Courses
ANTH 408: Sensory Ethnography
This course will explore ways of knowing made available through ethnographic and experimental film (e.g. Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner; Wedding Camels, David and Judith MacDougall, Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha; Okay Bye-Bye, Rebecca Baron)—through screenings, class discussions, and projects we will ask what and how such films communicate. Does ethnographic film generate different forms of knowledge than the ethnographic text? Or better, how do such films convey (in ways that complement and challenge written anthropological texts) the embodiment of the human subject and thus take seriously forms of sensory experience often missed in textual accounts? And what is it about film as an iconic and indexical mode of representation that allows a particular kind of access to that embodied experience? The fact that the primacy of language and text is subverted in many of the films we will study lead us to question the role of the senses and emotions in knowledge production more generally. Attending to potentially non-word based, non-propositional forms of knowing poses some risks to received epistemologies and we will ask why, in the end, the visual causes so much anxiety within the discipline of anthropology.
Link to syllabus:
https://www.mcgill.ca/anthropology/files/anthropology/stevenson_-_anth_-_408.doc.pdf
ANTH 370: Anthropology and the Image
This course will consider the role of the image in thinking, dreaming, knowing, feeling and doing. Michel Foucault, in an early piece on Binswanger’s Dream and Existence, described the image as “a language which expresses without formulating” (1993:36). What is it about the image that can draw us in—as in a photograph that we can’t take our eyes off, (or one we can’t bear to look at but do anyway)? How are images used to galvanize political action? Why also do we say that in a traumatic moment, “Images of my life passed before my eyes?” In this seminar we will consider the way anthropologists use images in their texts and films and we will take very seriously anthropology’s “iconophobia” (Taylor 1996)—giving special attention to the alleged culpability of images in what is understood as the “pornography of violence” (Daniel 1996). In so doing, we will develop a definition of the image that is broad enough to encompass soundimages, thought-images, dream-images and even word-images. We will thus be asking, with Barthes (1997) what it is that is imagistic about the image and filmic about film. This investigation will lead us to notice the way images of one sort or another form the material out of which much anthropology is built.
Link to syllabus:
https://www.mcgill.ca/anthropology/files/anthropology/370_syllabus_anthropology_and_the_image_2020_final.pdf