Paper short abstract:

This paper presents two case studies on what speculative methods can contribute to our understanding of ethnographic material. The first case study deals with Japanese Doll funerals and uses ‘material fantasising’ as an approach, the second with the death of robots through the lens of dreams.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents two case studies on what speculative methods can contribute to our understanding of ethnographic material. The first case study deals with Japanese Doll funerals and uses ‘material fantasising’ as an approach to imagine the still life and the potential death of the dolls, using an Ichimatsu doll that has been brought to a ritual of disposal as an example. I then contrast play in which the doll takes on anthropomorphic traits with the aliveness of the materials that the dolls are made of.

The second case study concerns the death of robots in French and Japanese research settings. Ethnographic material is enriched with dreams that were dreamt leading up and during the research project and shared in a dream matrix, a method of social dreaming. Bringing these specific dreams into conversation with other dreams dreamt by strangers revealed an unexpected vein of political meaning and anxieties that informed some of the interpretations that emerged from fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

Dolls have been an integral part of history, intricately woven into the cultural fabric of the society. The scope and use of dolls in is not limited merely to a children’s plaything, a wide variety of dolls are also collected by adult doll collectors. The category of dolls collected by adult collectors that will be explored in this paper are Ball Jointed Dolls (BJD) and Blythe Dolls .Most adult doll collectors explore spaces of healing, meditation and spirituality through doll play, the construction of subjective myths and also through the creation of dolls which are generally referred to as artist dolls .

These dolls become intricate part of an adult doll collectors life adding purpose to their lives. However, the BJDs are made of resin that decolorizes with age and the Blythe dolls go through a a series of change and transformation while they are customized by an artist. What happens to the dolls that ages and decolorizes? When a doll is customized and given a new form and body, what happens to the older one? Are they dead or reincarnated? This paper explores such questions with an extensive ethnographic research methodology focussing on the relationship between adult doll collecting and neo-animism.

Paper short abstract:

The purpose of the presentation is twofold. First is to reflect on the way production workers try to determine the life and predict the death of a particular object, namely a laminate, and second to speculate on the story of the laminate from its own perspective.

Paper long abstract:

The goal of the presentation is to reflect on the way in which the life and death of a specific object, a laminate, is inscribed in the very process of its production. As the laminate comes off the production line, it is carefully examined by a group of lab technicians who assess its quality and temporal specificity. The purpose of these activities is to try to predict its further course of life fate, in particular how it will relate to other things and its potential expiration date, the point at which it can no longer be considered useful. Laminate in the human world does not exist as a separate thing. In the later stages of its life, it is transformed into labels or stickers, and thus has no identity of its own, since its being depends on its ability to adhere to various objects, such as glass or plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, medical assortment, or food. I would also include in the presentation how the story of the laminate's life and death can be told from its own point of view. The presentation is based on ethnographic research conducted on the production floor of a company that is part of a multinational corporation.

Paper short abstract:

One of the ironic aspects of taxidermy is that it requires the death of the animal to recreate something resembling the living. In this paper, I would like to explore the question of the death of the object through the multiple lives of stuffed animals encountered in my ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract:

As the anthropologist Jane Desmond points out, one of the ironic aspects of taxidermy is that this art requires the death of the animal to recreate something resembling the living (Desmond 2002 :160). In this paper, I would like to explore the question of the death of the object through the multiple lives of various stuffed animals encountered in ethnographic research conducted since 2014.

More specifically, I will try to show how the lives of these "remnant models" (Griesemer 1990) are negotiated and how it differs from the status of animal as an organic, animate, and mortal element. By becoming an object, transformed by the art of taxidermy, the animal's body also acquires the status of model: a model of its species in the case of specimens stored in natural history museums or a (more-than) representation of the beloved pet in the case of dead domestic animals. However, this type of model has a particular property: "Not only do these share properties with the things modelled, they are actually made from the individuals modelled" (Griesemer 1990). Neither really an animal anymore, nor really a simple object, neither alive, nor really dead, the stuffed animal will operate an ontological blurring that questions our points of reference. And does all this have anything to do with the fact that the French say "nature morte" where the English prefer "still life"?

Paper short abstract:

Critiquing the global conservation discourse that imagines elephants as pristine and wild, this paper examines the vibrant human-elephant sociality in Kerala. Secondly, the paper posits that such a 'pristine' view of elephants is not just an act of conservation, but co-produced through local actions

Paper long abstract:

Within the current framing of the Anthropocene moment and species extinction, elephants have become cosmopolitan figures, mobilized as a flagship species in conservation discourse (Barua 2014). Such discourses that evoke global ecological responsibilities where ethics becomes a more-than-human endeavor, frame elephants as ‘truly’ belonging in the wild, stripping them of their social history and cultural embeddedness with humans (Kulick 2017). Examining the ordinary yet extraordinary interactions between humans and elephants in Kerala, this paper reveals the diverse phenomenological subtleties of the relation that emerge through attunement and trust-building, that the global narratives on elephants obscure. Further, such narratives that imagine elephants as a cosmopolitan, wild species have been critiqued for their framing of environmental conservation in post-colonial contexts, where Western ideals of conservation or the hegemony of Indian elites that view elephants as pristine beings of the wild are imposed onto local South Asian communities (Guha 1989, 2006). In complicating such arguments that posit the notion of ‘pristine nature’ as a bigger entity emerging from the outside, this paper illustrates how local people appropriate and feed into the ‘global’ conservation discourse through mundane activities. Such local practices, although embedded with motivations different from conservation discourse, interact with each other to produce a narrative of elephant epistemology that is stripped of its historical and ritual specificities. Following Tsing (2005) who troubles the oppositional framing of global and local, the paper argues that the cosmopolitan elephant is not just a production of global discourse, but produced in interactions and interconnections.