The “Natural” Is a Sham: The Baroque and Its Contemporary Avatars

This article discusses three aesthetics which go against the understanding of “the natural” as the default setting of life and being: baroque, punk and camp celebrate the artificiality and made-upness of man-made worlds. Reflecting on autobiographical encounters with these styles, and using a Lacanian frame of analysis, the author discusses what makes these styles appealing to some and horrific to others, and what they effectuate in the lives of their aficionados

The banquet of the gods is a mess

Como as imagens fazem você pensar sobre a religião? This question was send to me by Rodrigo Toniol, organizer of the Jornadas sobre Alternativas Religiosas na América Latina in Rio de Janeiro, and was to be at the heart of a public dialogue with my colleague Hugo José Suárez. The rather general formulation of the question could obviously lead us into a whole lot of different directions: how are one’s thoughts provoked by saintly statues, byzantine mosaics, buddhist mandalas, Islamic calligraphy? How to understand the materiality of religion? Or how to understand religious prohibitions of making images? Yet I immediately took up Rodrigo’s question as an invitation to reflect on my move from being an anthropologist who writes about religion to an anthropologist who films religion. Not in the least because camera-based research and image making was the immediate common ground with Hugo

The “Natural” Is a Sham: The Baroque and Its Contemporary Avatars

oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/518This article discusses three aesthetics which go against the understanding of “the natural” as the default setting of life and being: baroque, punk and camp celebrate the artificiality and made-upness of man-made worlds. Reflecting on autobiographical encounters with these styles, and using a Lacanian frame of analysis, the author discusses what makes these styles appealing to some and horrific to others, and what they effectuate in the lives of their aficionados

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Comentário ao texto "Transnacionalización de las danzas aztecas y relocalización de las fronteras México / Estados Unidos" de Renée de la Torre e Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñig

Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild

What does civilization mean to the inhabitants of a Serbian town after yet another bloody war on the Balkan Peninsula? How was it possible that people who had been friends and neighbors for so long ended up killing each other? And how do they deal with this barbarity in the post-war period?The figure of the gypsy, who often appears in Serbian popular culture, has always been invested with the mysterious power to unveil the mendacious undertones in the program of civilization. Wherever he appears - in jokes, songs, tales, literature, or movies - the civilized order is unmasked. This motif can be seen most dramatically in bars and taverns, where gypsy musicians lead their Serbian customers in veritable celebrations of unreason. "This is real," Serbs say about these gatherings where the canons of propriety and civilized behavior are overthrown with obvious relish. "This is life."The author, who spent several months in Serbia investigating these wild meetings, relates the 'unreason' of the behaviour in these bars to the atrocities committed during the war which broke out during his stay. Highlighting how the program of civilization brings with it the need to construct an image of humankind more compatible with the lessons of history, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild may be read as a case-study of how war-infested societies cope with wartime traumas