Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the uncertainties and impromptu responses underpinning rituals, arguing that the dynamic tension created add to their efficacy. Grau draws from Kulama a yearly ritual from the Tiwi of Northern Australia and Gore from Igue the annual renewal rituals of the Edo of Southern Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

Rituals follow a preordained sequence as it is through the precise enactment of specific actions that their efficacy is gained. Yet because they are performative, the anxiety that things may go wrong remains throughout. This uncertainty gives a dynamic tension, which, we argue, is just as important for ritual effectiveness as is the precise protocol followed by participants. At times, impromptu actions are undertaken or arise contributing to the "drama" necessary for a "good" ritual. Our presentation examines two events: Grau considers uncertainties within the regenerative Tiwi ritual Kulama. Working throughout the year men create songs engaging with many issues including commemorating the dead, becoming women, dealing with their mother-in-law, and tackling grievances. During the three-day event, however, a man may occasionally "forget" his words and family women step in and prompt him. Whilst officially marginal and external to this particular context of knowledge, women are drawn in, recognised, and able to reinforce their position. Gore examines how uncertainty is a constitutive aspect of Igue, the annual renewal rituals of the Edo, during which the Oba (king) of Benin honours his paternal ancestors and is in turn honoured by his chiefs after the regeneration of his person through herbs and sacrificial blood. The dramatic highlights of the events occur when first the chiefs and then the Oba himself dance with the ritual sword (eben). Intensity and uncertainty are at the heart of the performances since dropping the sword signals certain death within the year for the bearer.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines two distinct modulations of prayerful embodiment in Christian contexts in Ireland, the testimonial and the sacramental. The paper argues that both modulations embody the rhetoric of hesitancy, through invitation and response, to mediate temporal frames of recommitment to faith.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines rhetorical bodily practices in two Irish faith communities. I pay particular attention to the retention in prayerful bodily modulations of distinct moments of commitment and hesitancy in testimonies - how do people remember belief bodily, particularly those threshold moments where they had previously stopped not-believing and entered states of religious flow? Such moments are characteristic of Pentecostal testimonies and are often carried into faith practice and relived in prayer as moments of grace, moments where hesitation was replaced with faith. Catholics similarly seek recourse to new prayerful contexts, in the wake of an institutional church structure that has largely left them down, as evidenced not only in the scandals of Ireland's recent past, but also in the recently modified liturgy that, far from standardizing sacramental worship as intended, has at least for the moment left congregations feeling hesitant and acting hesitantly. How can the shock of this new prayerfulness be addressed in bodies already disciplined? How are testimony and sacrament relearnt and revisited to recover key moments of hesitancy through the body as medium and archive?

Paper short abstract:

I turn to the kidnapping of my Iraqi friend Jabar in 2009 to recount the moments of inability of those close to him to maintain their poise during the week long ordeal. Such moments point not only to some form of ethical and experiential intercoporeality, but also, more proximally, the exposedness and tremulousness of bodily-being itself.

Paper long abstract:

Bodily posture and poise has a remarkably ethical dimension to it: one might talk of being 'upright' morally or refer to someone as a 'stand-up' person. But what of the ethics, morality and experiences of when persons are no longer able to hold themselves upright in moments of trauma, fear or doubt? In this talk I turn to the kidnapping of my friend Jabar, which took place in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in 2009, to recount the moments of inability of those close to him to maintain their poise on hearing the news of his kidnapping, and also on seeing him after his being released. Such moments of breakdown and trembling point not only to some form of ethical and experiential intercoporeality, but also, more proximally, the exposedness and tremulousness of bodily-being itself.

Paper short abstract:

By focusing on Matses children of Amazonia, this paper considers hesitation and fear as central to their experiences of urban spaces. Hesitation in the city reveals children’s bodily insecurity and displacement, and is part of a physical and emotional process of learning in an unfamiliar environment.

