Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In his famous essay "On Ethnographic Surrealism" James Clifford describes it as a research perspective shared by anthropologists and artists in Paris during the 1920s and 30s (Clifford 1981). The ethnographic-surrealist perspective focused on the marvelous and the poetic of the everyday instead of its rule- and norm-boundedness. It was characterized by a fascination for the exotic as well as by a playful view toward its own culture and operated with techniques of collage and montage through which disparate elements were artfully combined. While we acknowledge James Clifford's argument that Ethnographic Surrealism is not a scientific program in the strict sense, we also look forward to a future, the emergence of a Surrealist practice of ethnography that acknowledges the scientific influences and dimensions of Surrealism often overlooked in traditional appraisals.
Repository Citation
Schwanhäußer, Anja, and Stefan Wellgraf. "From Ethnographic Surrealism to Surrealist Ethnographies." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–22. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss3/3