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 Astonishment and Evocation
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 Studies in Rhetoric and Culture

Edited by Ivo Strecker, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Stephen Tyler,

Rice University, and Robert Hariman, Northwestern University

Our minds are filled with images and ideas, but these remain unstable and
incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and oth-
ers of their meanings. It is this inward and outward rhetoric which allows us
to give some kind of shape and structure to our understanding of the world
and which becomes central to the formation of individual and collective con-
sciousness. This series is dedicated to the study of the interaction of rhetoric
and culture and focuses on the concrete practices of discourse in which and
through which the diverse and often also fantastic patterns of culture—includ-
ing our own—are created, maintained, and contested.

Volume 1
Culture and Rhetoric
Edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler

Volume 2
Culture, Rhetoric, and the Vicissitudes of Life
Edited by Michael Carrithers

Volume 3
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Economic Persuasions
Edited by Stephen Gudeman

Volume 4
The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture
Edited by Christian Meyer and Felix Girke

Volume 5
Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology
Edited by Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

Volume 6
Chiasmus and Culture
Edited by Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 Astonishment
and Evocation
The Spell of Culture
in Art and Anthropology

Edited by
Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

berghahn
NEW YORK • OXFORD
www.berghahnbooks.com

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 First published in 2013 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

©2013 Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Astonishment and evocation : the spell of culture in art and anthropology / edited by Ivo
Strecker and Markus Verne. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric and culture ; volume 5)
ISBN 978-0-85745-935-0 (hardback) —
ISBN 978-0-85745-936-7 (institutional ebook)
1. Art and anthropology. 2. Art and society. 3. Visual anthropology. 4. Visual
perception. I. Strecker, Ivo A., 1940– II. Verne, Markus.
N72.A56A77 2013
306.4'7—dc23
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2012037869

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-0-85745-935-0 hardback

ISBN: 978-0-85745-936-7 institutional ebook

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1
Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

Part I
Image

1. Do Pictures Stare? Thoughts about Six Elements of Attention 23

Todd Oakley

2. Gazing at Paintings and the Evocation of Life 27

Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

3. Tangled Up in Blue: Symbolism and Evocation 41

Boris Wiseman

4. Co-Presence, Astonishment, and Evocation in Cinematography 52

Ivo Strecker

Part II
Performance

5. Captivated by Ritual: Visceral Visitations and the Evocation of

Community 63
Klaus-Peter Köpping

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 vi
contents

6. The Spell of Riddles Among the Witoto 77

Jürg Gasché

7. Sounds of the Past: Music, History, and Astonishment 97

Markus Verne

8. Tears, Not So Idle Tears: “Time Binding,” Lachrymose

Emotionality, and Ethnographic Disambiguation 111
James W. Fernandez

Part III
Text

9. Stones, Drumbeats, and Footprints in the Writing of the Other 133

Dennis Tedlock

10. The Translation of the Said and the Unsaid in Sikkanese

Ritual Texts 146
E. Douglas Lewis

11. Ethnographic Evocations and Evocative Ethnographies 164

Barbara Tedlock

12. Reading Public Culture: Reason and Excess in the Newspaper 180
Robert Hariman

Notes on Contributors 190

Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Index 193

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 Acknowledgments

To begin with, we express our gratitude to the Volkswagen Foundation for

providing funds that enabled an international group of scholars to assemble at
the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, and hold four confer-
ences aimed at retrieving and further developing an ancient rhetorical theory
of culture (see http://www.rhetoricculture.org).
From 2006 onward, while we were busy preparing the results of our de-
bates for publication, the 75th birthday of Stephen Tyler was also imminent.
Because Stephen was considered a kind of “dean” of the project, it seemed ap-
propriate to give his anniversary some special recognition. So word was sent
to all the scholars involved in the rhetoric culture project, inviting them to
contribute to a Festschrift devoted to Stephen’s ideas of ethnography as an art
of evocation and a means for catharsis.
In the event an amazing mix of texts was collected. They numbered more
than forty, filling two improvised volumes that we printed out in a copy shop
in Berlin and then presented personally to Stephen in Houston on his birth-
day. We read passages from the Festschrift to Stephen and the other guests,
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

