Possession, Migration, Photography: Maya Deren in Haiti

In March 1942, Maya Deren published the article "Religious Possession in Dancing" in the journal Educational Dance. That same year, Deren would learn the mechanics of photography under the tutelage of her then-husband, the Czech avant-garde filmmaker, Alexander Hammid. These separate but parallel threads in Deren's career would come to ahead in 1947 when Deren encountered photographs of possession and dance shot by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the late 1930s in Bali – material that she obtained in preparation for a film that she was planning on Haitian dance. The notes Deren compiled will studying Bateson's footage serves a remarkable account of close looking, but also the development of what the philosopher Walter Benjamin would call a materialist anthropology. Central to Benjamin's notion was the neurophysiological concept of 'innervation' –photography’s accent, incorporation and assimilation on the nerves. Deren's output in Haiti was immense shooting over 400 photographs. At the culmination of her project, Deren scrapped her idea for a film and published instead a detailed study on Haitian vodou, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953). In 1961, Deren would unexpectedly pass away and the photographic negatives of Haitian possession remained abandoned in a drawer labeled 'TO BE PRINTED.' In order to historicize the nature of Deren's work on possession, the following paper seeks to trace the transmigration of ideas and images that took place between Deren and the artistic and anthropological communities in New York in the 1940s.