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- Convenors:
-
Miguel Alcalde
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Rahul Rose (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Eva Iris Otto (Copenhagen university)
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- Discussant:
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Joanna Cook
(UCL)
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the value of an 'anthropology of attention'. It is comprised of papers that explicitly engage with 'attention' as a theoretical concept and investigate how it can be leveraged to reconceptualise familiar ethnographic contexts and longstanding debates in anthropology.
Long Abstract:
The manipulation of 'attention' is seen as underlying many of the world's ills. Technology companies are said to be engaged in an arms race to harness our attention for profit, leading to divisive politics, technological addiction, and poor mental health. This has been exacerbated by a retreat into online worlds during the pandemic. Remarkably, attention, while being a source of anxiety, is also often touted as a cure for our runaway world as seen in the popularity of mindfulness and yoga.
As Pedersen, Albris and Seaver have argued, attention is an implicit but crucial concept in anthropological analyses of many domains, like digital technologies and ritual. Moreover, over recent decades influential anthropological works have used attention as an important part of their theories (Ingold; Luhrmann; Duranti; Csordas). Despite this history of engagement and current anxieties, attention has not thus far been the subject of robust theoretical debates in anthropology. This, however, is beginning to change with certain anthropologists arguing that attention deserves more explicit examination (Cook; Seaver; Cassaniti).
In the spirit of this fledgling turn, this panel considers the value of an 'anthropology of attention'. We encourage papers that explicitly engage with attention as a theoretical concept, unpacking the assumptions that underlie its often un-reflexive anthropological usage, as well as examining how understandings of the term vary across cultures. This includes asking: What theoretical problems are most important to the anthropological study of attention? How can attention be leveraged to reconceptualise familiar ethnographic contexts and longstanding theoretical debates?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 April, 2023, -Anna Bloom-Christen (University of California, Los Angeles)
Paper short abstract:
How does attention shape cross-cultural interaction? Drawing on philosophy of perception and anthropology of intentions, this paper analyses the connection between culture-specific facets of attention and their impact on cross-cultural interaction with an ethnographic case study in South Africa.
Paper long abstract:
How does attention shape cross-cultural interaction? And how do specific cultural backgrounds shape one’s attention?
Broadly defined, attention is an act of directing the mind. The capacity to steer attention is an integral part of our experiences and social lives. Our interactions in public and private spaces, institutions, offices and schools rely on cooperation, which in turn depends on our capacity to jointly attend to the same thing, and to each other.
This paper explores attention and its role in cross-cultural interaction. Drawing on philosophy of perception and anthropology of intentions, it analyses the connection between culture-specific facets of attention and their impact on cross-cultural interaction by means of an ethnographic case study in post-apartheid South Africa.
My hypothesis is that habits of attention evolve from perceptual, bodily immersion into specific social settings, as well as from exposure to hypotheses and arguments that, once absorbed, lead to normative attention. This modulation of attention is to some degree personal, but should be understood as connected to collective life experience. Examining this hypothesis, the paper seeks to shed light on the complex relations between mental and bodily habits of attention as fundamentally directed by specific experiences and norms.
Drawing parallels between intellectual and practical experience, I ask how to best understand attentional habits and their culturally patterned aspects. The main aim of this paper is to clarify the impact of attention on culturally specific legacies of attentional habits by studying its occurrence both as socially connecting and in its dividing power.
Josh Brahinsky Brahinsky (University of California, Berkeley)
Paper short abstract:
We tend to think of attention as a way of observing and focusing our intention, yet for charismatic evangelicals who speak in tongues, the trick is to follow passionatte attention with release and then to hold onto that disattention. This paper explores their play between focus, intent and release.
Paper long abstract:
We tend to think of attention as a way of observing and focusing our intention, yet for evangelicals who speak in tongues, the trick is to release focus and then to hold onto that feeling. This paper explores this play between focus, intent and release.
For the past 15 years, I have been observing Assemblies of God churches in Northern California where people are trained in charismatic evangelical worship, which means many speak in tongues (a form of prayer characterized by nonesense syllables, a feeling of releasing control to God and often accompanied by strong sensory experiences), and are slain in the spirit (which involves falling to the ground in an altered state). Each of these practices serves as a physical manifestation of the evangelical value of submission; concrete rituals attune the body to the experience of awe (the feeling that something is far bigger than us) and the resulting experience of a small self.
