ABSTRACT
This chapter looks to the work of child psychologists Donald Winnicott and Marion Milner. Winnicott's theorisation of transitional states, of what he calls 'me-not-me', is characterised by feelings of reverie linked to the child's capacity to play and create. The relationship between reverie, play and drawing is discussed by Marion Milner, who analyses her own 'heightened reciprocity' while attempting to draw and paint. Anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch has suggested that the camera can catalyse kinds of seeing and hearing different from those available in ' everyday life'. He combines an analysis of Zerma-Songhay notions of personhood with theories of cinema-veritre to develop an idea of shared anthropology. The film was shown at the 1971 conference of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) on notions of African personhood, during a paper presented by Rouch entitled On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer.