who attended the surprise party that James Faubion had arranged. Some of the
pieces were entertaining, such as “Mockery of Animals,” “Miming the Anthro-
pologist,” “My Favourite Shit Story,” or “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; others
were disturbing, such as “Hitler at the Nile,” “Riots in the Balkans,” and “The
Man Who Wanted to Unlearn Reading.”
Here we want to mention all those who provided papers for this celebra-
tion and by doing so helped create the present book, as well as another that is
still in the making. In particular we thank Jon Abbink, Marie-Cécile Bertau,
Nurit Bird-David, Anna-Maria Brandstetter, Vincenzo Cannada Bartoli, Ralph
Cintron, Jean de Bernardi, Susan du Mesnil, Susanne Epple, James Faubion,
James Fernandez, James Fox, Paul Friedrich, Echi Gabbert, Jürg Gasché, Felix
Girke, Robert Hariman, Alexander Henn, Holger Jebens, Klaus-Peter Köp-
ping, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Shauna LaTosky, Douglas Lewis, Jean Lydall, David

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 viii
acknowledgments

MacDougall, Christian Meyer, Todd Oakley, Michael Oppitz, Anthony Paul,

Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Nikolaus Scharaika, Bernhard Streck, Sophia Thu-
bauville, Barbara Tedlock, Dennis Tedlock, and Boris Wiseman.
The manuscript of Stephen’s Festschrift was left to rest for several years, but
once the first four volumes of the Berghahn Books series “Studies in Rhetoric
and Culture” had appeared in print, Marion Berghahn encouraged us to send
her an outline of a volume that would contain those essays that focused on
the themes of astonishment and evocation. Our task was to select, revise, and,
if necessary, completely recast the contributions to create a book—quite dif-
ferent from a Festschrift—in which the whole is more than its parts and each
chapter enhances the strength of the others. This demanded great efforts from
all the contributors, whom we herewith wish to thank warmly. We also want to
tell Marion how much we appreciate her good advice and patience. Finally we
are grateful to the anonymous readers whose thoughtful comments helped us
revise, not only the composition of the book, but even its very title.

Ivo Strecker
Up’n Hardigen, Melle

Markus Verne
Bayreuth
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 Illustrations

Figure 2.1. Sketch of Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In

(by Philippe-Joseph Salazar) 30

Figure 2.2. Sketch of Sir John Lavery, Tennis Party

(by Philippe-Joseph Salazar) 34

Figure 2.3. Sketch of Balthus. Le Jeu de cartes

(by Philippe-Joseph Salazar) 37
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 Introduction
Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

Wonder and astonishment lie at the heart of scholarship, as René Des-

cartes noted in The Passions of the Soul: “When the first encounter with some
object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we
formerly knew, or from what we suppose it ought to be, that causes us to won-
der and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know
whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder
is the first of all the passions” (1972: 358).
Similarly, Margaret Mead once said that anthropology demands an “open-
mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and
wonder that which one would not have been able to guess” (1977: IX). Thus,
wonder and astonishment are part and parcel of the encounter with the world
in our own and in other cultures, and they produce mental and emotional en-
ergy, which leads artists and anthropologists alike to look and examine closely
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

a particular phenomenon that has caught their attention.

Ethnographers and artists not only experience astonishment when in the
field. They also relay it to others. As Clifford Geertz, in his genial fashion, has
characterized these rhetorics: Anthropologists (and also artists, one might
say) are “merchants of astonishment” who “hawk the anomalous, peddle the
strange” and who have “with no little success, sought to keep the world off bal-
ance; pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers” (2001: 64).
Yet even though scholars of art and anthropology have been aware of aston-
ishment as an intrinsic part of their experience, they have as yet not explored it
in any depth. Only Tim Ingold and Richard Buxton have recently identified as-
tonishment as a topic for research. Ingold has called for a renewal of “the sense
of astonishment banished from official science” (2006: 9), and Buxton has dem-
onstrated how ancient Greek myth and storytelling may be best understood as
an art aimed at creating various “forms of astonishment” (2009).

