Paper short abstract:

Bodily participation is mostly conceived as a partial aspect of participant observation but seldom studied in its own right. Building on an example from West Africa, this paper examines how the epistemological advantages, insights and potentials of participation affect the ethnographic imagination.

Paper long abstract:

In many situations, bodily participation provides insights that mere observation cannot offer - though everyday language suggests otherwise. Anthropology often ignores this epistemo-logical difference when framing "participant observation" as only one and coherent method. Based on an ethnographic vignette, this paper explores how bodily interactions in ethno-graphic fieldwork raise awareness for non-observational knowledge and practices. It looks at how subtle bodily interactions constitute sociality and eventually a social space that remains invisible to outsiders but where profound intersubjectivity unfolds between those who par-ticipate. This leads into two epistemological problems. The first is related to the professional attitude of anthropologists: while bodily social practice is largely non-predicative, ethnog-raphers are urged to put it in words, which affects their relationship to that practice and how they can engage in it - but it also affects their imagination of the social as a subject of reflec-tion. The second challenge is the habituation of bodily practices. The longer ethnographers engage in such social practices, the more they will develop routines and no longer focus con-sciously on what they do. The initial dislocation caused by bodily experience will give way to inattentive performance that ethnographers may no longer be aware of - and again, this has consequences for the ethnographic imagination. The tension between the two problems can distort the ethnographic account of bodily practices. Nonetheless, bodily ethnography is the only way of accessing the finely spun and often hidden dimensions of social life where neither observation nor interviews will lead very far.

Paper short abstract:

What if we take seriously the materiality and thingness of the atoms that dwell in our bodies? Then we realize that archaeologists are not using isotopes to assess information on mobility, diet and chronology; instead, these isotopes are expressing their own roots, bonds, becomings, and times.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I plunge myself into the isotopic world by presenting some of the attributes and propensities of strontium, nitrogen, and carbon atoms and isotopic forms, followed by a discussion on how these attributes and propensities afford the archaeometric analyses undertaken by archaeologists. The only reason why we can perform isotopic analyses is because the atoms have their own attributes and, most importantly, are alive and in constant becoming. This means that archaeometry is not performed by the archaeologist alone, but in correspondence with the things approached. Furthermore, I try to demonstrate how isotopes can provide us with some insights into our thingness as human beings. When we trail the flows of matter and energy from the world, passing through the body, and becoming together, we suddenly realize that we are not using isotopes to assess archaeological information; rather, these isotopes are expressing themselves on us. Instead of taking strontium, nitrogen, and carbon isotopes as expressions of chronology, diet, and mobility, I propose that we understand chronology, diet, mobility and even ourselves as expressions of the isotopes' own roots, bonds, becomings, and time. At the end of it, I raise the question of how we can take all this beyond the mere theoretical exercise so that we can reach methodological transformation. How to allow other things than us to participate more actively in the production of knowledge and, in this process, to transform our epistemologies or "ways of knowing"?

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I focus on phenomena of possession and Roman Catholic exorcism in contemporary Italy. I argue that imagination skills related to bodily perceptions, embodied memories, "affective correspondences" and processes of enskilment play a major role in the emergence of spirit realities.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I focus on phenomena of possession and Roman Catholic exorcism in contemporary Italy, in an attempt to "capture that moment of transcendence in which perception begins, and, in the midst of arbitrariness and indeterminacy, constitutes and is constituted by culture" (Csordas 2002, 61). I will show the processes through which spirits emerge through possession and exorcism, on their becomings and the "social life" (Blanes and Espirito-Santo 2013) that they acquire and elicit.

Relying on ethnographic data gathered through fieldwork, I will analyse the case of Maria (45 year-old in 2017), who is possessed by the devil and has undergone Roman Catholic exorcism since 2014. In particular, I will analyse the processes of emergence of Metatron, an Archangel that Maria feels particularly close and that, when invoked during exorcisms, provokes very strong reactions by the possessing devil.

Following Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen's (2009) discussion on the "technologies of imagination," I will argue that imagination skills related to bodily perceptions, affect and feelings, or "affective imagination skills," play a major role in processes of emergence of spirits, their realities, subjectivities and consequent social lives. In doing so, I will shed light on processes of enskilment (Ingold 2000) related to imagination, arguing that in these processes, "affective correspondences" (De Antoni 2017) and embodied memories play a major role. Moreover, I will show and that embodied memories and imagination entangle with the "cultural," discursive, aspect of spirits, as well as with power and authority, during (ritual) practice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the ways in which people dealing with severe food allergies in Japan develop and enact embodied skill-sets, built on embodied memory, affective imagination, and their wider social and material environments.

Paper long abstract:

Ten-year-old Hana, her mother and I are walking along a lake pathway on a hot August day. As we walk Hana suddenly tenses slightly: she has noticed an ice cream coming towards her. She edges her body towards the side of the path until it moves past. Her mum also shifts her bodily positioning, angling slightly forward as if to protect Hana as they open some space between themselves and the cone. This was not an unusual occurrence for Hana or her mother in the summer because Hana is severely allergic to milk and has had a number of anaphylactic reactions in which her body has mobilised a rapid immune response. Allergens are something that allergic bodies (over)react to (to varying degrees), however, they are also more than that. Individuals with experience of severe food allergies tend to be attuned to the presence of their allergens in their environments through memories, imagination and enskilment (Ingold 2000) that imbue food allergens with more meaning than a random 'protein' they are allergic to. Through embodied memory and affective imagination, allergens become agents that are enacted through affective meshworks (Ingold 2011). They become more than a substance, more than a protein or material: instead they become something imbued with a potential life of its own. This paper looks at the ways in which people dealing with severe food allergies develop and enact embodied skill-sets, built on embodied memory, affective imagination and their wider social environments.

