Participatory Perception by Multisensory Evocation. The Audiovisual Anthropology of the Invisible and the Absent

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Frank M. Heidemann
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 232674124

The context of the research project is the applicant's focus on research and teaching in visual anthropology; it investigates the social contexts and discourses of documentary films. The points of departure are the following questions: How is emotional and multisensory experience translated into film language? How is experience mediated in audiovisual representations and how is it negotiated in and by social discourse practices? What role does multisensory evocation play regarding the viewer's empathy, participation and affective involvement? The applicant and the prospective researcher investigate the "documentary" field of discourse as regards the questions mentioned above.Through an integrative study of visual anthropology, anthropology of the senses and the emotions, along with the fields of film, literature and philosophy, the project focuses on the production and discursive reception of various poetics of feeling.The subject matter is films that thematically and stylistically question the western hierarchy of the senses and the preference of vision. Thus the focus moves from a supposedly pictorial representation towards a multisensory evocation of social realities and emotional life. Therefore films will be analyzed which thematically and stylistically make the invisible and absent into a sensuous experience for the viewer. This focus, which is manifest in film language in narrative gaps, editing techniques and other cinematic strategies, is due to the leading thesis that cinematic blanks are filled in the viewers' imagination - thus they are stimulated to participate in an emotional, multisensory way. This thesis needs to be examined through an interdisciplinary plurality of methods, which include discourse analysis and questions on the aesthetics of reception. The project focuses its attention on actors in the heterogeneous discourse on documentaries.Because of its interdisciplinarity and its focus on the viewer and reception the project closes a gap in Visual Anthropology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants