Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
1 | dance
The dominance of science defined our view of ourselves, our view of inside and outside:
During the last centuries every human body was therefore seen as a "closed system",
whereas before 1700 bodies were permeable. In the last few decades we returned to those
"pre-scientific" days: In 1994 Richard Sennett wrote, that urban space takes shape in the way
in which humans experience their body. To make people of different origin live together
harmonically in intercultural cities they have to become aware of their own bodies (Sennett,
1997 [1994]: cf. p. 456) in order to be able to perceive the bodies of other human beings and
respect their demands (cf. p. 30) -- and to be able to communicate physically. The word
Only few years later German sociologist Martina Loew argues that those physical dispositions
are moving again (cf. 2001: p. 128). With regard to Helena Wulff's article "The Irish Dancing
Body" (2005) I would add that in some societies, e.g. the Irish, the dispositions or the
awareness of the body maybe have never been stable. "Dance has been linked to national
identity for a long time in Ireland", she writes and argues that the "Irish dancing body" lives
with and within movement (p. 45f). Irish culture is "not just marked but actually defined by the
perpetual motion of the people who bear it. Emigration and exile, the journeys to and from
home, are the very heartbeat of Irish culture. To imagine Ireland is to imagine a journey", Irish
1
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
Ireland is an island and therefore has had mainly stable borders (except the partition of
Northern Ireland) for the last centuries. While there are only about six million people living in
Ireland there are claimed to be 70 million Irish in diaspora all over the world (although this
figure is just a vague estimation1). Around 1850 Ireland struggled during the Great Famine, a
period of mass starvation (caused by a potato disease) and mass emigration. In Ireland
"dance and dance culture have been connected to travel, displacement and mobility", Wulff
says (2009: p. 47). With regard to Sennett it could be Irish tradition and their awareness of
"perpetual motion", of their "dancing body" that makes them move and integrate everywhere
in the world while still not forgetting where they came from.2
I want to bring in another example of the integrative function of dance, which also shows the
disadvantages of this cultural asset: the Kalela Dance3 (Hannerz, 1980: pp. 132). "The urban
experience of migrants to the Copperbelt towns [in Central Africa] involved mingling with
strangers of many ethnic backgrounds, and finding ways of dealing with them", Hannerz wrote
2
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
(p. 134). Clyde Mitchell, a member of the Manchester School (that Victor Turner, who I will
refer to in the third part of this paper, also belonged to), saw the Kalela "performed several
times by a group of the Bisa people in Luanshya" (p. 133). Hannerz describes that there was
intercultural "interaction" -- unifying as well as differentiating: "The team had about twenty
members, mostly men in their twenties, laborers or in other relatively unskilled occupations,
ethnically heterogeneous but normally all-African audience." Some elements of the dance --
e.g. members that were dressed as a doctor or nurse -- were "inspired by the contact with
Europeans". The main topic of the dancing and its songs was town life: "Most, however, were
concerned with ethnic diversity, praising the virtues of the dancers' own tribe and the beauty
of their homeland, but also ridiculing other groups and their customs." Whereas "the dance
was not used (...) to express antagonism to Europeans, or to ridicule them by mimicking their
Now, coming back to Sennett and his explanation about physical communication, one has to
keep in mind, that the Kalela was performed by laborers in the township -- facts that show that
those people belonged to a suppressed social class (and they were only or mainly men!).
Probably they were not respected by their bosses. Nevertheless Mitchell, according to
Hannerz, concludes: "These dances were significant as statements about the interethnic
encounter in the towns, about the need to know, evaluate, and handle people in terms of their
3
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
ethnic identity. The ridicule of other tribes in the Kalela songs could be seen as a sort of
unilateral declaration of a joking relationship on the part of the Bisa and seemed to be
understood in this vein by the spectators" (p. 135). So there seems to exist not only an "Irish
dancing body", but a "Bisa dancing body" -- and millions of other potential "dancing bodies" as
well.
