Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing – including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images – Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork
Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff
Part I: Experiencing and Conceptualizing the Exceptional
Chapter 1. To Be Stunned: Uncanny Experiences and Uncertainty in ‘Ordinary’ Fieldwork
Deborah Reed-Danahay
Chapter 2. Looking at the African Masks at Musée du Trocadéro – He Understood….
Thomas Fillitz
Chapter 3. Art and Anthropology in Graphic Form: Exceptional Experience andExtraordinary Collaboration in the Making of ‘Light in Dark Times’
Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden (images)
Chapter 4. Exceptional Experiences in Academic Life
Moshe Shokeid
Chapter 5. The Exceptionalism of Art as Disclosure of Deepest Truth: Stanley Spencer and the Look of Love
Nigel Rapport
Part II: Literary Realms of the Exceptional
Chapter 6. Haunted Reading/Haunting Johnson
Petra Rethmann
Chapter 7. Sacred Muses: The Lake Goddess in Flora Nwapa’s Literary Worldmaking
Paula Uimonen
Chapter 8. Experiential Literary Ethnography: How Creative Writing Techniques Can Capturethe Cultural Value of Live Arts-Based Experiences
Ellen Wiles
Part III: Exceptional Visual and Practice Experiences
Chapter 9. Lighting Praxis: Lighting Aesthetics and Creativity Narratives in Professional Cinematography
Cathy Greenhalgh
Chapter 10. ‘Hammered by the Image’: Exceptional Experiences of Art as Aesthetic Impact
Helena Wulff
Chapter 11. Shaking up Worlds, Opening up Horizons: Contemporary Dance Experiences in Ramallah and Beyond
Ana Laura Rodriguez Quinones
Chapter 12. Participant Growing-Places in and of the World: Rendering the Transformative Atmosphere of a Contemporary Opera in the Making
Maxime Le Calvé
Afterword: The Sixth Sense
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
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