled down. The
ratioproposed by nineteenth-century English hydrodynamicist William Froudesuggests that
if one wants to watch a real-time film of a 1:100 scale model tsunami and have it feel anything
like a real world event, it needs to be slowed down by 10, not 100 times. Hollywood filmmakers
know this well and do such calculations whenever they destroy a scale model city with a wave of
water, whenever they summon what Gregg Mitman (1999) might call reel nature. In the lab, reel
time needs to be slowed down by the inverse of the square root of gravity times depth in order to
give the impression of real timewhich, recursively, is only available through such reel time (see
Weston 2002 and Riles 2004 for more on real time).
So, if making waves and filming them is, perhaps, to quote Pandian, participating in the creative
process and potential of a larger universe beyond the human (8), that beyondness may sometimes
be wrestled back into sensorial access by media techniqueeven as that very wrestling
immediately underscores the phenomenons very otherness to everyday human experience.
Viewers of artificial waves, of time-corrected video of such waves, and of footage of real-world
tsunamis often gather their sensibilities about how to compare these phenomena (as I do now as I
restart the tsunami video) through experiences across screenscinematic, computer, and
documentary. They develop what Cristina Grasseni calls skilled vision, a hybrid viewing that
permits them to see in physical objects those features that might be modulated by social action
(Grassenis examples are from the biological world, having to do with how breeders learn to see
different potentials in the cattle they domesticate). Pandian writes, Vectors of experienceundo

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the very distinction between subjects and objects of human action (272). That is certainly the case
here in the wave lab. The vector of experience into which I am being initiated as I begin to see a
slice of the world through a mathematical formula makes me see these waves differently. I am able
newly to ask what these waves are. Are they autonomous agents, subject to human action? Are
they humanly made artifacts, objects of human action? Both? The scientists around me suddenly
strike me now as science fiction aliens able to see in two temporalities at the same time, a kind
of skilled vision that permits them to see the waves as hybrids, natural and artificial.
Some of this is about speed as a sensation, not sheer velocity as such but the impression of shifting
from one velocity into another (222)where such impressions, for wave scientists, require not
simply tuning for exaggerated speed and slow-motion torpor (226), but, back to the equation
above, knowing how to move skillfully through exponential, not linear, time. If ethnography is, as
Pandian suggests, less a matter of immersion in a fluid medium, to use the aqueous metaphor
associated most often with anthropological fieldwork, than a gamble on encounters with possible
forms, that gamble, here in the wave lab, requires managing ratios of cinematic, mathematical,
and experiential time to understand the forms that waves, normal and disastrous both, take. When
I again pause the video of the tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan in 2011 so I can watch a
simulation in the wave tank, I realize that all this juggling of time, motion, and materials across
screens is something like what we see in Pandians account of a key segment of the gangster film
thriller Billa (Vardhan 2007), in which he counterposes a temporally shuffled scene in the film
(the protagonist having waves of recollection and anticipation wash over her experience of a
present moment [142]) with a narrative of the making of the scene (139-140;
http://reelworldbook.org/#/new-gallery-3/). Shuffling time, motion, and materials across screens
and media is how I am working ethnographically, too, and how my scientific colleagues here at
the wave tank work, as they seek to understand and avert disaster through their own practices of
creationmediated, mathematical, and, in their own way, cinematic.

References
Grasseni, C. 2014. Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics. Social
Anthropology 12: 41-55.
Mitman, G. 1999. Reel Nature: Americas Romance with Wildlife on Film. Harvard University
Press.
Riles, A. 2004. Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological
Knowledge. American Ethnologist 31: 392405.
Taussig, K.-S., K. Hoeyer, and S. Helmreich. 2013. The Anthropology of Potentiality in
Biomedicine: An Introduction. Current Anthropology 54, Supplement 7: 3-14.
Vardhan, V., director. 2007. Billa. Chennai: Ananda Picture Circuit.

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Weston, K. 2002. Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age. New York:
Routledge.

Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. His latest book is Sounding the Limits of
Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/reel-waves

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Break with the Program

Richard Baxstrom
University of Edinburgh

I want to work until Ive made a mark.