This submission-small self pattern not only emerges out of the passionate roar of focused attention in worship, but also is made stable through the continued practice of releasing attention (disattention, perhaps?). This paper uses participant observation and phenomenological interviews to trace a complementary relationship between focus and release and its effects within charismatic evangelical worship.
Miguel Alcalde (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
By looking at how the everyday experience and political convictions of practitioners of hagiotherapy are shaped by attentional processes, this paper argues that careful consideration of attention is essential for understanding socio-cultural phenomena.
Paper long abstract:
Observing the close relationship between attention and subjective experience, William James famously wrote: “my experience is what I agree to attend to”. More recently, this relationship has been further explored and theorised in a body of work emerging from the confluence of cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind that identifies attention as a crucial factor in the unfolding of conscious experience. At the same time, scholars in anthropology and the humanities, interested in the prevailing narratives and cultural concerns about attention, have been conceptualising attention as a collective and socio-cultural phenomenon. This paper brings together these two approaches to bear upon a single ethnographic context, deploying ‘attention’ as a theoretical thread capable of weaving together various domains and scales of analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Croatia among practitioners of a spiritual practice known as hagiotherapy, this paper argues that careful consideration of attention is essential for understanding a range of phenomena, from the spiritual to the political. It does this by revealing how the practitioners’ experience of everyday life is shaped by practices, behaviours, events, and situations that direct, train, shape, and attract their attention. More broadly, this paper suggests that an explicit focus on attention, underpinned by a cogent theoretical framework, can provide novel insights and produce more cohesive accounts of socio-cultural realities.
Rahul Rose (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
What connects the many and variegated ways in which people talk about attention? This paper poses one possible answer to this question, and, in doing so, examines how paying attention to attention in diverse ethnographic contexts can provide a richer theoretical account of agency.
Paper long abstract:
Attention is notoriously difficult to define despite William James’ often-quoted assertion that everyone knows what it is. This paper examines the profusion of different metaphors and terms for attention that circulate within northern India and the UK, as well as within different theoretical schools in anthropology. It considers what links these usages - which at first glance seem too disparate to be connected - to arrive at a heuristic framework for understanding attention in terms of volition and selectivity. The framework points to the usefulness of attention as an ethnographic and theoretical tool for re-conceptualising longstanding debates in anthropology about agency, as well as contributing towards recent attempts to develop more robust accounts of will and volition. The usefulness of paying attention to attention in diverse ethnographic contexts to arrive at a richer understanding of agency is explored through examples from fieldwork, including the cultivation of intense states of absorption by Indian classical musicians in Banaras, and the experience of chronic distraction by students in London. In each case, the particular ways that attention is cultivated, talked about and experienced shed light on different emic models of agency which do not easily fit within existing theoretical frameworks in anthropology.
Katarzyna Buzanska (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the anthropological study of attention illustrated by putting ethnographic data from fieldwork with teenagers under combined cognitive and anthropological theoretical scrutiny.
Paper long abstract:
In the process of considering my doctoral fieldwork data in terms of a dynamic relationship between teen bonding and attention, I encountered many interpretative challenges that can shed light on the theoretical issues an anthropology of attention would benefit from attending to. How, with what degree of consciousness, and what social consequences do students in a classroom juggle attention between their teacher, Instagram feeds, and the flamenco practice outside the window? How does the attention given to the three differ? In what ways does life in the "attention economy" infiltrate teenage experiences and our anthropological understanding of their education, identity, and citizenship? Our attention is directed by socially enmeshed ideological, somatic, and emotive factors impossible to all grasp in a laboratory experiment. That is why ethnography is ideally suited to explore the complex social processes influencing our attention and reversely the attentional backdrop required for different instantiations of sociality. Nevertheless, the cognitive basis of our human attentional capabilities and potential shifts in their everyday use linked to technological and socio-economic change will have an inevitable effect on the meaning of anthropological topics of inquiry. Consequently, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the anthropological study of attention illustrated by putting ethnographic data under combined cognitive and anthropological scrutiny. In its constitution, an anthropology of attention should not shut itself out of cooperation with cognitive science but work with its finding to gain a better understanding and more holistic analysis of ethnographic data through an ‘attentional’ lens.