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 2
ivo strecker and markus verne

Ingold’s and Buxton’s retrieval of astonishment as a scholarly concept goes

well with the intentions of Stephen Tyler, in whose honor the contributions
to the present book were written. According to Tyler’s theory—developed in
The Said and the Unsaid—the use of language is precarious, full of risks and
surprises and therefore prone to cause wonder and astonishment. Speaking,
he writes, is “more like breathing than thinking” (1978: 25), and “the more we
consciously attend to it, the less perfectly we do it” (1978: 24). There are “slips
between the tongue and the lips,” and “our speaking often fails to convey what
we had in mind” (1978: 137). Discourse typically contains “false starts, hesita-
tions, and repeats,” which derive “from forgetting where we were going or from
searching for a fugitive word or apt phrase, or merely from a desire to hold the
floor, or because we want to create a dramatic effect, even to dissimulate. …
One of the things we often sense in speaking is that we are not saying what we
had in mind. The retrospective and prospective accommodation of phrases
creates an order at variance with our original intention” (1978: 134). The use
of language is thoroughly rhetorical, for “the match between words and things
… is hardly complete or total; nor is it analytic, the combination of atomic ele-
ments into larger unities. It is instead indexical, analogical and inferential—a
creative accommodation of words and things” (1978: 181).
The ramifications of these and other related thoughts have led Tyler to
emphasize the role of evocation in ethnography. He says that “ethnography is
a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to
evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible
world of commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration
that will have a therapeutic effect. It is in a word, poetry—not in its textual
form, but in its return to the original context and function of poetry, which,
by means of its performative break with everyday speech, evoked memories
of the ethos of the community and thereby provoked hearers to act ethically”
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(1987: 202).
This attractive view of a liberated form of ethnography (and by implica-
tion, the interpretation of art) can only hold up its promise as long as we are
aware that the source of evocation is astonishment, which, however, may also
have its drawbacks. As Descartes observed, astonishment can cause “the whole
body to remain as immobile as a statue,” and it can prevent one from “perceiv-
ing more of the object than the first face which is presented, or consequently
of acquiring a more particular knowledge of it. That is what we commonly call
being astonished, and astonishment is an excess of wonder which can never be
otherwise than bad” (1972: 364).
Furthermore, such an excess of wonder may become a habit—a so-called
malady of blind curiosity—that leads people to “seek out things that are rare
solely to wonder at them, and not for the purpose of really knowing them: for

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 introduction
3

little by little they become so given over to wonder, that things of no impor-
tance are no less capable of arresting their attention than those whose investi-
gation is more useful” (Descartes 1972: 366).
How is one to judge what deserves wonder and what does not? Has the
modern age not suffered less from an excess but rather from a lack of wonder,
and is it not therefore the task of both ethnography and art to revive and culti-
vate the most important “passion of the soul”—that is, wonder, astonishment,
or, as James Joyce has called it, epiphany? Joyce’s hero Stephen Daedalus, pon-
dering the meaning of a clock in one of Dublin’s streets, told his friend: “Imag-
ine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to
adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object
is epiphanized. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme qual-
ity of beauty” (Joyce 1944: 211).
The “spiritual eye” defamiliarizes the object and then focuses on it anew
to achieve a heightened level of trance-like awareness—epiphany—which Ste-
phen Daedalus explained, saying: “First we recognize that the object is one
integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a
thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts
are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is.
Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul
of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us
radiant. The object achieves its epiphany” (Joyce 1944: 213; Joyce’s emphases).
Overhearing a “fragment of colloquy” in the streets of Dublin, Stephen
Daedalus thought of “collecting many such moments together in a book of
epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether
in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind
itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies
with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and eva-
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

nescent of moments” (Joyce 1944: 211).

