Short Abstract

With this workshop we revisit anthropological thought on patienthood for an analysis of the present, asking how inner images and affective states of being moved can be taught, learned and transmitted, and become politically generative across media, movements, and moments of danger.

Long Abstract

Classical ethnographic scholarship on the interplay between patient- and agenthood—pathos and poiesis—in the work of Godfrey Lienhardt, Fritz Kramer, and Alfred Gell has recently been taken up by scholars arguing that the separation of reality and imagination in European thought constitutes a Sonderweg, one that has not only been challenged by worldwide techniques of cultivating inner images, trance, and possession, but also being destabilised by new media and virtual realities. With this workshop we aim to revisit anthropological thought on patienthood for an analysis of the present. Where Lienhardt traced how Dinka experience is shaped by images that act upon persons rather than being merely produced by them, Kramer developed an ethnology of passiones—states of being seized, possessed, or overwhelmed—and Gell's theory of art as a technology of enchantment located agency in the efficacy of images and objects, not intention. We ask how such approaches can re-inform an ethnographic theory of the political efficacy of inner images and the affective states they produce and mediate. We are interested in how such states are taught, learned, and used across media, movements, and moments of danger. We zoom in on patienthood as a crucial element in political agitation, domination, and resistance—generating passion, endurance, and violence. Rather than treating imagination and pathos as passive and representational, we examine both as modes of action in their own right—entangled forms in which pathos and poiesis, being-moved and moving, cannot be separated. Contributions aim toward an ethnographic theory of patienthood as politically generative for a publication.