Between Matter and Method

Encounters In Anthropology and Art

Gretchen Bakke, Marina Peterson, Gretchen Bakke, Marina Peterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781474289207
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000181098
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Building on the lively exchange between anthropology and art that has emerged in recent years, Between Matter and Method makes a bold and creative contribution to this rapidly growing field. Taking an expansive approach to the arts, it finds commonalities in approaches that engage with visual artifacts, sound, performance, improvisation, literature, dance, theater, and design. The book questions current disciplinary boundaries and offers a new model grounded in a shared methodology for interdisciplinary encounter between art and anthropology. Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson have gathered together anthropologists whose work is notable for engaging the arts and creative practice in conceptually rigorous and methodologically innovative ways, including Kathleen Stewart, Keith Murphy, Natasha Myers, Stuart McLean, Craig Campbell, and Roger Sansi. Essays span the globe from Indonesia, West Virginia and Los Angeles in the United States, to the Orkney Islands in the UK, and Russia and Spain.

Labyrinth of Linkages—Cinema, Anthropology, and the Essayistic Impulse^*

Rachel Thompson

And so she turned her attention to the discrete actions of men,

in search of an alchemical approach to the writing of time.

Hers was to be a tale of criss-crossings, ventriloquism,

and puppets without strings.

Extinction Number Six and the Year Without Summer

In 1833, while venturing north from Buenos Aires along the River Paraná, Charles Darwin was astounded by the number of fossilized remains embedded within the grand estuary deposit of the lowland Pampas region. Darwin heard from local residents about the hill of the giant and the stream of the animal. He was also told of “the marvellous properties of certain rivers, which had the power of changing small bones into large; or as some maintained, the bones themselves grew.”¹ Within The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin likens the region to a vast mausoleum of extinct creatures. Thoughts of the Beagle were perhaps not far from the mind of Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois when, in 1887, he declined a professorship in Amsterdam and set sail for the Indies, in search of material proof of that elusive missing link. Denied funding from the colonial government for paleontological pursuits, Dubois sought a military solution, enlisting for eight-years’ service in the Dutch East Indies Army—Medical Officer, Second Class. He detested the work, but at least it would provide passage. He would take up fossil finding on holidays and off-hours. First in caves, later in rivers.

Dubois is one of several historical characters—mythical and actual—that populate my peripatetic essay film Extinction Number Six. Comingling aspects of literature, anthropology, history, and criticism, the film follows an eccentric narrator’s search for the (im)material traces of Java’s colonial, mystical, and paleontological past—a journey haunted in equal measure by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora and the still murky events of the 1965 Indonesian coup and subsequent anti-communist massacre. The film is structured according to a hybrid literary-musical form—four chapters with an overture and epilogue, within which all manner of seemingly disparate materials and events are brought into meaningful relation. Each chapter corresponds to a period of political rule in Java, and later Indonesia: the first—to the brief British occupation during the Napoleonic Wars; the second—to Java’s waning dynastic rule; the third—to Dutch colonialism; and the fourth—to the birth of the Indonesian nation.

Extinction opens with a frenzied account—told through still images—of the European fallout from a volcanic eruption half a world away on the island of Sumbawa, due east of Java. Sulfuric particles from Tambora’s cataclysmic eruption, carried west by stratospheric currents, set European skies aglow in 1815, while their lingering presence the following year blocked from the Earth the radiant heat of the Sun. Temperatures slumped from Tunisia to Britain. Hungary received brown snow in June, while in Italy it fell red throughout the year. Swine in Switzerland were slaughtered for lack of fodder. All manner of things were eaten: sorrel, moss, and cat. While the resulting climate irregularities lead to widespread famine throughout a continent still reeling from Napoleon’s long war, they also sparked the writing of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Byron’s “Darkness,” and the previous year produced those turmeric-tinged sunsets over the Thames, so fervently depicted by Turner. Through her slightly occluded, yellowed glasses, the narrator views this sulfuric discharge, and the litany of misfortune that followed in its atomized wake, as a metaphysical declaration of defiance—dispatched from the colonies. She read from Governor Raffles’ report that in Java, some took the sound of Tambora’s detonations to signal their deliverance from colonial rule, while others held that Ratu Kidul, Queen of the South Seas, was firing salutes from her supernatural artillery. They called the ashes the dregs of her ammunition, the deposit of which was three feet at Sangar, one foot on Bali, and about the thickness of a dinner knife at Batavia.²

Our narrator soon awakens stiff-legged and bleary-eyed from a dream of these atmospheric oddities, emerging as if from a prolonged hibernation. Attempts to trigger locomotion in the legs grant her no such ease of movement. She’d sat too long in a reclining chair—her passport expired. Confined to small quarters, sleeping only in spurts, she’s gorged herself Quixote-like on a vast collection of colonial-era treatises, and seems to have downloaded a perfectly palindromic number of images from Indonesia, in the hopes of solving a puzzle she cannot quite name. She began with five archival images—a set of rabbit holes into which she intended to burrow. But her collection soon grew to unwieldy proportions. While for a time it sufficed to take a flight of fancy through an ever-shifting accumulation of materials, it proved impossible to reach the end of the universe within a single sleepless night. So after a lengthy period of hermetic reclusion, she sets off in search of “an alchemical approach to the writing of time,” one capable of confronting—as Kidlat Tahimik might say—the perfumed nightmare of the entire colonial enterprise.³ Animated by Benjamin’s assertion that “the past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again,” her journey is driven by a restless search for these fleeting images.⁴

