Abstract: What does it mean to be possessed by an image? To have a song surge up of itself in a time of difficulty? In this paper I return to some of the images (visual and sonic) that populate my recent book Life Beside Itself in order to revisit the question of what it might mean to think in images. Specifically I focus on the shooting of Inuit sled dogs in Iqaluit in the late 1950s and a series of tape-recorded messages made by family members for their relatives in tuberculosis sanatorium in 1961. I reflect on what difference such thinking-in-images could make to our received conceptions of history and identity.

Lisa Stevenson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

Image:  Inuit children re-enacting the shooting of the dogs. Photo taken by T. Yatsushiro, 1959.