Paper Short Abstract:

To this day, the aesthetic-anthropological approaches of cultural anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus (1929-2017) have been marginalised in academic discourse. The lecture is dedicated to a critical re-reading and extension of her – how you could call it – “multimodal” anthropology.

Paper Abstract:

To this day, the aesthetic-anthropological approaches of cultural anthropologist Ina-Maria Greverus have been marginalised in academic discourse. Against the backdrop of the currently prominent discussions about multimodal approaches in anthropology, a closer examination and critical expansion of her work seems productive. Greverus, who conceived anthropology at least as translation work, developed her “pathways towards an aesthetic anthropology” as a response to the writing culture debate. Her understanding of aesthetic anthropology is less concerned with a most objective – written or visual – representation of knowledge about cultural worlds ("writing culture") than with the question of what scientific practice can achieve within in a society. Alongside or in part together with Greverus, there are numerous researchers who think about power-critical aspects of field research and knowledge transfer: from engaged science to situated knowledge, from tentacular thinking to assemblage research, from the ignorant schoolmaster to the anti-ethnographic ferry master, from post-representation to multimodality. With reference to various historic and recent examples, the presentation pays particular attention to the concept of "translation" - understood as the establishment of connections between the heterogeneous human and non human actors that researchers encounter in the course of their field work.