Samuel Tettner, PhD
I'm a cultural anthropologist and multimedia artist interested in diverse research and creative adventures exploring how movement and immersive arts can catalyze socio-political/ secular spiritual transformations of the self, and produce new or different modes of being and relating to other humans and our earth.
"Contrasting the politics of self/other in ethnography." Guest talk at the "Ethno/Musicology in Action: Fieldwork and Ethnography" course at the University of Manchester on April 29, 2022.
My intellectual toolkit draws from Cultural Anthropology (Anthropology of religion, Anthropology of dance), Science and Technology Studies, new materialism and non-essentialist relational philosophies, and Non-western and decolonial thought.
I graduated with a Ph.D. from the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. I was co-supervised by anthropologist of sound Rupert Cox and ethnomusicologist Caroline Bithell; my examiners were Andrew Irving and Nigel Rapport. My thesis can be found here.
My Ph.D. was about the self-transformations and self-alternations of dancing in modern, secular "spiritual" communities in Europe. I studied and practiced a type of conscious dance called Ecstatic Dance. Through this work, I explored how spiritual but not religious experiences involve the formation of new conceptualizations of selfhood that come about via the embodied, inter-subjective, sensorial, and sensational particularities of dance.
I previously did a 7-month ethnography at the Naqshbandi Sufi Center of Barcelona, Spain, as part of an MA in Anthropology in Ethnography co-supervised by visual and religious anthropologist Roger Canals and anthropologist of Islam Alberto Bargados (2018). In this study, I explored theories about space and approaches to spatial analyses of social practice in relation to sound and sonic behaviors of Islamic ethical subjectivity.
I did a Masters in Science and Technology Studies from Maastricht University in the Netherlands (2012) under the supervision of Bernike Pasveer, through which I learned about material semiotics and Actor-Network Theory. My academic career started with a Bachelor of Science in Public Policy from the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA (2009), where I did a discursive analysis of the grammar of institutions from a philosophy of language perspective.
My art education consists of a one-year postgraduate diploma at the University of Barcelona's Art, Globalization, Interculturality research cluster called "ON MEDIATION" (2020-2021). I also did a one-year vocational training in non-fiction and documentary filmmaking in Barcelona. My dance training consists of several dance residencies at a dancing commune in Portugal called Ser Vivo.