Transcultural Montage

Disruptive montage has often been regarded as a potential threat to the dialogue between scholarly representations and 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. When two elements are brought together in montage, something extra, a surplus or an excess, is always produced. This "extra" reacts to the original elements and produces a state of generative instability, where each part transforms and takes on new shapes within the wider constellation. In studies of phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, or globalization, montage evokes excessive alterity as the standard through which seemingly ordinary realities need to be addressed. Furthermore, as George Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage 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.