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.