anthropology photo essay

Photo Essay Submissions

We welcome submissions from anthropologists at any stage in their career, working on any topic in any geographic region. You can download our best practices for this form of public scholarship and send us a message below and check out our published photo essays for inspiration. You retain all the rights to your images and are free to use them in any other context — just let us know how we can copyright your work, if applicable. We do ask that you do not reuse or remix your writing, however. Feel free to ask questions in the comment section below!

Given the specificities of a photo essay — light on text, heavy on photos — it may be helpful to conceptualize your photo essay around a discrete concept or theme. This might mean thinking about how to visually represent a concept that has been important to your written research — one that you feel is important engage a public audience, or that could be useful in public discourse. However, you might also take this opportunity to explore a concept that has come up in your research but that you haven’t been able to explore in written scholarship.

Think of yourself as a visual storyteller.

Download “Photo Essay Best Practices” cool-anthropology-photo-essays-best-practices.pdf – Downloaded 34 times – 732 KB

Dear Photo Essay Editors,

I really want you to check out photos I have taken and read the introduction to my essay. I understand I need to submit a link where you can access and view the photos along with a 200-300 word introduction, and that -- if my essay is selected -- I will be coached to write robust and engaging captions for the public to more completely understand my work and perspective.

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Anthropology & Photography

ISSN 2397-1754 Anthropology & Photography is an open-access publication series edited by the RAI Photography Committee . Emerging from the international conference of the same name organized by the RAI at the British Museum in 2014, the series will highlight and make available to the widest possible audience the best new work in the field.

We are eager to solicit new contributions from anthropologists and practitioners which could be visual, textual, or somewhere in between.

Guidelines for submission:

Texts should be on average 4-6,000 words (including endnotes and references), with anything up to 30 images. We are interested in the intersections of text and image, and the capacities of the visual to concept anthropological ideas or participate in anthropological debates. We also want to support publications that are primarily visually based and are interested in the potential of the anthropological photo-essay or extended documentary project although there should always be some accompanying text that locates the images in relation to anthropology. Authors/Photographers will be responsible for clearing all image permissions and rights to publication for both their and other’s images. Contributions should be previously unpublished. Authors are welcome to discuss their proposed submission with the editor, [email protected]

Manuscripts should be submitted to: [email protected]

Volume 1 Daniel Miller, Photography in the Age of Snapchat (published December 2015)

Volume 2 Emilie Le Febvre, A Shaykh's Portrait: Images and Tribal History amongst Bedouin in the Negev (published March 2016)

Volume 3 Catherine de Lorenzo and Juno Gemes, From Resistance Towards Invisibility (published May 2016)

Volume 4 Shireen Walton, Photographic Truth in Motion: The Case of Iranian Photoblogs (published May 2016)

Volume 5 Carol Payne, Culture, Memory and Community through Photographs: Developing an Inuit-based Research Methodology (published September 2016)

Volume 6 Sabra Thorner, Visual Economies and Digital Materialities of Koorie Kinship and Community (published November 2016)

Volume 7 Paolo Favero, 'The Transparent Photograph': Reflections on the Ontology of Photographs in a Changing Digital Landscape (published January 2017)

Volume 8 Heather Shirey, Pierre Verger, Roger Bastide and A Cigarra: Candomblé, photography, and anthropology in the popular press (published November 2017)

Volume 9 Francisco Martínez, Analogue photo booths in Berlin: A stage, a trap, a condenser and four shots for kissing the person you love (published May 2018)

Volume 10 Christopher Morton, The graphicalization of description: Drawing and photography in the fieldwork journals and museum work of Henry Balfour (published July 2018)

Volume 11 Odira Morewabone, MATATUism: Styling a Rebel (published January 2019)

Volume 12 Duncan Shields, Alfred Maudslay’s Causality Dilemma: Archaeology, Photography and the influence of Nineteenth-CenturyTravel Literature (published June 2019)

Volume 13 Michael, Aird, Joanna Sassoon and David Trigger, From Illustration to Evidence: Historical Photographs and Aboriginal Native Title Claims in South-east Queensland, Australia (published February 2020)

Volume 14 PhotoDemos Collective, University College London, Citizens of Photography (published November 2021)

Volume 15 Heangjin Park, Reading from Cutouts: The Aesthetics of Alienation in Photographs of Chinese Factory Workers (published April 2022)

Volume 16 Sabine Luning and Robert Jan Pijpers, Drawing on words and images: Collaborations in the anthropology of the underground (published December 2022)

Submissions
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Book Reviews

Blog Editor

September 20th, 2017, photo essay: seeing displacement through ethnographic photography #lsereturn.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Visual and written narratives about conflict and victimhood tend to generate a series of much-repeated tropes. In this article, LSE’s Elizabeth Storer unveils a project which seeks to present a more accurate portrayal of displacement through the medium of photography.

This article is part of our Politics of Return series, an AHRC/ESRC PaCCs-funded project which explores the dynamics of return and reintegration of refugees in Central and Eastern Africa. Follow all updates on the project on Twitter and Instagram through the hashtag #LSEreturn.

Since 2013, the resurgence of conflict in the South has once again forced hundreds of thousands of residents from their homes, often across international borders. It is now estimated that nearly one million South Sudan citizens are seeking refuge in Uganda. The scale and complexity of the current crisis has reinforced the usual use of statistical descriptors, explanations of ‘inter-ethnic violence’, and impersonalised stories of victimhood in popular accounts. The advocacy of this explanatory industry – while perhaps based on good intentions – often silences and flattens local experience.

To counteract these generalised narratives which continue to shape how global publics understand war in South Sudan, the Beyond the Statistics workshop hosted on the 26 May 2017 at the Uganda National Museum, brought together an audience of over 80 representatives from South Sudanese communities, academia and activist projects to discuss alternative ways of seeing the long history of violence and displacement. In two panel discussions, scholars explored the practical, intellectual and emotional politics and history of displacement. Panel One, R eflections on Long-term and historic displacement featured presentations from Dr Mohamed A.G. Bakhit, Atem Elfatih and Dr Nicki Kindersley . The second panel focused on the contemporary displacement experience, and hosted Peter Justin, Clement Samuel, Ogeno Charles and Bashir Ahmed Mohammed Babikir.

Emplacing Visual Narratives

Representations of conflict – and victimhood – in South Sudan are not just a product of writings on the conflict. In much photojournalism relating to the South Sudanese conflict and associated refugee experience – there are particular recurrent visual themes. Images often present militarised, masculine tropes of war – contrasted to helpless women and children who – in displacement seem to be waiting assistance. On the other hand, echoing the somewhat optimistic narrative with which the Uganda policy of self-settling refugees has been reported as a ‘welcoming’ and model example. Neither of these generalised tropes accurately reflect the lived experience of displacement.

Enduring Exile

Aiming to counteract these generalised tropes, the Enduring Exile project, strives to present a more realistic narrative of displacement through the medium of photography. The approach of this project was grounded in ethnographic research, which aimed to understand the logics and institutions which actually structured experiences of exile. Without denying the loneliness and isolation which comes with the uncertain surroundings of displacement, we aimed to understand how these emotional struggles were overcome in individual and communal settings.

Based in Arua Town, the project follows the lives of those that have opted to endure exile outside of the camps. Owing to its location near the border of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Arua has long hosted a cosmopolitan population. During prolonged periods of civil war, South Sudanese citizens have periodically sought refuge within these city limits. Some have developed long-standing links with communities in the West Nile, which have proved to be crucial for their survival. Often the ability to live in Arua is afforded by remittances from home, but as the value of currency continues to deteriorate, life becomes increasingly precarious.

Living in an urban setting does have benefits. For those who can afford school fees, educating children provides an essential investment for the future of families. However in Arua, as sometimes undocumented outsiders – South Sudanese live largely beyond the gaze of international humanitarian interveners. Fearing authorities, most avoid interacting with the arms of the Ugandan State. Life is often isolated, particularly as families are often stretched across national geographies. It is often the different denominations of the Christian church that offer the most coherent semblance of support for individuals subject to growing financial pressures and social isolation.

The church in exile

Dictated by local realities and priorities, this project documented the congregation of South Sudanese worshippers in three churches across Arua: Bishop Alison Theology College, Pajulu; St Charles Lwanga Catholic Church, and Ambiri-ambati Anglican Church. In each case, specific services have been set to accommodate the influx of South Sudanese citizens – translated into Equatorian languages, Zande and Dinka respectively.

The forms, objects and styles of worship differs according to denomination. In Pajulu, the Theology College which has served as a haven for displaced South Sudanese over successive periods of exile, now often hosts Pentecostal preachers. Sermons often serve to make direct links between individual sin and responsibility for continuing conflict. The message is clear: active repentance will facilitate return. Often uncontrolled outbursts of prayer and repentance contrast to the solemn regularity of the weekly service in the Charles Lwanga Catholic Church – where the set liturgy is of course the same as that read in Catholic churches at home.

South Sudanese worship remains divided in Arua Town – though this is partly because of the different languages. However church services provide a forum for different South Sudanese communities to come together and express their identity, without the self-censorship that can be involved in daily life amid Ugandan communities. These services provide ongoing support for the challenges faced in exile.