Paper short abstract:

This study does not aim to identify body sensations, movements and affects of people living with dementia as pathological, nor does it seek 'meaning' per se. Instead, it shows the ways in which people living with dementia engages with their immediate surroundings within the illness capacities.

Paper long abstract:

This article challenges the prevailing perceptions of living with dementia in an institutional setting, which are often described as repetitive, routinised, and placeless, with no meaningful social interaction and communication, but only scheduled daily (care) practice. Based on a decade of voluntary work and a year's intensive fieldwork in a Jewish care home in London, I attempt to unravel my attentive engagement with people living with dementia by tracing their trajectories from their room to the dining room and taking their morning meal. I focus in particular on their body movements, sensations, and affects. The ethnographic findings reveal that, although in a minute and often fragmentary manner, they continuously shapes and re(un)shapes their relations with the lives of other people, things, and places through her affective performativity within their illness capacities.

Paper short abstract:

In the emerging field of human-computer integration, understanding affect depends on the technological modes through which experts investigate it. Drawing on fieldwork in affective computing labs in Japan, this paper explores the sociality of digital experiments with sensation and memory.

Paper long abstract:

Emotionally intelligent robots, affect-sensitive wearable devices, and other technological modes of experimenting with affect demonstrate that what we know theoretically of how feeling ontologically works in the world requires working technologically through "practices of feeling with the world" (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017). The distinction highlights an epistemological gap between what we feel and what we know about what we feel that places our cognition of feeling (emotion) in a dynamic and mediated relationship with our physiological experience of it (affect). This affect-emotion gap proves not only fundamental to recent theorizations of affect in the social sciences but also productive of technological interventions into affect in scientific laboratories. Exploring technological aspects of the affect-emotion gap, this paper draws on fieldwork among experts working on affective computing and human augmentation in Japan, where technologies of human-computer integration are applied to amplify cognitive and physical capacities, and even the existential sense of one's body, health, and wellbeing. The paper focuses especially on the mutual construction of technological modes of investigating feeling and the social production of knowledge about feelings in Japan, aiming to demonstrate the potential for technological methods to contribute to an evolving anthropology of affect.

Paper short abstract:

I explore particular Maguindanaon emotions borne out of remembering and imagining violence as manifestations of fellow-feeling, which are emergent from and shaped by historical, political, and sociocultural contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on my ethnographic research among Maguindanaon supporters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Southern Philippines, I consider the relationship between emotions, memory, imagination, and the (un)making of an imagined community, particularly in contexts of violence and the struggle for the right to self-determination, by looking at the links between moral judgment and action, emotions, and imagined identification, or how much we relate with and imagine our resemblance with other groups and individuals. Bringing my ethnographic data into dialogue with the philosophy of fellow-feeling, the anthropology of emotions and empathy, and current kinship theory, I explore particular Maguindanaon emotions borne out of remembering and imagining violence as manifestations of fellow-feeling, which are emergent from and shaped by historical, political, and sociocultural contexts. I further examine how foregrounding the relationship between fellow-feeling and imagined identification provides one way of elaborating on the emotional and moral salience of the Bangsamoro imagined community and the relationship between individual and social memory.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from fieldwork in Tokyo's unofficial 'Chinatown', Ikebukuro, to discuss the ways Chinatowns can be conceived as 'technologies of imagination' (Sneath et al. 2009) producing new ways of imagining contemporary Chinese sociality

Paper long abstract:

In celebrations of multiculturalism around the world Chinatowns are often cited as examples of the historical roots of diversity in a given nation. Chinatowns act as playful spaces of consumption and are posited as one of the many 'happy objects' that make up multiculturalist imaginaries in many nations. In Japan Chinatowns in Yokohama, Nagasaki and Kobe, have also become tourist hotspots that suggest new images of diversity. Yet, not all forms of localised Chinese sociality are celebrated, raising questions about how we conceptualize Chinatowns. This paper draws from fieldwork in Tokyo's unofficial 'Chinatown', Ikebukuro, to discuss the ways Chinese sociality is re-imagined in Japan. Chinatowns shape the possibility of imagining Chineseness in Japan, from labelling an area as a Chinatown and the playful practices that constitute its affective atmosphere, to the physical demarcation of 'ethnic space' through architecture. Its powerful capacity to re-produce and contain certain kinds of sociality also means it is contested, as the case of Ikebukuro shows. Northwest Ikebukuro has been proposed as a Chinatown due its 300 Chinese-owned businesses and significant Chinese population. But many young Chinese people in Tokyo are hesitant to call it a Chinatown, seeing the label as an old-fashioned way of imagining Chineseness. Chinatowns are 'technologies of imagination' (Sneath et al. 2009) whose indeterminacy resides in its efforts to determine and contain Chineseness. As young cynical responses to Ikebukuro's Chinatown suggest new ways of imagining Chinese sociality are emerging out of this contested site of affect and imagination in Japan.