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- Convenors:
-
Georgina Ramsay
(University of Delaware)
Matthew Bunn (University of Newcastle)
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- Location:
- Old Arts-156
- Start time:
- 2 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Life, death, and other foundations of human existence are made precarious at the thresholds of exceptional experience. This panel explores embodied experiences of extra-ordinary circumstances, where being is refracted through previously unrealised boundaries, thresholds, and limits.
Long Abstract:
The mediating of boundaries, limits, and borders is central to the unfolding of human experience in both ritual and mundane settings, as anthropological inquiry broadly attests. But what of the thresholds that emerge in the limits of human experience, in those realms of exceptional circumstance that push and compel subjects to negotiate their existence within precarious and hitherto incomprehensible and unimagined terrains? Through thresholds, being unfolds on the verge of states that are yet to be experienced, but to which the shape of future existence is to be determined. Life, death, and other foundations of human existence are made precarious in the mediating of thresholds at the boundaries of exceptional experience. The mediating of such circumstances can be encountered as a deeply empowering expression of subjectivity through which we can confront, extend, or even transgress previously unrealised personal limits. In other circumstances thresholds are imposed, and subjectivities are compromised as agents are forced to traverse the limits of an existence that unfolds within incompatible logics. In this panel, we invite papers that explore how limits are mediated within and beyond thresholds of experience, and how the discontinuities that destruct subject's understanding of the world come to be traversed through embodied experience of the extra-ordinary.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the way in which thresholds are defined, modified and extended through the of high-risk climbing styles. This is examined through the willingness of climbers to participate in climbs that are anticipated to be unpleasant and dangerous yet still considered to have an existential payoff.
Paper long abstract:
For climbers, risk is an unfixed proposition. Climbers will hone their skill, knowledge and physical prowess in order to confront the challenges of vertical terrain. This ability grants a greater perceptual, strategic and tactical appreciation of the nature of the risks both prior to the climb and in the depths of its immersion. Viewed as edgework - the sociology of voluntary risk-taking - these abilities bring clarity to where this edge lies - to just how close the boundary between life and death is. But through increases in climbing ability, the risks are also modified. The once difficult ascent becomes easy. A mountain that seemed imposing becomes accessible. The breach of these thresholds reveals new horizons that extend deeper out into the mountains. Yet, much of this practice is not immediately enjoyable. Climbers refer to this in a system known as the 'three types of fun'. Sometimes climbs are fun while you are doing them. In others they are fun once you have finished doing them. In others still, they are not fun while doing them, or after, but they were still worth doing. It is the purpose here then, to explore the latter two of these stages to explain why they constitute worthwhile experiences to participants. This will draw from eighteen months of ethnographic immersion within high-risk climbing styles to explore the crossing of these thresholds.
Paper short abstract:
Boundaries are part of the everyday they expose the ordinary and extra-ordinary of daily life and lived experience. Traversing these boundaries involves embodied experience, expression and engagement with the world. I will look at the boundaries of the everyday as extra-ordinary experience.
Paper long abstract:
What makes something ordinary or extra-ordinary? Where do experiences become bounded or surpass boundaries? Boundaries "always have the potential to be transgressed, seen across, thought beyond or else acted upon in ways that transform or expand them" (Irving 2010). In this paper I explore the ordinary as a contradiction. What can be interpreted as a shared experience can take on new dimensions when looked at from another perspective. In my research with people with dyslexia the mundane is exposed as containing multiple dimensions of experience. Something regarded as an everyday activity such as walking through a doorway can trigger bodied responses. For my collaborators they described how walking into a room, which is a physical crossing through a threshold, releases a myriad of unknown possibilities and floods of new information which accompany its crossing. The mundane is therefore something complex, interwoven with embodied experience, histories and expectations. The ways in which objects and subjects are bounded can traverse the skin, surfaces and exteriors and in so doing communicate information with persons. The different perceptions of bounded interobjectivity and intersubjectivity can create clashes and even bring into question personhood, as it can for my collaborators. Boundaries are also associated with censure or approval and therefore affected by social expectations. As my collaborators explained traversing certain boundaries resulted in people describing them as strange. Boundaries therefore can sit between expected behaviours and embodied experience and in this session I discuss persons as traversing boarders.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the extra-ordinary experiences of residents and staff in aged care facilities where the thresholds of knowing are daily encountered and mediated in their endeavor of seeking mutual understanding and meaningful representation.
