Paper short abstract:

This paper relies on Csordas's notion of embodiment and Laplantine's paradigm of 'sensible thinking' to explore an ethno-filmic methodology in which bodily and embodied rhythms (and disturbances) could be perhaps not represented but 'lived through' the practice of filmmaking.

Paper long abstract:

Csordas's influential elaborations on an existential notion of embodiment, and its implications for an anthropology which, in contrast, has traditionally approached the body as an object of cultural analysis rather than the subject of culture, will be confronted with Laplantine's modal anthropology which, from a non-phenomenological stance though, also signifies the body and rhythmicity as the central elements not only of ethnography but of an anthropology of the living or, of rhythm. Thus, I will firstly advocate that bodily and embodied rhythms can be best represented, and perhaps, simply evoked, through the practice of filmmaking whose sensible knowledge should be understood as co-constituted by, and produced for, an embodied spectator. Furthermore, if cinema has the capacity not to merely represent bodily and embodied temporalities but to allow us to 'live through' them and, equally important, to simultaneously address the emotive, embodied and material aspects of the challenges faced by people in the rhythmical and arrhythmical oscillations of their everyday lives, I defend that an alternate switching and cohabitation of diverse and complementary modes of, or attitudes in, experiencing the body in ethno-filmic methodologies may become crucial to understand and make sense of a, perhaps more than ever, uncertain world.