FROM THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR TV

FROM THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR TV

The orchestrations, too, understand the styles to such a degree they can be subverted with subtle modern twists to stop this being a museum piece: the spectacular Absolutely Me is what Cab Calloway would have done if he'd ever had a drum machine The Other Woman features the funkiest xylophone you'll ever hear, mixed with the sort of electric guitar that ought to have its own 60s TV theme.Д«ut while the arrangements add an almost cinematic setting to the narratives, this is all about the vocals. These dozen songs ease their way around swing, mambo, rumba and lounge, as big rich vocals weave the kind of witty, intriguing stories sure to draw you into a world of loves lost, found and betrayed. However, Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor is so thoroughly joyous and cleverly thought out it's almost impossible not to be seduced by it.Д®merald is a conservatory trained jazz vocalist and it's her consummate mastery of this specific skill allows her to hold her own against a fiery swing band, while focussing on interpreting the songs not just hitting the notes. It's also the sort of album that could only have been taken seriously somewhere like Holland - big-band jazz and lounge, fronted by a vocalist channelling Jane Russell's wardrobe. The photographs produced by James OвЂ™Neal reveal some things but in turn conceal others, prompting me to invoke seselelame as an analytic tool.This album has spent longer at number one in the Dutch charts (27 non-consecutive weeks) than any other, and although that's a bit like saying 'Sneezy was the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs' it shouldn't be taken lightly. But this is made possible only with the assistance of George Pinto вЂ“ an interpreter who works with the Ghana National Association of the Deaf. You see the anthropologist interviewing one of GhanaвЂ™s leading Deaf activists: Mahama Johnson Numeri. This slideshow (from fieldwork in 2010) makes evident that ethnography derives from and thrives on relationality. So while Westerners may say that вЂњseeing is believing,вЂќ Africans might say вЂњfeeling provides proof.вЂќ If Cartesian dualism or mind-body split characterizes a kind of Western way of being-in-the-world, seselelame rivals this as an African style of fusing body to mind. Seselelame is a sensibility that is highly valued, trusted, and believed. In one of the local languages this is referred to as seselelame: feel-feel-at-flesh-inside or feeling in the body and the skin. If we are fortunate enough to see a photograph, it is often a posed portrait of the вЂњinterviewee.вЂќ This piece rescues photos from вЂњthe cutting room floorвЂќ to display and explore the feeling tone of an ethnographic interview.ДЇor more than 20 years I have been studying sensory-emotional elements of experience and bodily ways of knowing in Ghana. But we seldom glimpse the dynamic interview process we rarely view the emotional vicissitudes of the exchange. The audio-taped ethnographic interview is a mainstay: it is listened to, transcribed, coded, analyzed, and the content is woven textually into theoretically dense prose. This piece experiments with materials that are usually вЂњleft on the cutting room floorвЂќ as the paradigmatic journal article is written, edited, and produced. Sensorial anthropology asks that we engage the sensual revolution in scholarship in part by thinking beyond the academic text. Screen capture video of one possible pathway through the material displayed below. Original format: Zeega multimedia non-linear platform Originally published in Sensate: June 2012

From the cutting room floor