Anand Pandian attributes this quote to Rajeevan, the art director for numerous Tamil films who
serves as the protagonist of Chapter Five (Art) in his provocative new book Reel World: An
Anthropology of Creation. Ever the good ethnographer, Pandian presses Rajeevan to go further,
asking how he will know when his mark has, indeed, been made. Speaking of the legendary art
director Sabu Cyril (Rajeevans mentor), he replies, They say he can do anything. Just that. I get
the sense that this exchange is quite significant for Pandianas if Rajeevan has given voice to
something that the author aspires to not only document, but himself express. With Reel World, it
is very clear to any reader that the author wants to make his markto produce a work that can
address itself to the anything of creation and of life.
Reel World is just that.
Cinema itself has forcefully vied to make its mark in modern timesas art, as evidence, as a form
of living for its makers and audiences alike. It is safe to say that over the last 120 years the medium
has succeeded in etching its mark deep within the substance of contemporary living. Yet how such
a mark is made remains, even after all of this time, mysterious. Reel World frames both this mark
and the mystery of its making as themselves the empirical elements of what we mean when we say
cinema. If I have understood the author correctly, this is the whole point of an anthropology of
creationit can show us how creation exceeds the sum of parts we would associate with
creativity and how the forms of life that constantly emerge out of such creation exceed the sum
of the facts we marshal as explanations for them. Reel World asks if cinema can tell us about
something like life. For me, the book has convincingly made the case that it can, even if what it
tells us does not in any way resolve itself as a singular answer.

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The modes of creation under scrutiny in Reel World are made material via the classic strategies of
the experiment. Each chapter operates as a separate experiment serving the whole; they make and
then test their particular object, just as any version of the experimental method demands.
Structured as experiments in sensing, expressed as experiments in writing, Reel World subjects the
ethnographic material to the force manifested in deploying the conventions of multiple literary
genres over the course of a single narrative. As with all stress tests, some of these experiments
buckle or rupture the materialthe stream of consciousness, single sentence chapter Desire
(Chapter Seven) is surely no Eden Eden Eden (Guyotat). Nevertheless, even as they occasionally
breach their object or fall apart methodologically, the individual chapters/experiments still
consistently yield a valuable, intuitive picture of what is at stake. In short, they succeed as
experiments. We are able to think cinema, creation, and life simultaneously in Reel World. Just
that.
So Reel World indeed makes its mark. It makes its mark on our understanding of Tamil cinema,
on our ability to grasp the resonances between these films and ordinary life in South India, and on
our feel for the reverberations across contemporary life that cinema itself broadly generates. This
is all clear. What is less clear is the kind of mark the book will have on anthropology. The
historically plural methods of the discipline today serve as positive catalysts in the work of creative
artists, filmmakers, and even scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers. Yet how will
the anthropologist, under ever more pressure to be useful in a normative fashion, respond to the
creative, systematic, experimental energy driving Reel World? Perusing Walter Murchs foreword
to Pandians book, I am reminded of a line from Apocalypse Now that was Murchs responsibility
to ensure we heard clearly. Marooned for most of the film on a small patrol boat making its way
into the dark heart of the Vietnam War, Willards internal line of dialogue reacts to his fellow
soldiers having undertaken an impromptu expedition off the patrol boat into the forest, only to
encounter an angry tiger.
Never get off the boatabsolutely goddam right! Unless you were goin all the way.
Of course, Willard does eventually get off the boat, just as Anand Pandian disembarks from the
mainstream with Reel World. Can we anthropologists follow? Will the mark this book makes be
coded as a sign leading towards a path that once guided anthropologists and, although now
overgrown and disused, can be renewed to get us where we must go? Or will we feel this mark as
a wound, a painful reminder of a foolish foray into the lair of a tiger? When we think absolutely
goddam right to ourselves in reference to Reel World, what will we be referring to as rightthe
safety of the boat or the necessity to get off of it, to split from the program, to make our mark?

Richard Baxstrom is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the

author most recently of (with Todd Meyers) Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the
Mastery of the Invisible (Fordham University Press 2016).

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For a Creative Anthropology: A Reply

