Welcome. I kindly invite you to take a journey through my WordPress Website and Blog.

These pages are about humans and nature.
Humans and their [spiritual] relationships with places, spaces and – in particular –
natural and cultural landscapes.
About their immensely inventive ways to live their lives in an ever changing environment,
highlighting their creative and diverse responses to the gigantic challenges of contemporary society.

Within the conceptual framework of my lifelong anthropologic research, [eco-spirituality] is conceived as a non-institutionalized, phenomenological experience by people in relation to certain locations and events within the space/time continuum. However ephemerous and visceral this experience may be, [eco-spirituality] goes, nevertheless, hand in glove with materiality; that’s why there are stories about material culture with, within and through the land (-scape) here as well. You can find on this site an array of texts, photographs, drawings, sound recordings covering parts of the multitude of human interactions with nature, through the medium of the land (-scape).

By researching foodways, spiritual experiences and lifeworlds, space/place conjunctures, key-rituals, the build environment, material culture production (‘art included’) and community responses to external socio-political and economical pressure, various domains of the intertwinement of human societies with their environment are explored. Basically, human’ s bond with the universe is investigated through their external expressions of an ‘inner spirituality’ in relation to a particular place and it’s landscape. My experimental (audio-) visual anthropological research can be situated on the intersection of classic themes within the field such as: the culture/nature intersection, City/Countryside divide, beliefsystems, foodways and -rituals, indigeneity, human ecology,
the aftermath of colonialism and challenges of decolonisation (to name but a few).

This research highlights the human experience in a Meta-Modern world and translates in an (audio-) visual and textual way different facets of the diversity in human lifeways through their sociocultural responses to a transforming Blue Planet in the challenging era of the Anthropocene. Despite people’s ferocious ‘active’ lives (always busy with working, travelling, commodifying, enjoying, designing, etc.) in an age of globalisation, hyper-commodification and super-mobility, the phenomenological/ visceral sensation with a space/place configuration, where and whenever, stays paramount in human existence.

So one could say that people are in a way the place they live in, the land and the environment moulding their lifeways up to a certain degree. These interactions have repercussions on the land itself thus creating a circular movement of interdependency and (occasionally) symbiosis between man and nature. Its this theoretical assumption with its contradictions and tensions that marks the startingpoint of my research-journey.

As a Brussels’ s based Visual Anthropologist, I developed my interest in landscape, human spirituality, working with and within the natural environment and the bridges between the three already as a child (as I later in my life re-discovered), but emerged totally into it during my fieldwork as a masterstudent (MSc) in Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven University (Belgium). Besides writing, auditive [inspired by Steve Feld’s ‘acoustemology’ (1992)] and visual explorations (still photography and drawing) of human relationships with the (natural) environment are my favoured ethnographic tools.

Enjoy your stay on this site and delve into but a tiny sample of the vast ocean that human social and cultural diversity is.

Jo Massin
[Experimental] Visual Anthropologist