Beyond Former Heaven (or the Institute of Surrealist Ethnography), 2010

summer school, Banff Centre, Canada

In 2010, I ran a six-week experimental summer school at the Banff Centre, Canada, in which participants were encouraged to work, live, play and think collaboratively. The ethos was one of mutual education and all our activities were organised collectively, as we engaged with one another and our surroundings. As the Institute of Surrealist Ethnography, we borrowed methods from Mass Observation (a strange marriage of the social sciences with surrealism), approaching our research as a performance in itself.

Mass Observation was founded in England in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet and communist Charles Madge, and documentary film-maker and surrealist Humphrey Jennings. Together with Kathleen Raine they created a network of radical amateur anthropologists all over the UK. These ‘respondents’ would receive regular directives, instructing them to document areas as varied as the importance of coincidence as a way of ordering experience, religious beliefs and superstitions, popular culture, working conditions, as well as attitudes to democracy and education. In contrast to the colonial anthropology of the time, the intention behind Mass Observation was to map the poetics of everyday life, in order to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’. Our own methods of observation included reading groups and field trips, alongside collaborative film-making, dream surveys and other more irrational approaches to knowledge production. We regularly produced a magazine together, called The Occasional, based on our research findings.