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- Convenors:
-
Bernhard Leistle
(Carleton University)
Julie Laplante (University of Ottawa)
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Affects, Movement and Stillness/Corps mouvants: Affects, mouvement et repos
- Location:
- VNR 3035
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Our panel wants to look at the phenomenological interrelationship between the experience of movement and cultural systems of meaning. We ask how concrete bodily movements simultaneously express and produce culture. Papers can address this question from empirical or theoretical perspectives.
Long Abstract:
The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has referred to the experience of movement as a "praktognosia", an original way of knowing the world. Phenomenology has shown, moreover, that movement and perception are inextricably intertwined with each other: every appearance of the world suggests a way of moving one's body, and every bodily movement immediately translates into a changed perception of the world. It is from the incessant interplay between these aspects that experiential reality arises, over time producing the structures of meaningful experience that anthropologists call "culture".
When anthropologists study corporeal movement, however, they tend to focus on the ways in which gestures, practices and habits express existing, historically grown systems of cultural meanings and social contexts. Relatively rarely are they concerned with the question how lived experiences of movement are also constitutive of the meanings they express.
For our panel we invite papers which aspire to do just that, to connect corporeal movement as a mode of experience to the emergence, transformation, construction and, possibly, destruction of socio-cultural worlds. Papers can approach the topic empirically or theoretically; they can focus on the experience of one's own movements or of others, including non-human entities and agents. As for theoretical perspective, we welcome papers in the area of phenomenology broadly conceived, that is including other approaches concerned with experience, e.g. performative anthropology, psychoanalysis, neuropsychology, semiotics. Empirical topics are open, but we regard the areas of ritual, politics, arts and sports as particularly fertile for demonstrating the phenomenological interrelationship between motility and culture.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Putting descriptive phenomenology to practice, I show how Thai boxers’ corporeal movements instantiate particular times and values under local conditions of precariousness in military-industrial Thailand.
Paper long abstract:
Based on apprenticeship-participation research with northeast Thai boxers and their families in Bangkok, I reevaluate critical expectations equating sovereign cultural movement with street-based revolutionary practice, instead considering Thai boxers' rural-urban(e) (s)paces as--in an extension of the Husserlian lifeworld--a deathworld where sovereign-subjects ritually manage relative rates of decay and strength. In the shadow of spectacular populist—nationalist representational political processes given way to state delegated torture, nested within the hypertrophy of architectures productive of the military-industrial regime, I trace how Thai boxer's movements make certain times and values under local precarious conditions. In this paper I will be especially concerned with the rest and off-hours of Thai boxing competition, insofar as these regenerative programs mark off a negative gestalt from which to draw efficacious--i.e. memorable--action. I find that this storage space of reflexive and ritual substitution provisions a form of life which opens anew an address appropriate to de-composing structures of inequality and temporality amongst manifold violences which stake claim to the present in Thailand.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the embodied experience of pain caused by bodily movements such as kicking, punching and choking works as a focal point for how individuals build social relationships to each other within the experiential space of a Danish MMA gym.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the embodied experience of pain caused by bodily movements such as kicking, punching and choking works as a focal point for how individuals build social relationships to each other within the experiential space of a Danish MMA (mixed martial arts) gym in Copenhagen. Through sharing experiences and fighting with the men and woman in the gym, I came to understand that the daily embodied experience of shared pain constitutes a complex social space where meanings, relationships and imaginations are constantly transformed and negotiated and therefore provide a grounds for social interaction. This interaction not only operates on a discursive level but in embodied, tacit and sensorial ways. Fighters ritually spar and drill different agonizing bodily techniques with each other that evoke facial expressions of clenched teeth and bloodshot eyes and verbal sounds of fighters gasping loudly for air after being choked.
Building on the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity, I argue that fighters' shared experience with painful bodily movements can challenge general ideas about physical pain as a merely private or passive experience, wherein pain is inflicted upon a suffering object, rather than an agentive subject (Asad 2000:41). Not only can the experience of physical pain work as a way for humans to recognize their individual agency, as Talal Asad argues (Ibid), I also suggest that such agency expands into the collective space of the MMA gym, where it establishes an embodied experience of pain that gives a shared social meaning to the fighters.
