Interdisciplinary Possibilities: Images, Fear and the Atlas Methodology

Warburg’s Atlas methodology, used in his unfinished work 'Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne' (1927-1929), sought to analyse different human aptitudes – such as dance, ritual or religion – by comparing images that represented these phenomena in order to find a common way across different fields and disciplines. His aspiration was to not only portray human emotion but also identify, through figurative forms, a common thread within history. We use Warburg’s Atlas methodology as a foundation for this chapter, to further his aims. We asked the authors and editors who were originally selected to participate in this book to choose an image they thought represented fear and the visible or invisible ways of its induction. We then employed these images to create a canon, or table of images, that embodied different ways of seeing the topic of fear in order to produce our Fear Atlas. Our purpose in producing this Fear Atlas was to find possible correspondences and analogies between this book’s different chapters and the images chosen for this research. Our overall aim is to give this book an interdisciplinary conclusion by making visible points of contact and correspondences between apparently distant forms and disciplines.