your FACE is surrealist!

“Ethnography combined with surrealism can no longer be seen as the empirical, descriptive dimension of anthropology, a general science of the human. Nor is it the interpretation of cultures, for the planet cannot be seen as divided into distinct, textualized ways of life. Ethnography cut with surrealism emerges as a theory and practice of juxtaposition. It studies, and is part of, the invention and interruption of meaningful wholes in works of cultural import-export” (147).

What does a surrealist ethnography look like? Or an ethnography that uses elements of surrealism? What is surrealist about Land Without Bread? Or better yet, how does Land Without Bread demonstrate a surrealist way of knowing? (I’m really posing these questions—answer me!)

Clifford notes, “I am using the term surrealism in an obviously expanded sense to circumscribe an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions—that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic, and the unconscious” (118). I think Clifford is explaining that his conception of “surrealist ethnography,” or their intersection, or their mutual abilities to generate new meanings of self and other, doesn’t necessarily have to do with what we think of as “surrealist” art per se. In other words, I need not summon images of French aristocrats inspiring themselves with the wealth of spiritual and exotic outlets so many primitives may lend them. Right?

He wants to view surrealist as a way of seeing, that in turn will produce knowledges. Land Without Bread confused me though, because it seemed straightforward in its ethnographic methodology, whether it’s meant to be parody or not. When I first thought of “surrealism” and “ethnography” as related concepts, Juan Downey’s Laughing Alligator came immediately to mind. If surrealism is about being open to other realities, breaking down the whole and seeing the fragments, and juxtaposing those fragments in new ways, then Downey’s film seemed to demonstrate this well. The aspect of Laughing Alligator that appealed to me so was that it supposed that Yanomami consciousness, and sub-consciousness, aught to be explored, even through the somewhat cheesy tricks of late 70’s video art.

If we are not to think of surrealism in this context as directly aligned with the artistic movement of the same name, and more of an attempt to use “the full human potential for cultural expression,” then putting a surrealist label on ethnography seems to me to be more of a symbolic act than an actual practice (129). In practice, I hope, ethnographers have been attempting to see or capture alternate realities for a long while.

At the same time, I know Clifford is not advocating that we put a surrealist label on ethnography. He draws a distinction between ethnographic surrealism and it’s converse, surrealist ethnography (146). Yet I don’t understand what methodologies might support a surrealist ethnography. He states, “An ethnographic surrealist practice…attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. Two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other” (146). This is an interesting juxtaposition with MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema, which seemed to want us to look for the similar, the familiar, to find that the other and ourself were/are not so different or apart. Might MacDougall and Clifford be saying essentially the same thing, but phrasing it in distinct ways?

Clifford closes his essay by using two examples that demonstrate “juxtaposition and intervention in the modern world system” (147). The first is the typified surrealist scenario—Picasso sees an “African” mask and voila—cubism! Clifford writes, “Something new was occurring in the presence of something exotic,” or, being exposed to something new but that also is a expression of the human experience will lead us to understand others, but mostly ourselves, in a fresh and meaningful way (148).

The second example is more specific. Trobriand islanders, handed the colonial practice of playing cricket, end up playing the game in the post-Malinowski era, but in a tricked-out, carnivalesque, and basically Trobriand way. So humans will ingest, invert and subvert the cultural mandates given to them; even the colonized are actors with agency and the power to negotiate meaning. For Clifford, the blue plastic Adidas bag from which the Trobriand shaman-umpire extracts his betel nuts can be viewed in a similar vein as Picasso’s African masks—and this exemplifies ethnographic surrealism. I see this interplay as less surrealist per se, and more of a plain old example of why we cannot talk about the tribe any longer. Ethnographic objects cross boundaries, are re-positioned, invested with new meanings, are re-presented.

I’m not doubting (read: criticizing) Clifford’s connections between surrealism and ethnography. I just need to understand more fully what he means when he writes of a surrealist ethnographic attitude.