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- Convenors:
-
Daniel White
(University of Cambridge)
Emma Cook (Hokkaido University)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores exercises of enchantment and play in fieldwork where affect arises as a challenge to anthropology's dominant analytics. It suggests that responsible commitments to interlocutors require attuning to affect as both a method of fieldwork and tool of disciplinary critique.
Long Abstract:
What if the most responsible reply to a problematization was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of an affect? What if understanding unfamiliar discourses required somatic rather than semiotic exercises? Finally, where speaking from habituated perspectives of anthropological professionalism prohibits experiencing possible worlds, what if anthropology as a discipline could leverage affect to differently connect with and cultivate collaboration with others? This panel investigates encounters in fieldwork in which typical theorizations, problematizations and other conceptual frameworks brought to the field are contested not only through discursive tactics but also affective practices of feeling and doing that disrupt the anthropologist in ways that invite critique of the discipline's dominant analytics. One particularly rich area for these encounters is in the activity of creativity and play, where people actively cultivate feelings of enchantment and wonder in ways that do critical work. In contrast to classic perspectives of critical theory that view enchantment as a bemusing consequence of commodity fetishism and the culture industry, anthropological accounts of art and music, athletic and ascetic practices, virtual agents and online environments, and the variety of playful tactics employed in acts of political resistance reveal how people actively leverage material culture to the cultivation of enchantment as a practice of ethical development and critical inquiry. While one way of studying these themes is through the discursive analytics of dialog and discussion, this panel explores the possibilities and even responsibilities of exercising affect as both a method of fieldwork and tool of cultural critique.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Memorial services for robot pets in Japan illustrate how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in AI—and, if practiced by anthropologists in collaboration with the interlocutors to whom they are responsible, a means for anthropological critique.
Paper long abstract:
In robot pet memorial services in Japan, users of the Sony robot AIBO honor the death of artificial life. For the two primary organizers of these ceremonies, a Nichiren Buddhist priest and a former employee of Sony, such ceremonies offer comfort to AIBO owners who have come to consider their robot as important members of their family. At the same time, the ceremonies facilitate the collection of robot bodies as 'organ donors' that can be used to repair other ailing AIBO, recirculating a 'sense of life' (seimeikan) as social and economic currency in conjunction with advances in mechatronics and artificial intelligence. While many academic treatments of artificial agents in Japan attribute animacy either to a cultural tradition of quintessentially 'Japanese' sensibilities or to the technological capacity of engineers to model universal properties of life through robotics, this paper takes a different view. The authors understand animacy as a mutable capacity that is exercisable through the cultivation of amusement in relation to robot pets, and responsive to demands of historical, social, and market-driven technoscientific change. Documenting how users cultivate a sense of amusement toward robots that neither neglects nor negates analytical distinctions between the artificial and the living but rather playfully holds them together in the figure of a living robot, the paper illustrates how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in AI—and, if practiced by anthropologists in collaboration with the interlocutors with whom they aim to cultivate responsibility, a means for anthropological critique.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for enchantment as a method and theoretical lens for analyzing the imaginative and material afterlife of dreams and hopes for the future in the face of failed political projects. It is based on fieldwork with musicians at Venezuela’s classical music education program El Sistema.
Paper long abstract:
“Me encanta,” Venezuelan musicians would say about music, meaning that they are enchanted by it, that they love it. As the word “cantar” nestled within “encantar” demonstrates, enchantment also describes the act of being surrounded by song and sound. In this paper, I propose enchantment as an ethnographic method and mode of critical analysis for understanding how people make sense of the failure of political and personal life projects. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with musicians at the classical music education program El Sistema in Venezuela, I describe enchantment as a medium for sensing the world-building potential of people’s engagement with music practices. Enchantment captures the transformative effect of aesthetic experience, as well as the dreams for the future that are conjured through it. I study the fate of such enchantments as the political revolution in Venezuela, spearheaded by Hugo Chavez, crumbled and sent the country into a humanitarian crisis. Many El Sistema musicians fled to Europe and other parts of Latin America. Following my interlocutors as they moved to Paris, in this paper I ask: How do people think about their past enchantments in the aftermath of political failure? What is the role of nostalgia in how people make sense of their past and present? What vestiges of enchantment – both material and imaginative – perdure in the ruins of political, social, and personal failure? What are our responsibilities as anthropologists in representing our interlocutors’ enchantments, past and present?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the ‘serious play’ engendered by the card game Ranran Lunch is used as a practice of ethical and empathic learning, and asks, what kind of critical and ethical work does cultivating affects do in the context of food allergy education programs in Japan?
