Call for papers for the dossier: Images in Trance.
The dossier Images in Trance emerges from the working group of the same name held during the XV Reunião de Antropologia do Mercosul, in Salvador, in 2025. The title emphasizes the idea of trance as inspiration, epiphany, and a state of abstraction experienced in the artistic production of anthropological images, as well as images themselves as producers of enchantment, transcendence, and deception in their circulation. It also highlights the condition of a planet in trance and the potential of images to imagine new forms of relating to a damaged world (Tsing et al. 2017).
Amid the intensification of digital technology, artificial intelligence, and the automation of sensitive processes, the production of images seems never to have been so effusive — a phenomenon that unfolds in parallel with the planet’s climatic transformations (Latour 2020). There is a pluriverse of images composed of audiovisual narratives, drawings, photographs, collages, cartographies, embroideries, and sonic, mental, “artificial,” archival images, among others. From an epistemological perspective, a vast field of possibilities opens up for actions alternative to capitalism and the singular project of modernity, connecting images to the production of anthropological knowledge. In this sense, we are interested in asking which images are evoked, imagined, and produced in the Anthropocene as a “limit event” (Haraway 2023), and what effects they produce in the world.
The aim of the dossier is to bring together original contributions that take images as a methodological and/or analytical axis in dialogue with issues related to climate change, the Anthropocene, and its various derivations and problematizations. We welcome works that make explicit how images intervene in anthropological practice, redirecting research toward other paths; as well as works centered on the analysis of pre-existing images — such as films, photographic archives, collections, and artisanal productions, among others.
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Call for contributions for the section "Chimera" with visual ethnographies that will compose the forthcoming issues