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- Convenor:
-
Andrea De Antoni
(Kyoto University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Andrea De Antoni
(Kyoto University)
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Sessions:
- Saturday 28 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on doing ethnography about feelings, discussing the necessary reflexive and experimental skills to do fieldwork in specific environments, the peculiarities of doing fieldwork in Japan, and how the researcher's feelings and imagination can be seen as methodological tools.
Long Abstract:
The present panel focuses on doing ethnography on topics in which feelings and affects play a major role. In recent years, the so-called "affective turn" (Clough and Halley 2007) has become an important framework for approaching knowledge and sociality in the humanities and social sciences. Anthropology is not an exception: discussions about affects and feelings have prompted new research and methodological discussions (e.g. Stewart 2007, Mazzarella 2012, White 2017, Coker 2019, De Antoni 2019). Moreover, Ingold's work (2000, 2013) has pointed at the need to highlight the creative processes of social practice in the making, emphasizing the importance of engagements and correspondences of the lived body feeling with an environment in which skills of perception and action emerge along with ontologies. This research has pointed at the ways in which bodily skills and techniques develop within a certain milieu. In relation to this, the importance of "technologies of imagination" (Sneath et al. 2009) in the construction of the social has also been highlighted, advancing an embodied understanding of imagination. Despite these methodological discussions, however, theorizations or even reflections about the methodologies and skills involved in doing ethnography on topics related to affect, perceptions and imagination are surprisingly lacking.
This panel contributes to filling this gap. By focusing on fieldwork as a practice in which processes of embodying knowledge play a major role, it addresses the peculiarities of doing an ethnography of feelings; examines what techniques, strategies or skills can be useful; and asks how the researcher's feelings and embodied imagination can be taken into account and expressed in an anthropologically legitimate way.
It also discusses the peculiarities of doing fieldwork in Japan. This does not mean relying on notions of uniqueness of a reified "Japan" or "Japaneseness." Rather, by discussing fieldwork practices about butoh, ki healing, experiences with spirits and robot affinity, this panel sheds light on localized social and power relations, on the affect they generate through specific environments, on the role of embodied imagination—including the aforementioned construction of an imagined "Japan"—in the creation of the social, and on these elements' formative interrelations with ethnographic practice itself.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 28 August, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation will investigate affects and becomings in the avant-garde performance form of butoh by introducing cases from the presenter's fieldwork on butoh practice in Japan. It will also discuss how the researcher's body is a methodological tool in doing affective ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
The creation of avant-garde dance performance, especially butoh, is arguably a laboratory for affect. In butoh, choreographers and dancers isolate the affect of a variety of objects and phenomena and make these affects happen in their own body through movement. For the dancers, this realization of affect is not an expression, nor an imitation; they call it a becoming, naru, one of the foundations of their practice. Definitely, their embodiment of affects can be thought of as a becoming in the Deleuzian sense of the word (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). In the presenter's fieldwork, affect and becoming appeared to be inseparable in the process of creating butoh: becoming is constituted by the generation of affects, and affects are the intensities that emerge when a thing undergoes a becoming.
Following this discovery of the affects and becoming in butoh, in this presentation I will begin with the following questions: how do you become something in butoh, if you are the dancing body? If you are watching a dancing body (or thing), how do you know if it is becoming or not? To answer these questions, I will introduce short cases of becoming in butoh practice that I encountered in my fieldwork in Japan. Through these cases, I will demonstrate a physical methodology for this affective ethnography, moving among the positions of researcher, dancer, and audience member to clarify the generation of affect in and the possible conditions for these becomings. Since I am a native English speaker trained in modern dance, my background inevitably serves as my basis of comparison for my consideration of butoh practice, but it is also the source of my ingrained assumptions and thus limitations of thought. I, the researcher, can only overcome these limitations through not only reflexive thinking but also a becoming of my own. By discussing this fieldwork, I hope to demonstrate how the researcher's becoming, imagination, and relationships in the field are essential for doing affective ethnography.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on fieldwork in Japanese kikō classes. It will discuss how qigong has been localized in Japan, focusing on the perspective of feeling, enskilment, and imagination. It will also take the researcher's bodily experiences into account and discuss their importance in ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how Chinese "qigong" (healing through energy or qi), evolved into the Japanese "kikō" through specific practices. Most anthropological literature about qigong has focused on contemporary China, discussing the impact of political and economic conditions on bodily practices. Yet, the "embodiment" paradigm proposed by Csordas (1990), allows a description of the process of generation of qigong focused on the role of the body in shaping practice. Furthermore, through such a focus on experience, also an analysis of Japanese kikō practices and how they have been localized beyond their "Chinese" characteristics becomes possible.
