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- Convenors:
-
Diana Espirito Santo
(Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Sergio Gonzalez Varela (University of Warsaw)
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Short Abstract:
The objective of this panel is to contribute to a critique of current anthropological debates on regularity, representation, and traditional forms of descriptive discourse. The aim is to focus on the power of play and creativity in addressing the limits of anthropological analysis.
Long Abstract:
What if anthropology were not about regularity, explanation, or description but about play and the unexpected? What would it look like if it resisted certainty, rationalization, or “assembling fragments into a whole” (Martínez et al 2021: 14)? We suggest that by engaging with both theoretical and pragmatic notions of play, anthropology can engender a reflection on the angst and uncertainty that currently envelopes human beings. Play, as Handelman shows (1992), following Bateson (1972), is both paradoxical and inherently dynamic in this paradox. If we translate this dynamism to anthropology, we could posit that the discipline needs to playfully develop languages that allow for open-endedness, incompletion, motility, and paradox in order to deal with those situations that are commonly excluded from its discourse. Anthropology could and should learn to speak in the idiom of the trickster, of anti-structure, of negation, beyond the symbolic. Its grammar, however, sometimes needs to be sought from spaces other than its own. In this panel we suggest that the raw materials for this playful “trickster” anthropology be sought in 1) extraordinary, intense, and absurd fieldwork experiences, 2) theatre and performance, and 3) the arts (film, fiction, graphics, painting). We invite papers from authors who are unsatisfied with anthropology´s inability to respond to the non-representational, to paradox, and to conceptual voids (where meaning stops or becomes paradoxical) in the worlds of their interlocutors. In our vision of anthropology´s future, it must play, and move within this playfulness, in order to contribute to our most vexing questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 April, 2023, -Ray Abu-jaber (Goldsmiths University London)
Paper short abstract:
Fusing film and game theory with affects of care, this art-based project celebrates and breaks down Queer Joy as a point of representation for Queer people. Using art and haptic technology in games, the project looks into translating the embodied emotional experiences of Queer players as they experience joy, valuing their emotions in play. Culminating in creation of a haptic game, this project aims to inspire Queer Joy in audiences.
Paper long abstract:
When was the last time you saw a joyful queer on TV (or for that matter a queer character that actually lasted for a few episodes and didn't die)? Can't remember? Don't worry, this project has got you covered!
Inspired by and working with Black Joy, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toi Dericotte, Jack Halberstam, and a dash of Rupaul's Drag Race, this art and games based research explores what Queer Joy can be, using methods of care as it's main point of navigation. Breaking down the beautiful twinkling experience that is Joy into Self-care, Care, and the messiness of Joy, this research uses methods of embodiment, experience, emotions and games to take such a study out of the academic field, instead aiming to create ways in which Queer people can experience and be reminded of their capacity for Joy in their every day lives. Fusing methods of care within the Queer community, affects of care for Queer people, and Queer game and film theory, this research employs these methods into the ongoing creation of a tangible haptic sensorial game, in order to inspire joy in audiences outside of academia. Providing an antidote to so called "queer" media's prevailing narratives of shame and trauma, this project aims to reinterpret (or fix) current representations of Queer people in media, whilst valuing Queer embodied emotional experience during play as an anthropological method, using care and the joy it brings for Queer people to create healing representations made for and by our community.
Sinan Jabban (The University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork among treasure-hunters in North-western Turkey, this paper argues that taking playful deceit “seriously” might be a way of better understanding how people conceptualise notions of “right” and “wrong” in a world characterised by profound uncertainty.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among archaeological looters in North-Western Turkey, and particularly focussing on two instances where informants actively encouraged me to fabricate my research, this paper argues that in a world characterised by deep uncertainty for most of its inhabitants, engaging with what is, arguably, “playful” deceit might be one way of better understanding how people conceptualise notions of “right” and “wrong.” Looters in Turkey, better known as “treasure-hunters,” are typically people who occupy life-worlds characterised by scarcity, precarity, and indebtedness. This is one key factor motivating their oft destructive search for buried valuables from the past. However, such activities are also illegal in the context of Turkish law. As many of their hopes tend to hinge on various notions of “treasure,” treasure-hunters will generally risk the potential consequences as they navigate unexplored places during the “darker hours” of the day. Still, although much scholarly literature on looting tends to frame the problematic on ethical terms, I argue that such vernacular excavation practices also lead to a certain ethical disposition, particularly with regards to how treasure-hunters develop certain understandings about wealth, work, and certainty. Entangled with religious and folkloric elements, this disposition is often expressed in terms that may initially come across as somewhat contradictory. So, this paper argues against a strict, mechanistic understanding of normativity and claims that in fact, riding the wave of contradiction, figuratively speaking, may be the way to understand the paradoxical nature of what one might call “the moral economies of looting.”