Anand Pandian
Johns Hopkins University

I wish to express my profound gratitude to Somatosphere, Todd Meyers, and the forum
contributors for these incisive reflections on Reel World. The forest paths evoked by Richard
Baxstrom took me back to a morning spent in the shadow of the High Wavy Mountains in Tamil
Nadu, in the midst of my dissertation fieldwork in 2001. This was a tract that wild elephants, boar,
and the occasional tiger were known to prowl. But the women weeding the bean fields on the
terraced plain that day likened what they were doing to acts of domestic care: like feeding, bathing,
or grooming the plants, as one would do with children. Older women in weathered cotton saris
called out folksongs to pass the timeIts been eighteen days since you came this way
while the younger members of the weeding party made quiet retorts with recent film songs and
lyrics. Everyone there knew the present as an age of cinema, and it was hard to miss how
thoroughly cinematic images, sounds, and feelings had come to saturate the organic process of
creation in this part of the world, yielding a supple means of expressing its trials and uncertainties.
This book, Reel World, wrestles with the problem of what to do in the face of such experience.
How best to make sense of such cinematic recourse? Should we retreat to the critical distance that
would account for what surfaces when and why in the lives of our interlocutors, or try instead to
think, as they often do, with the vicissitudes of the world at hand: its snaking paths, precarious
plants, and, indeed, its cinema? The stakes of this question are much greater than the problem of
how best to engage that object of inquiry we call cinema. As Eduardo Kohn suggests in his
thoughtful response, the question here is whether cinema and anthropology can contribute toward
one of the defining challenges of this time of ecological malaiseas Kohn puts it, learning to
open oneself to the wild world beyond what we think we can control.
Elsewhere in a recent essay, Lisa Stevenson and Kohn (2015) suggest that the
film Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel 2012) might best be grasped as an ethnographic
dream, yielding a sensorial method for allowing [other kinds of] realities to make us over. Reel

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World asks whether an anthropological text could not be written, and perhaps even experienced,
in this manner. What would it mean for our writings to evoke, embody, exude, or express
something of the creative and disruptive force of the myriad beings and worldly elements with
which we think and work? There is the very real possibility here of the sadness to which Kohn
refers, the discordant reactionsNever get off the boatabsolutely goddam right!
(Baxstrom, Apocalypse Now)that such sensory ventures can provoke. All the same, I share with
Kohn an ethical concern for trying to learn, as he suggests, to inhabit the world of the
unforeseeable.
Simply putting things this way raises a problem of scope, as Stephen Chrisomalis rightly observes
in his lucid analysis of the book, for claims are thereby implied with regard to the very nature of
things. Are we evaluating philosophical premises using ethnographic evidence, Chrisomalis
asks, using evidence to draw generalizations, or something else entirely? His elegant distinction
between the telescopic and the microscopic pulls the question into sharp focus. But I am reminded
of the medieval Tamil poet and mystic Idaikkadar, who wrote of glimpsing the seven seas in a
single mustard seedsuch is the infinitely telescopic promise, I would argue, of attending closely
to an ethnographic singularity in its uniqueness.
This has less to do with opposing realist and non-realist traditions in anthropology than with
extending our realism in a speculative direction (Shaviro 2014: 67). Reel World draws from a
number of ethnographic and philosophical archivesmythical, religious, literary, aestheticthat
seek to work with the tendency of things to exceed their givenness, that is to say, that affirm the
reality of what is intangible and evanescent. Cinema is replete with the tugs and force of such
spectral presence. The writing in the book pursues a speculative poetics of what could be true if
expressed in a form faithful to the openness of such a reality, rather than seeking always to
approximate what is already given. As I ask in a chapter on the conjuring of divine miracles in a
digital effects lab, what must reality be to accommodate such wondrous deeds?
The book therefore turns to certain thinkers like Henri Bergson less for axioms to follow than for
their intuition of potential openings between disparate domains of thought and practicerecall
what Levi-Strauss (1963: 103) said so generously of Bergson and Rousseau, that they were trying
on themselves modes of thought taken from elsewhere or simply imagined. The chapter on time,
to which Chrisomalis refers, juxtaposes side-by-side the ideas of Bergson and the ideas of a young
Indian film director, not to explain one by means of the other, but instead to explore what could
happen to our understanding of time if we stayed with the experience of a filmmaker. What is
essential here is the possibility of a novel and emergent congruence, which is why the arguments
themselves are left in speculative form. This does court the risk, as Chrisomalis notes,
that [readers] will splice together perspectives that were never mean to be brought together by the
author, but such possible splicing, with all of its hopes and perils, is entirely apt for the books
project and its montage style.
These are indeed problems of knowledge, but they have less to do with the familiar epistemological
worryHow can I know?than with the question of what our knowledge could become, in a