Paper short abstract:
Phenomenology insists that movement is at the same time representative and constitutive of cultural meaning. The paper explores this intertwining in the field of dance experience where it is realized in an exemplary manner.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper I will explore the question how dance is, or under what circumstances it can become a constitutive force in the emergence and transformation of cultural universes of meaning. Based on the works of Monica Langer, Maxine Sheets, Erwin Straus, Bernhard Waldenfels I will sketch an outline of a phenomenology of dance as a specific mode of communication in which interior experience and exterior expressivity are inseparably intertwined with each other. It is this intertwining I will argue that provides the foundation for the cultural efficacy of dance. More particularly, an anthropologically fertile phenomenology of dance has to fulfill at least two requirements: It has to clarify how dance is different from other forms of expressive movement; and it has to make clear how the dancing experience is connected with witnessing the dance. The phenomenology of dance can therefore not be separated from the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. On a more abstract level, I will show how an understanding of the relationships between experience and expression presented by dance contributes to current discussions on ontology and representation in anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how the theoretical concept form phenomenology 'the moving lived body' can challenge how the body has been constituted as a constructed, and scientific (analytical) phenomenon. We ask; What can phenomenological methodology contribute with regrading understanding the 'the moving living body' across political and disciplinary contexts?
Paper long abstract:
> he moving body is constituted as a social, political and experiential phenomenon. Moving bodies are both represented as problems and solutions in public and political discourses. However, moving bodies are lived and expressive and challenge political ideas about them. The paper "try out" how the lived body; understood in its own right, as subjective and intersubjective and ambiguous, can contribute to knowledge production across political and disciplinary contexts. We use a dance and yoga context to challenge the view that bodied are defined and constructed as problematic. Through data from an experiential context of yoga and dance we regard the body weight, instability, senses and affects as productive meaning-making, ambiguous and affected by - and affect others with and through movement. Bodily affectivity operate in the practice and need to be regarded as more than body image and exercise used as solutions to health issues. We give attention towards lived experience, proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect that might enhance increased vitalities, joy and belonging. Based on an analysis of these ambiguities, the paper address how theoretical and methodological creativity can contribute to grasp and challenge the complexities of moving lived bodies in the context of yoga and dance. The paper reflect also how our findings can contribute with knowledge of the lived body to other fields and subjects.
Paper short abstract:
Long distance cyclists use their bodies in order to activate diverse elements in the natural and cultural environments they are mobile in. It is suggested that here not only new experiences of the roads and bodies but also a sense of route is suggested which reveals also changing socio-cultural worlds.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will look at question of 'being there' in case of experiences of cycling long distances in alternating natural and cultural environments and between the different modes of being mobile which cycling practices seem to entail and integrate. Cycling, as a form of physical exercise hardly allows one to omit the interrelationship between the experience of movement and the expressions of meanings emerging from such motility. The basis for discussing the phenomenology of cycling is formed by autoethnographic materials as well as ride-alongs with diverse groups of cyclists in regions often regarded as cultural and political borderlands in Finland, Sweden, Poland and Germany where this type of mobility is not very commonplace (arctic region) or is a rather recent phenomenon due to changes of borders. What is at stake here is the way that cycling provides a context for people to deal with familiar and less familiar environments in ways that may also challenge socio-cultural worlds in the borderlands. Here also GPS based technologies are used for tracking the cyclist hybrid. The ideas of movement as an original way of knowing the world become suggested, e.g., as a group of cyclists becomes transformed along the routes they undertake. Here the demands of the practice (e.g. speed, danger, fatigue) are essential part of the experience of movement and the construction of meaning by the researcher and the co-cyclists.
Paper short abstract:
This paper demonstrates the potential of walking with reference to a medieval context. Based on fieldwork on the Cathar Trail, it argues that particular meanings developed through people’s walking. Walking meditation, historical narratives, imagination and gesture were particularly important.
Paper long abstract:
This paper demonstrates the potential of the physical activity of walking with reference to a medieval context. It is based on fieldwork on the Cathar Trail, a long-distance hiking trail in the south of France which was named after a persecuted medieval minority. Walkers and long-distance hikers came to the trail with a particular, socio-culturally defined project: to reground themselves through 'nature' and the 'elementary human experience' of walking. Adopting a phenomenological approach to human-environment interaction, the paper focuses on people's kinaesthetic experiences once on the trail. It draws on their narratives of movement and history, on the researcher's perceptions and experiences and on historical accounts and novels.