Viewing Images

At the Beyond the Statistics workshop, the project was displayed for attendees to interact and comment on this representation of their exile. The display was coupled by a theatrical interlude from the South Sudanese United Students Association, who feature in the exhibition. Their play, Healing through God’s Power , which was photographed in the grounds of St Charles Lwanga Catholic Church, and documents the moral and spiritual challenges of keeping faith during conflict and exile.

Coupled with the static portrayal of their performance, this drama provided a multi-dimensional snap-shot of life in exile, and the centrality of spiritual – as well as material challenges.

Impact of Enduring Exile

Enduring Exile makes visible groups of South Sudanese citizens who, by choosing to avoid residing in humanitarian settlements, may otherwise by invisible. It also focuses on church spaces central to constructing normalcy during exile, and offering teachings key to generating hope that return may one day be possible.

Documenting alternative spaces where life in exile is lived out, and emotional experience resides is difficult. It requires sustained research, and building the trust of communities. But it is only by uncovering these spaces that we can begin to understand how individuals and groups endure exile.

Find out more about the Politics of Return research project .

Read a full report on the panels, speakers and outcomes of the ‘Beyond the Statistics’ workshop hosted on the 26 May 2017 at the Uganda National Museum.

Elizabeth Storer ( @lizziestorer ) is a doctoral researcher in LSE’s Department of International Development.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the Africa at LSE blog, the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa or the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Acknowledgements

The Beyond the Statistics workshop was supported by funding from the Haycock Grant , administered through the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the Nationality, Citizenship and Belonging for South Sudanese Communities grant awarded to Dr Mohamed A.G. Bakit and Dr Nicki Kindersley from the Volkswagen Foundation .

The Enduring Exile project is a collaboration between Elizabeth Storer (research) and Katie G. Nelson (photography) and can be viewed online .

Curation for this exhibition was provided by Kara Blackmore, kindly assisted by the Politics of Return ESRC/AHRC grant . The Enduring Exile exhibition remains on display at the National Museum of Uganda , and will appear at the London School of Economics and Political Science, later in 2017.

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Thinking through the Photo Essay: Observations for Medical Anthropology

Medicine Anthropology Theory

As photography becomes more prevalent in ethnographic research, scholars should more seriously consider the photo essay as a medium for sharing their work. In this Position Piece, we present guidelines for the creation of ethnographic photo essays for medical anthropology that do not simply combine image and text, but create a balance that allows words to provide context for the image(s) and images to reinforce or challenge the text. We feel there are three basic elements every photo essay must consider that are informed by the theory and practice of visual anthropology. While a solid background in visual anthropology is not necessary to produce a successful photo essay, being mindful of these three elements in relation to your work will help you develop a photo essay that combines the best of what both media offer your audience.

Related Papers

Ruth Prince

The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, comprises a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlining this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology and photography explores key issues arising out of recent work in the area. While reviewing the contributions of history, STS and photographic theory to the study of medical visual cultures, regimes and economies, we explore what a distinctively anthropological approach – through its ethnographic and comparative scope-offers to the topic. Unlike medical historians and STS scholars who over the past decade have been increasingly engaging with visual culture in a systematic manner, anthropologists have traditionally paid scant attention to the visual aspects of medicine, epidemiology and public health. This is, however, a trend that is beginning to change, with major projects and conferences dedicated to the anthropological examination of medical visual culture. If this interest is at the moment demonstrated mainly by medical anthropologists, it is the aim of this special issue to expose some important strands of this new research to a wider audience, and in particular to scholars engaged in the field of visual anthropology.

Medical anthropology

Jerome Crowder

Sofia Caldeira

The aim of this text is to explore the possibilities for the study of the photographic image in the scope of Visual Anthropology. It begins by presenting the predominance of the Visual in contemporary society and the current anthropological interest in the questions of visibility. The text then refers the ability that images have to expose wider social problematics. Soon after it points to some methodological possibilities for the study of visual productions and the dependency that those methodologies have on a certain fascination that the images exert on the analyst. It is this fascination that comes in play in the choice of a photographic theme for this essay. It explains why this focus on a broader photographic discourse and establishes several parallels between the activities of both photographers and anthropologists. It thus analyzes the advantages that the indexical character of photography brings into the anthropological study, but it warns to the necessity of recognizing the subjective influences at play in the making of a photographic image. It attempts to make evident the benefits that the study of photographic images might bring to the general field of Anthropology. Finally it mentions the limits of such a photographic study.

Megha Sharma Sehdev

This course explores how photographs can be used as a tool in the writing process. Many well-known writers such as Sigmund Freud kept photographs to help develop theoretical ideas; many more-including Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Lewis Carroll – were amateur photographers and used photos to render descriptions of places. Anthropologists, no less, have used photography from the colonial period to the present in order to capture, remember, and analyze aspects of human culture in their fieldsites. In this course we will: 1) acquire basic composition skills in photography; 2) explore how photographs can assist us in developing an anthropological writing practice; 3) examine how photographs interact with writing. A text may strive to "replicate" a photograph, but we will also explore other dynamics between these mediums. When does the analogy between photo and text collapse? What can one medium accomplish that the other cannot? Other themes to be covered will include: rendering a description versus forming an interpretation; the place of sensations and interiority in the creative process, and the role of time and reflection in drafting a photo-text. We will also discuss issues of care and ethics in photographing and describing people, places, and objects. Course Structure: The course will be project-based. You will be introduced to basic photographic composition skills using principles of geometry, framing, and emphasis, and you will use the principles to take photographs of your chosen fieldsite. We will then practice writing descriptions drawing from our fieldnotes. The class will examine particular texts in which visual imagery has been coupled with certain forms of writing; based on these readings, we will experiment with writing techniques. As time goes on, the earlier data and write-ups will be re-visited to see what aspects may have initially escaped our awareness. Thus we will learn to " re-visualize " image and text in an ongoing analytic process. Toward the end, we will work on producing a vision of our individual writing that carries a degree of consistency and a narrative arc. Class website: http://craftinganthropologicaltext.tumblr.com

Visual Anthropology Review

patrick sutherland

Visual Ethnography Journal -Special Issue

Chiara Scardozzi , Marina Berardi

Ethnography and Photography are founded on relational practices which are based on encounter and storytelling. In such an observation, participation and representation space, these disciplines are configured as two forms of writing with their own methodological specificities, as well as zones of contact. Considering the profound technological changes in the recent decades (such as greater accessibility to photographic devices, the increasing production and circulation of photographs, the diversification of virtual spaces, the new digital ethnography), what are the current links between ethnographic research and photography? What kind of contribution do the visual languages offer to the production of anthropological knowledge? Which kind of relations are established between texts and images? How creative and/or authorial artistic research combines with scientific knowledge? The aim of this issue of Visual Ethnography, edited by Marina Berardi and Chiara Scardozzi, is to generate a critical reflection starting from intersectional points between the two disciplines and the plurality of visions and methods. It is conceived as a moment of thought and comparison on the role and the future of photography in ethnographic research, through a theoretical and visual approach, to start a reasoning about theoretical and practical tools of cultural and social anthropology, considering how photography and/or post-photography and its uses declined through the different devices, in addition to making the research contents visible, can also be considered as a real collaborative practice, methodology of intervention, restitution and/or autonomous authorial narration. The call is open to papers and photo essays focused on experiences of collaborative visual ethnographies that use photography to solicit specific narratives and / or include methods of participatory photography aimed at involving groups and communities in the research and co-production of visual contents; researches that explore the possibilities of creating subjectivity in the online life by sharing new forms of self-representation of the body, gender, identity; reflections that interweave ethics and aesthetics in the representation of otherness ; studies concerning photographic collections that are interpreted through their political and public use and inserted (or censored) within the so-called heritagization processes; researches relating to the most innovative and creative trends in contemporary photography that redefine the boundary between reality and fiction starting from the idea of "post-truth", using different media and methods.

Anthrovision

Aleksandra (Ola) Gracjasz

While photography has a long history of being used by anthropologists, not much has been written of the use of anthropology by photographers. Based on my personal experiences of two distinct ethnographic fieldworks, I argue that these two practices, photography and anthropology, overlap in several ways and one can combine the skills, techniques, knowledge, insights, and objectives from the two disciplines. Throughout my master’s and PhD research I was constantly navigating back and forth between my anthropological and photography skills, which led to a blurring of the boundaries between the two. Both practices fed into each other and my anthropological work gained advantage from my photography. Specifically, anthropology can benefit from the art of photography in a way that expands and deepens meanings and ways of looking. In this article, I will provide examples of how I combined these skills and will present my argument in three steps: firstly, I will focus on mediation; how looking through the medium of a camera affects what and how we see. Secondly, following the idea of “the affective lens” developed by Brent Luvaas (2017), I will delve into how photography helped me bridge distance in the field and facilitated an easier engagement with research participants. Finally, I will spend some time explaining the state of “heightened awareness” presented by David MacDougall (2006) and will expand on it by drawing on Jean Rouch’s concept of ciné-transe (Rouch 1978). I will also refer to the concept of kinok by Dziga Vertov as a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship between the camera and the body.

GHMJ (Global Health Management Journal)

Andrew Macnab

Background: In the applied health and science disciples there is an expectation that project work is reported through a publication. The conventional papers written to do this follow a structure that includes sections providing background, methods, results and a discussion or conclusion, supported by figures and tables. Sometimes photographs are included, and with more on-line publications the opportunities have increased for these to be available in full color. Borrowing from the field of photojournalism photo-essays are now a publication option where a series of images are used to tell the story; these are often related to health and well-being.Aims: To summarize the methodology used to effectively combine a series of images with a brief text, and short reference list to create a visually engaging and informative short report.Guidelines: Images are taken throughout the project with consent obtained from those whose images will be recognisable. Creative licence is used to compile r...