Julia Modern (SOAS, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role everyday forms of attention play in assistance provided between co-resident members of a disabled and deaf women’s organisation (and their children) in a Ugandan market. It pays particular attention to the socio-spatial bases of ‘somatic modes of attention.’
Paper long abstract:
In an intellectual context in which discussions of attention predominantly focus on attention as a scarce resource, this paper expands on an insight from literature on practices of mindfulness: that valued forms of attention can be cultivated through bodily-mental practice. However, rather than looking at people who deliberately foster the capacities of their own (individual) minds, I consider how ordinary repeated bodily-mental acts of attention sediment in collective intersubjective space. Drawing on anthropological work on care and the body, I examine the role that everyday forms of attention play in the intersubjective forms of assistance provided by co-resident members of a disabled and deaf women’s organisation (and their children) in a Ugandan market. I identify a specific ‘somatic mode of attention’ (Csordas, 1993) that is prevalent among this social grouping, which is characterised by a disposition to attend to bodily-mental variation and to perceive and address the needs for assistance created by misfits between non-normative body-minds and social environments. This is similar to what Dokumacı calls ‘care intimacy’ (Dokumacı, 2020) – routine ‘unspoken’ attention paid to others’ needs for assistance. However, where Dokumacı investigates pairs of carer and disabled person, I focus on a dense collective of disabled people, investigating how the spatial, temporal, and relational features of this urban grouping produce the affective engagements that elicit attention to needs for assistance. In doing so, I demonstrate the importance of considering the materiality of social spaces to understanding the development of ‘care intimacy’ and other desired forms of attention.
Patricia Lange (California College of the Arts)
Paper short abstract:
Human attention is assumed to be interchangeable and measurable. Yet, it is not fungible like money. Interpretations of approbation change when bestowed across individuals. This paper explores attentional theories and heteromorphic forms of reciprocity to analyze attention in creative milieus.
Paper long abstract:
Influential models of attention economies tend to treat the human act of attention as interchangeable across different people, and as fungible with economic value and money. Yet, attention comes in many different forms, one of which might be characterized as approbation, or a sense of approval or appreciation that one may bestow when paying close attention to someone through their creative work. Further, attention emitted from different individuals may emerge from varied motivations and relationships, and may produce a complex landscape of reactions. This paper will reflect on the experiences of early vloggers on YouTube, and how they mutually bestowed attention using the technical features of the site. It will reach back into the anthropological record to understand the relationships between mutual forms of attention, approbation, and feelings of obligation to reciprocate human attention. It explores questions such as, under what conditions did YouTubers feel motivated to reciprocate attention? When did they feel the need to disrupt bids at attention? What forms of reciprocity are facilitated by today’s video-sharing platforms, and how do technical and social features complicate meaningful types of mutual approbation and reciprocal attention? The paper will theoretically explore different forms of attentional reciprocity, including homeomorphic and heteromorphic forms, and how they relate to desired feelings of approbation. The paper will conclude with a philosophical reflection on how algorithmic features of video-sharing platforms may be impacting opportunities for giving and receiving interpersonal attention in creative milieus.
Andrea Ford (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Unwell bodies cry out for attention, and technologies aimed at women's health attempt to attend to them. This happens in cultural and material contexts that themselves beg for attention and shape how bodies are experienced. What use is the concept of attention in making sense of this tangle?
Paper long abstract:
The burgeoning interest and investment in 'FemTech,' or digital technologies aimed at women's health, implicitly invokes attention to both bodies and the contexts in which bodies exist. Yet such ways of paying attention are not as straightforwardly complementary as they may first seem. Unwell bodies cry out for attention: for example, chronic endometriosis pain, or hormonal 'imbalances' like PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) or PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). Technologies and investments can validate these problems through the attention they pay them. Yet, as in Martin's classic analysis of PMS, we should ask whether the issue is rightly in the body or in an 'imbalanced' society, given corrosive gender expectations, inhospitable economies, and pervasive chemical toxicities to which unwell bodies (could) draw attention. Technology usage can facilitate attention to one's bodily experience -- though surveillance, tracking, and pressure to 'optimize' can induce anxiety, and attention to the technology itself can also foster bodily disconnection. What are the differences in technologically-mediated bodily attention and 'organic', 'authentic', or 'internal' bodily attention, and why does this binary persist in seeming relevant? The rise in FemTech (and related phenomena like recent UK and Scottish parliamentary initiatives to address women's health disparities) indicates attention to systemic women's health inequalities -- does attention result from cultural change, and/or drive it? Drawing from ethnographic work on endometriosis, period tracking, and hormonal self-management in the US and UK, this paper sets out theoretical provocations that attempt to articulate embodied attention otherwise than the overdetermined binary between distraction and mindfulness.
