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- Convenors:
-
Natasha Fijn
(The Australian National University)
Muhammad Kavesh (University of Toronto)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Jan Anderson (E101A), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 December, -, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
In this panel we invite presentations broadly engaging with the senses, while focusing on the agency and subjectivity of more-than humans; integrating written sensory ethnography with visual and auditory material to enhance our understanding of self and others.
Long Abstract:
Donna Haraway has encouraged us to value Significant Others as companion species where the more-than-human is not just good to think with but good to live with. In order to include a sensorial understanding of interspecies sociality, thinking beyond the human necessitates different modes of communication beyond classic forms of anthropological text. Both Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing utilize critical description with narrative, striving to avoid human exceptionalism, while embracing multispecies landscapes. Through the work of Paul Stoller, Steven Feld and filmmaker Castaing-Taylor's Sensory Ethnography Lab there has been a push towards sensory ethnography, fusing the intelligible with the sensible, examining vision, sound, smell, touch and taste to examine a more-than-human world.
In this panel we invite presentations broadly engaging with the senses, while focusing on the agency and subjectivity of more-than humans. We welcome papers that incorporate multiple beings, including plants, fungi, horses, dogs, pigeons, whales, insects or spirits. Anna Tsing, for example, has written evocatively about the smell and taste of the matsutake mushroom; while Steven Feld recorded and subsequently analysed how a woman tilling a taro field spontaneously composed a song to accompany the strident sound of a cicada. Preference will be given to submissions that integrate written sensory ethnography with visual and auditory material to enhance our understanding of self and others.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper I look at the socio-ecological context of the landfill and beyond in an effort to understand the relations that hosts have with 'more than human agents': from vermin to microbes, and how these relate to wider cultural sensibilities, economic factors and government policies.
Paper long abstract:
Stench is often the most immediate mark of something rotten, dirty, decaying and diseased. In India, stench, and the sight of rancid smoke is a common indication of an open dump or landfill nearby. Frequently a slum is located in the vicinity too, housing waste-pickers who forage off these sprawling dumps, in search of salvageable waste. These spaces are also host to vermin, insects, birds and wild dogs, and more recently, dangerous bacteria have been found to thrive in such landfills: microbes resistant to even the top-end antibiotics, popularly known as 'superbugs'.
In this paper I look at the socio-ecological context of the landfill and beyond in an effort to understand the relations that hosts have with 'more than human agents': from vermin to microbes. I focus on the rise of 'superbugs' in India to highlight how the spread of infectious disease and superbugs relate to wider concerns to do with cultural sensibilities, economic factors and government policies.
Paper short abstract:
Pigeon flying is a popular passion in rural Pakistan. By intertwining the sensory experiences of pigeon flyers and their ultimate passion for keeping pigeons, this talk outlines the importance of personal enthusiasm in multispecies ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
The construct of multispecies ethnography has helped explain some of the ways in which humans shape their lifeworld around nonhumans. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend the underlying motivates that weave such inter-species relationship and enable the existence of multispecies sociality, unbounded affection, and the knowledge of the self and others. Through an ethnographic study carried out with Pakistani pigeon flyers between 2008 and 2017, this talk takes the shauq or strong enthusiasm for keeping and flying pigeons as the underlying motive, and argues that it allows the rural men to generate a meaningful interaction with their animals, explore their emotions, and achieve a deeper understanding of the self to obtain profoundest delight and fulfilment. By linking the discussion of shauq with the larger literature in the anthropology of personal passion, and by taking inspiration from the philosophical thoughts of twelfth-century Muslim mystic poet Farid Ud-Din Attar, the talk discusses how this interspecies relationship leads enthusiasts to structure their daily routines, develop friendships, and shape their social universe to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties. The talk will include a five-minute video to illuminate the existence of sensory multispecies relationship—developed through breeding, keeping, feeding, and touching pigeons—and explains how a sensuous scholarship can lead us to understand the dynamics of pigeon keeping shauq in rural Pakistan.
Paper short abstract:
This paper details the ritual and ceremony surrounding horse-oriented festivals. Instead of human ritual aspects, the focus is from the perspective of the horse and how, over the centuries, Mongol or Japanese culture has shaped the horse.
Paper long abstract:
Literature on the domestication of the horse tends to focus on genetics and morphology, yet social, behavioural and sensory connections between horse and rider are significant. The adoption of riding the horse, the composite bow and the advent of stirrups were crucial points in world history, in terms of the structure of societies, in the engagement in combat and in the colonization of vast areas of Eurasia. Yet what were the consequences of the colonization of new lands in relation to the bio-sociality of the horse? The Mongol horse stems from ancient stock, similar to the first horses ridden on the Central Asian grassland steppe. The Mongol horse migrated with their human counterparts east, as far as Japan. Genetics was not the only element that migrated with the horse, however, as cultural aspects surrounding riding horses became integrated within local societies too. In Japan today, there are annual festivals, where horse and rider are dressed in traditional attire. Accompanied by fan waving and elaborate pageantry, each horse gallops along a narrow runway, while the rider fires arrows at passing targets, much as the samurai would have done during times of warfare. In Mongolia horse and rider gallop across expansive grassland steppe. With accompanying video segments, this paper demonstrates the differing ritual and ceremonial significance of the horse in festivals in Japan and Mongolia.