Propelled by an essayistic impulse—that roving, ruminative, shape-shifting, authorial energy—Extinction Number Six strikes an off-kilter rhythm, by turns frenetic, digressive, and occasionally languid. As the narrator’s path cuts across spatial and temporal bounds, heaps of visual and textual materials pile up in her wake. On the surface, the film seems to traffic in proliferation and plunder. Yet beneath the growing stockpiles, something else is afoot. The narrator presents as a positivist, an empiricist, with an insatiable appetite for collection—yet her reasoning is often queer. A surfeit of reading and a deficit of sleep cause her to jump the grooves along which normative thought tends to travel. As materials, ideas, and concerns accumulate within the film, one may sense at first that things simply do not add up. But soon this semblance of disarray gives way to the emergence of patterns and linkages, as we acclimatize to the manner in which the narrator spins her tales. Seed bombs are dropped, take root, and then sprout before she cycles back round to catch these new specimens in her web. As the film progresses, meaning accrues less through direct assertion than through points of convergence and elision—through echo rather than enunciation.

Essayism

In what follows, I sketch the contours of one possible zone of resonance between art practice and anthropological inquiry by considering the essayistic impulse at work in the creation of Extinction Number Six, along with its subsequent role in my centrifugal passage from the realm of cinema towards the field of

anthropology. I ask, what might the essay film—as a method of research, mode of production, and form of audio-visual inscription—share with anthropological pursuits? My intention is not to prescribe a particular method of borrowing from one to the other, nor to draw a verbal Venn diagram delineating clear boundaries or the dimensions of common terrain. Rather, in the spirit of the cinematic essay, I’ll work through strategies of suggestion, insinuation, and montage, so as to configure a space of possible resonance between these two inquisitive endeavors, a zone where neighboring objects might oscillate in sympathetic vibration. While the label “essay film” has been used to describe a subgenre of documentary, or a melding of non-fiction and experimental cinema, like its literary counterpoint, it continues to defy generic codification. I argue for a view of the essay film as method rather than genre—as a modality marked by the intricacy of its stylistic maneuvers, its micro-structural exertions, and its restless, ever-meandering flow. It’s a verb more than a noun. While I cannot here fully contend with the essay’s slippery nature, I’ll briefly sketch its somewhat peculiar behavior, along with its passage from literature into cinema.⁵

The essay is at heart an open-ended investigation—a fragmentary, wandering, though far-from-aimless form of prose. Meandering, meditative, yet remarkably resourceful, the essay forever multiplies its points of entry and exit onto the material at hand. It is an ambulatory form of inquiry, always on the lam from threats of boredom. While at times it traverses a vast terrain, the essay concentrates its energy within nooks and crannies. As it migrates from one center of attention to the next, the essay presses neither toward wholeness nor the resolution of loose ends. Its sketch-like form, however, is not an affectation, but rather reflects a decidedly skeptical disposition, conscious of the limits of human knowledge. More than recording the end result of critical thought, an essay documents a performance of thinking-through.

Many writers have penned essays on the essay, commenting on its essence while enacting its very form—Huxley, Woolf, Lukács, to name but a few. In his 1958 “The Essay as Form,” Adorno grants the essay an impassioned exegesis. He speaks of the essay as “classed among the oddities,” as possessing “a childlike freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what others have already done.”⁶ The essay’s borrowings, however, should not be confused with reckless plunder, for they evince a Benjaminian devotion to a practice of critical citation, seeking to obviate the need for quotation marks. After praising Benjamin as an inimitable master of the how of expression, refusing to separate method from material, Adorno describes the process by which an essay assembles itself:

concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of this texture … In the essay, discretely separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding, no edifice. Through their own movement, the elements crystallize into a configuration.⁷

A literary fugitive, the essay traffics in transgression. It cannot be pinned down like moth to mounting board. Within the essay’s fields of force, intuition takes the upper hand. In defiance of a positivist procedure that would render content indifferent to form, the essay asks: what method does the matter demand? The essay loosens our contemporary, disciplinary-bound understandings of method by returning to the Ancient Greeks. Before Latinate logicians of the sixteenth century conferred upon the term a sense of systematic, orderly procedure, methodos referred more broadly to a pursuit of knowledge or modes of investigation; to the development of a hodos—a path or way. Adopting a de-calcified, de-codified manner of query, the essay “takes the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure, and introduces concepts directly, ‘immediately,’ as it receives them.” The concepts, Adorno concludes, “gain their precision only through their relation to one another.”⁸ Perhaps the engine of essayism might best be characterized as an impulse or drive—an unmethodical method, as Adorno would have it.⁹ An impulse that striv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• This is an Introduction, or, What is happening?
• Formless Matters: A User’s Guide
• 1 Labyrinth of Linkages—Cinema, Anthropology, and the Essayistic Impulse
• 2 Mattering Compositions
• 3 On Misanthropology (punk, art, species-hate)
• 4 Notes Toward Critical Ethnographic Scores: Anthropology and Improvisation Training in a Breached World
• 5 Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-natural History of a Black Oak Savannah
• 6 Art, Design, and Ethical Forms of Ethnographic Intervention
• 7 The Recursivity of the Gift in Art and Anthropology
• Another World in This World
• 8 A report from the archives of the Monument to Eternal Return: Comgar
• 9 Wind Matters
• 10 The Comparative Method: A Novella
• 11 Audible Observatories: Notes on Performances
• This is an Index
• 12 Blubberbomb
• This is a Title