Christian Suhr
Biographic Data
| ID | 640132 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Suhr |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Suhr |
| SIGNATURE | SUHR C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3025-6694 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 110 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The lived experience of remembering a ‘good’ interview: Micro-phenomenology applied to itself
Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue between two authors that illustrates and comments on th…
Transcultural Montage
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,…
Reflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking: The case of Unwritten Letters
Previous articleNext article FreeFilm SymposiumReflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking The case of Unwritten Letters Comment on Unwritten Letters. 2020. Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, directors. Distributed by The Royal Anthropological Institute.Christian SuhrChristian SuhrAarhus University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints S…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
The light of the Prophet Muhammad: An audiovisual and microphenomenological journey
In 2014, an Egyptian friend gave me the following advice: “Stop focusing on the darkness in this world: Look at the light”; an approach he himself had learned after having been in and out of Salafism as well as through two failed revolutions before he found relief in a different form of religious devotion, a form that appears to be rising in post-revolutionary Egypt. I took his advice and together with Egyptian filmmaker Muhammad Mustafa, the pho…
Montage
Montage refers to the production of new amalgamated wholes by joining different elements in a variety of combinations, repetitions, and overlaps. It is often associated with film editing but the basic principles of montage are also found in a broad range of artistic, cultural, and academic practices. In anthropology, montage has been used as a disruptive principle of analysis and representation in experiments with ethnographic writing, film, phot…
Faith in anthropologyResponse to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau:…
Response to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane , and Christian Suhr . 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–78
Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer's divine revelation
Anthropological insights are not produced or constructed through reasoned discourse alone. Often they appear to be given in "leaps of faith" as the anthropologist's conceptual grasp upon the world is lost. To understand these peculiar moments, we adopt the Kierkegaardian concept of religious faith, not as certitude in some transcendental principle, but as a deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of underst…
Camera Monologue: Cultural Critique beyond Collaboration, Participation and Dialogue
Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are taught socially to perceive and the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that …
Camera, Intervention and Cultural Critique: An Introduction
The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present-as always in a state of emergence and involving ima…
A second look at invisibility: Al-Ghayb, Islam, ethnography
Islamic exorcism and the cinema fist: Analyzing exorcism among Danish Muslims through the prism of film
In this article I apply film theory as an analytic prism through which to examine the ritual mechanisms of a particular kind of Islamic exorcism (al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya). I show how these exorcisms operate as a ritual montage that conjures the absent presence of al-ghayb—a hidden world of power that only God can see in its totality and to which the possessed patients and the jinn spirits must succumb. These exorcisms thus provide healing, not in t…
The failed image and the possessed: Examples of invisibility in visual anthropology and Islam
This paper asks whether an exploration of responses to visual media in neo-orthodox Islam could provide new answers to the recurrent queries regarding the value of images in visual anthropology. It proposes that the photographic image shares a curious resemblance to the bodies of people possessed by invisible spirits called jinn. The image as a failed example or model of reality works like the possessed body as an amplifier of invisibility pointi…
Transcultural Montage
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,…
Can Film Show the Invisible: The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions - a position often associated with observational cinema - but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its …
Can Film Show the Invisible: The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions - a position often associated with observational cinema - but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its …
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer's divine revelation
Anthropological insights are not produced or constructed through reasoned discourse alone. Often they appear to be given in "leaps of faith" as the anthropologist's conceptual grasp upon the world is lost. To understand these peculiar moments, we adopt the Kierkegaardian concept of religious faith, not as certitude in some transcendental principle, but as a deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of underst…
A second look at invisibility: Al-Ghayb, Islam, ethnography
The failed image and the possessed: Examples of invisibility in visual anthropology and Islam
This paper asks whether an exploration of responses to visual media in neo-orthodox Islam could provide new answers to the recurrent queries regarding the value of images in visual anthropology. It proposes that the photographic image shares a curious resemblance to the bodies of people possessed by invisible spirits called jinn. The image as a failed example or model of reality works like the possessed body as an amplifier of invisibility pointi…
Camera Monologue: Cultural Critique beyond Collaboration, Participation and Dialogue
Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are taught socially to perceive and the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that …
