Transcultural Montage

<p> 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 film and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception memory visuality ritual time and globalization they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very combustion chamber of social theory by juxtaposing one's claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.</p>