Between the sensible and the intelligible: Anthropology and the cinema of Marcel Mauss and Jean Rouch

Abstract

In this paper I explore the connections between the anthropology of Marcel Mauss and the anthropological cinema of Jean Rouch. In the process, I identify elements in the work of the filmmaker and anthropologist that amount to a critique of any simplistic opposition between prose and poetry, science and art, rational and irrational, material and immaterial, the thought world and the lived world, ethnographic description and creative interpretation, sound and word, ethnographic film and documentary, anthropology and cinema.