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Accepted Paper:
What can speculative methods contribute to an ethnography of the life and death of dolls and robots?
Fabio Gygi
(SOAS, University of London)
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.