Nick Seaver (Tufts University)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists frequently set ethnography apart by suggesting that it embodies a distinctive form of attention. What ideas about the meaning of attention are embedded in these methodological appeals?
Paper long abstract:
An ongoing concern of anthropologists and other ethnographers is how to distinguish the research methods of ethnography from other practices it closely resembles, ranging from journalism to the everyday lives of ethnographic subjects themselves. One distinguishing feature that has appealed to many writers on the subject is the idea that ethnographers, while engaged in fieldwork, embody a distinctive form of attention—a mode of engagement with the world that may be more particular, more general, more informed, more intense, or more motivated than "ordinary" participants. Drawing on an analysis of anthropological texts, this paper examines appeals to attention in the methodological literature, bringing them into dialogue with writing about attention from other humanistic fields. Historians, for example, have drawn attention to the normative qualities of attentional regimes: in workplaces, devotional settings, and in education, the concept of attention has long been entangled with ideas about how to lead a good life and to embody virtue. If ethnographic attention is an epistemic virtue, can we critically examine its foundations? What might ethnography look like without appeals to the normative value of attentiveness?
Karen Lane (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how anthropological attention on the particular can feed into (and sometimes skew) a metanarrative of people and place. It subsequently analyses this through a theory of attention to explore how it can be leveraged to diagnose and treat a potentially unwell anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Susurrus: a whispering background sound, undemanding of attention. To hear it one must shift focus from the loudest or seemingly more urgent, since 'human attention is a scarce resource' when information is abundant (Pedersen, Alberis and Seaver 2021:311). Moving from sound to social relations, one could argue that long-term participant observation is well placed to document susurrus, but certain peoples and places could be said to be 'over-researched' (Clarke 2008), leading to a number of questions. What receives anthropological attention? What directs our attention? How does this feed into an academic metanarrative? And what responsibility do anthropologists have to consider attention at the outset of research? Twenty-five years on from the Good Friday Agreement published academic output on Belfast, Northern Ireland is still largely anchored to the 30-year conflict popularly known as The Troubles - whether that is exploring the post-conflict legacy, analysing ongoing aggression or sectarianism, or furthering understanding of various aspects of the two dominant ethno-politico-religious groupings. Other voices are sometimes present - people's small 't' troubles, one might say, rather than the capitalised one - but these subjective experiences susurrate in an academic metanarrative of life in the city that is still inherently Troubled. Cook (2018) believes that attention to attention can be both symptom and cure, therefore I use Belfast as an ethnographic launchpad to explore how a theory of attention can be leveraged to critique and shape anthropological attention, drawing on Wittgenstein's aspect perception, Berger's (1972) ways of seeing and Robben's (1995) ethnographic seduction.
Toby Austin Locke (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on original ethnographic research on ADHD in online and offline contexts alongside theoretical material from philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology to offer a framing of the concept of attention with particular focus on implications for ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has seemingly risen in prominence over the last few decades with adult medical diagnoses in the United States increasing 126% during the period 2016-17 (Chung et al 2019). Non-clinical engagement with the psychiatric category also appears to have increased with #ADHD being the 7th most popular public health hashtag on TikTok in October 2021 (Zenone et al 2021). This paper unpacks the psychiatric category of ADHD and its relation to the emergence of the attention economies and algorithmic agency. Through original ethnographic research in online and offline settings, and engagement with philosophical, psychological, psycho-analytic and anthropological theories of attention, ADHD is framed as a vernacular anthropology—that is, a theory of the existential and psychosocial conditions human being and becoming in the contemporary world. The seemingly increasing resonance of the category of ADHD with many people navigating complex digital realities offers a window into the relationship of the psychosocial, existential, and phenomenological conditions of human experience entangled with novel attention economies and digital technologies. Through this analysis a theoretical framing of the concept of attention more broadly will be offered with particular focus on the implications of such a reframing for contemporary anthropology and ethnography.