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worldly sense, through a deeper embrace of its sensory and imaginative textures. It is this kind of
question that cinemaitself a thinking medium of experience and sensationinvites. I think of a
moment late in the wonderful film by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, Manakamana (2013),
when two older Nepali women take the gondola down from the shrine of Manakamana. The film,
as you may know, seats us in a cabin with a series of different occupants, its frame always fixed
to the borders of a window that reveal the precipitous depths of the Himalayan foothills below.
With this particular sequence, much of what is happening takes place beyond the frame: a crinkling
sound that is eventually revealed as a plastic bag, the hidden lap onto which its ice cream bar keeps
dripping, and the remarked beauty of a vista that falls somewhere beyond the edge of the screen.
The struggle to keep melting ice cream from dripping is a familiar one, and we are led to laugh
along with these two women in a shared spirit of implication. But then, as we are spliced into this
unexpected kinship with these two travelers from elsewhere, we are invited to make another kind
of connection: between the fearsome depths beyond the window and the sweetened fluid falling
much closer at hand. Something of epic gravityan Austrian-engineered transect through the
Himalayassuddenly gains a sense of lightness and caprice, a feeling of openness and
vulnerability.
Thinking back to Chrisomalis, I have no idea whether this concatenation was meant by Spray and
Velez. But a scene like this from Manakamana, and the weave of ideas it puts into
motion, underscores a crucial point made in Sprays moving response to Reel World, that style,
form, and structure are not ancillary to content. I am grateful for her attention to the seams in
the fieldwork that made the book possible and the fragments that came to comprise its
descriptions, as she examines, with an editors eye, its intercutting ethnographic scenes with
theory and reflections. As I read this talented filmmaker move so fluidly between the emergent
possibilities of both cinematic and textual form, I am drawn to her evocation of the creative
potential that surrounds us as embodied and sentient beings in any given moment, if we would
cultivate the perception of a maker. Such perception involves something less than mastery, Spray
reminds us, calling on us instead to lend an open ear to the world.
The vulnerability of an open ear to suggestion and deception has long been conceived in Western
thought as a problem for knowledgethe ear, as Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler wrote, is
fundamentally a passive organ (1947: 13). Although Larkins challenging commentary is more
concerned with the visible than the audible, his questions concern the difference between passive
uptake and active critique. Are we not exposing ourselves to unnecessary dangers of
misunderstanding by leaving open the field of social relations, whose operation we already
understand so well? I was surprised that Larkin found the book anchored in a basic opposition
between the human and the non-human, given all of its attention to what happens behind
office doors, beside video monitors, or in small clusters of conversation and collaborative labor.
Throughout the book, I tried to convey a complementary interplay between human and non-human,
the conscious and unconscious, thought and sensationtake, for example, the many scenes of
mass spectatorship in theaters presented by the book, where waves and pulses of feeling are always
intercut with critical rejoinders that brush those moods at a tangent.

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Larkin poses this problem in relation to a middle ground of scholarly inquiryto put it in slightly
different terms, the question of what company we keep when we think anthropologically. This
book seeks to think with and among the human interlocutors that comprise its chief characters
the cameraman on the cover, for example, Nirav Shah, a recurrent protagonist in the chapters
and to follow what happens when circumstances exceed their capacity to master them. Its
ecological sensibilities lie in its attunement to this excess. Scholarly engagements are there, but
left chiefly to the notes, as a writing strategy meant to yield argumentative force to the stories
themselves.
Think of what Marilyn Strathern observes in Partial Connections: the anthropologists contexts
and levels of analysis are themselves often at once both part and yet not part of the phenomena s/he
hopes to organize them with (2004: 75). Because our scholarly perspectives on things and their
contexts may deeply cross-cut the local perspectives we seek to make sense of, Strathern notes,
one can always be swallowed by another (2004: 75). Facing up to this possibility, I would add,
means relinquishing our habitual tendencies to explain each thing by putting it securely in its place,
and taking the risk instead of acknowledging that certain things will necessarily exceed the
context-giving boundaries of our understanding. This acknowledgment once again informs the
way that Reel World is written: the chapter on color, for example, which tries to work along the
grain of sensations resistance to grammar.
Here, I acknowledge imperial chromophiliaI work with Taussigs insightsand the chapter
identifies aesthetic debts to the chromolithographic traditions that Larkin invokes. The question
remains, though, as to how these histories might be made to matter, what they might allow us to
understand differently. Reiterating a regional or a cultural attachment to vivid colors, it struck me,
would sit too well with a troubling legacy of pathologizing such attachments. At the same time,
my fieldwork also showed that the moments of disdain that Larkin picks out were always crosshatched with feelings of joy and wonder at the spectacles conjured in cinema, and the writing seeks
a way of affirming the openings that such feelings could effect. For Walter Benjamin, the right
kind of image could blast open the continuum of history by fanning the spark of hope in the
past (1968: 262, 255). Could we as scholars share in the making of such transformative images?
This too is a matter of history, but in a minor key. There are pragmatic resources for novel forms
of change vested in the fleeting possibilities of creative processin the historical biographies, one
might even say, of these cinematic images and sounds.
The value of such attention to minute scales of process is beautifully conveyed in Stefan
Helmreichs report from an Oregon wave lab. There was an event of critical significancethe
2011 tsunami in Japan. But this history serves here less as a known context for what is happening
in the lab than as an ongoing provocation to realign bodies and forces already in motion. Far from
confronting human and non-human entities across a rigid divide, we see how many different kinds
of beings scientists, waves, paddles, signals are woven together into a conjoined process of
investigation. Helmreichs detailing of the differential scaling of time and space helps to
underscore a point that I also try to convey in the book, that there is a value in attending to the
differences between specific horizons of experience, cinematic or otherwise. And as we follow