Paper short abstract:
Combining written and audio-visual ethnography, I ask how spiritual power is sensed, known, and embodied in Afghan landscapes. I argue that studying spirits can help us understand how sovereignties in Afghanistan are fragmented, where power is often shared with, and performed through, the unseen.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I walk with the listener through landscapes in Afghanistan that are considered, by those who live in them, to hold spiritual power (baraka). Merging written ethnography with audio-visual recordings from the field, I draw attention to sights, sounds and touches that characterise these evocative places. What is it that gives such places a sense of wonder, of something beyond the ordinary? And how do "signs of the past," places where spirits dwell, shape social experience in the present and constitute very earthly societies? The more-than-human in these landscapes tend to be spirits of jinn, saints, and martyrs fallen in war. These spirits shift and travel between the human and non-human worlds, connecting present inhabitants with the greater cosmological realm. They also transform the earth they inhabit - infusing dust, rocks, hills, and trees with healing power. Living with spirits strikes me as integral to Afghan ways of dwelling-in-place, often influencing personal decisions and social action. In this paper I take this notion further, arguing that spirits also hold sovereignty over certain places. To understand how power is performed locally in Afghanistan, we may need to view sovereignty from a different perspective. This requires a shift from understanding "territory" as a secular sphere of political authority, in which a human polity has full authority over defined and bounded places. In these Afghan landscapes, power tends to be fragmented and sovereignty distributed between worldly rulers and the unseen realm - where humans share power with, and through, spirits.
Paper short abstract:
Moving between my fieldwork on NZ sheep farms and my own experience as a shepherd, this paper uses sight, sound, touch, and smell to share the value of a sheep's life and a shepherd's vocation.
Paper long abstract:
Whilst many aspects of contemporary livestock farming are scientific, "good stockmanship" is often described as an art, or more specifically as an embodied sensibility towards farmed animals that cannot be taught even if discrete handling or husbandry skills can. Indeed, sensing sheep—using sight, sound, touch, and smell—is the primary means by which a shepherd apprehends her flock. This paper draws on my own experience as shepherd of a very small flock of sheep, and contextualises it within my broader ethnographic fieldwork with very large flocks and their shepherds. Learning the differences between individual and group behaviours is crucial to being able to anticipate sheep actions and reactions, and paying closer attention to our own senses can also attune us to the sensory experiences of animals in our care. This awareness encourages shepherds to recognise different forms of sheep agency and subjectivity, and offers new means of providing and assessing farm animal welfare, including how to elicit a sheep's cooperation rather than using force. Using a combination of writing, photography, video and audio recordings, I evoke the sheep I have known and invite others to experience them in ways that may challenge common (mis)understandings of both sheep and shepherds.
Paper short abstract:
Utilising audio recordings, this paper explores why donkeys matter to Warlpiri people at Willowra. Linking fears of donkey removals to the production of ass-hide glue used in Chinese medicine and cosmetics, I examine differing senses of being and predicaments that donkeys evoke cross-culturally.
Paper long abstract:
An indelible memory of visitors to Willowra is the sound of donkeys braying as they are chased by barking dogs and roam the village in search of food. While local Warlpiri regard donkeys as integral to their sonic landscape, outsiders typically perceive the animals as a noisy land-management "problem" and want them removed. Recently, the arrival of a stranger in a truck towing a donkey trailer provoked much discussion. Talk intensified when, for a few days, the donkeys disappeared, and the silence of the donkeys echoed throughout Willowra. Utilising audio recordings, this paper explores why donkeys matter to local people, sensorially and otherwise. Briefly sketching the relational history of donkeys and Lander Warlpiri people, I indicate how donkeys contribute to local identity and sensorially mediate distinctions between Willowra and other Warlpiri settlements. I then widen my focus to consider links between donkey removals in the NT and the production of ass-hide glue used in Chinese medicine and cosmetics. To conclude, I draw on Michael Taussig's "Cry of the Donkey" to examine differing senses of being and predicaments that donkeys evoke cross-culturally.
Paper short abstract:
New desert Virtual Reality artworks that immerse users in stories of survival in colonised more-than-human lifeworlds conjure powerfully uncanny embodied modes of social intimacy.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, Virtual Reality films made by media-artists working with desert communities have conjured uncanny embodied modes of social intimacy by immersing viewers in stories of survival in colonised more-than-human lifeworlds. The re-animation of atomic bombs, animals, trees, songs, fires and healing powers in VR exerts splitting and re-locating forces on place and time perception that in turn multiply possibilities for imaginative projection into more-than-human agents and action. As experimental modes of witnessing, co-presence and narrative participation these VR films operate simultaneously as localising intergenerational pedagogy and universalising/humanising ethnographic gestures.
This paper explores some of the dynamics of community storytelling and media-artist design co-creativity involving 360' and 'first person empathic' cameras, ambisonic and binaural sound technologies and digital animation to shape magics of teleportation and co-dwelling in storied lifeworlds and offer temporary experiences of re-embodiment. What re-arrangements of agency, authority and value are effected in the virtual recasting of historical and traditional stories in these new media works and through these forms of cultural production?