Planet Bee Magazine

Michaela Clark

Photography has been used within the field of medicine to record conspicuous symptoms of disease since the mid-19th century. But the meaning and interpretation of these images are not limited to hospital administration, medical education, or scientific publication. This brief article asks ‘What is a clinical photograph?’ by addressing the tension between this form of medical depiction (on the one hand) and its popular as well as personal dimensions (on the other). Ultimately, I propose to show that historical photographs of patients are complex images that cannot simply be labelled ‘clinical’.

Acknowledgements

The Photo-Essay is Dead, Long Live the Photo-Essay is both the name of a workshop and title of a rapid-prototype publication. The workshop was organized by the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective for the 2016 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Minneapolis Minnesota, held on November 17, 2016. The workshop featured presentations from international contemporary art photographers, photo-journalists and anthropologists and resulted in a collaboratively-produced rapid prototype ‘zine of the photo-essays curated for presentation in the workshop and photo-essays by workshop participants. The zine cover was designed and the book was printed by Sam Gould of Beyond Repair , in Minneapolis as a limited edition and distributed at a launch event 36 hours later.

About the publication

Before the workshop, presenters were asked to submit creatively designed and critically engaged page-spreads featuring photo-essays and discussions they would present during the workshop. Participants in the workshop were encouraged to print photographs from their own photo-essay works in-progress and bring them to work with, throughout the day. We documented the event and the spreads and notes and included a selection of them in the zine publication. Sam Gould of Beyond Repair created the cover.

While photographs have been a component of anthropological practice since its earliest formation as a discipline, there has been little sustained and critical engagement with modes of presentation and publication in the context of visual anthropology. As a result there has to date been little clarity around the definition of a photo-essay especially within the context of anthropology. This reality is precisely what interested us. Our academic conventions for sharing photographs have been cemented around a limited number of typically black and white images in a journal article or monograph.

We also believe that still photographs and their entanglements with other media are on the cusp of finding new importance in anthropology in the form of the photo-essay, in particular as the serial nature of photography is being tested out within digital infrastructures on the Internet. We were interested in a workshop that could be a testing ground, and so we encouraged making and working on the photo-essay by the workshop participants: To disrupt, to re-define, and to work within and beyond the photographic frame. ET provided simple supplies such as scissors, sharpies, post-its, and invited participants to use these to explore new modes presentation, to include new formats, to create a record of questions and comments that arose over the course of the day.

Building on Ethnographic Terminalia’s art-anthropology experiments at off-site locations, we decided to return to the American Anthropological Association annual meetings site in 2016 to re-examine the photo-essay within anthropological, photographic and publishing communities within the format of a workshop. ‘The Photo-Essay is Dead, Long Live the Photo-Essay!’ emulates our recent workshop and rapid-publication projects ( Vancouver 2015 ). To achieve this within the framework of the AAA meetings, we issued an open call and invited participants to actively consider how experimentations at the intersection of art and anthropology might function as prototypes for thinking about the future of the photographic image in anthropology.

The workshop was organized around presentations by international contemporary art photographers, photo-journalists and anthropologists, in three parts. Part One began with provacteurs Stephanie Sadre-Orafai and Jordan Tate (University of Cincinnati). Part Two featured Lee Douglas (New York University), Kate Schneider (Ontario College of Art and Design), and Teresa Montoya (New York University). Part Three featured Aubrey Graham (Centre for Humanities Research, South Africa) Donna DeCesare (University of Texas, Austin) and Jeffrey Schonberg (San Francisco State University).

After the workshop, Ethnographic Terminalia and guest editor Gabriela Aceves-Sepulvéda completed the design, layout, and printing of the zine. Then we sent it to Sam Gould at Beyond Repair in Minneapolis for printing and binding within a 36-hour time frame. These limited edition print copies were made available on Saturday, November 19, 2016 at the Society for Visual Anthropology-supported Ethnographic Terminalia Lounge and Book Launch in the AAA Meeting venue.

‘The Photo-Essay is Dead, Long Live the Photo-Essay!’ was organized by the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective for the 2016 meetings of the American Anthropological Organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This rapid-prototype publication, which was printed and launched within 36 hours of the conclusion of its partner workshop, and this website, is the product of the creative energy and enthusiasm of many people and organizations.

We would like to express our gratitude to all of the workshop participants for joining us in the experimental creation of this publication. In particular, we acknowledge the workshop presenters for sharing their inspiring work in the workshop and in the pages that follow: Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Jordan Tate, Jeffrey Schonberg, Donna DeCesare, Kate Schneider, Lee Douglas, Teresa Montoya, and Aubrey Graham.

Our gratitude to Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, who led the print design and layout of the zine, and to Hannah Turner who assisted the rapid-production of the zine throughout the workshop and into the night. We are also very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Sam Gould at Minneapolis’ Beyond Repair , who designed and printed our cover, and facilitated the rapid printing of the publication. Thank you to Reese Muntean and Aynur Kadir for documenting the workshop.

We extend our sincere thanks to the American Anthropological Association (AAA), in particular Ushma J. Suvarnakar and Samuel Martinez, for inviting this experimental event to the 2016 meetings. We are ever grateful to our funding partners for making this work possible: The AAA, The Society for Visual Anthropology, and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

This website was designed by Kate Hennessy, Aynur Kadir, and Kyle McIntosh at Popgun Media.

Photographs are by Reese Muntean and Kate Hennessy.

The video was produced by Aynur Kadir and Kate Hennessy with the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective.

The Ethnographic Terminalia Collective is: Stephanie Takaragawa, Trudi Lynn Smith, Fiona P. McDonald, Kate Hennessy, and Craig Campbell.

Join the SCA
Cultural Anthropology

Fieldsights Editors’ Forum

Writing with Light

Cultural Anthropology began publishing photo essays on its website in 2012, amid wide-ranging discussions about alternative forms of critical ethnographic expression. In 2016, this section was relaunched as a collaboration with the Society for Visual Anthropology known as Writing with Light. While further submissions are no longer being accepted, the peer-reviewed photo essays presented here testify to a fertile period of experimentation and engagement with visual scholarship.

The Writing with Light collective is currently in conversation about next steps for the project; please see the Society for Visual Anthropology website for updates.

Final Writing with Light Series

By Vivian Choi , Mark Westmoreland , Arjun Shankar , Craig Campbell , and Lee Douglas

October 29, 2019

The Writing with Light collective was a SCA/SVA joint initiative which provided editors and authors the opportunity to focus closely on the photo-essay as a dis... More

Camps and Ruins: Notes from Greece on the Visual Representation of the 2015 “Refugee Crisis”

By Yannis Ziindrilis and Dimitris Dalakoglou

My grandmother had very few photographs from her childhood; I believe there were only two.1 The first photo was one taken in an unknown studio, depicting her en... More

“This is about racism and greed”: Photographs of Philadelphia’s Mass School Closures

By Amy J. Bach , Julia A. McWilliams , and Elaine Simon

After months of community opposition and protest, on March 7, 2013, the School District of Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission (SRC) voted to close twenty-t... More

Experiments in the Field

By Paul V. Stock , Tim Hossler , and D. Bryon Darby

Farmers are either disappearing or rock stars (Weiler, Otero, and Wittman 2016; Phillipov and Goodman 2017). If a farm is not reaching economies of scale then i... More

Borderwaters: Conversing with Fluidity at the Dominican Border

By Kyrstin Mallon Andrews

Wind tugging at my sleeve feet sinking into the sand I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean where the two overlap a gentle coming together at other ... More

Connotative Memories

By Derek Pardue

Recent events of violence in São Paulo, Brazil targeting Palestinian, Syrian, as well as Angolan, Nigerian, and Congolese bystanders during a protest against th... More

Debris n-1: Visualizing a Bullerman Erotics

By Amar Wahab

In this photo essay I hope to extend the contemplative space of what Bruno Latour (1993, 144) calls a “parliament of things” through the juxtaposition and relat... More

Archiving Postcolonial Modernity: The Foreign Service Family Slide Show

By Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

November 14, 2018

My father worked for the Indian Foreign Service from 1955 to 1982. During this period our nuclear family lived in several countries across Africa, South America... More

Navigating the Anarchy of Debris: Observing the Loss of Material Sovereignty

By Sreedeep Bhattacharya

November 5, 2018

This essay is an immersive exploration of an abandoned industrial site, which addresses the degeneration of materials and the imagery of ruination. By visually ... More

Repetition and Extraordinary Living in the Gaza Camp

By Michael Vicente Pérez and Elena Boffetta

June 20, 2018

On a winding two-lane road, just a few kilometers southwest of the ancient city of Jarash, a small refugee camp punctuates the Jordanian landscape. Established ... More

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Larping Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s: A Look Into the Birth of Performance Studies and Experiential Ethnography

The historical precedents similar to Nordic larp range from ancient Egyptian ritual dramas (Pohjola 2015) to psychological techniques in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Fatland 2016), from the war gaming associations of American campuses (Peterson 2012) in the 1970s to Hungarian children’s camps (Túri & Hartyándi 2022). Sometimes a trail of influence can be drawn, at others it is a question of parallel evolution. Yet, no matter how distant the relation, lessons can be learned across millennia by studying similar practices earlier on.