2 | visual
"Modern anthropology, as I was taught it, was not about making films, interrogating
photographs, or experimenting with images and words. It was about writing texts", Anna
Grimshaw complains (2003: p. 3). In her book "The Ethnographer's Eye" she attests
"iconophobia" to the British school that she herself came from. She advises every
ethnographer to allow her or his "eyes" two ways of approaching ethnography: montage and
mise-en-scène. Grimshaw says that she uses the first one "to disrupt the conventional
categories by which visual anthropology has become to be defined and confined", with which
she evokes "the violent collision of different elements in order to suggest new connections
I think that this is a very courageous and artistic approach towards scientific research. To
back up this approach Grimshaw refers to Russian filmmakers such as Sergei Mikhailovich
Eisenstein: "They recognised that what we see is inseperable from how we see" (p. 11).
4
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
Grimshaw opposes the technique of montage with mise-en-scène, which "in its focus and
particularity is an expression of the academic caution which subsequently followed the initial
euphoria" (p. 12). To clarify this definition, Wikipedia offers a quite comprehensive and
concise explanation: "Recently, the term has come to represent a style of conveying the
Cinema": "Among experimental documentary filmmakers (...) observational filmmaking has for
the most part been supplanted by one of two other styles, each of which seeks to remedy
certain of its weaknesses" (MacDougall, 1998: p. 6). According to Taylor this -- firstly -- is
what is called "docudrama", secondly it is "the autobiographical: the first-person diaristic film
From my point of view5 both techniques meet the requirements of today's mass media, each
one in its special way: The docudrama "tends to subordinate facts to fiction", Taylor notes (p.
5
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
7). A drama by definition follows a special dramaturgy that again by definition has an
elaborated structure (plot points, arc of suspense etc.). So the ethnographer does not only
have to assess the ongoing things he observes, but really has to intervene like a director.
Missing links have to be made up to fit "a story" (maybe even made up itself) into
dramaturgy. Wikipedia lists e.g. Fernando Mereilles' quite popular Brazilian "City of God"
(2002) as recent "ethnofiction"6, so probably one could add "Slumdog Millionaire" (Danny
Boyle, 2008) to this listing. Considering docudrama in terms of representation and having
those examples in mind, I think it represents an image (including lots of clichés) and not
authenticity -- although of course image itself is again authentic in its own way.
The "autobiographical film essay" carries potential further problems: Nowadays mass media
tends to "personalize" every new trend. Whenever I -- working as a journalist -- had to write a
story about a local or national phenomenon, I had to find an example in person to whom I
could link my plot to. I was reminded of that experience when I watched a trailer to a not yet
released ethnographic film7 about a white Australian girl, introducing her "adopted" Aboriginal
family to her (biological) white family. The protagonist is a very likeable, outgoing young
woman. Thinking of my experience as a journalist who had to deal a lot with TV producers, for
the responsible purchasing agent at a TV station the protagonist probably is very appropriate:
6
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
She is young, pretty, female -- a figure fitting perfectly into audiovisual mass media.
On the one hand I think that commercialisation is a threat to ethnographic filmmaking. On the
other hand: Who watched ethnographic films before ethnofiction moved mainstream? I think
that even commercial visual anthropology increases awareness and therefore appreciate this
3 | rituals
One of my friends' Jewish boyfriend, Ran, just moved from the US to Vienna. He wants to
stay and in order to get in touch with Vienna's Jewish community he and his girlfriend Lisa
decided to go to the synagogue every Sabbat. On this day religious Jews avoid not only
working but being "active" at all. They also refuse to use e.g. any kind of transportation and
therefore go to synagogue by foot. Ran and Lisa go to a synagogue in Vienna's first district.
Without taking the tram it would take them quite some time to get there. So their compromise
is to use public transport to get near the synagogue but to walk for the last few hundred
meters. They don't want to provoke other members of the community that they are eager to
So from this point of view this aspect of Jewish Sabbat could be seen to fulfill the minimum
requirements of Victor Turner's definition of "ritual" -- but nothing more than that: According to
7
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
Mathieu Deflem Turner defined ritual as "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given
over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers"
(1991: p. 5). "Social glue" (p. 3) was another, rather reluctant function Victor Turner -- being a
conceded to rituals at an early stage of his career in 1957. Three decades later Deflem
argues: "What many rituals (of rebellion) often do is precisely to enact social conflicts." (p. 4).