Paper long abstract:

The Matses, a native people of Peruvian Amazonia, spend most of their lives in rainforest villages and rarely visit urban settings. Matses people are skilled, dynamic and agile when carrying out everyday activities in their forest environments. However, when walking on the city streets they are clumsy, insecure and ungraceful. Their confidence as skilled hunters and fishermen in the rainforest transforms into fear and hesitation in urban environments. By using creative methodologies such as drawing and photography, this paper specifically addresses Matses children and their experiences in the city. I explore children's movement and bodily engagement in public urban spaces, suggesting how these are characterised by clumsiness and hesitation as opposed to their confidence in forest dwellings. Hesitation is here understood as a moment of bodily awareness in and before a world that is unfamiliar and has to be discovered. Hesitating becomes a moment of suspension before a foreign environment, which reveals bodily uncertainty in a world that requires different attitudes and skills in order to move and fit in. Being hesitant is thus part of a process of situated learning, in this case learning how to move in an unexplored world of concrete, non-Indian people (chotac), cars, street markets and artificial lights. Hesitation-in-the-city, as Matses children explain, is significantly intertwined with fear (dacuëden) and characterises their experience of urban spaces. Therefore, I address how hesitation and fear are part of a bodily and emotional engagement through which Matses people encounter and physically experience the city.

Paper short abstract:

In the Caribbean clubs of Paris, dance competence is experienced as naturalized heritage of the diaspora. Nevertheless, clubbers develop alternative spaces where learning processes can be articulated and become the site for bodily experiment vis-à-vis the uncertainties of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

In the Caribbean nightlife of Paris, bodily uncertainty is unspeakable. Occupying the dance floor is a sign of self-confidence and shared belonging, whereby dance is conceived as the naturalized heritage of the Caribbean diaspora. Making moves sound familiar, affirming and performing bodily knowledge are promises non-professional dancers have to commit to. Caribbean youth engage with dance and music as if to demonstrate the legitimacy of their belonging to the homeland. In the smoky warehouses of the urban periphery, the Caribbean subcultural industry thrives around nationalist claims, practices of exoticism, cosmopolitanism and desires for upward social mobility. Yet the apparently coherent statements about identity are spaces for anxiety and hesitancy, namely with regard to the body. As much as the non-proficient body is rejected within the public space of the performance, the body is involved in a permanent learning process that cannot be publicly articulated. This paper aims to contend notions of familiarity and bodily knowledge in the construction of an imagined community, in order to highlight the challenges and the doubts dancers experience with regard to a very demanding culture of public display. Clubbers of the Caribbean diaspora engage with constant practices of learning and testing old and new steps by virtue of new media technologies; watching professional dancers performing on Youtube allows for the learning to remain private, the anxieties to remain unspeakable, while publicness maintains its secure essentialist façade. This paper aims to address the body and its ambivalences within zouk and dancehall club cultures in Paris.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the hesitation and the moments of uncertainty in the Athenian Goth clubs’ dance practices. Exploring the relations of movement and space will be illuminated how the above are parts of crossing boundaries in Goth hierarchies and how these are being negotiated in dance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the hesitation and the moments of uncertainty in the Athenian (GR) Goth clubs' dance floors and how this hesitation and uncertainty are componenta of crossing boundaries in Goth hierarchies.

Reflexive and autobiographical narratives combined with ethnographic data are used and Goth identity is viewed as a performative process suggesting that the presentation of 'gothness' during dancing helps its members to obtain subcultural capital.

As subcultural theorists suggest, subcultures obfuscate class but contain their own forms of social hierarchies. For the analysis of the rules of Goth social hierarchies, Sarah Thornton's model for subcultural capital is used. Gothic subcultural capital is mainly attained by adopting specific style (dress, dance), participating in events, having in scene knowledge and being in a Goth circle with high subcultural capital.