One such example is the fruit of the auspicious friendship between anthropologist Victor Turner and theatre director Richard Schechner. Their mutual fascination towards aspects of their respective fields which we might now consider larp-like led to the development of performance studies and experiential ethnography.

The work of both pioneers has been cited in works exploring the lineage of Nordic larp, such as Play To Love: Reading Victor Turner’s “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual; an Essay in Comparative Symbology” (Ericsson 2004), Chorus Novus: Or Looking for Participation in Classical Greece (Pohjola 2015), and The Classical Roots of Larp (Pohjola 2017). However, the interaction between Schechner and Turner and their experiments actually aligning with larp has not been discussed before.

Victor and Richard

Victor Turner (1920–1983) was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage.

The focal point of his extensive field studies were the Ndembu, a Bantu ethnic group in Zambia, with whom he and his family lived for fifteen months in grass huts. Victor and his wife Edith, also an anthropologist, would study the Ndembu and home school their children. At nights Victor would read the freshly published The Lord of the Rings to the kids (Baer 2016). The Turners’ son, poet Frederick Turner describes his parents

They went there as traditional, structuralist, functionalist anthropologists with a Marxist background. They were both Atheists … Their primary interest was studying the structure of roles, statuses, and relationships – kinship – in the culture, and seeing them as a system for survival. They had expected to find that economic factors would be the primary forces in the culture, but they discovered, instead, that it was really ideology, ideas, religion, ritual, and ritual symbolism that were running the society… So my parents were struck with the power of religion and ritual in the Ndembu culture, and they became world renowned experts on those subjects (Baer 2016).

Meanwhile, Richard Schechner (1934–) is a theater director known for his radical interpretations of classical plays, the editor of The Drama Review, and a performance theorist with a major interest in rituals.

Schechner’s seminal work had been the participatory play Dionysus in 69 staged in New York. It was based on Euripides’s play The Bacchae but deconstructed the text, and invited the spectators to become active participants. Schechner says they wanted to transform an aesthetic event into a social event and managed to create “ an atmosphere in which participation ranged from clapping and singing to spectators stripping and joining in the ritual celebrations and dances” (Schechner, 1973).

If Dionysus in 69 sounds suspiciously like the rituals that take place at Nordic larps and larpers’ gatherings, it is no coincidence. Both Schechner and Turner have been a major influence on many larp designers and scholars. The three rules for participation Schechner (1973) detailed were:

The audience is in a living space and a living situation. Things may happen to and with them as well as “in front” of them.
When a performer invites participation, he must be prepared to accept and deal with the spectator’s reactions.
Participation should not be gratuitous.

These rules are not met by all contemporary immersive theatre productions, but they are met by most, if not all larps.

When Turner was studying the Ndembu and when Schechner was transgressing Euripides, they had not yet met, but they were certainly aware of each other’s work. Schechner described their first meeting like this:

Turner and I first met face-to-face after he phoned me in the spring of 1977. “I am in New York to introduce a lecture by Clifford Geertz at Columbia,” Turner said. “Why not you and I go out for a beer after?” Knowing Turner’s writing, I was eager to meet him. When we did, what should have been a 45-minute getting-to-know-you chat turned into a 3+ hour seminar-of-two. Really, we were made for each other: inquisitive, good sense of humor, wide-ranging interests, not afraid to go out on a limb, rampant with appetites. And, of course, performance. What Vic called “process” I called performance. It was social drama, liminal-liminoid, communitas, ritual, and more. Vic’s mother was an actress; theatre was in his upbringing. He had an urgent belief in the efficacy of human enactment, and a delight in it also (Schechner 2020).

This first meeting quickly grew into a collaboration that lasted until Turner’s untimely death in 1983. They worked together on three conferences sponsored by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and crucially, on a two-week workshop sponsored by School of the Arts, New York University (Schechner 2020).

The symposium in which they first collaborated, Cultural Frames and Reflections: Ritual, Drama and Spectacle, was held at a castle in Austria. The symposium was “a performance in itself” (Stoeltje 1978, 51), bringing together “anthropologists, literary critics, folklorists, a historian, a semiotician and impresario, a dramatist and stage director, novelist, poets, and an ethnopoetician – participant observers and observer-participants preoccupied with many kinds of cultural performance” (MacAloon 1984b, 2). Interwoven with the conference papers were poetry readings, dramatic techniques, storytelling, and viewings of Fellini’s La Strada and the film version of Dionysus in ’69, the avant-garde play that had established Schechner’s reputation in theater. … the symposium altered the models of reality that the participants brought to the table in the first place (Stoeltje, 451), and each of them returned to their work at least slightly transformed (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

The Groundbreaking Workshop

The symposium resulted in a workshop which was held at Schechner’s Performance Garage in Soho, where Schechner’s company, The Performance Group, had given groundbreaking performances such as Makbeth , Tooth of Crime , and Dionysus in 69 . This summer workshop was a key point in the development of their art.

Schechner invited Victor and Edith Turner, anthropologist Alexander Alland, and sociologist Erving Goffman to join himself and 27 participants to take part in a two-week workshop (Schechner, 2020). The participants were graduate students, professors, performers, and devisers of performance, and numbered 16 women and 11 men.

The participants had applied based on an announcement where the workshop was described like this:

This is an intensive workshop – two sessions daily, 5 days per week with all faculty participating in most of the sessions so that there will be maximum interaction among faculty and among faculty and students. The workshop will explore the interface between ritual and theatre. […] The aim of the workshop is to shatter boundaries between performance and social sciences and between art and cognitive studies. […] participants will be selected to ensure a balance between artists, scholars and scientists (Schechner, 2020).

The workshop turned out to be groundbreaking for the participants and for the fields they presented. It also seems to have many parallels to early forms of American larp and quasi-larp that were already in existence in the late 1970s such as Society for Creative Anachronism, the Model United Nations, and Society for Interactive Literature.

According to Schechner (2020), they “talked, performed, partied (some), took a weekend trip to Baltimore for a theatre festival, and dove deep into each other’s ideas and felt experiences.” Victor Turner himself describes the workshop in great detail in his article “Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology” (Turner, 1979):

Even the best of ethnographic films fail to communicate much of what it means to be a member of the society filmed. … How, then, may this be done? One possibility may be to turn the more interesting portions of ethnographies into playscripts, then to act them out in class, and finally to turn back to ethnographies armed with the understanding that comes from “getting inside the skin” of members of other cultures, rather than merely “taking the role of the other” in one’s own culture (Turner, 1979).

Turner emphasizes the difference between playing a character of one’s own culture and playing a different culture altogether. Later on, he would also find joy and enlightenment in the former.

This is similar language that is used of playing characters in larps: “Most players report having the phenomenological experience of immersion in role-playing games, using phrases such as ‘losing myself in the game’ or ‘the character took over’” (Bowman, 2018).

Turner continues:

…at Schechner’s summer institute, I tried to involve anthropology and drama students in the joint task of writing scripts for and performing ethnographies. It seemed best to choose parts of classical ethnographies that lent themselves to dramatic treatment […] But time being short (we had only two weeks), I had to fall back upon my own ethnography both because I knew it best, and because I had already, to some extent, written a script for a substantial amount of field data in the form I have called social drama (Turner, 1979).

The “script” in question was two social dramas Turner described in his book Schism and Continuity in An African Society (1968) , describing life in the Ndembu village.

Schechner sees the actor, in taking the role of another — provided by the playscript — as moving, under the intuitive and experienced eye of the director/producer, from the “not-me” (the blueprinted role) to the “not-not-me” (the realized role), and he sees the movement itself as constituting a kind of liminal phase in which all kinds of experiential experiments are possible, indeed mandatory (Turner, 1979).

The “not-me” or “the blueprinted role” would traditionally mean a role described in the play text, and here, a person from the ethnographical description of village life and ritual. In a larp context, it would refer to a character description provided by the larp designers. The “not-not-me” or “the realized role” in a larp would be the larper’s interpretation of the character, the character as it is actually played.

Turner uses the word “liminal” a lot. It comes from the Latin word limes , meaning “border”. Liminal events happen when crossing a border, entering the world of the ritual or enacted social drama or larp. Participants leave behind their everyday identities and “absorb a new ‘liminal’ identity for the duration of the ritual, and relate to each other through that identity. … [O]ther participants have a similar role, and only see each other through that role” (Pohjola, 2015).

To get things started, the group had read the social dramas by themselves, and then Turner read them out loud, offering necessary commentary along the way. The dramas dealt with “Ndembu village politics, competition for headmanship, ambition, jealousy, sorcery, the recruiting of factions, and the stigmatizing of rivals” (Turner, 1979). These are key components in many a larp plot, as well.

But how does one turn a larp script or a social drama script into something that lives and breathes?

When I had finished reading the drama accounts, the actors in the workshop told me at once that they needed to be “put in the right mood”; to “sense the atmospherics” of Ndembu village life. One of them had brought some records of Yoruba music, and, though this is a different musical idiom from Central African music, I led them into a dancing circle, showing them to the best of my limited, arthritic ability, some of the moves of Ndembu dancing (Turner, 1979).