Paper long abstract:
Boundaries are fundamental to human existence. Bounded by individual bodies, the experiences of both oneself and the others are limited by embodied perspectives. The intersubjective mutual understanding is characteristic of reciprocity of viewpoints. It is achieved in intimate interactions between bodies transgressing individual boundaries with the acknowledgement of another body as like our own. However, there exist limits of taking another body's point of view in the exceptional circumstances where the other bodies are dramatically different from ours. Residential aged care is such a setting. The most vulnerable residents live with severely limited abilities of constructing and representing a truthful mental reality of their selves and the external world. This paper discusses the extra-ordinary experiences of residents and staff in care facilities. The thresholds of knowing are daily encountered and mediated in their endeavor of seeking mutual understanding and meaningful representation. While the experiential limits are often traversed in care activities characteristic of merging bodies, such transgression both mediates the institutionally imposed thresholds and precipitates the crisis of control. The moments of transgression instigates transitions between persons and categories and makes meaning for the caring and the cared. This paper is based on the author's 12-month fieldwork in two care facilities as part of an ethnographic study on the residents' lived experiences. To rethink anthropological understanding of the extra-ordinary experiences in the terrains of phenomenal uncertainty, this paper offers both insights and empirical materials.
Paper short abstract:
Witchcraft (Tok Pisin: sanguma) appears stronger than ever throughout PNG at the present time. This belief is held by large numbers of the population in times of stress at sickness, accident or death. Its persistence and ubiquity are to be attributed to its religious character.
Paper long abstract:
Those identified as witches in PNG are ordinary people in many ways, but the community comes to a judgement that they are extraordinary: “He is a sanguma. We all know that.” The result can be taken to the extremes of public torture and execution. Many theoretical viewpoints have been brought forward to explain what is happening with the rise of sanguma practices, with the suffering that makes urban dwellers fear a return to the village, and with the way out of this barbaric vigilantism. The Prime Minister of PNG has called it “nonsense”. This paper searches for suitable ways of identifying the religious nature of sanguma, which accounts for its resistance to arguments based on “just good sense” or on the accumulation of reasonable secular experiences and processes. Individuals can be found to have special powers in the light of the mysterium tremendum et fascinsosum. These powers are enhanced by the initiation traditions in many areas, where kn
owledge is characterized as forever partial and yet leading on. The transformation of personalities in these traditions are drawn on in present conflicts involving sectors of society in Madang, who are largely at war with one another, following different initiations. The causality of killing is beyond the ways of daily reasoning, discontinuous in its account of what persons are capable of. Communities must open up their ways of discernment and keep control of what is done in their name.
Paper short abstract:
The forced removal of children from Central African refugee women resettled in Australia through child protection interventions confronts them with an extra-ordinary circumstance of existential death.
Paper long abstract:
For Central African women who have endured years of protracted exile in refugee camps across Africa, resettlement to Australia is described by them as being akin to a miracle. Yet, even within the conditions of safety and security that resettlement to Australia brings, there are circumstances that can confront women with previously incomprehensible experiences of violence. The forced removal of children at the mandate of the Australian state due to interventions of child protection is one such circumstance. For the women I conducted fieldwork with who had their children removed from their care in Australia, this severing of maternal relatedness leaves them with an absent sense of existential purpose. The forcible rupturing of their existence as a mother leaves these women physically alive, but existentially 'dead'. Pushed to this unexpected and extra-ordinary threshold of existence, these women live a paradox through which the violences that have emerged in their contemporary life in Australia eclipse their previous experiences of insecurity as refugees in protracted exile.