Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Anja Dreschke (Siegen)
Cologne Tribes. A Media-Anthropological Study on the Reenactment of ‘Foreign’ Cultures
My Ph.D. project deals with the Cologne Tribes (Kölner Stämme), an association of about 80 societies from Cologne whose members reenact ‘foreign’ cultures as a leisure time activity. Originating from the Cologne carnival traditions they organize large camping events to submerge themselves into the historic life worlds of their examples. Thus they established a diverse local network encompassing a wide range of different interest groups such as carnival clubs, amateur anthropologists, and practitioners of alternative spirituality. For the mimetic practices involved in the amalgamation of local and ‘foreign’ traditions, the societies draw on a multitude of globally circulating representations of alterity such as feature films, adventure novels, television documentaries, ethnographies, travelogues, or historical resources that are appropriated in diverse forms of self-staging, e.g. in artifacts, web sites, and club magazines or photography and home videos. To investigate how this process of remediation is expanded by performative and corporeal practices of reenactment and how these visual, textual, and sonic representations are experienced through embodiment and transformed into social and ritual practices, I accompanied the Cologne Tribes with a video camera in the course of an ethnographic fieldwork. On the basis of this audio-visual material I realized a documentary film that is an integral part of my research project.
Anja Dreschke is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She studied cultural anthropology, history of arts and theatre, film and television studies in Cologne. She currently is a research fellow at the postgraduate program Locating Media at the University of Siegen.
Recent Publications
2011: Tribes of Cologne (Real Fiction, DVD).
2013: Trance Mediums and New Media. Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction, ed. with Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger, New York: Fordham University Press.