The second social drama contained a name inheritance ritual ( Kuswanika ijina ), and the group decided to try to recreate it with the limited props available at the Performance Garage. This impulse turned the workshop into what seems very much like a larp festival. The ritual

…marked the temporary end of a power struggle between the stigmatized candidate for headmanship, Sandombu, and Mukanza, the successful candidate. Sandombu had been exiled from the village because he was accused of killing his cousin Nyamuwaha through sorcery. Sandombu had been gone for a year and sympathies had turned for him. In a b plot there was illness in the village and at the same time many dreamed of Nyamuwaha. The Ndembu interpreted this to mean that Nyamuwaha’s shade was disturbed by the troubles in the village, and used this as a pretext to invite Sandombu back to ritually plant a tree that would appease Nyamuwaha. Officially the ritual would involve Nyamuwaha’s eldest daughter Manyosa inheriting her name, but this was the context for it (Turner, 1979).

As any amateur game master would, Turner cast himself in the key role, playing Sandombu. He then had to find someone to play Manyosa. “Someone whom we shall call Becky, a professional director of drama, volunteered” (Turner, 1979).

I asked Becky to give me the name of a recently deceased close female relative of an older generation who had meant much in her life. Considerably moved, she mentioned her mother’s sister Ruth. I then prayed in Chilunda to “village ancestors.” Becky sat beside me before the “shrine,” her legs extended in front of her, her head bowed in the Ndembu position of ritual modesty. I then anointed the shrine-tree with the improvised mpemba, white clay, symbol of unity with the ancestors and the living community, and drew three lines with it on the ground, from the shrine to myself. I then anointed Becky by the orbits of her eyes, on the brow, and above the navel. I declared her to be “Nswana-Ruth,” “successor of Ruth”, in a way identified with Ruth, in another replacing her, though not totally, as a structural persona. I repeated the anointing process with other members of the group, not naming them after deceased kin but joining them into the symbolic unity of our recently formed community of teachers and students (Turner, 1979).

The workshop participants had discussed the ritual enactment for hours and agreed it was the turning point after which they understood both the factions and scapegoating within the village and also the sense of the village belonging together, as well as the affectual structure of the social drama (Turner, 1979). The physical and mental motions enhanced their collective and individual understanding of the conflict situation.

This was their first foray into “larp”, and it led to many more. They wanted to stage the ritual dramas in their entirety, not just individual rituals. One question was whether this would be a realistic larp or a fantasy larp: “some events … would be treated realistically, naturalistically; but the world of cultural beliefs, particularly those connected with sorcery and the ancestor cult, would be treated symbolically” (Turner, 1979). They talked about making a film to be shown in the background. Whether the end goal of the enactment would be to perform to a regular theatre audience or for the participants to understand the culture by exploring the rituals, was also up in the air.

It is clear from his writing that after these exercises Turner himself started to strongly identify with and root for the character he played: “In capitalistic America, or socialistic Russia or China, a political animal like Sandombu might have thrived. In Ndembu village politics, however, a person with ambition, but procreatively sterile and without many matrilinear kin, was almost from the start a doomed man” (Turner, 1979).

The workshop was over before they could portray all the social dramas they had planned, but a spark was ignited, something that would continue in further conferences, and in the works of Schechner, the Turners, and many of the students who were present. “There is nothing like acting the part of a member of another culture in a crisis situation characteristic of that culture to detect inauthenticity in the reporting usually made by Westerners and to raise problems undiscussed or unresolved in the ethnographic narrative,” Turner writes (1979).

The workshop was a turning point for Schechner, as well:

I made more than 50 pages of notes. These tell me of vigorous discussions among Turner, Goffman, Alland, and I — especially during the [three] days Goffman was there. … Turner was a transgressive superstar for sure. The takeaway, 41 years later, from that workshop is a flash of memories. Sitting in a circle on the second floor of The Performing Garage in SoHo. Participating in, evoking, and responding to Vic’s ebullience, brilliance, jouissance, and appetite to go where few if any anthropologists have ventured. This in contrast to Goffman’s profound skepticism and irony and Alland’s academic probity. And to recall that Edie [anthropologist Edith Turner] was there with Vic, coaching and coaxing, sometimes critiquing, never passive, a player (Schechner, 2020).

Subsequent larps, I mean, enacted social dramas

After the two-week workshop in Soho, Victor and Edith Turner kept exploring what is essentially larping. With New York University drama students, they performed Central African and Afro-Brazilian rituals, “aided by drummers drawn from the appropriate cultures or related cultures” (Turner & Turner, 1982).

The Turners continued these experiments at the University of Virginia where they taught anthropology. The social dramas were enacted in the large basement of the Turners’ home in Charlottesville.

Our aim was not to develop a professional group of trained actors for the purposes of public entertainment. It was, frankly, an attempt to put students more fully inside the cultures they were reading about in anthropological monographs. … What we were trying to do was to put experiential flesh on these cognitive bones (Turner & Turner, 1982).

They had already moved away from the constraints of stage play with an audience and clearly were only interested in the experience itself. In a way, ritual drama turned into larp, showcasing the similarities between the two forms.

The Turners’ own analysis of what went on has been contradicted by the experiences of some of their students who have since become anthropology professors in their own right:

I was not a member of the inner circle of faculty and graduate students who prepared and organized the reenactments. … I had the impression that Vic was less interested in how the reenactments complemented ethnographic texts and more interested in whether the ritual itself had an impact on the participants even if they were not immersed in the culture from which it came (Brownell, 2020).

This sounds very much like a newbie coming to their first larp and feeling left out of key plots and social cliques. But also like someone recognizing a nascent art form and wanting to make it even better by inventing their own way of doing it better. This, to me, echoes the sentiments of the early Nordic larp scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The social dramas enacted included the Cannibal Dance of the Kwakiutl, a First Nations group in Canada, a ritual of the Barok people from Papua New Guinea, the midwinter ceremony of the Mohawk of Canada, and a completely made-up fake ritual created by students. Douglas Dalton, then a student who participated in the Cannibal Dance and now a Professor of Anthropology at Longwood University, commented after the experience:

As the ceremony progressed I felt not so much the antagonistic rivalry that was overtly expressed in the ceremony between the bear clan and the killer whale clan, but the fact that we were collectively doing something really important—something essentially correct. There was so much power flowing all over the place in the longhouse (the Charlottesville basement) that night! The spirits were really at work that evening and we had to keep everything in line so all that power wouldn’t destroy everything! (Turner & Turner, 1982).

These narratives bear a striking relationship to people coming back from their first larp and wanting to explain everything that happened and flailing at articulating just how meaningful it all was.

A Virginian Wedding

It was not all about exploring “the other”, however. Richard Schechner famously sees almost every mundane task as something that can be viewed as performance, echoing Erving Goffman’s previous observations (Goffman, 1956). In that spirit, one of the Turners’ graduate students, Pamela Frese, designed and ran a performance about a contemporary Virginian wedding in 1981. This was a topic of her own anthropological studies.

The entire anthropology department were cast as participants. The Turners played the bride’s parents. According to the Turners, “the bride and groom were identified primarily because they were not in the least a ‘romantic item’”(Turner & Turner, 1982). According to Frese herself, the opposite is true: “[the students playing the bride and groom] did joke about this afterward since they really were a ‘thing’ as my students would say today. The Turners apparently didn’t realize this at the time, but their relationship was why I asked them to play the role in the first place” (Frese, 2020). And indeed, the bride’s player had reservations about her own marriage. Talk about playing close to home.

The other participants played wedding guests with roles such as “bride’s sister”, “groom’s ex-girlfriend”, “groom’s grandfather”, “bride’s drunken uncle”, and so on. The minister was a graduate student of Religious Studies. A relationship map was pinned up in the department office several weeks before the event and people started filling out their loosely sketched characters and relations.

One of the faculty members declared, as father of the groom, that his “side” of the wedding represented $23 million of “old New England money”. … Victor Turner was an old proletarian Scots immigrant who made vulgar money by manufacturing a cheap, but usable, plastic garbage can, and who quoted Robbie Burns, often irrelevantly (Turner & Turner, 1982).

Note that the Turners do not write that Victor played the part of a proletarian immigrant but that he was a proletarian immigrant. The character had taken over.

The wedding ceremony took place in the Turner’s basement which this time had been turned into a church and was followed by a reception upstairs with real champagne and festive foods (Frese, 2020). All the guests had brought gifts to the happy couple, presented by hand-made item cards. As the evening progressed, some stayed in their characters continuously while others reverted to being out-of-character and only “larping” when something exciting happened.

Others were taken over, “possessed” by what Grathoff and Handelman have called “symbolic types” — priest, bride, bridegroom, and so on, in the domain of ritual liminality; Drunken Uncle, Pitiful Lean and Slippered Pantaloon in the play domain (the “bride’s grandfather” — a student played this senile type; in the middle of the service he shouted, “Battlestations! Battlestations!” reliving old wars) (Turner & Turner, 1982).

The Turners worried that such improvisations disrupted the social drama, as they were not a part of the ritual script. Frese disagrees:

And why did another graduate student and friend, acting as a senile old man waving his cane, suddenly erupt with angry outbursts exchanged with invisible people during the ceremony? … They were endangering the success of the event!! But were they? Now in hindsight, these unplanned, improvisational acts actually created a more successful ritual performance than I originally planned and illustrate well what liminality can engender (Frese, 2020).