Paper long abstract:
Brightly coloured cards with pictures of dishes of food are stacked neatly into two on the table: one stack are menu cards, the other are allergen cards. A free download on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare website, created by a paediatric allergist and thereafter printed by a Japanese food allergy NPO in collaboration with Nippon Foundation for their ‘Food Allergy Patient Support Project’, this card game is described on the NPO website as: "A campaign where adults play and think seriously". The NPO advises groups to play the game and subsequently do a workshop or study session about food allergies, suggesting that participants discuss what they both learnt and felt whilst they were playing. Aimed squarely at adults, whilst being simple enough for children to play, the cards have a dual purpose: to get adults to have fun and relax through play, and then to prompt learning about allergens in common dishes whilst cultivating an understanding of the experiences and feelings of those with food allergies. This initiative expands ideas of responsibility beyond the allergic individual to also encourage non-allergic people in wider society to be aware, knowledgeable, and engaged. This paper ethnographically explores how the ‘serious play’ engendered by this card game is being used as a strategy and practice for ethical and empathic learning of food allergy realities and asks, what kind of critical and ethical work does cultivating affects do in the context of food allergy education programs in Japan?
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the role of affect in discerning possession and illness among Catholic exorcists and medical doctors. It shows how affects are employed to criticize scientific analytics and argues that affective ethnographic methods are fundamental to understanding the emergence of possession
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will focus on the role of affects in the practice of discerning demonic possession and (mental) illness among Roman Catholic exorcists and the medical doctors who collaborate with them in contemporary Italy. In doing so, I will shed light on the interplay between affects, bodily perceptions and decision making. I will show that, while scientific analytics and interactions based on dialog and discussion are employed, certain detailed and specific feelings that emerge in the interaction with sufferers become fundamental to the diagnosis. I will shed light on how both exorcists and medical practitioners actively and creatively rely on such affects and, as a consequence, (re-)create the boundaries between two ontologies – “scientific medicine” on one hand and “religion” on the other – which are perceived as oppositional and, at least to a certain extent, incompatible. I will argue that discernment needs to be seen as a “practice of feeling with the world” (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017), from which spirit ontologies and realities emerge as “meshworks” (Ingold 2013) of feelings of the living body corresponding with certain environments, humans and non-humans. By shedding light on how affects can shift the distribution of authority and responsibility in discussions on possession in ways that challenge dominant scientific analytics on illness, I will also argue that an account of demonic possession cannot be properly achieved if not relying on affective ethnographic methods.
Paper short abstract:
Discussion
Paper long abstract:
Discussion on 'Affect as Cultural Critique: Somatic Engagements with Enchantment, Creativity and Play'What if the most responsible reply to a problematization was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of an affect? What if understanding unfamiliar discourses required somatic rather than semiotic exercises? Finally, where speaking from habituated perspectives of anthropological professionalism prohibits experiencing possible worlds, what if anthropology as a discipline could leverage affect to differently connect with and cultivate collaboration with others? This panel investigates encounters in fieldwork in which typical theorizations, problematizations and other conceptual frameworks brought to the field are contested not only through discursive tactics but also affective practices of feeling and doing that disrupt the anthropologist in ways that invite critique of the discipline’s dominant analytics.