But talking of Turner: What did he describe as "functions" of rituals? In his model rituals were
used on the one hand for transitions through life-crises (birth, death, illness/healing; I'd add
"rebellion" and "reconciliation" here), on the other hand as rituals of affliction (shades of
deceased relatives afflict the person). He ascribed a processual character and three phases
of progression to every ritual: firstly separation, "when a person or group becomes detached
from an earlier fixed point" (Deflem, 1991: p. 8), after that the threshold, the liminal, when the
state of the ritual's subject is ambiguous and social structures are absent, and as a last stage
the re-aggregation, a stabilization with a plurality of new perspectives. From my point of view
the first kind of ritual, that should help one during a life-crisis, is constructive; the second, the
Deflem shows (p. 16) how Turner tried to apply his model of ritual to modern societies and
detects an "ambiguity": First Turner concludes that every ritual has religious connotations but
then differentiates between "liminal" (for tribal rituals and modern religious rituals) and
8
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
"liminoid" rituals (for modern recreation; not necessarily includes resolution of the crisis).
Deflem explains that this problem could be solved -- even sticking to Turner's terminology and
just distinguishing between tribal societies, where religion is part of a network of various
cultural/societal institutions, whereas in modern society "the several institutions have become
independent of each other". Today rituals "may happen outside the realm of institutionalized
religion in domains where matters of the 'supernatural' are not dealt with". (Deflem, 1991: p.
17)
I want to take Deflem's observation further and would like to hypothezise -- coming back to
my first example of this Jewish friend Ran -- that in modern society even institutionalized
religious rituals could be liminoid and don't have to have any religious component at all,
because they are somehow mis-used. To Ran religious connotations are unimportant, there is
no "supernatural" to deal with any more, because he lives a secular life. One of its symptoms
is to go to synagogue by tram, but walk the last few steps by foot to pretend that this religious
meaning for him still exists. But: It is the side effects of religious rituals that have become the
core argument for Ran to join, the recreational and communal aspect. Another example would
be me, a secular person (but on paper still a Roman-Catholic), celebrating Christmas with my
family only for recreational and communal reasons. Those rituals' function is no longer to
worship but to celebrate. So I think that the "belief in mystical beings and powers" is no longer
necessary at all to define ritual. On the other hand: Maybe since Turner's times simply our
9
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
gods have changed. Because what happened since Turner (who -- by the way -- was a
"devoted" Roman Catholic, Deflem wrote) is that the mainstream of Western society adopted
a new orientation: from the afterlife to the here and now. "Religious" religion has lost its
What could these new gods look like? Particularly with regard to art and aesthetics I would
like to mention Walter Benjamin's view of ritual. According to him, rituals -- especially magic
and religious ones -- were the fertile soil which art could prosper from. In his essay "The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Benjamin argues that only due to this
"mechanical reproduction" art for the first time in history was able to emancipate itself from
(religious) ritual (cf. Benjamin, 2005: p. 17). According to him, politics is the new foundation of
art. Thereby Benjamin refers to politics of power, but I think that one as well could refer to
politics (as a means to achieve a target) of knowledge, of fun, of art (which nowadays has got
its very own momentum), of nationalism, of community etc. The targets that those politics are
etc. I would call those values our new gods. I'd even say that religion finds it place in this
model: Politics of religion evoke actions (e.g. Kurt Westergaard's caricatures of Mohammed,
the work of a Catholic NGO in the so-called "Third World") in order to achieve targets like
differentiation or welfare. And being a football fan of a club like Manchester United could be
10
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BINTER, Julia T. S., 2009: We Shoot the World. Österreichische Dokumentarfilmer und
Turner's Processual Symbolic Analysis. In: Journal for the Scientific Study of
HANNERZ, Ulf, 1980: Exploring the City. Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology. New
SENNETT, Richard, 1997 [1994]: Fleisch und Stein. Der Körper und die Stadt in der
TURNER, Victor W., 2008 [1969]: The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. New
WULFF, Helena, 2005: Memories in Motion. The Irish Dancing Body. In: Body &
11
Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11
Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264
Society, Vol. 11 (4). London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, Sage Publications, pp. 45-62
WULFF, Helena, 2009 [2007]: Dancing at the Crossroads. Memory and Mobility in
12