Indeed, much more takes place at a wedding than what is officially described in the program. Without such human elements any event would feel thin and theoretical instead of lived-in and real. Since everyone is the main character of their main story at larps, we rarely have an issue with this. And clearly the same is true of enacted social dramas, too, even if the Turners at first did not recognize it.

One can imagine how intimidating it can be for a student to run a larp at superstar faculty members’ home and cast them in it. But once play starts, such social distinctions disappear:

One of the most obvious dimensions of this liminal experience was the reversal of social roles that emerged through the performance of the ritual and the embodiment of reversals as faculty and students came together as “fictive kin,” temporarily erasing hierarchical power relations within the department (Frese, 2020).

The Turners’ method of performative anthropology has drawn its share of valid criticism since the 1980s. Issues such as cultural appropriation, emotional safety, ethical research, research on human subjects, elites using the power of ritual to further their own interests, and the transformational power of ritual, are all valid concerns (see e.g., Brownell & Frese, 2020). Such criticism is familiar to many larp organizers, as well. And like many larpers, the field of experiential ethnography has taken this criticism to heart and learned from it:

[Professor Mark Pedelty’s] answer to the potentially troubling dynamic is to incorporate the problems of cultural appropriation and ethnocentrism into the course, making them central both to inquiry and to the analysis of the performance itself (p. 250). We also advocate for the explicit discussion of these issues in preparation for a classroom performance as well as in the post-performance debriefing and written analysis by the students (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

One now common strategy of mitigating cultural appropriation is planning re-enacted social dramas with members of the groups being studied. Or having international students play the parts of elders when performing a ritual they themselves had been a part of (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

An interesting possibility for larp designers wary of cultural appropriation but interested in exploring real-life cultures other than their own is to, instead of avoiding those topics altogether, to deal with the question in the workshops surrounding the larp or within the larp itself. And possibly collaborate with members of those cultures when designing and running the larp, as was done at least in the Palestinian-Finnish collaboration Halat hisar (Finland, 2013). Kaisa Kangas (2014) wrote, after having played the ritual-heavy hunter-gatherer larp KoiKoi (Norway 2014):

For me, KoiKoi was successful as a playful attempt at experimental anthropology, and I got many new thoughts and ideas about culture. However, we should be cautious. It would be tempting to make conclusions about real-world hunter-gatherers based on the game. … That is nothing but an illusion. You don’t learn about real cultures by playing larps inspired by them. Definitely not if there are no members of these cultures in the organization teams. There is only one way to really come to understand a different culture: you learn the language, you go there, you live the life. … The ankoi culture doesn’t allow us to draw conclusions about real hunter-gatherers. However, it can become a mirror to reflect our own, industrialized 21th century Nordic culture, and that is valuable by itself. There lies the merit of experimental anthropology as a larp genre.

It seems real-life anthropologists still walking in the Turners’ footsteps are less skeptical of the possibilities of larping ethnographies than Kangas was. On the other hand, the ankoi in KoiKoi were a fictional culture based on several stone age societies, not a serious attempt at a specific ethnography.

The seismic waves caused by Victor Turner’s and Richard Schechner’s collaboration are still felt today. According to Susan Brownell and Pam Frese, their “pioneering blend of theater and anthropology gave birth to performance studies and reinvigorated other disciplines, such as folklore, communications, linguistics, and education” (Brownell & Frese, 2020).

Many of the Turners’ former students now use these methods in teaching anthropology at universities across the United States, sometimes even using the term “role-playing” (Brownell & Frese, 2020). They may not call it edularp, but they might just as well. Similarly, a week at Østerskov Efterskole where students larp ancient Romans and read all about Rome to better get into character, sounds very much like Turnerian experiential ethnography.

Richard Schechner’s (2002) introductory book Performance Studies – An Introduction is mandatory reading in theatre academies across the world. His theories have directly influenced many high-profile Nordic larps, such as Hamlet (Sweden 2002) and Mellan himmel och hav (Sweden 2003, Eng. Between Heaven and Sea). Their work is also central in our understanding of the precursors of larp in history and current larp-like practices in different cultures all over the globe. Martin Ericsson muses, “[h]ad Nordic-style live-action role-playing been around in New York in the sixties, it would have been the natural focus for their studies and would have been hailed as the key, the missing link, in their quest to understand humanity’s constant creation of performances” (Ericsson, 2004).

In the end, the friendship between Victor Turner and Richard Schechner lasted for only six years. Turner died of a heart attack in 1983. There were two funerals, attended by Turner’s family, friends, students, colleagues, and of course, Schechner. The first was a requiem at a Catholic church, the other a basement ritual based on a Ndembu chief’s funeral ceremony.

[Edith Turner] went into the [Ndembu seclusion] hut and we collectively performed the rite for the passing of a headman. I could hear Edie weeping, wailing, suffering her enormous loss. Outside, people were telling jokes, singing, dancing, describing Vic, enticing Edie to step from her isolation and rejoin her community. To transform mourning into celebration; to combine the two; to enact the ritual process. Wife of 40 years, mother of five, anthropologist, and now widow, Edie brought herself and the Victor she both lost and incorporated from the hut back into the world (Schechner, 2020).

Edith Turner and Richard Schechner continued their collaboration for decades, delving further into the strange liminal realm between theatre and anthropology. I end this essay with a comment from Victor Turner after his first larp-like experience:

The group or community does not merely “flow” in unison at these performances, but, more actively, tries to understand itself in order to change itself (Turner, 1979).

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Turner, Victor & Edith Turner (1982): “Performing Ethnography”. In The Drama Review: TDR/The Drama Review 26 (2), Intercultural Performance. (Summer, 1982), pp. 33-50

Turner, Victor. 1968. Schism and Continuity in An African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life . Manchester University Press. Manchester, United Kingdom.

Worthen, W.B. 1995. “Disciplines of the Text/Sites of Performance.” TDR/The Drama Review 39 (1) (Spring): 13–28.

Abdulkarim, Fatima, Faris Arouri, Kaisa Kangas, Riad Mustafa, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson & Mohamad Rabah. 2013. Halat hisar . Finland.

Ericsson, Martin, Anna Ericson, Christopher Sandberg & Martin Brodén. 2002. Hamlet. Sweden: Interaktiva Uppsättningar.

Raaum, Margrete, Tor Kjetil Edland & Eirik Fatland. 2014. KoiKoi. Norway.

Schechner, Richard. 1968. Dionysus in 69. Based on the play Bacchae by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith. United States, New York City: The Performance Group.

Wieslander, E. & Katarina Björk. 2003. Mellan himmel och hav. Sweden.

Unnamed re-enactment of a Virginian wedding. 1981. USA, Charlottesville: Pamela Frese.

This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

Pohjola, Mike. 2024. “Larping Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s – A Look Into the Birth of Performance Studies and Experiential Ethnography.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp , edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski, 266-280. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

Cover photo: Photo of a tabla drum by Swaroop B Deshpande on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.

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Play Boldly – Let Yourself Be Vulnerable

Words of Advice from an Old Witch to Aging Larpers

Experience vs. imagination – effects of player age, villain self care.

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April 4, 2024

To Ancient Maya, Solar Eclipses Signified Clashing Gods

Ancient Maya saw solar eclipses as a “broken sun” that was a sign of possible destruction

By Kimberly H. Breuer & The Conversation US

Mayan pyramid with purple starry sky and green space in front.

El Castillo pyramid at night under a starry sky in Chichen Itza, Mexico, one of the largest Maya cities.

fergregory/Getty Images

This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024.

We live in a light-polluted world, where streetlamps, electronic ads and even backyard lighting block out all but the brightest celestial objects in the night sky. But travel to an officially protected “ Dark Sky” area , gaze skyward and be amazed.

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This is the view of the heavens people had for millennia. Pre-modern societies watched the sky and created cosmographies, maps of the skies that provided information for calendars and agricultural cycles. They also created cosmologies, which, in the original use of the word, were religious beliefs to explain the universe . The gods and the heavens were inseparable.

The skies are orderly and cyclical in nature, so watch and record long enough and you will determine their rhythms. Many societies were able to accurately predict lunar eclipses, and some could also predict solar eclipses – like the one that will occur over North America on April 8, 2024 .

The path of totality, where the Moon will entirely block the Sun, will cross into Mexico on the Pacific coast before entering the United States in Texas, where I teach the history of technology and science , and will be seen as a partial eclipse across the lands of the ancient Maya. This follows the October 2023 annular eclipse, when it was possible to observe the “ring of fire” around the Sun from many ancient Maya ruins and parts of Texas.

A millennia ago, two such solar eclipses over the same area within six months would have seen Maya astronomers, priests and rulers leap into a frenzy of activity. I have seen a similar frenzy – albeit for different reasons – here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where we will be in the path of totality. During this period between the two eclipses, I have felt privileged to share my interest in the history of astronomy with students and the community.

Ancient astronomers

The ancient Maya were arguably one of the greatest sky-watching societies. Accomplished mathematicians , they recorded systematic observations on the motion of the Sun, planets and stars.

From these observations, they created a complex calendar system to regulate their world – one of the most accurate of pre-modern times.

Astronomers closely observed the Sun and aligned monumental structures, such as pyramids, to track solstices and equinoxes . They also utilized these structures, as well as caves and wells, to mark the zenith days – the two times a year in the tropics where the Sun is directly overhead and vertical objects cast no shadow.