Lydia Maria Arantes (University of Graz)
Paper short abstract:
I will give insights into newly developed playful approaches to teaching anthropology and reflect on their implications for the teacher and the students. I argue that anthropology must not only “move within playfulness” in the realm of research and representation but also on the level of teaching.
Paper long abstract:
I have long tried to move away from teaching as “passing on knowledge” (Ingold 2017) and moved towards practicing teaching as co-creating knowledge. Adopting one of the principles of ethnographic fieldwork – attending to lived realities in an explorative and open way – I had already regarded teaching as a joint act of exploration, also taking into account students’ everyday life experiences. This autumn I went further: Lustvolles Lehren und Lernen (pleasurable teaching and learning) became my new credo. While offering a rough structure I also made sure to leave enough room for anti-structure to emerge. This required openness and vulnerability on behalf of me as the person developing the course as well as a new kind of engagement and involvement on behalf of my students. In doing so, the course opened up space for making visible “epistemological journeys” (Arantes 2021) and “liminal knowledges” (Burgos-Martinez 2018).
In my talk I will give insights into some of the chosen approaches – of which a few involved playing with the idiom ‘business before pleasure’ – and reflect on their implications, both on the side of the teacher and the students. I will argue that anthropology must not only “move within playfulness” in the realm of research and representation but also on the level of teaching. Furthermore, conceptualizing teaching as research, I reflect on what teaching playfully and giving space to Homo Ludens (Huizinga 1950) can teach us about the broader role of play for anthropology.
Tushnim Gangopadhyay (Nand Lal Singh College, Jai Prakash University)
Paper short abstract:
Video games offer a myriad of opportunities for anthropological analysis, yet the nature of the medium and the participants therein defy formulaic study. This paper attempts to study some of the select variables within the Indian gaming community and their resistance to categorization.
Paper long abstract:
Compared to 2010, the year in which Bonnie Nardi’s celebrated study of World of Warcraft titled My Life as a Night Elf Priest and Tom Boellstorf’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human was released, the current, post-pandemic decade offers a much more varied and diverse landscape of online video games and gaming communities. New digital environments have come into existence with their distinct terms and conditions of involvement, and social media has become integrated into the world of digital gaming, offering platforms for creators, participants, as well as spectators to participate and cohabitate, creating a dynamic discursive environment which exists both inside and outside the games themselves.
During the pandemic years, India has discovered its opportunity to interface with the world of gaming on a major and unforeseen scale. As a new arrival into the global community with negligible prior footprint, Indian gaming communities bring to the discourse a presence which defies familiarity, resulting both in situations which can adhere to specific stereotypes, as well as interactions which are unexpected and difficult to chart.
As of 2022, there are only a select number of games which offer social interactions and sport a significant number of Indian gamers. This paper intends to study the Indian ethnography within such games in an effort to discover the ways in which it defies expectations, familiarity, and attempts towards observation.
Mari Korpela (Tampere University)
Paper short abstract:
I elaborate on the joking relationships and the playful and spontaneous, at times absurd, interactions during my fieldwork among 14-year-old expatriate youth in an international school. I argue that trying to express the playfulness in a written form necessarily flattens the situation.