Here, in the fantasy of a “book of epiphanies,” it seems that we are en-
tering the realm of art and anthropology, for one may well understand eth-
nography and art criticism as an attempt to recall the spellbinding moments,
the epiphanies people have experienced in their encounters with works of art
or another culture. Note that Joyce not only mentions objects, gestures, and
speech performance, but also thought itself. What he calls “a memorable phase
of the mind” resembles Tyler’s cooperatively evolved text, which “evokes in the
minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of
commonsense reality” (Tyler 1987: 202).
Epiphany and fantasy are both elusive and inaccessible to what Tyler calls
“that inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric” (1987: 207). The only appro-
priate response can be the art of evocation, which “makes available through

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 4
ivo strecker and markus verne

absence what can be conceived but not presented” (1987: 199). This seemingly
cryptic statement needs to be read against Tyler’s theory of tropes, especially
metaphor. A full account is found in the paragraph on metaphor in The Said
and the Unsaid, of which we quote three passages that are most relevant here.
The first introduces the topic and runs as follows:
Metaphor is perhaps the most fundamental process in language and thought,
for it accounts not only for equivalence in a formal sense, it is the major means
by which language changes and by which thought encompasses new ideas. A
measure of its importance is the fact that it was one of the first purely semantic
relations to be subjected to analysis in early philosophy (1978: 315–316).

The second outlines the role of metaphor in the extension of knowledge:

We often speak of something being “just metaphor,” and this pejorative usage
signifies a common attitude toward metaphor, that it is suitable only to poetic
fancy and apt to be misleading in other contexts. How wrong this view is
when we take into account the role of metaphor in extending our knowledge.
Rather than an inferior means of reason properly restricted to the imagina-
tion at play or in its aesthetic moments, it assumes a rational function more
fundamental than any yet described. As the principal means by which we
establish equivalences, it must underlie all our classifications, for a classifica-
tion is nothing more than a system of equivalences (1978: 335).

The third draws attention to the fact that the use of metaphor has its cost
because metaphor both reveals and obscures:
Metaphor is fundamental and unavoidable in meaningful discourse. True
enough, it has its other uses, which have long been noted, of lending style
and color to a text, and there can be no doubt but that a good metaphor has a
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

dual role in the imagination, for it both reveals and obscures. By emphasizing
certain features in a comparison, for example, it draws our attention to just
those features, pushing others into the background. When we see something
as something else we see only the similarities and not the differences. A meta-
phor may mislead in exact proportion to the amount it reveals, but this is the
price of any revelation (1978: 335–336).

One cannot, therefore, escape metaphor (as well as other tropes) and the
elusive meanings it entails. But Tyler is prepared to accept this as the price we
have to pay for worthwhile ethnography. James Clifford held a similar view
when he wrote that ethnographies are the work of rhetoric and that all ethno-
graphic writing is “allegorical at the level both of its content (what it says about
cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is implied by its mode of
textualization” (1986: 98).

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 introduction
5

However, allegory or, more generally, figuration is not only the means by
which we “write culture,” it is also the means by which we create it. As Den-
nis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim have pointed out, “cultures are produced,
reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members” (1995: 2) and,
most important, “once culture is seen as arising from a dialogical ground,
then ethnography itself is revealed as an emergent cultural (or intercultural)
phenomenon, produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues between field-
workers and natives. The process of its production is of the same general kind
as the process by which ethnic others produce the cultures that are the objects
of ethnographic study” (1995: 2).
To this we need to add that these dialogues abound with multivocal mean-
ings and are saturated with tropes. Or, put differently, the dialogues make use of
figures that despite or, as the present book argues, because of their elusiveness
put us under their spell (Streck 2011), fire our imagination, and lead us jointly
to conjure those fantasies and their manifestations, which we call culture.

Part I: Image

Chapter 1, “Do Pictures Stare? Thoughts about Six Elements of Attention,” by

Todd Oakley, draws on the author’s long-term research in the fields of rheto-
ric, linguistics, and cognitive science and is meant as a kind of overture to the
present book, for attention—especially spellbinding attention—constitutes the
precondition for astonishment and evocation. The chapter, short and written
in a deceptively simple style, is in fact filled with deep thought and is a “fruitful
heuristic” not only for an investigation of attention, but also the study of aston-
ishment and evocation. Attention may be understood as the mental and emo-
tional energy without which neither astonishment nor evocation will occur.
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

But what exactly is attention? How does it come about? How is it sustained,
controlled, harmonized?
Oakley uses his experience of an art exhibition to provide answers to these
questions. As it transpires, not only the individual items on display, but also
the museum as a whole, may induce and celebrate astonishment and evoca-
tion. It is the Frick Gallery in New York where the author’s eureka occurred:
His attention “zeroed in” on two Holbein portraits—one of Thomas Cromwell
and the other of Thomas More—that were so cleverly placed it seemed that the
two archenemies were staring at one another. Oakley remarks, “Frick prob-
ably savored the irony of this hang.” To understand fully the curiously evocative
placement of the two paintings, one needs the “ability to construct on the fly
mental simulations from disparate domains of knowledge, in this case, from the
domains of artistic portraiture, curatorial practices, and political infighting.”