Maya scribes kept accounts of the astronomical observations in codices, hieroglyphic folding books made from fig bark paper. The Dresden Codex , one of the four remaining ancient Maya texts, dates to the 11th century. Its pages contain a wealth of astronomical knowledge and religious interpretations and provide evidence that the Maya could predict solar eclipses.

From the codex’s astronomical tables , researchers know that the Maya tracked the lunar nodes, the two points where the orbit of the Moon intersects with the ecliptic – the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which from our point of view is the path of the Sun through our sky. They also created tables divided into the 177-day solar eclipse seasons, marking days where eclipses were possible.

Heavenly battle

But why invest so much in tracking the skies?

Knowledge is power. If you kept accounts of what happened at the time of certain celestial events, you could be forewarned and take proper precautions when cycles repeated themselves. Priests and rulers would know how to act, which rituals to perform and which sacrifices to make to the gods to guarantee that the cycles of destruction, rebirth and renewal continued.

Six sheets of the Dresden Codex (pp. 55-59, 74) depicting eclipses, multiplication tables and the flood.

Eclipse panels in the Dresden Codex.

Credit: NMUIM/Alamy Stock Photo

In the Maya’s belief system , sunsets were associated with death and decay. Every evening the sun god, Kinich Ahau, made the perilous journey through Xibalba, the Maya underworld, to be born anew at sunrise. Solar eclipses were seen as a “broken sun ” – a sign of possible cataclysmic destruction.

Kinich Ahau was associated with prosperity and good order. His brother Chak Ek – the morning star, which we now know as the planet Venus – was associated with war and discord. They had an adversarial relationship , fighting for supremacy.

Their battle could be witnessed in the heavens. During solar eclipses, planets, stars and sometimes comets can be seen during totality . If positioned properly, Venus will shine brightly near the eclipsed Sun, which the Maya interpreted as Chak Ek on the attack. This is hinted at in the Dresden Codex, where a diving Venus god appears in the solar eclipse tables, and in the coordination of solar eclipses with the Venus cycles in the Madrid Codex, another Maya folding book from the late 15th century.

With Kinich Ahau – the Sun – hidden behind the Moon, the Maya believed he was dying. Renewal rituals were necessary to restore balance and set him back on his proper course.

Nobility, especially the king, would perform bloodletting sacrifices , piercing their bodies and collecting the blood drops to burn as offerings to the sun god. This “blood of kings” was the highest form of sacrifice, meant to strengthen Kinich Ahau. Maya believed the creator gods had given their blood and mixed it with maize dough to create the first humans. In turn, the nobility gave a small portion of their own life force to nourish the gods .

Time stands still

In the lead-up to April’s eclipse, I feel as if I am completing a personal cycle of my own, bringing me back to earlier career paths: first as an aerospace engineer who loved her orbital mechanics classes and enjoyed backyard astronomy; and then as a history doctoral student, studying how Maya culture persisted after the Spanish conquest.

For me, just like the ancient Maya, the total solar eclipse will be a chance to not only look up but also to consider both past and future. Viewing the eclipse is something our ancestors have done since time immemorial and will do far into the future. It is awesome in the original sense of the word: For a few moments it seems as if time both stops, as all eyes turn skyward, and converges, as we take part in the same spectacle as our ancestors and descendants.

And whether you believe in divine messages, battles between Venus and the Sun, or in the beauty of science and the natural world, this event brings people together. It is humbling, and it is also very, very cool.

I just hope that Kinich Ahau will grace us with his presence in a cloudless sky and once again vanquish Venus, which is a morning star on April 8.

This article was originally published on The Conversation . Read the original article .

The Chicago Blog

Smart and timely features from our books and authors

In Memoriam: Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)

The University of Chicago Press mourns the passing of Marjorie Perloff, a long-time Press author and advisor. The following obituary was prepared by her family with the assistance of Charles Bernstein and the Press.

black and white photo of Perloff at her desk

One of the most influential American literary critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff died at her home in Pacific Palisades (Los Angeles), California, on March 24, according to her daughters, Carey and Nancy Perloff.

Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz in Vienna on September 28, 1931, into a prominent intellectual Jewish family. She and her family fled Vienna on March 15, 1938, two days after the Anschluss. This escape, and their journey to America, is recounted in The Vienna Paradox (2003). Perloff’s vast knowledge of European literature, not only in her native German but also French, Italian, and Russian, combined with her love of American culture and the American avant-garde, made her a seminal critic and a beacon for students of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.

Perloff started her career relatively late in her life. At twenty-one, she married cardiologist Joseph Perloff (1924–2014), who became a renowned physician and the Streisand and American Heart Association professor at UCLA. She had two children, Nancy and Carey, in her mid-twenties. Her first job was at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, writing subtitles for movies. After the family moved to Washington, DC, she earned an MA in English literature at Catholic University. Perloff relished her time at Catholic University, finding it to be a rigorous and intellectually stimulating, and she returned to CU in 1965 to get her PhD with a dissertation on “Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats” (published as a book in 1970). Perloff was offered a full-time job by CU, where she taught from 1966 to 1971. She went on to teach at the University of Maryland from 1971 to 1976 and at the University of Southern California from 1979 to 1986.

Perloff’s writing career took off with the first book on the poetry of Frank O’Hara, one of the great figures of the 50s and 60s, who, along with John Ashbery, was part of the “New York School.” Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters” (1977) secured Perloff’s status as a major voice in the contemporary poetry scene and introduced her as an influential critic of the visual arts, concrete poetry, book art, conceptual art, and the intersection of language and visual culture. Her O’Hara book was followed by The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) , which reevaluated post-war European and American poetry. Her work over the years on John Cage, Robert Smithson, Gertrude Stein, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Johanna Drucker, David Antin, and numerous other artists proved groundbreaking. She also wrote trenchant criticism on Samuel Beckett.

Perloff’s academic career culminated in her move to Stanford University in 1986 and appointment in 1990 as the Sadie Patek Dernham Professor of Humanities. At Stanford she taught classes on everything from Pinter and Beckett to the work of Language poets such as Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein to classes on Joyce and Proust, as well as mentoring students who went on to become significant critics and scholars. Perloff also organized an important conference on and celebration of the work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage.

Perloff became an internationally sought-after speaker and scholar with a vast knowledge of post-war literature and art, and ability to see the bigger trends that have moved culture forward. In addition to her many books, Perloff wrote scores of reviews for small magazines and scholarly publications. These reviews have been collected as Circling the Canon (two volumes, 2019). She was a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement In 2006, Perloff served as president of the Modern Language Association. In 1997, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society. Several of her many interviews have been collected in Poetics in a New Key  (2014). Perloff was also active in China, where her work was widely known and translated. In 2011 she co-founded the Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics; she remained president at the time of her death. Perloff frequently lectured in China. In 2021, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art and made an Austrian citizen.

Perloff was a maverick, refusing to go along with the latest academic trends or to see herself as disadvantaged by her status as a woman, a Jew, a mother, or a scholar without an Ivy League degree. Instead, her outsider status gave her a unique lens on literary movements. She overturned views on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other canonized artists, always returning to her close reading and textual analysis. Perloff was fascinated by Futurism and wrote the landmark study The Futurist Moment (1986), dedicated to the magical “defamiliarization” that occurred in Russia between the wars and lifted the modernist project into an experimental sphere that left naturalism and the lyric behind. That book began her long association with the University of Chicago Press, which published it and most of her subsequent books. Her exploration of poetry and technology continued with Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media  (1992).

Toward the end of her career, Perloff returned to the literature of her childhood, exploring the writers of the Austrian diaspora in Edge of Irony (2016),a book that brought together Paul Celan, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus to reveal how their own outsider status within the Hapsburg Empire gave these writers a mordant wit and despairing irony.

Throughout this later period Perloff became more and more fascinated by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his groundbreaking idea that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Tracing Wittgenstein’s influence on artists as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Susan Howe, and Marcel Duchamp, Perloff opened readers’ eyes to the vast energy of the modernist project. During the COVID pandemic, Perloff translated into English Wittgenstein’s secret notebooks, written in code during WW I (her edition was published as Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 in 2022). This brought her into close contact with Damion Searls, whose 2024 translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus includes an introduction by Perloff.

What distinguishes her writings is Perloff’s insatiable curiosity, roving intelligence, linguistic dexterity, and irrepressible wit. She never took given wisdom as gospel; she was forever questioning why and how certain literary movements had come to be and what would prove to be lasting. Perloff analyzed work she loved and championed artists she felt others had ignored or misunderstood.

Perloff is survived by her daughters Carey and Nancy, their husbands Anthony Giles and Robert Lempert,   and her grandchildren Alexandra, Ben, and Nicholas. Carey, a playwright and theater director, was the long-time Artistic Director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Nancy is a curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the author of books on the Russian avant-garde, concrete poetry, and the circle of Erik Satie. Perloff was a passionate and devoted mother and grandmother.