Paper long abstract:
I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among 14-year-old expatriate youth in an international school in Finland for eighth months. School provides a very structured environment where there is the right place and time to do things and pupils follow strict timetables. At the same time, pupils interact with each other in playful ways during breaks and lunches, and often also during lessons. As a middle-aged woman, I was initially concerned on how I would be able to conduct participant observation among teenagers. It was easy to observe them but participation was trickier. During the fieldwork, I realised that joking was an essential part of their everyday interactions. Consequently, I often ended up joking around with them, and jokes and playful, at times absurd, interactions turned out to be an important channel to construct meaningful relationships. They also made the fieldwork a truly fun and enjoyable experience and made the spontaneity of the youth’s everyday lives tangible. In this presentation, I elaborate on the joking relationships and the playful interactions during my fieldwork. I argue that trying to express the playfulness in a written form necessarily flattens the situation. A film that I made with a few other boys on their freetime manages to express the playfulness of teenagers’ interactions to some extent but even the film format fails to catch the richness, absurdness and spontaneity of the playful relationships and due to ethical concerns, filming is possible only with certain people in certain places.
Diana Espirito Santo (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Paper short abstract:
Through my ethnography of Chilean ufology (2019 to present), in this paper I unwind the ufology expert´s premise that the UFO is essentially an unrepresentable object and attempt a recursive anthropology that seeks outside of itself tools to elucidate the non-conceptual.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have often dismissed the conceptual “dark”, those absurd or paradoxical experiences that interlocutors are at odds to explain themselves. What is not known is taken as somehow ontologically extractive, an absence to be explained later on with fuller knowledge. Paul Stoller has referred to these experiences as “not-knowing-your-backside-from-your-frontside” (2021). In Chile, some ufologists maintain that UFO phenomena is essentially constituted by absurdities and what they show us about the limits of our representational thought (much like koans). For example, there are multiple witnesses of roadside UFO crashes, where aliens are mechanically repairing their craft at the side of the road, or UFO appearances that seem to mimic UFOs in movies. Through my ethnography of Chilean ufology (2019 to present), in this paper I unwind the ufology expert´s premise that the UFO is essentially an unrepresentable object. I suggest a look at a school of negative theology that posits a cosmogonic force to unknowability, absurdity and paradox. Ever-elusive, the UFO phenomenon presents itself as a game of mirrors, through which it both envelopes and creates itself. But absurd events lie in a void, an in-between or a cloud of not-knowing that also pushes us, its documenters, to places that recognise our own mis-recognitions and incomprehensions – our limits as ethnographers of social realities. Thus, following Žižek´s notion of parallax (2016), I argue that there is a gap between two perspectives (within the ufological absurd and its witness, as well as between this absurd and anthropology) that precludes a final narrative.
Sergio Gonzalez Varela (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
Based on my long-term fieldwork among Afro-Brazilian capoeira groups, in this paper, I describe the complex relationship between teachers and students and the difficulties of learning the art of deception, which is non-representational but essential to understanding capoeira’s system of knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological analysis of ritual practices has focused in the last thirty years on its effectiveness in creating a self-contained world. In this sense, this self-referential capacity has given rise to cultural forms that use symbols, images, and paradoxical mythical narratives accompanying those ritual practices. In Afro-Brazilian capoeira, conceived here as a ritual art form that combines elements of fight, dance, play, and music, body performance is the cornerstone of cosmological knowledge and what teachers call tradition. The logic of traditional practice is based on deception. Teachers conceive deception as something one cannot transmit to others; it is non-conceptual, beyond representation and words. However, it is a quality all capoeira practitioners can see through performance but cannot be explained as a development of simply physical techniques. Thus, the performative evidence of deception is wrapped with mystical and spiritual connotations that give meaning to its existence. The ineffability of deception, paradoxically, becomes the cornerstone of power and hierarchical knowledge, which structure capoeira groups in Brazil and abroad. In this paper, I describe how the paradox of deception provides a non-rational experience of power that gives practitioners a chance to explore other human possibilities of freedom that lies beyond the realms of cultural constraints and hierarchical impositions.
Julia Pérez Amigo (University of Granada)
Paper short abstract:
Autoethnography is a tool for constructing alternative interpretations of ethnographic data. From my experience researching tattooing and tattooed bodies from a feminist perspective, I will ask: Are poetry, disordered reflection or unanswerable questions, possible in our ethnographic work?
