Paper short abstract:

Situated spiritual moorings hover gently at the centre of anthropological enquiry and ethnographic movements. Via a tentative exploration into worlds that lie below, this paper moves beyond the solitary mobile subject, towards more collaborative, spatially-attuned frameworks of analyses.

Paper long abstract:

Every day, anthropologists walk through landscapes that are equal parts soft and harsh, or even bewildering and incomprehensible; situated spiritual moorings hover gently at the centre of all these acts of movement and well-meaning enquiries. Anthropological analyses are ventures towards intentionally heightened convictions, regardless of whether that belief lies in an inherent worldly goodness, in vibrant flickers of humanity, or in the constructive value of knowledge and lived ontologies. Frameworks closely attuned to spatiality can offer possibilities for enlightened ways of thinking, resistant to easily anthropocentric modalities. This hopeful, tentative exploration is lovingly dedicated to metaphorical and physical immersion into the organic worlds and communities below, recognising that "a city lies under your feet" (Tsing 2010, p. 191). In enquiring after the practice of inhabiting the ethnographic landscape, I want to invert and reimagine notions of the solitary mobile subject away from romanticised inwardness and performative masculine flâneurie (originating from Baudelaire). Instead, this paper is a slow, searching undertaking, looking to cultivate an ethos and praxis that are intertwined with collaborative ecologies, boldly emerging from non-canonical disciplinary substrates (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010) and offering tangible methods of being alongside ever-encroaching contemporary apocalyptic narratives (Instone 2015). Spiritual and sensory moorings, in this manner, can be used to both make sense of and carefully represent challenging environments.