I argue that movement was crucial in generating physical and imagined Cathar worlds. It was the act of embodied and emplaced walking which was constitutive of meaning for certain walkers and hikers on the trail. Here, I follow Vergunst (2012: 29) who argues that meaning forms through people's gestures in the process of their engagement with their environment. I discuss features of long-distance hiking and an organised travel group's 'conscious walking', a holistic wellness practice which involves walking meditation. Walkers and hikers experienced a heightened awareness of existential needs and a sense of self which encompassed their environment. Following phenomenological and ecological philosophers, I argue that our imagining inheres in our bodily gestures. Walkers imagined the Cathars through walking along paths, enduring climbs and descents and battling against the wind. They shaped the historical narratives of an itinerant religious minority.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on ethnoarchaeological data from British Columbia, Canada and Cyprus to illustrate how identity, landscape and the nonhuman world are interwoven through he embodied act of moving.
Paper long abstract:
It is through movement that we know the world and (re)construct our place in it - our social landscapes. This paper focuses on the dialogic relationship among the embodied experience of walking and cultural identity. As Lee and Ingold (2006: 73) state, walking is an experience "in which environment shifts and imprints on the body, and is at the same time affected by it".
Walking is only one part of a much larger, complex engagement that requires awareness of the dialogue amongst human and the nonhuman world and an ability to adjust to their ever shifting interactions. It is through such shifts that cultural identities emerge and reflect back.
I use two case studies to illustrate how identity, landscape and the nonhuman world are interwoven through he embodied act of moving. The first draws on ethnoarchaeological data from a five day high school trek in southwestern British Columbia. The 'Harrison Hike' has influenced how generations of students come to understand their place in this unfamiliar landscape and their own social worlds.
The second draws on community based heritage work in a rural Cypriot village where people's lives were once entangled with/in the forest and its resources. Under British Colonial administration the forest was delimited and their access restricted. Here the practice of walking forest pathways is part of 'heritage-making' - confirming and recreating cultural practices, fostering a renewed sense of pride in their silenced past to carry with them into the future.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation aims to look at meditation,particularly Mindfulness meditation, as a technique that re-orders reality . The meditation re-focuses the body regular engagement in and perception of its environment in order to refresh its experience of reality.
Paper long abstract:
Siting, or zazen, Buddhist meditation will be discussed as a technique that re-orders reality by overcoming the mind in its 'delusional state'. The ultimate goal of Buddhism is Enlightenment consisting in breaking out of the illusion of duality created by this 'delusional state' which is also called 'monkey mind' and characterised by reactively 'running around' after the distractions of everyday life. Still, focused and non-reactive states are both the goal and the method in meditation practice. I draw from the phenomenological exploration of Mindfulness through first hand practice, anthropological fieldwork as well as from the biological understanding of the physiology of the meditative states. Mindful Meditation as movement slows down the biological process while stepping into the river of life. The mind re-focuses the body's regular engagement in and perception of its environment in order to refresh its experience of reality. Remaining centered, literally and metaphorically, still, yet paradoxically moving as one with the basic rhythm of the breath, the automatic biological processes and the play of nature outside. The value of the phenomenological lens will be discussed in its relevance to 'translating' and making Buddhist terminology and ontology comprehensible to non-Buddhist academics. More specifically Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'web' and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming' help us understand the Buddhist ontology of a non-dual reality. Zazen meditation will be further compared with moving meditations such as mindful walking as both constitute the Buddhist philosophy that attention, overcoming the distractions of mundane existence lead to an 'awakening' to non-dual reality.
Paper short abstract:
I would like to discuss how moving within the flows of life, as well as various movements during Zâr ritual (the prevalent healing ceremony in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa), constitute new meanings of healing, life and the world for the people of Qeshm Island, Iran.
Paper long abstract:
Over the centuries, the social sciences mainstream was under the influence of Descartes' famous proposition, "I think, therefore I am." Hence, two premises were prevalent in most of the scientific research for a long time: the dualisms between the mind and the body, and the subject and the object. Disgracing the body as the motionless locus of illusory senses, valorizing the rational scientific process as the only valid source for acquiring knowledge, and human's detachment from the world and his supremacy over the environment can all be considered as the consequences of such reductionist viewpoints. It was only by the beginning of the twentieth century and the emergence of approaches like phenomenology that some scholars, casting doubt on the idea of a universal scientific path to knowledge, commenced going beyond these dualities. Nowadays, it is possible to speak of latest anthropological works, for instance, which consider the human body as a moving field of sensory experiences that perceives the world through its ceaseless connectedness with things and non-human beings.