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along with Helmreich, we begin to see the scientists themselves in differential form, as filmmakers,
as aliens, perhaps even as gangsters.
We know these scientists are also striving to see and understand these waves otherwise, which is
what leads them to run some waves as so many cinematic takes: roll em! And so the
possibility that surfaces is one of generative vision: what would it take not only to see what is just
on the threshold of emergence, but also to bend its emerging form into a novel shape? A tsunami
that would not be a disaster, for example? Or an ethnography that might learn a new intention as
it goes along? Helmreich tells us of a possible resonance between our practices and those of the
others we study. Would it be too much to wonder what a rogue wave of insight might look like
the conditions that might possibly precipitate such a thing, and what it would take to live with its
consequences?
We are indeed on the terrain of the experiment, the character of which is attested so well by Richard
Baxstrom. The writing in these chapters does take various twists and turns, but I did not have a
particular strategy or style in mind at the outset of writing any of them. I worked with various
forms of sensory material resistant to the conventional form of scholarly prose, and in each case I
tried to let that material and its qualities push as far as possible against these conventions without
buckle or rupture, as Baxstrom observes. Marks to be made therefore began with the body of the
text itself, in a manner perhaps akin to the traces of demonological thinkingdiscernibly etched
upon the surface of the film in Benjamin Christensens 1922 Haxan(Baxstrom and Meyers, 2016:
104). Such experiments with narrative form entertain decisive risks, and I remain unsure how well
they work in this book. But I took heart from the improvisational way that these Tamil filmmakers
worked themselvessuch as the composer Yuvan Shankar Raja, who once told me, regarding one
of the songs I write about in the book, I just went with the flow and it took me all over the place.
What is at stake here, ultimately, is the possibility of trusting in the creative potential of worldly
circumstance, what Gilles Deleuze called belief in the world (Deleuze 1986: 171). I dont deny
the sense of political urgency or the pressures of bureaucratic expediency that drive so much of
what we do now in anthropology. But it might still be worth asking the pragmatic question in a
more speculative and open-ended manner: what else is anthropology good for? What else can
anthropology do? This book taught me that an anthropology of creation should aspire to a creative
anthropologyone that could share in the transformative powers of experience and the genesis of
worlds. That was the spirit in which it was written. Beyond this, there is little more to do than to
grab a box of popcorn and wait to see what happens.

References
Adorno, T., and H. Eisler. 2007. Composing for the Films. New York: Continuum.
Baxstrom, R., and T. Meyers. 2016. Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery
of the Invisible. New York: Fordham University Press.

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015

Book forum: Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation

29

Benjamin, W. 1968. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations. New

York: Schocken Books.
Castaing-Taylor, L., and V. Paravel. 2012. Leviathan. New York: Cinema Guild.
Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Levi-Strauss, C. 1963. Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press.
Shaviro, S. 2014. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press.
Spray, S., and P. Velez. 2013. Manakamana. New York: Cinema Guild.
Stevenson, L., and E. Kohn. 2015. Leviathan: An Ethnographic Dream. Visual Anthropology
Review 31: 49-53.
Strathern, M. 2004. Partial Connections. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.

Anand Pandian is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. In addition

to Reel World, he is author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Duke 2009)
and Ayyas Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India (Indiana 2014).

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/for-a-creative-anthropology-a-reply

Somatosphere | December 17, 2015