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 6
ivo strecker and markus verne

Taking off from here, Oakley launches his ideas about six elements of
attention. He calls the first alerting and defines it as “a general readiness to
process novel stimuli.” The second he names orienting, the disposition “to at-
tend to particular items over others.” These two are the “pre-attentive elements
necessary for initiating a sequence of higher order processes,” which are the
following:
Selecting “directs attention toward items and away from other items” and
is especially interesting for a theory of evocation in that it may involve un-
conscious filtering, blockage, and deprivation. The same applies to sustaining
attention, which Oakley says needs time and effort: As the viewer perceives
Cromwell eyeing More, evocations arise, “mental simulations” take place that
are “anchored in the here-and-now of a museum visit but referencing the
there-and-then of Tudor England.”
Oakley calls this fifth element controlling attention and points out that it
is “vital for functioning in complex, social and technological environments.”
Harmonizing is the sixth and probably most relevant element in the context of
the present book, because it involves the awareness of other people’s cognitive
horizons and an ever-elusive yet indispensable anticipation of their thoughts
and feelings.
Chapter 2, “Gazing at Paintings and the Evocation of Life,” by Philippe-
Joseph Salazar, similarly shows how the museum can be understood as an in-
stitution where spellbinding attention, astonishment, and evocation are culti-
vated. Like Oakley and Wiseman he recalls and reflects on what he experienced
at particular exhibitions, but he does it in a very personal and dramatic way.
Noting that visual experiences have often triggered an epiphany in the course
of his life, he uses this term as a key concept in his “self-ethnography.”
An epiphany happens “when the unexpected jolts the mind into confront-
ing that, which had remained out of sight,” and whenever he went to a mu-
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

seum, Salazar looked forward not only to particular works of art that he was
going to see, but also to writing about such “unexpected jolts.” Gazing and
writing became one, as it were, in his moments of epiphany. The essay quotes
three entries from his diaries, which show how paintings may “take possession
of one’s life” by evoking “moral lessons.” He also provides details of elements of
attention (see Oakley above) that influenced his gaze.
The first entry is about Paul Cadmus’s The Fleet’s In (1934), which in
Salazar’s mind “hails back” to the past, to the High Renaissance, to a “courtly
theme.” The sailors, and the men and women of the Great Depression, who are
portrayed in the painting, reminded him of the plenipotentiaries and courtiers
depicted in a fresco at the Ambassador’s Staircase in Versailles. As he kept gaz-
ing, the individual figures in the painting captured his attention and he noticed
what Wiseman would call their “immanent qualities.” With ever-increasing

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 introduction
7

intensity he describes how these figures are depicted by the painter, and in an
ever-widening realm of comparison, which includes other paintings and other
contexts, Salazar lets us share his evocations. Finally, in an additional twist he
conjures up what the figures in the painting may be facing, may themselves be
thinking and feeling.
John Lavery’s Tennis Party (1885) and Le Jeu de cartes (1948–1950) by
Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski de Rola) led to similar cascades of evocation.
Salazar was obviously captivated by the many pictorial tropes—especially
irony—that abound in all of the paintings, and his diary entries show how they
fueled his feelings of epiphany. Again, we note his attention to minute but tell-
ing details of form and function, and it can be said that both the painters who
painted the pictures and Salazar who gazed at them are masters of attribution
(see Strecker below). In addition they are masters of allegory. English tennis
becomes a “game of adultery,” and the French belote becomes a “game of life.”
Salazar supports this with an account of his internal rhetoric. Is the card game
about cheating? No. Is it about a personal relationship? Yes. After attending to
the most telling details he says, “This is the painterly lesson of Le Jeu de cartes:
a life is lived fully if played at the edge of Life.”
Each of the three paintings does even more than evoke the mood and mo-
dalities of individual lives, it also summons the vision of an historical period:
Tennis Party brings to mind the impending end of the British Empire: “lawn
tennis played on summery afternoons will disappear as proverbial clouds will
gather over Empire”; The Fleet’s In rouses memories of an exulted moment in
America’s history, when “Roosevelt and his emissaries design the New Deal”;
and Le Jeu de cartes, Salazar concludes, “is a trope of the Cold War. That’s how
I see it.”
Chapter 3, “Tangled up in Blue. Symbolism and Evocation,” by Boris Wise-
man, widens and deepens the topic of the present book by reminding us that
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