Relying upon my own fieldwork in Qeshm Island, Iran and several approaches in phenomenological anthropology, I will initially explore how moving within the flows of life (roaming in the open air, being enwinded or immersed with water, dancing within the flows of music) constitutes people's perceptions of their worlds. Relatedly and more specifically, I will discuss how various movements during Zâr ritual (the prevalent healing ceremony in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa) constitute new meanings of healing and dwelling for the sufferer and the whole community.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about "corridor" as the liminal space when chronically ill population are to navigate the uncertainty in hospital. The corridors are a metaphor that has allowed ethnographer to understand the nature of uncertainty and recognise how Javanese people govern the uncertainty.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about "corridor" as a space of uncertainty in medical setting. When medical knowledge and practices of understanding bodies produced in the 'Global North' used in the 'Global South', the gap frequently occurs between science and tradition. Medically, limb loss bodies and chronically ill populations can be identified as disabled people. But they may be perceived from a mixed socio-cultural perspective and seen as oddities or abnormalities represented in various cultural perceptions. Describing specific characters of cancer patients who are facing amputation, I have found the corridor is a liminal space or passageway when people are compelled to navigate the uncertainty to fill the 'gap'.
The "corridor" is as open space with peace and the lack of hierarchy- bringing into the hospital network and creating in the hospital a zone or a space where various information is shared in an informal way, with sense of openness, transparency, flexibility, hope and perhaps freedom. However, this space may also lead to the position of emotional or mental disorder- leading to the space of emotional outrage like anger, grief, desperation, and depression due to loss or disability. This paper will analyse how specialists, Residents, nurses, patients' family govern these uncertainties in Java: resorting to scientific explanation, friendship, fate, God's involvement, and resignation.
Paper short abstract:
Jamu medicine is an everyday practice of preparing fresh plant elixirs. I argue that knowledge is within the very bodily processes (movements, sounds and rhythms) involved in transforming fresh vegetal matter into liquid form to fit with fluid Javanese bodies of winds and flows.
Paper long abstract:
Numerous people in Yogyakarta engage in everyday practices of preparing fresh plant elixirs as part of jamu medicine. First, I explore the particular 'praktognosia' as the processes (movements, sounds and rhythms) involved in transforming fresh vegetal matter into liquid form to fit with fluid Javanese bodies of winds and flows. Second, I reflect from the colorful yellow-orange javanese turmeric root (temulawak) as it tints elixirs, the hands that press it as well as the practice of jamu as a whole. Third, I reflect more broadly on how people-plant synergies and alignments within these forms of medicine can be understood as both enlivening perception in continuously new ways as well as grounding human-plant becomings in a complex rhizome vibrating on itself and thus providing a somewhat steady state or 'plateau' that, once we abstract it, we can call 'culture'. Through the lived experiences of moving along with plants, I thus aim to show how these very experiences both do and transform healthy bodies. I also want to explore what happens to these meaningful experiences when the movement in-between humans and plants is obstructed, interrupted or modified, whether it be with blenders, distant regulations or gloved hands in laboratory settings.
Paper short abstract:
The work of oil extraction in Western Canada is rife with movement, violence, and implication, partnering humans and machines against 'nature'. Through a phenomenological lens, this paper explores the implications of these sites of cultural exchange and making.
Paper long abstract:
The collision between Earth and industry is one fraught with impactful movement, creating a series of localities for wrestling with potentially explosive notions of work and 'nature'. In Western Canada, land-based petroleum extraction is a complex mechanical dance, one in which humans and machines are partners in dominating a physical environment, so often apprehended as passively resource laden and ripe for plunder. This paper explores the positionality of such a physical environment and its (il)logical categorization, and grapples with the phenomenological and philosophical ramifications of human engagement with a constructed nature that is simultaneously passive and yielding, vengeful and dangerous. Drawing on the perspectives of Bordieu, Haraway and Heidegger, as well as personal experience and fieldwork, the author seeks to challenge ways of 'knowing' about nature, and suggests that knowing can simultaneously support and destabilize large-scale industrial work and the people who perform it.