Communication and Aesthetics

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Communication and Aesthetics | Helena Wulff | Winter Semester 2010/11

Home Exam | Patricia Kaefer | Student ID 0002264

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1 | danceThe 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

communicate goes back to Latin "communis" which means "collective", "together" or -- as a

second meaning -- "friendly".

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


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(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,

and it performed in a public place in the township on Sunday afternoons, in front of an

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

comportment". (p. 134)

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


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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-scne. 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

and meanings" (p. 11).

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).


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Grimshaw opposes the technique of montage with mise-en-scne, 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

information of a scene primarily through a single shot -- often accompanied by camera

movement. It is to be contrasted with montage-style filmmaking -- multiple angles pieced

together through editing."4

An alternative to those "traditional" methods does exist: ethnofiction. Lucien Castaing-Taylor

describes this style of filmmaking in his introduction to David MacDougall's "Transcultural

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

essay" (p. 7).

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.

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_scne(Nov. 8th, 2010)

5 I hold a Master's degree in journalism and have worked as a journalist for five years (mainly covering audiovisual

media) for a national Austrian newspaper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8nehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8nehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8nehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8nehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8nehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8ne


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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 clichs) 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnofiction(Nov. 8th 2010)

7 Sophie Wagner, who attended Helena Wulff's lectures at the University of Vienna in October 2010, presented a

trailer of this film (she was involved in this Australian production) to the group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnofictionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnofictionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnofictionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnofiction


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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

tendency (with reservations).

3 | ritualsOne 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 nearthe 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

join. They don't want to pollute their ritual.

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


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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

student researcher at Max Gluckman's "ritual-hostile" (p. 4) Manchester School then --

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

ritual of affliction, is destructive one.

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


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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

authenticity in this part of the world.

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

assigned to could be values like appreciation, recreation, provocation, freedom, differentiation

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

considered being "religious", too.


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BIBLIOGRAPHYBENJAMIN, Walter, 2005 [1963]: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen

Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp.

BINTER, Julia T. S., 2009: We Shoot the World. sterreichische Dokumentarfilmer und

die Globalisierung. Wien/Berlin/Muenster, Lit Verlag. [Google Books]

DEFLEM, Mathieu, 1991: Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion. A Discussion of Victor

Turner's Processual Symbolic Analysis. In: Journal for the Scientific Study of

Religion 30 (1), pp. 1-25

GRIMSHAW, Anna, 2003 [2001]: The Ethnographer's Eye. Ways of Seeing in

Anthropology. Cambridge, University Press. [Google Books]

HANNERZ, Ulf, 1980: Exploring the City. Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology. New

York, Columbia University Press.

LOEW, Martina, 2001: Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp.

MacDOUGALL, David, 1998: Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, University Press.

SENNETT, Richard, 1997 [1994]: Fleisch und Stein. Der Krper und die Stadt in der

westlichen Zivilisation. Berlin, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch.

TURNER, Victor W., 2008 [1969]: The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. New

Jersey, Transaction Publishers. [Google Books]

WULFF, Helena, 2005: Memories in Motion. The Irish Dancing Body. In: Body &


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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

Ireland. Oxford, Berghahn Books. [Google Books]

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Communication and Aesthetics