During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic. In this blogpost, the genre of the Corona video is approached from the perspective of anthropological filmmaking. Can anthropologists create their own cinematographic interventions into the pandemic, by joining these visual conversations while commenting on them at the same time?
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Michaela Schäuble: Ecstasy: A review of two recent exhibitions on consciousness-expanding experience
In his classic Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, I. M. Lewis (1971) contends that ritual, belief, and spiritual experience are the three cornerstones of religion, with the third certainly being the most important. Although disputed, this thesis strongly resonates with trends and themes currently taken up by gallerists and exhibition curators. Last year saw the launch of two major exhibitions on the topic of ecstasy: one at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG) in Switzerland entitled Afrique: Les religions de l’extase (Africa: The ecstatic religions) and the other one simply called EKSTASE (Ecstasy) at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany.
Marcus Banks: Revisiting Raju
Raju and His Friends was released almost exactly a quarter of a century ago, and revisiting it now at the invitation of the FocaalBlog editor is something of a trip in a time machine for me. As I discuss below, ethnographic film and anthropological theory have moved on considerably since then. The question, therefore, is whether the film still has relevance to students and fellow academics today.