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AntSoc02


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Feeling fieldwork in Japan: affective environments, imagination and ethnographic skills 
Convenor:
Andrea De Antoni (Kyoto University)
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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, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates