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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.