Perloff leaves behind friends across the globe, from China to Israel, to whom she was devoted and whom she visited often in her travels and lectures around the world. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages, and her hundreds of articles and essays continue to be reprinted and devoured by new generations of readers. Perhaps it is Frank O’Hara who summed up her life force: she was filled with “the grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”

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The Photo Essay
Abstract. This invited essay reflects upon the use of the photo essay within documentary photography. In particular, it compares Righteous Dopefiend, the much-lauded anthropological text by Philippe Bourgois with photographs by Jeff Schonberg, to work by photographers exploring similar subject matter. It aims to tease out some of the essential ...
Thinking through the Photo Essay: Observations for Medical Anthropology
As photography becomes more prevalent in ethnographic research, scholars should more seriously consider the photo essay as a medium for sharing their work. In this Position Piece, we present guidelines for the creation of ethnographic photo essays for medical anthropology that do not simply combine image and text, but create a balance that allows words to provide context for the image(s) and ...
The Photo-Essay's Bark
The Photo-Essay's Bark. Reading the Writing with Light print issue no. 1, courtesy of Zahira Aragüete-Toribio. The compelling force of the photo-essay as a format is, among others, its ability to weave a complex social encounter through entangled visual and interpretative pathways that playfully construct ethnographic and artistic meaning ...
Corpus: Mining the Border
Editors' Introduction. In 2010, a conversation was ignited over incorporating photo essays into the new Cultural Anthropology website. The conversation, which started about a photo essay project, quickly transformed into a discussion about disciplinary boundaries, peer review, and new directions in anthropology.
Thinking through the Photo Essay
The photo essay is an evolving form of digital media that has changed the way we create our theoretical and methodological arguments. We feel there are three basic elements every photo essay must consider that are informed by the theory and practice of visual anthropology.
Turning around the camera: Self-portraits of an anthropologist on
Abstract. This photo essay explores the practice of digital self-portraiture as an epistemological practice. Drawing on the well-established role of photography within the anthropological canon, this photo essay looks with a new criticality on the act of self-portraiture by an anthropologist as both performative praxis and ethnographic tool.
PDF The Photo Essay
The Photo Essay. Patrick Sutherland University of the Arts London. Email: [email protected]. Abstract: This invited essay reflects upon the use of the photo essay within documentary photography. In particular it compares Righteous Dopefiend, the much-lauded anthropological text by Philippe Bourgois with photographs by Jeff Schonberg ...
Society for Cultural Anthropology
Writing with Light: Looking Back, Moving Forward. Cultural Anthropology's commitment to innovations in digital publishing enabled and encouraged Michelle Stewart and Vivian Choi to create a platform for peer-reviewed digital anthropological photo-essays, something that no other anthropological journal was doing at the time.The initiative featured open reviews to provide models for engaging ...
[PDF] The Photo Essay
This invited essay reflects upon the use of the photo essay within documentary photography. In particular it compares Righteous Dopefiend, the much-lauded anthropological text by Philippe Bourgois with photographs by Jeff Schonberg, to work by photographers exploring similar subject matter. It aims to tease out some of the essential elements of the photo essay as well as the connections ...
Thinking through the Photo Essay Observations for Medical Anthropology
In this Position Piece, we present guidelines for the creation of ethnographic photo essays for medical anthropology that do not simply combine image and text, but create a balance that allows ...
Photo Essay Submissions
Download "Photo Essay Best Practices" cool-anthropology-photo-essays-best-practices.pdf - Downloaded 34 times - 732 KB. ... Photo Essays collections of photos with captions written by one of our cool anthropologists. Cool Anthropology Newsletter. We send our ideas, research, events and the intriguing things we find around the (inter ...
Anthropology and Photography
ISSN 2397-1754 Anthropology & Photography is an open-access publication series edited by the RAI Photography Committee.Emerging from the international conference of the same name organized by the RAI at the British Museum in 2014, the series will highlight and make available to the widest possible audience the best new work in the field. We are eager to solicit new contributions from ...
(PDF) The Photo Essay
The Photo Essay. 2016, Visual Anthropology Review. The aim of this text is to explore the possibilities for the study of the photographic image in the scope of Visual Anthropology. It begins by presenting the predominance of the Visual in contemporary society and the current anthropological interest in the questions of visibility.
Photo Essay: Seeing Displacement through Ethnographic Photography #
Photo Essay: Seeing Displacement through Ethnographic Photography #LSEreturn. Visual and written narratives about conflict and victimhood tend to generate a series of much-repeated tropes. In this article, LSE's Elizabeth Storer unveils a project which seeks to present a more accurate portrayal of displacement through the medium of photography.
Photography and the Ethnographic Method
Photography's Historical Presence in Anthropology. Photography has had a long-term relationship with anthropology. But, as MacDougal has correctly pointed out, anthropology as a discipline has never been able to work out how to clearly implicate photography in the practice of the discipline (pp. 276, 283).Viewed differently however, this difficultly can also be seen as a contradiction that ...
Alexandra Sastrawati's photo essay published in Johns Hopkins
Alexandra Sastrawati, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in medical and urban anthropology and Young NUS Fellow at National University of Singapore (NUS), debuts "Dwells and Descends"—a lyrical, photo essay exploring injury's resonance in ethnographic, war and art museums across cities such as Amsterdam, Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore. Published in Johns...
Supplement Sutherland VAR 32.2
The editors of Visual Anthropology Review invited me to write this essay because they are keen to encourage the submission of photo essays for potential publication within the journal.It is designed as a companion piece to my article "The Photo Essay," and offers some advisory notes to support the submission of photo essays to the journal.
Thinking through the Photo Essay: Observations for Medical Anthropology
In this Position Piece, we present guidelines for the creation of ethnographic photo essays. As photography becomes more prevalent in ethnographic research, scholars should more seriously consider the photo essay as a medium for sharing their work. ... Thinking through the Photo Essay: Observations for Medical Anthropology ...
Ethnographic Terminalia
The Photo-Essay is Dead, Long Live the Photo-Essay is both the name of a workshop and title of a rapid-prototype publication.The workshop was organized by the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective for the 2016 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Minneapolis Minnesota, held on November 17, 2016. The workshop featured presentations from international contemporary art ...
A photo-essay from Yelahanka
EMBRACING FLUX. Concept Note: This set of postcards narrate a story of Old Yelahanka that touches time and embraces every bit of it. With silicon valley to its immediate, the Yelahanka town is gradually moving to urbanisation. Little remains of each time can be seen easily while taking a stroll in Yelahanka.
How to Write an Essay: A Guide for Anthropologists
This paragraph opens your essay. It needs to grab the reader's attention. You can use an anecdote, a story, or a shocking fact. Paint a picture to put the reader in a special time and place with you. Resist the temptation to rely on stereotypes or often-used scenes. Provide something novel and compelling.
Writing with Light
Cultural Anthropology began publishing photo essays on its website in 2012, amid wide-ranging discussions about alternative forms of critical ethnographic expression. In 2016, this section was relaunched as a collaboration with the Society for Visual Anthropology known as Writing with Light. While further submissions are no longer being ...
Current Anthropology: Visual anthropology competition
Laurence Cuelenaere is the 2022 winner of Current Anthropology 's Visual Anthropology Competition. Her work is featured on the cover of all standard issues of Current Anthropology ( CA) published in 2022. The photographs in her essay, "Journey to Amerika," were taken in Tapachula, which is known in Chiapas as "Prison City" (Mexico ...
Madonna versus "Mother Russia?" Visual Anthropology of Loneliness and
Visual anthropology is a relevant approach to study Russian identity. Scholars pointed to one of the key foundations of the legitimation of power in Russia through visual representations. Kivelson and Neuberger suggest that Russians have a special "conspicuous predisposition to turn into the visual in order to summon a new reality into being ...
Larping Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s: A Look Into the Birth of
In Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom: Engaging the Legacy of Edith and Victor Turner, edited by Susan Brownell & Pamela R. Frese. Palgrave Macmillan. Ericsson, Martin. 2004. " Play To Love: Reading Victor Turner's "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual; an Essay in Comparative Symbology ".
Current Anthropology: Call for submissions
Current Anthropology has established a new section entitled "Anthropological Currents" and invites submissions of 1) reports; 2) literary ethnographic manuscripts; 3) short manuscripts accompanied by translations; and 4) photographic essays.. The editorial board hopes that the new section will provide an avenue for innovative works that offer critical anthropological insights and stimulate ...
Spotlighting War's Cultural Destruction in Ukraine
An archaeologist, anthropologist, and film expert examine the staggering amount of damage to cultural heritage caused by Russia's war on Ukraine. By Ian Kuijt , Pavlo Shydlovskyi , and William Donaruma. 9 Apr 2024. The photo shows what remains of the Church of the Holy Mother in the village of Bohorodychne, Ukraine, which was attacked by ...
Thinking through the Photo Essay
photo essays for medical anthropology that do not simply combine image and text, but create a balance that allows words to provide context for the image(s) and images to reinforce or challenge the text. We feel there are three basic elements every photo essay must consider that are informed by the theory and practice of visual anthropology.
To Ancient Maya, Solar Eclipses Signified Clashing Gods
This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024. The following essay is reprinted with ...
In Memoriam: Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024)
One of the most influential American literary critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff died at her home in Pacific Palisades (Los Angeles), California, on March 24, according to her daughters, Carey and Nancy Perloff. Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz in Vienna on September 28, 1931, into a prominent intellectual ...

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Mike Pohjola

Play Boldly – Let Yourself Be Vulnerable

Words of Advice from an Old Witch to Aging Larpers

To Ancient Maya, Solar Eclipses Signified Clashing Gods

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Heavenly battle

Time stands still

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