The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very “combustion chamber” of social theory by juxtaposing one’s claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.

The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very “combustion chamber” of social theory by juxtaposing one’s claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.

Introduction: Montage as an Amplifier of Invisibility
Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr

Part I: Montage as an Analytic

Chapter 1. Montage and Time: Deleuze, Cinema and a Buddhist Sorcery Rite
Bruce Kapferer

Chapter 2. Temporal Aesthetics: On Deleuzian Montage in Anthropology
Morten Nielsen   

Chapter 3. All the Difference in the World: Liminality, Montage and the Re-Invention of Comparative Anthropology
Stuart McLean

Chapter 4. Into the Gloaming: A Montage of the Senses
Andrew Irving

Part II: Montage in Writing

Chapter 5. Being a Montage
Anne Line Dalsgaard

Chapter 6. Smith’s Tour Favela
Paul Antick

Chapter 7. Labour days: a non-linear narrative of development
Nina Vohnsen

Chapter 8. Mind the Gap
Karen Lisa Salamon

Part III: Montage in Film

Chapter 9. Women in Cities: Comparative Modernities and Cinematic Space in the 1930s
Catherine Russell

Chapter 10. Radioglaz and the Global City: Possibilities and Constraints of Experimental Montage
Julia T. S. Binter

Chapter 11. Filming in the Light of Memory
Alyssa Grossman

Chapter 12. Montage as analysis in ethnographic and documentary filmmaking: From hunting for plots towards weaving baskets of data
Jakob Kirstein Høgel

Chapter 13. In Defense of Observational Cinema: The Significance of the Bazinian Turn for Ethnographic Filmmaking
Anna Grimshaw

Part IV: Montage in Museum Exhibitions

Chapter 14. Assembling Potentials, Mounting Effects: Ethnographic Exhibitions Beyond Correspondence
Peter Bjerregaard

Chapter 15. Assembling Bodies: Cuts, Clusters and Juxtapositions
Rebecca Empson

Chapter 16. Project Villa Sovietica: Clashing Images, Expectations, and Receptions
Alexandra Schüssler and Willem Mes

Afterword: The Traffic in Montage, Then and Now
George E. Marcus