the question of nonreferential language is still one of the “supreme enigmas”

of cultural studies. In a short introductory paragraph he recalls that the French
Symbolists (among them, Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and pioneers of abstract
art (for example, Kandisky) experimented with the spellbinding capacity of
language and other media, showing that art is above all a matter of “sensu-
ous evocation.” Anthropologists and linguists have analyzed some of the more
important ways in which evocation may be generated and kept in motion, for
example, by using imaginative strings of homologies (Lévi-Strauss), analogies
(Jakobson), and synaesthetic correlates (Whorf).
In a second step, Wiseman remembers how an exhibition—Indigo—first
roused his interest and led him to explore empirically and in minute detail the
evocative power and symbolic ramifications of this blue dye. Astonishment, he
observes, is enshrined in the production of indigo because an “extraordinary

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
 8
ivo strecker and markus verne

transmutation of the natural world” takes place whereby colorless plant fibers
suddenly yield their “precious chromatic essence.” Evocation is involved when
it comes to the social use of the color: the almost magical transformation ob-
served in the natural world is projected onto the social world where the use of
indigo dye plays a prominent role in rites of passage and is symbolically con-
nected with death and regeneration.
Drawing on his wide knowledge of both anthropology and art history,
Wiseman goes on to provide examples from various cultural contexts that show
how the symbolism of indigo weaves sensory experiences together and creates
moods that derive from the immanent qualities of indigo. Then he returns
to general theory—to Lévi-Strauss and the interpretation of Apollinaire’s Les
colchiques. Once more we find ourselves “entangled in blue,” subject to aston-
ishment and evocation, as Wiseman makes a refined analysis of the poetic lan-
guage that entertains a comparison between the blue color of a flower (meadow
saffron or naked lady) and the eyes of the enchanted poet’s mistress.
Finally, Wiseman examines not only the evocations of blue but also of red
and black as they appear in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Claudel, Rilke, and
Imbert. Particular colors relate to, and resonate with, others. This is not only
true for colors present in the same perceptual field, but also for those that are
part of a person’s memory or even the imaginary product of the mind’s eye.
Thus, a field of indirect evocation extends beyond the field of direct perception
and may be cultivated and carried over from one work to another, so that one
may speak of a culture’s history of evocation and perception.
Does this mean that all evocations associated with particular colors are
culture-specific? Wiseman answers: “I see a close kinship between the figure
of the dye-maker and that of the artist and by extension the museum or gal-
lery visitor. They share the same fine grained attentiveness to the qualitative
dimensions of things and the conviction that these signify.” In other words,
Copyright © 2013. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

because of indigo’s immanent qualities, we are all prone to fall under its spell.
Regardless of our cultural background we get entangled in strings of evocation
and are captivated by indigo’s mysterious blue.
In chapter 4, “Co-Presence, Astonishment, and Evocation in Cinematog-
raphy,” Ivo Strecker explores the spellbinding power of cinema. Like the mu-
seum, the cinema derives its raison d’être from the opportunity it provides
visitors for astonishment and evocation. Literally as well as metaphorically, it
is a site for focusing, for intense viewing, for sustained attention, and for men-
tal and emotional epiphany (see Oakley and Salazar above).
While working on his own films, or watching films made by others,
Strecker often wondered about the evocative power of seemingly incidental
phenomena, such as when a dog appears and is kicked away just as a baby is
being born or a bird rises and circles above a dancer. Why are cinematogra-

Astonishment and Evocation : The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, edited by Ivo Strecker, and Markus Verne, Berghahn
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