Camera, Intervention and Cultural Critique: An Introduction
The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present-as always in a state of emergence and involving ima…
The light of the Prophet Muhammad: An audiovisual and microphenomenological journey
In 2014, an Egyptian friend gave me the following advice: “Stop focusing on the darkness in this world: Look at the light”; an approach he himself had learned after having been in and out of Salafism as well as through two failed revolutions before he found relief in a different form of religious devotion, a form that appears to be rising in post-revolutionary Egypt. I took his advice and together with Egyptian filmmaker Muhammad Mustafa, the pho…
Islamic exorcism and the cinema fist: Analyzing exorcism among Danish Muslims through the prism of film
In this article I apply film theory as an analytic prism through which to examine the ritual mechanisms of a particular kind of Islamic exorcism (al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya). I show how these exorcisms operate as a ritual montage that conjures the absent presence of al-ghayb—a hidden world of power that only God can see in its totality and to which the possessed patients and the jinn spirits must succumb. These exorcisms thus provide healing, not in t…
Can Film Show the Invisible: The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions - a position often associated with observational cinema - but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its …
Transcultural Montage
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,…
The failed image and the possessed: Examples of invisibility in visual anthropology and Islam
This paper asks whether an exploration of responses to visual media in neo-orthodox Islam could provide new answers to the recurrent queries regarding the value of images in visual anthropology. It proposes that the photographic image shares a curious resemblance to the bodies of people possessed by invisible spirits called jinn. The image as a failed example or model of reality works like the possessed body as an amplifier of invisibility pointi…
A second look at invisibility: Al-Ghayb, Islam, ethnography
Islamic exorcism and the cinema fist: Analyzing exorcism among Danish Muslims through the prism of film
In this article I apply film theory as an analytic prism through which to examine the ritual mechanisms of a particular kind of Islamic exorcism (al-ruqya al-sharʿiyya). I show how these exorcisms operate as a ritual montage that conjures the absent presence of al-ghayb—a hidden world of power that only God can see in its totality and to which the possessed patients and the jinn spirits must succumb. These exorcisms thus provide healing, not in t…
Montage
Montage refers to the production of new amalgamated wholes by joining different elements in a variety of combinations, repetitions, and overlaps. It is often associated with film editing but the basic principles of montage are also found in a broad range of artistic, cultural, and academic practices. In anthropology, montage has been used as a disruptive principle of analysis and representation in experiments with ethnographic writing, film, phot…
Faith in anthropologyResponse to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau:…
Response to rejoinders to Willerslev, Rane , and Christian Suhr . 2018 “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–78
Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer's divine revelation
Anthropological insights are not produced or constructed through reasoned discourse alone. Often they appear to be given in "leaps of faith" as the anthropologist's conceptual grasp upon the world is lost. To understand these peculiar moments, we adopt the Kierkegaardian concept of religious faith, not as certitude in some transcendental principle, but as a deeply paradoxical mode of knowing, whose paths bend and twist through glimpses of underst…
Camera Monologue: Cultural Critique beyond Collaboration, Participation and Dialogue
Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are taught socially to perceive and the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that …
Camera, Intervention and Cultural Critique: An Introduction
The key questions of the research project Camera as Cultural Critique, in which all contributors to this section of the issue participated, are outlined here. The overall purpose of the project was to explore how the use of audiovisual media in ethnographic research may contribute to sustained cultural critique. Grounding that critique in a certain understanding of the temporality of the present-as always in a state of emergence and involving ima…
The light of the Prophet Muhammad: An audiovisual and microphenomenological journey
In 2014, an Egyptian friend gave me the following advice: “Stop focusing on the darkness in this world: Look at the light”; an approach he himself had learned after having been in and out of Salafism as well as through two failed revolutions before he found relief in a different form of religious devotion, a form that appears to be rising in post-revolutionary Egypt. I took his advice and together with Egyptian filmmaker Muhammad Mustafa, the pho…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Transcultural Montage
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,…
Reflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking: The case of Unwritten Letters
Previous articleNext article FreeFilm SymposiumReflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking The case of Unwritten Letters Comment on Unwritten Letters. 2020. Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, directors. Distributed by The Royal Anthropological Institute.Christian SuhrChristian SuhrAarhus University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints S…
The lived experience of remembering a ‘good’ interview: Micro-phenomenology applied to itself
Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue between two authors that illustrates and comments on th…
Sociology (11 works) · Art (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Ethnography (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · History (5 works)