Cover Arrowsmith, Pocket Books, 1944 EditionSinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith, published in 1925 to critical and public acclaim (the book was awarded the Pulitzer prize, although Lewis refused it), is a bildungsroman with an unusual hero: a young doctor cum scientist, Martin Arrowsmith (Lewis, 1925). The hero’s career includes a range of roles and positions: he is at …
We know that illness can be narrated but can it be shown?
Feminist artists have been amongst the first to show the sick female body. Jo Spence used photography during the 1980s to document her breast cancer diagnosis and the impact of the treatments on her body. Spence’s projects, such as “The Picture of Health?” and “Narratives of Disease,” have …
In the paragraphs which follow, we will be discussing the ways in which two pieces of speculative fiction, the science fiction film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the novel The Tiger’s Wife use diagnostic and prognostic certainty as part of their creative narratives. In both cases, the confidence vested in the diagnosis and its outcome is contrasted …
This commentary on Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel’s In the Shadow of Ebola is intended as a post-script to the forum on the film which appeared earlier this year. Lachenal prepared this text, written in Paris, for a special session of the African Studies Association meetings in San Diego on 20 November 2015.
The first time I saw the film, …
In recent anthropological film practice we see a shift from established visual ethnographic paradigms focused on discursive representation (Crawford 1992), towards the realm of interdisciplinary cooperation and experimentation. Working with filmmakers and artists has a long history in visual anthropology, however recent theoretical debates open up new terrains for cooperation with various fields like science and technology studies, bio-medical sciences, …
Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev, editors
Afterword by George E. Marcus
Berghahn Books, 2013. 300 pp.
Transcultural Montage contains an abundance of fresh ideas in many sub-disciplines of anthropology such as medical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, cultural and economic anthropology, but also semantics, museology and knowledge production not to mention visual anthropology, the main sub-discipline to which …