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- Convenors:
-
Aglaia Chatjouli
(University of the Aegean)
Venetia Kantsa (University of the Aegean)
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- Stream:
- Health, Disease and Wellbeing
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel aims at problematizing the ways responsibility of (well)being is informed by changing notions of being related, in an era of awareness of potentially endangered futures and changing connections involving more-than-human relations.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological approaches of kinship as consanguineal, affinal and cohabitation relationships have placed considerable emphasis on the complex web of rights, responsibilities and consequences that result from these relations and inform notions of personhood and the self, as well as assumptions about care and (well)being.In an era of awareness of potentially endangered futures and changing connections involving more-than-human relations, how are assumptions about care and wellbeing within kinship, family and household relations being transformed? How do metaphors about nature and kin relations come into play in the attempt to nurture an interconnection between the human and nonhuman? How do old and new understandings of how everything (human - nonhuman) is interrelated inform responsible living?The panel aims at problematising the ways responsibility of (well)being is informed by changing notions of being related. In what respects do responsibility for personal, familial, collective, and earthly (well)being draw from particular cultural logics and practices of relatedness? How do ways of being related (symbiosis, care, communication, understanding) became key constituents and prerequisites of responsibility which, when practiced, aspire to a restoration of mutual connection? If part of our (well)being in the era of the Anthropocene draws from our overall responsible symbiosis, we need to ethnographically elucidate the analogies at play.We invite submissions that address the interconnections between responsible (well)being and liable relations. Possible topics may include but are not restricted to care for terrestrial, atmospheric, oceanic environment; responsible symbiosis with more-than-human entities (microbes, animals, plants); care for (future) bodily/planetary (well)being as kin work.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
"Homing In: An Adopted Child's Story Mandala of Connecting Reunion and Belonging," uses autoethnography, a transformational process, recollecting relational connections and kinning. Questing for a Culture of Care, the storyline moves from kinship to living in/on Earthship, storying Alpine activism.
Paper long abstract:
Kinship is analysed through the lens of adoption using the autoethnographic method to tell an adoption and reunion story. The recounting process enfolds through the phase of rememberings, recounting reunion, and reflections on belonging in/on Earthship. Embodied epigenetics, planetary wellbeing, and relational transformation are concepts intertwined within the story mandala. Synchronicity and reunion and how the homing in mechanism works to inform and guide adopted children searching for their birth parents are analyzed. Using narrative inquiry to generate an emancipatory process the storyline addresses humanity's potential to home in to a hopeful future. Relational approaches reflect on the interconnections between self, family, and bioregions in the performance of a Culture of Care.Whilst facing Anthropocene, communities are challenged to co-construct viable relational matrices interweaving kinship and Earthship. Kinning generates new relations, stories, and flyways. As we are storied beings, Green New Deal art and storytelling can enkindle a movement as did New Deal Art, with the potential of eliciting a cultural shift and planetary transformation. Relational responsibility storied through intergenerational bonds and transgenerational connectivity, creates reflexive space about transmission, stewardship, and sustainability. Creating flexibility through storytelling gives form to life-o-grams, or aesthetic life history, that when beholden become transformagrams, transfigured life course trajectories. Berry, Thomas. 2015. The Dream of the Earth. Berkley: Counterpoint. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2009. Relational being: beyond self and community. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Riva, Susan Mossman. 2020. Homing in: an adopted child's story mandala of connecting, reunion, and belonging. 1st éd. Christiansburg: WriteLife Publishing.
Paper short abstract:
This essay explores the contingent caring relation between silkworms and Chinese farmers in feeding, hosting and doctoring practices. It analyses how proximity, chronic uncertainties, and silkworm’s biological, ecological and cultural attributes shape farmers’ caring labour, affect and knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Silkworm has been a strenuous protagonist in sericulture for more than five thousand years, but farmers' hands-on practice of raising this insect has not yet been automated into assembly lines in factory farms. In Guangxi Province in China with the highest raw silk yield in the world, most farmers still keep silkworms within their own farmhouses, take care of those critters daily, and harvest the cocoons for a living. Hence the human-silkworm cohabitation in this physical and affective proximity cannot be reduced to the capitalist framework of chasing profit or accumulation of bio-capitals. This essay, therefore, aims to explore the ambivalent caring relation between silkworms and farmers through the lens of feminist care ethics and to elucidate how the silkworm’s biological, ecological and cultural attributes shape the forms and meanings of the farmers' caring practices, based on anthropological fieldwork at villages in Guangxi. This essay will analyse the ethnographic details on how farmers tinker with tensions among tedious toil and divergent temporalities in feeding labour, intimate sensations and distanced conservation in a shared space, and the analogous discourses and prescription logic in disease management etc., and the farmers' care of this docile but squeamish creature will be unpacked into trilateral roles of mothering, hosting and doctoring. The study will show how those chronic uncertainties in maintaining the wellbeing of silkworm enact constant, contingent and situated caring activities, and further argue that species boundaries in these caring entanglements are staggering metaphorically and materially.
Paper short abstract:
In my paper, I focus on the relational ways, people are establishing their wellbeing as a part of Ayurveda practice. I look at how these new forms of bio-social kinship are created in the process of accommodating Ayurveda body ontology in ones´ health-seeking practice.
Paper long abstract:
Since one starts to practice Ayurveda – usually understood as a traditional Indian medicine - her ideas of body and health are reconfigured towards an interconnectedness of a person and surrounding bio-social environment. The body, usually perceived as quite isolated, and autonomous subject becomes understood and experienced as more dependent on and as a part of its surroundings.
In my four-years long research of Ayurveda in the Czech Republic, I have followed people, who, in 2013 enrolled in the course for an Ayurvedic practitioner. I was looking at how the, relating it to the dominant biomedical ideas, different ontology, and epistemology of the body and therefore wellbeing has been confronting the prevailing body-related ideas and practices these people were used to enact.
The by-products of the process of negotiating wellbeing according to Ayurveda teachings, change often quite drastically human and non-human relations within. In my paper, drawing on a critique of anthropology and sociology of CAM which mostly agrees about CAM having an emancipating effect on people, I look at how new forms of symbiosis are created in the process of accommodating Ayurveda body ontology and epistemology in ones´ everyday practice. These people are developing a kind of alliances but also antagonism with surrounding (natural) environment. In my paper, I therefore ask, how the new ways of establishing wellbeing in the situation of co-dependency with bio-social environment, informed by Ayurveda ontology, reconstruct the ideas and practice of kinship.