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Capturing the Experience of Divine Healing with a Video Camera Friday 03/23/2012: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM Department of Anthropology, Center for Visual Anthropology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Christian Suhr of Denmark’s Aarhus University screens a preliminary version of his film-in-progress for feedback and discussion. This anthropological film project explores how Muslims in Denmark experience divine healing, exorcism, and psychiatric health care. By combining images, sounds and words, film appears to resemble normal human perception and experience more holistically than any other medium of expression. But does this also hold true when dealing with experiences of divine, supernatural and invisible realities? When following a subject on film, we often find ourselves identifying with the person as if we were living the person’s life through the events that unfold. Identification seems to be the key to how film allows access to other people’s experience. Yet identification also involves a great deal of illusion, since viewers can’t fully get inside the bodies presented on the screen. This presentation argues that a visual anthropology of religious experience needs to abandon identification, correspondence and likeness to perceived reality as the basis for cinematic analysis. Instead, it proposes a form of analysis in which the end point is not to unite the viewer with particular cinematic realities, but rather the opposite, to create intervals in which associations are forced outside of the screen and into ultimately unrepresentable bodies of knowledge and experience. Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and Ph.D. researcher at the Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His Ph.D. study concerns the interface between the visible and invisible dimensions of human reality, with a particular focus on how Muslims in Denmark experience divine healing. Relying on visual anthropological fieldwork, he hopes to find ways in which montages of words, images and sounds may enable us to approach the invisible aspects of such experiences and give them a space in anthropological research without reducing them to visibility. The event is sponsored by the USC Center for Visual Anthropology. Admission: Free Organized by: Jennifer Cool Add event