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Institute of Social Anthropology, Münsterplatz 19, 4051 Basel
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Institute of Social Anthropology
Michaela Schäuble: "Are Spiders Good to Think With?" (University of Bern)
In media anthropology as well as in artistic research, tentacularity is often conceptualised in terms of entanglements and layerings, and the tentacular is imagined as spreading through nets and networks.
In this presentation, Michaela Schäuble is taking Haraway’s proposition of “tentacular thinking” (Haraway 2016) quite literal, by drawing on long-term multimodal ethnographic research on Apulian tarantism, a spider possession cult that is endemic to Southern Italy and intrinsically linked to Saint Paul, the patron saint of those bitten by venomous animals. Schäuble argues that several more-than-human agents – venomous critters, Catholic saints and eventually landscape itself – continue to shape social relations that are grounded in a principle of shared corporeality open to suffering.
The presenter will screen passages from her ethnographic documentary film “Tarantism Revisited” (together with Anja Dreschke) to discuss principles of essayistic montage, layering and leveraging the (multimodal) archive in relation to “tentacular thinking.”
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