Because the purpose of this paper is to explore dance practices, it explores the kinetic rules of Goth dance styles and tries to understand the hesitation of 'newbies' to enter the dance floor and the uncertainty of their movement. It also ties to connect dancers' subcultural capital with the spatial preferences of their performance on the dance floor, out of it or on clubs' stage. In the Athenian Goth network, most participants have got to know each other. Performing dance is a moment of uncertainty because, while one present one's 'gothness' in the dance floor, most attendees gossip dancer's act as a result of one's revaluation subcultural capital and, consequently, one's place in Goth hierarchies.

Paper short abstract:

The paper speaks about hesitation as it is understood in the professional practice of contemporary dance. The author will argue that hesitation has little to do with the realm of improvised/unscripted moments and/or the familiar rules. Rather, it is a state, created by dis-alignment between body and mind(thought), in terms of not-being-fully-here.

Paper long abstract:

From the perspective of contemporary dance (particularly improvisation) the author (both a dancer and an anthropologist) will firstly aim at clarifying a few crucial nuances between terms, e.g. hesitation vs. suspension, uncertainty/insecurity vs. indecisiveness, etc. By doing so she hopes to set a more distinctive ground, in order not to miss the essence/substance of dance/bodily practice in the first place. Furthermore, she would like to show how hesitation and/or uncertainty are both basic states, which do not appear any differently due to a contextual setting/frame/form of the practice - i.e. its uprise does not depend on whether dancers are learning, improvising or performing a highly rehearsed performance. On the contrary, hesitation may happen equally within any of these settings, while - at least in performing arts - its effects could hardly be considered as anything else but disruptive.

Namely, in dance (performative) practice, hesitation and uncertainty are known as a result of "not being in the body", "thinking ahead" or simply "mind and body being apart". Although in theoretical fields such dualism is thought to be (somewhat) clarified, dancers know that "oneness" needs to be established each second anew. When they fail to practically achieve it, hesitation takes place. This prevents a performer from "being-there" and makes the dance non-believable. Thus, achieving a state of total "decidedness" is a skill and plays an equal role within any expression, communication, form of practice, within any objectified or possibly objectifiable practice. This is what defines a real doing: anything else is either trying-to-do, or representing-the-doing.

Paper short abstract:

Dans la capoeira brésilienne deux « joueurs » se défient en présence d’un « maître » afin de faire tomber l’adversaire. Ma réflexion tourne au tour de comment, en absence de règles négatives fixes, l’incertitude du contenu éthique des relations entre les acteurs peut faire basculer les registre de l’interaction poussant le jeu vers le rituel ou la violence.

Paper long abstract:

La capoeira est une technique corporelle afro-brésilienne où deux « joueurs » se défient à l'intérieur de rondes animées par un orchestre, dont l'instrument principal, appelé berimbau, est joué par le maître de la cérémonie.

Le but c'est de faire tomber l'opposant par des coups de pieds et de tête en faisant usage de feintes et des ruses.

Le jeu se fonde sur une complémentarité de mouvement. Le coup de l'un doit amorcer dans le corps de l'autre un mouvement synchronisé d'esquive. Il ne s'agit pas de bloquer le coup, mais de sortir de la ligne d'impact.

L'interaction se fonde donc moins sur des règles proscriptives concertantes les mouvements d'attaque, que sur une seule règle prescriptive invitant les joueur à s'esquiver avec adresse des coups de l'opposant.

Ma réflexion tourne autour de comment, en absence de règles négatives fixées une fois pour toutes, l'incertitude du contenu éthique des relations entre les participants (notamment entre les joueurs et ceux-ci et le maître) contribue à exacerber l'instabilité du registre de l'action.

Le ton ambivalent des relations (déférence ? défi ?) peut faire basculer l'interaction à deux, censée être un « jeu », la poussant or vers la répétition ritualisée or vers des éclats de violence imprévus.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the relationship of second order ‘thick descriptions’ of martial movement to reflexive first-order embodied experiences of such movement and awareness. It will explore the centrality of ‘hesitation’ in martial movement, and how uncertainty may go beyond a language of time and space to a feeling that the trained body intuits.

