The “museum trance” and the film Hampi. Le ciel est posé sur la terre by Jean Rouch (1961)

Résumé 0

‪Following her training in ethnographic methods developed in the 1930s in France at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, where photography played an important role, Monique Roussel de Fontanès carried out her first fieldwork expeditions in the 1950s in Calabria on behalf of the Musée de l’Homme. Her approach to research, focusing on traditional women’s clothes, was largely centred on photography. Through the objects, drawings, and notes, her work was part of a huge project of documentation in line with the museum’s ambitions and its interest in material culture. However, the discussions that emerged around the wearing of costumes and the use of photographic equipment also allowed her to establish and maintain close relations with her female interlocutors, based on sharing and a sort of reciprocity. While the emotional aspect of her work in the field gets lost through the cataloguing, publication and display of the collected documents, the photographs still bear traces of this emotion, and by looking at archives and correspondence of this ethnologist we can understand the full depth and complexity of this work.‪