Exceptional Experiences

Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing – including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images – Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.

Petra Rethmann is Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario and Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition. She is the author or editor of three books and has held guest professorships at the University of St. Petersburg, University of Cape Town, and Aleksanteri Institute/Helsinki.

Helena Wulff is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Among her publications are three monographs, most recently Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (Routledge, 2017) and several edited volumes including The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn, 2016).