Over several years, Christian Suhr followed Muslim patients
being treated for jinn possession and psychosis in a Danish mosque
and in a psychiatric hospital. Through rich filmic and textual case
...studies, he shows how the bodies and souls of Muslim patients
become a battlefield between the moral demands of Islam and the
psychiatric institutions of European nation-states. The book
reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work to produce
relief from pain, and also entail an ethical transformation of the
patient and the cultivation of religious and secular values through
the experience of pain. Creatively exploring the analytic
possibilities provided by the use of a camera, both text and film
show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to
destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, which
allows patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic
medicine or God.
The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense ...perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors-anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators-explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very "combustion chamber" of social theory by juxtaposing one's claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.
This paper asks whether an exploration of responses to visual media in neo‐orthodox Islam could provide new answers to the recurrent queries regarding the value of images in visual anthropology. It ...proposes that the photographic image shares a curious resemblance to the bodies of people possessed by invisible spirits called jinn. The image as a failed example or model of reality works like the possessed body as an amplifier of invisibility pointing towards that which cannot be seen, depicted visually, or represented in writing. This suggests a negative epistemology in which images obtain their value not from the adequacy of their correspondence to perceived reality, but rather from the ways they fail to exemplify that which they appear to depict.
Défaillance de l'image et possession : exemples d'invisibilité dans l'anthropologie visuelle et dans l'islam
Résumé
L’exploration des réponses aux média visuels dans l’islam néo‐orthodoxe peut‐elle apporter de nouvelles réponses aux interrogations récurrentes sur la valeur des images en anthropologie visuelle ? Le présent article avance que l’image photographique partage une étrange ressemblance avec le corps des personnes possédées par les esprits invisibles appelés djinns. En tant qu’exemple ou modèle défaillant de la réalité, l’image fonctionne, comme le corps possédé, en tant qu’amplificateur de l’invisibilité, pointant vers ce qui ne peut être vu, dépeint visuellement ou représenté par écrit. Cela suggère une épistémologie négative, dans laquelle la valeur des images proviendrait non pas de l’adéquation de leur correspondance avec la réalité perçue, mais plutôt de la manière dont elles échouent à donner en exemple ce qu’elles semblent représenter.
Absorption or resonance Raman scattering are often used to identify and even quantify carotenoids in situ. We studied the absorption spectra, the Raman spectra and their resonance behavior of ...β-carotene in different molecular environments set up as mixtures from lipid (emulsion) and non-polar (ethanol) solvents and a polar component (water) with regard to their application as references for in situ measurement. We show how both absorption profiles and resonance spectra of β-carotene strongly depend on the molecular environment. Most notably, our data suggests that the characteristic bathochromic absorption peak of J-aggregates does not contribute to carotenoid resonance conditions, and show how the Raman shift of the C=C stretching mode is dependent on both, the molecular environment and the excitation wavelength. Overall, the spectroscopic data collected here is highly relevant for the interpretation of in situ spectroscopic data in terms of carotenoid identification and quantification by resonance Raman spectroscopy as well as the preparation of reference samples. In particular, our data promotes careful consideration of appropriate molecular environment for reference samples.
I stedet for et abstract er her artiklens første side:Mediernes forenklede dækning af islam, voldelig ekstremisme og integrationsproblemer har gennem de seneste år resulteret i en række ...ukonstruktive politiske tiltag. I denne artikel ser vi nærmere på mediernes dækning og den politiske debat i kølvandet på terrorangrebet i København i februar 2015 og TV2’s serie af dokumentarprogrammer om forholdene i danske moskeer fra marts 2016. Disse to eksempler illustrerer, hvordan mediernes dækning ikke blot har skabt en voldsom, følelsesbetonet og forplumret politisk debat, men også har medvirket til at eskalere de problemer, man har ønsket at afdække. Som forskere er vi bekymrede for denne udvikling, hvor vi ser en stigende tendens til, at både private og licensbetalte nyhedsmedier prioriterer sensation, drama og frygt over saglighed. Desuden vækker det vores bekymring, at landets lovgivere tilsyneladende lader sig diktere af mediernes dækning. De to eksempler, vi diskuterer i denne artikel, har således både resulteret i nye lovtiltag og ændringer af eksisterende lovgivning. Ikke desto mindre er det svært at se, hvordan politikere skulle reagere anderledes. Politikerne bliver ligesom almindelige borgere påvirket af mediernes dækning og er nødt til at vise handlekraft i forhold til de problemer, medierne skildrer. Men hvis mediernes dækning af (...)
In this article I apply film theory as an analytic prism through which to examine the ritual mechanisms of a particular kind of Islamic exorcism (
al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya
). I show how these exorcisms ...operate as a ritual montage that conjures the absent presence of
al-ghayb
—a hidden world of power that only God can see in its totality and to which the possessed patients and the
jinn
spirits must succumb. These exorcisms thus provide healing, not in the sense of immediate “well-being” or “relief from pain” but in the sense of moral witnessing, an opportunity to testify to the limits of human seeing and action and to the ways in which invisible and divine forces give shape to the tangible world.
Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are taught socially to perceive and ...the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that a camera can produce. But how would a camera perceive the footage it produces, and what would it think of the various ways we use it? In this textual experiment, I imagine what different cameras might reply to these questions if they could speak. In doing so, I call attention to ethnographic filmmaking as a more-than-human, more-than-collaborative and more-than-dialogical mode of cultural critique.
Can Film Show the Invisible? Suhr, Christian; Willerslev, Rane
Current anthropology,
06/2012, Volume:
53, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but ...rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.
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