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1970s, autoethnography has been proposing new paths for anthropological research from positions that are openly critical to the history of the discipline itself. Autoethnographic data covers a wide range of media and languages, from narrative to poetic or audiovisual, and it is sometimes difficult to fit them into larger research projects. Particular modes of autoethnography, like indigenous autoethnography, seek to increase the complexity of our proposals, allowing us to include in the pages of our research reflections that are closer to action and human feeling than the rigid traditional Western academic structures usually allow us to do.
My embodied autoethnographic experience is part of the process of constructing a doctoral thesis that investigates tattooing and tattooed bodies from a feminist perspective in the Spanish context. From here, I will ask myself how could we incorporate complex data, with emotional depth and deeply linked to our biography, in our anthropological research. Are poetry, disordered reflection or open, unanswerable questions, possible in our ethnographic work? In my fieldwork, my autoethnographic notebooks are intermingled with interviews with my informants and a meticulous observation that does not only cover specific times but extends to all the moments of my life. This research process, which in a way seamlessly combines one's own life with academic reflection, requires new languages and a committed openness to what we study, especially if, as in my case, the main actor is the body.
Rony Ohad (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Paper short abstract:
Intersecting with the (im)balance of the city, two radical street performers who reinterpret the armed forces in occupied Jerusalem, pave the way to an analysis of its colonial, social, political and artistic prospects, through theories of research, production, and performance in contested spheres.
Paper long abstract:
How does participatory political art performance restructure power dynamics?
I will present two characters that, being part of the militant settler colonial society, portray representatives of the regime through radical street performance. They propose new perspectives on authoritative power structures in the contested city of Jerusalem.
The White Soldier, performed between 2009 and 2014, was dressed in fully geared Israeli military uniform including a vest, a helmet, and (a plastic) assault rifle; painted white from head to toe. The distorted representation of the soldier, as he interacted with perpetrators and victims in Jerusalem’s conflictual spheres, disseminated awareness and remonstrance.
The clown Officer Az-Ulai, created in June 2020, is a contemptuous police character with soap bubbles, heart stickers, and oversized army boots. She accompanies and interacts with the police during demonstrations across various societies, and acts as a human barrier in violent confrontations. By ridiculing the powerful she aims at empowering the powerless.
The actors challenge and deconstruct the power dynamics between Palestinians, Israelis, tourists and law enforcement servicemen, and ask, in their words: “Who has the power?” and “What is [their] purpose?” Their performative acts intersect with the religious, settler-colonial, historical, political, social and artistic features of the city and its diversity. I will address the intricacy of Anthropological-Performative research in The Old City of Jerusalem, the benefits and complexities of intersectional case studies, and the ethnographic methods that allow their inquiry in one of the largest staged areas worldwide, spreading more than 400 cameras over one km2.
Zihan Xu (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Rather than considering self-care practices as merely rational and prudent endeavours, this paper draws attention to the playful, subjunctive, and experimental mood implicated in the dynamic processes of sensing and making well.
Paper long abstract:
Rather than considering self-care practices as merely rational and prudent endeavours, this paper brings attention to the play-element, as implicated in the dynamic processes of sensing and making well. Drawing upon multimodal and autoethnographic research materials relating to movement improvisation practised during self-isolation, I explore how sensory resources were drawn into self-care processes in a subjunctive, experimental, and playful way amid a global crisis. While the domestic space confined and clashed with the dancers' habitual moving bodies, leading to bodily discomfort and frustration, movement improvisation emerged as a self-care practice that dynamically organizes sensory perception to reharmonize and retune the relationship between dancing bodies and their surroundings. As dancers improvised with sensory resources from everyday settings - such as with unexpected sounds, the space underneath a table, or within a camera's frame -not only did they cultivate an attentive body that attunes to their constantly changing surroundings, but the seemingly mundane spaces were also re-explored and reconstituted through the dancers moving bodies, expanding their sensory lifeworld within confinement. This process of improvisation was described by dancers as an 'endless workshop', implying a playful mood by which to attune to the ever-changing world, venture out into its ambiguity and indeterminacy, and act within it through experimenting with what could be. Play can thus be seen as a mode of engaging with the world that is concerned less with an end point than with an open path forward, thereby transforming uncertainty and limitations into potentiality in ways that support wellbeing.