Paper long abstract:

Zanshin is a Japanese term used in martial arts training to speak about a calm state of body/mind awareness of others' bodies. Through developing this awareness one learns about timing and how to sense an opening, a momentary hesitation or uncertainty in the attacker or opponent's body that invites entry. One trains for many years to be able to feel, interpret and act upon such uncertain moments in the most effective way. In this paper, I will consider the relationship of second order 'thick descriptions' of martial movement to reflexive first-order embodied experiences of such movement and awareness. To do this I will draw on my own experience of training and teaching in aikido, a Japanese martial art practiced now around the globe, as well as from multiple voices of other practitioners of the craft. This will result not only in an understanding of the centrality of 'hesitation' in martial movement, but, more generally, it will suggest that one cannot understand hesitation simply as a gap in time that can be witnessed. Instead, in embodied contexts, uncertainty may go beyond a language of time and space to a feeling that the trained body intuits, or believes to intuit and that may indeed be absent for even the most knowledgeable and sensitive observer. This raises questions about the relations between observation, discussion, and participation on the path towards a 'thick' ethnographic description of embodied experience.

Paper short abstract:

This paper scrutinizes the corporeal challenges that people face in embodied zones like disaster-torn Japan and in Euro-American martial arts communities—and among clusters of ethnographers who drag their weary bodies to conference venues in search of inspiration, stimulation and gourmet gluttony.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographers frequently find themselves on the front lines of bodily disjuncture as they enter varied communities and subject their stooped, stiff, under-exercised, insomniac, or otherwise neglected frames to the rigors of dirt floors, tatami mats, un-ergonomic office furniture, rickety transport, and other arenas of cross-cultural discomfort. For this reason, anthropologists are well qualified to comment on embodied struggles of various kinds and the uncertainties and adjustments that these can present. This paper scrutinizes the corporeal challenges that people face in embodied zones as varied as toxic, irradiated, disaster-torn Japan on the one hand and Euro-American martial arts communities on the other—as well as among clusters of ethnographers in departments and in the field who drag their weary bodies to conference venues in search of inspiration, stimulation and gourmet gluttony.

Injured or contaminated bodies present familiar but important challenges to movement, health, and fitness. The paper highlights the struggles of victims of environmental illness recorded ethnographically for over a decade, but it also includes ruminations from the author's long experience as an injury-prone athlete, internal arts practitioner, desk-bound academic laborer, jetlag zombie, and ethnographic journeyman. This narrative blend of experiences and subjectivities, while messy, will hopefully lend perspective to an account that ultimately concerns us all as inveterate users and abusers of our bodies in a range of fieldsites and cultures.

Paper short abstract:

Through the lens of 'assimilation' as a kind of movement and cultural work, my paper argues that uncertainty and disquiet should belocated in the inter-subjectivity between anthropologist and 'informants'. Inter-Subjectivity is a site of intersection of trajectories, both "real" and "imaginary".

Paper long abstract:

Through the lens of 'assimilation' as a kind of movement and work of contextualization, my paper argues that uncertainty and disquiet should be approach in terms of the inter-subjectivity between anthropologist and 'informants'. Inter-Subjectivity is understood here as a site of intersection of trajectories, both "real" and "imaginary". Various social thinkers (Gluckman and Devons, Strathern, Ardener, Gofmann, Keane) have problematized the anthropologist's work of contextualization (translation, or analytical framing), whcih is not supposed to reduce experience to theory. Experience has a temporal dimension that is embodied and biographical and is not easily expresed in language. The experience of 'assimilation' to what is or used to be a colonial ideal of civilization is, I suggest, a case in point of the double difficulty of the work of contextualization/translation: that of the subjects of expeirence and that of the anthropologist trying to make sense of their work.