In order to research bodily experiences, De Antoni and Dumouchel (2017) proposed the idea of "practices of feeling with the world." They integrate bodily sensory perception, emotion and affect into a broader "feeling" and rely on Ingold's (2000) notion of enskilment, as central to the comprehension of correspondences between feeling bodies and material environments. In order to have a detailed description of feelings, anthropologists also suggested the importance of taking the ethnographer's perceptions and experiences into account (De Antoni and Cook 2019; Yu 2008). Since ki (qi) is invisible, in this research I will argue that the emergence of its reality depends not only on the senses and bodily perceptions but also on memories and imagination. Therefore, in order to analyze the emergence of experiencing ki and specific bodily states of kikō, I will rely on the idea of "technologies of imagination" (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009),
While drawing on ethnographic data I gathered during classes in the largest kikō group in Kansai and on my own bodily perceptions and experiences as a researcher trained in qigong in China, I will provide an account of how I compared, thought about, and overcame qigong knowledge I embodied in China, becoming enskilled in kikō in Japan through "practices of feeling with the world" and imagination. Moreover, I will compare my own experiences with the feelings and imaginations of the instructor and other practitioners, in order to discuss how bodies in Japan construct such localized qigong practice, which is "kikō".
Paper short abstract:
While relying on ethnographic data on experiences with spirits, I will show the centrality of feelings and imagination. I will discuss the role of my feelings, enskilment and imagination during fieldwork, arguing that "feeling ethnography" can create innovative knowledge also beyond anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes affective ethnography as a "practice of feeling with the world" (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017). The necessity to take ethnographers' perceptions into account has been highlighted in the context of "sensory ethnography" (Pink 2009). Emplacing ethnographic knowledge through the senses and co-participation, and conceptualizing interviews as practices through which interviewer and interviewee come together and create a shared space, have been stressed as central in doing fieldwork about sensory perceptions. However, Pink (2009) strongly focuses only on the senses, leaving the affective dimension aside. Moreover, she tends to provide general ideas about the methods, but not to delve much into their practical aspects. Furthermore, although she highlighted the importance of "sensory imagination," she did not elaborate on it in the context of fieldwork practice.
This paper attempts to fill these gaps. I will rely on ethnographic examples from my ten year-long ethnography about experiences with spirits and spirit possession in contemporary Japan. I will firstly provide a general descriptions of spirits' "symptoms," showing that spirit ontologies and realities emerge through practice as "meshworks" (Ingold 2011) of feelings of the living body corresponding with certain environments and non-human actors. I will argue that individual skills play a major role in these experiences, and that imagination as a bodily practice (Sneath et al. 2009) that 'fills the gaps,' given certain conditions provided by bodily feelings, is central.
Secondly, I will introduce the feelings I had especially by undergoing exorcisms, comparing them with the ones reported by sufferers. I will then provide an account of the techniques in which I got enskilled during fieldwork, in order to access people's bodily experiences. In doing so, I will also show how notions of "Japaneseness" contribute to shape spirits' behaviors, and how socially shaped habits and environments contribute to the emergence of certain experiences with spirits. Finally, I will argue that "feeling ethnography" has not only the potential to access and provide accounts of people's experiences beyond verbalization and discourses, but also to create legitimate scientific knowledge, which can be innovative also beyond anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
Documenting fieldwork on a robot designed to facilitate human-machine affection through "emotional" technology, this paper presents moments of affective discordance between anthropologist and engineer to diversify methodological considerations of affect more commonly focused on attunement.
Paper long abstract:
Groove X is one of an increasing number of companies in Japan investing in the production of robots for companionship, care, and comfort during a period in which such forms of affection have been widely declared to be in deficit or "precarious" (Allison 2013). According to Groove X, its signature robot LOVOT is designed for no other purpose than to "warm" and "heal" one's heart. The company's founder, Hayashi Kaname, has further explained that LOVOT offers a way to bring happiness into the relationship between people and machines and increase the amount of love in the world. While Hayashi's startup has dedicated substantial resources to cultivating human-robot affection through narrative technologies, it has also invested in what the company calls its "emotional robotics" technologies, which "stir people's feelings through the ways that the robots look, feel and behave" (lovot.life). Fundamental to creating this capacity for LOVOT to affect human users is the ability for engineers to design compelling solicitations of affection. This requires that engineers test their own embodied perception of a cute (kawaii) aesthetic against dozens of material iterations of the robot's eyes, voice, and body until a majority of staff concur that LOVOT has embodied a sufficiently endearing affective agency of its own. In such sites of affective accommodation between human and machine, robotic platforms serve as what Patricia Clough calls the "virtual surface for the expression of a logic of sensation" (2010). Focusing on the manufacturing of affective feedback through LOVOT design strategies, this paper explores how robotic platforms serve as "virtual surfaces" that both reflect and reproduce communities of robot users through the coordination of sensorial affinities. Based on conversations with LOVOT engineers and workshops that stage human-robot first encounters, the paper documents how technological experimentation not only demarcates communities that share affective sensibilities but also mediates between communities that do not, such as that of robot fan and critic, or interlocutor and anthropologist. Emphasizing moments of affective discordance in addition to accordance, it aims to expand methodological discussions of affect focused more commonly on the generation of knowledge through affective resonance, attunement, and correspondence.