Brief Encounter: The Meeting, in Mass-Observation, of British Surrealism and Popular Anthropology

Editorial: Journal formats and virtual issues

“…Edited by Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault, that journal was developed as a printed medium to disseminate poetry, prose essays, and reviews, to generate discussion, to innovate using graphic design and drawings, and to advertise diverse exhibitions – of Max Ernst's collages and photographs, for example – rent and events (see Adamowicz ; Fer, Batchelor & Wood ; Hage ). Noting relations, both of connection and divergence, between surrealists’ and anthropologists’ approaches and practices (Clifford ; Foster ; MacClancy ; Schneider ), the JRAI takes this opportunity to highlight journals, more generally, as significant and potentially innovative forms in anthropology and beyond. As a printed, and now digital, forum for current and critical analysis, and for wide‐ranging debate across all fields of anthropology and archaeology, the JRAI welcomes work in formats from core, in‐depth, written articles (up to 10,000 words) to experimental pieces using text and/or visual images, as well as manifestos that identify and examine key current issues and future directions.…”

Observing, Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's FieldworkAgencements

“…Instead, I want to pick up on another aspect of MacClancy's (1995MacClancy's ( , 2001), Hubble's (2006) and Highmore's (2007) analyses of MO in relation to the connection between surrealism, Freudian psychology and the material form in which MO collected, stored and subsequently presented its work. For example, I have already noted the use of the language of documentary film making in explaining the relationship between the Observer's reports in the London section in the publication of May the Twelfth: Mass Observation Day Surveys.…”

“…He emphasizes the development of the social sciences in Britain within this context, associating the emergence of this new intellectual formation with, amongst other things, the popularity of the Left Book Club and the newly launched Penguin and Pelican paperbacks which covered science, current affairs and social issues in a technical manner, but were nonetheless cheaply available and became widely read amongst this new class group. While MO and its founders' (particularly Harrisson's) struggle for academic credibility in relation to contemporary British anthropology and sociology has received much attention in accounting for the relative invisibility of MO in histories of British anthropology (MacClancy 1995(MacClancy , 2001Stanley 2001Stanley , 2009Street n.d.;Hubble 2006), I want to emphasize another adjacent field-the aesthetic-which has perhaps received less attention in relation to the question of the conceptualization of population and the legacy of MO in the wartime and post-war British administrative-bureaucratic apparatus. Historian of Science Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent argues for the importance of exploring the mechanisms of demarcation and discrimination between science and rival forms of knowledge and "how the notions of science and the public have been mutually configured and reconfigured" (2009,361).…”

“…Madge announced the establishment of the "Blackheath Group" whose "anthropology at home" sought to understand the reaction of the public to this crisis and similar contemporary events. This group included MO co-founder, poet and documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings and photographer Humphrey Spender who had been involved in organizing the first London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and whose approach was strongly influenced by surrealism and notions of the collective unconscious (MacClancy 1995(MacClancy , 2001Highmore 2002Highmore , 2007. Harrisson, who had already begun working in 1936 in the north of England in a factory in Bolton as an exercise in the participant observation of England's "natives" (Madge and Harrisson 1937, 10), combined his anthropological fieldwork practices with the more artistic and journalistic methods of Madge and Jennings, and the foundation of MO was reported in the same periodical briefly afterwards.…”

De potências perturbadoras: encontrando o sagrado na modernidade

“…Mas o texto de Leiris chama a atenção para a existência de empreendimentos anteriores. O surrealismo certamente desempenhou um papel fundamental nesses empreendimentos, seja na França, como ilustra a revista Documents e a própria biografia de Leiris (Peixoto, 2011), seja na Inglaterra, onde se desenvolveu o projeto Mass Observation como proposta de uma "antropologia de nós mesmos" (Macclancy, 1995). O que estava em jogo era tanto a definição da antropologia (como disciplina ou como prática), quanto a relação que se poderia estabelecer -e questionar -entre povos distintamente posicionados considerando o marco da "civilização ocidental".…”