At first glance the spheres of social science and surrealism don't seem to share any overlap. However, after closer inspection these two trains of thought have much to offer one an other, especially according to noted anthropologist James Clifford. He views "Surrealism [as an] aesthetic that values fragments, curious connections, unexpected juxtapositions - that works to provoke the manifestation of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic and the unconscious." (Clifford 118) This draws clear parallels to the realm of ethnography and its attempt to deconstruct the participant observer's surroundings.
"From this [surrealist] disenchanted viewpoint stable orders of collective meaning appear to be constructed, artificial, and indeed often ideological or repressive. The sort of normality or common sense that can amass empires in fits of absent-mindedness or wander routinely into world wars is seen as contested reality to be subverted, parodied, and transgressed." (Clifford 117)
He further places the reciprocal relationship next to one another when
Clifford refers to "a more general cultural predisposition that cuts through modern anthropology and that this science shares with twentieth-century art and writing. The ethnographic label suggests a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality. The surrealists were intensely interested in exotic worlds... Their attitude comparable to that of the fieldworker who strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible, tended to work in the reverse sense, making the familar strange." (Clifford 121)
Things in between the two world wars got complicated due to the surrealist because "Reality, after the surrealist twenties, could never again be seen as simple or continuous, describable empirically or through induction." (Clifford 134) He also elaborates further, "Reality is no longer a given, a natural, familiar environment... To see culture and its norms- beauty, truth, reality- as artificial arrangements susceptible to detached analysis and comparison with other possible dispositions is crucial to an ethnographic attitude." (Clifford 119)
"Ethnography, which shares with surrealism an abandonment and distinction between high and low culture... two key elements of ethnographic surrealism are noticeable: first, the corrosive analysis of a reality no identified as local and artificial; and second, the supplying of exotic alternative." (Clifford 130) This makes itself evident in the surrealist work of Buneul whose faux-documentary Land Without Bread, shows through a parody of style and authority how reality is mailable.
After reading this essay and seeing some early surrealist work, it really is no surprise that these two practices draw from each other so much. Put bluntly: "Changing definitions of art or science must provoke new retrospective unities, new ideal types for historical description. In this sense ethnographic surrealism is a utopian construct, a statement about the past and future possibilities for cultural analysis." (Clifford 118)
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