Books by Louise Amalie Schultz Bjerre
by rodo pfister, Chiara Thumiger, Angelika C. Messner, Claire Bubb, Louise Amalie Schultz Bjerre, Thomas Cousins, Jason Birch, Victor Golubev, Marta Hanson, Christoph Geiger, and Monique Kornell The images and texts in this catalogue testify to a wonderful cooperative effort: Comparative Gut... more The images and texts in this catalogue testify to a wonderful cooperative effort: Comparative Guts, the coming together of over thirty anthropologists, artists and historians to explore the human body and establish a dialogue between representations, perceptions, audiences and communicative styles. The focus is on one particular body part: the innards of the lower torso,what English-speakers sometimes call the “guts”. The images and texts collected here speak about the way human beings have desired and attempted to learn about this region of the body, and to describe and represent it visually. The project’s work resulted in a digital exhibition (www.comparative-guts.net) whose sections, like the chapters of this book, aim to overcome regional boundaries and cultural structures to make as much space as possible for variety and interconnections, juxtaposing mainstream works and well-known stories with cultural expressions that are peculiar, specific, far apart, eccentric and even obscure.
Comparison and the “comparative disciplines”, of course, never allow for straightforward, monolithic projects, and cannot be methodologically innocent in their goal to “make equal”, comparare, different things. Comparison is never safe from applying a measure that is disadvantageous to some participants, flattening incommensurable differences, or oversimplifying complex networks of ideas and influences. These and other pitfalls led Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2003 _Death of a Discipline_, to speak of a demise of comparativism as an approach to the human world which divides it into neatly catalogued cultures, generally in translation, within a globalised whole. Instead, she proposed that the field be reshaped into one in which peripheries, local languages, and hybridisation between cultures assume the foreground.
This criticism is not to be ignored, and these pitfalls must be a major concern for a project such as ours. Comparative Guts, with its focus on “image” and “body”, attempted to address some of these issues in various ways: by questioning definitions of knowledge and who should be its repositories; disrupting the very concept of “image” as stably given and immediately and objectively evident to (primarily visual) perception; undermining the slicing of cultures into discrete regions and eras; and questioning the mapping of the animal body into recognisable, universal “parts”. --------------------
THUMIGER Chiara (ed.) 2024: Comparative Guts: Exploring the Inside of the Body through Time and Space. Kiel: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. https://doi.org/10.38071/2024-00345-3
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Books by Louise Amalie Schultz Bjerre
Comparison and the “comparative disciplines”, of course, never allow for straightforward, monolithic projects, and cannot be methodologically innocent in their goal to “make equal”, comparare, different things. Comparison is never safe from applying a measure that is disadvantageous to some participants, flattening incommensurable differences, or oversimplifying complex networks of ideas and influences. These and other pitfalls led Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2003 _Death of a Discipline_, to speak of a demise of comparativism as an approach to the human world which divides it into neatly catalogued cultures, generally in translation, within a globalised whole. Instead, she proposed that the field be reshaped into one in which peripheries, local languages, and hybridisation between cultures assume the foreground.
This criticism is not to be ignored, and these pitfalls must be a major concern for a project such as ours. Comparative Guts, with its focus on “image” and “body”, attempted to address some of these issues in various ways: by questioning definitions of knowledge and who should be its repositories; disrupting the very concept of “image” as stably given and immediately and objectively evident to (primarily visual) perception; undermining the slicing of cultures into discrete regions and eras; and questioning the mapping of the animal body into recognisable, universal “parts”. --------------------
THUMIGER Chiara (ed.) 2024: Comparative Guts: Exploring the Inside of the Body through Time and Space. Kiel: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. https://doi.org/10.38071/2024-00345-3
Comparison and the “comparative disciplines”, of course, never allow for straightforward, monolithic projects, and cannot be methodologically innocent in their goal to “make equal”, comparare, different things. Comparison is never safe from applying a measure that is disadvantageous to some participants, flattening incommensurable differences, or oversimplifying complex networks of ideas and influences. These and other pitfalls led Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2003 _Death of a Discipline_, to speak of a demise of comparativism as an approach to the human world which divides it into neatly catalogued cultures, generally in translation, within a globalised whole. Instead, she proposed that the field be reshaped into one in which peripheries, local languages, and hybridisation between cultures assume the foreground.
This criticism is not to be ignored, and these pitfalls must be a major concern for a project such as ours. Comparative Guts, with its focus on “image” and “body”, attempted to address some of these issues in various ways: by questioning definitions of knowledge and who should be its repositories; disrupting the very concept of “image” as stably given and immediately and objectively evident to (primarily visual) perception; undermining the slicing of cultures into discrete regions and eras; and questioning the mapping of the animal body into recognisable, universal “parts”. --------------------
THUMIGER Chiara (ed.) 2024: Comparative Guts: Exploring the Inside of the Body through Time and Space. Kiel: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. https://doi.org/10.38071/2024-00345-3