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Digital Skin, Virtual Masks

Publication at Faculty of Humanities, Faculty of Arts |
2018

Abstract

The classical anthropological study "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" was published by Horace Mitchell Miner in 1956. In it the strange habits of an obscure tribe living in North America were described in a fairly typical way.

Nacirema, however, is "American" spelled backwards, and the study is in fact a satire of ethnocentrism and the implicit racism of classical anthropological exploration: the author of the essay describes his own society, ie the United States of America in the 1950s, using anthropological terms. Dalibor Knapp sets himself similar goals in his book Digital Blacks: Ethnographic Dictionary (Studio FAMU-Množina, 2018), but he makes them real with the playful form of performance collage.