Lavinia Tanculescu-Popa
(Hyperion University - Bucharest)
Keir Martin
(University of Oslo)
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Discussant:
Thomas Stodulka
(Universität Münster)
Formats:
Panels
Network affiliated
Sessions:
Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Affective Dimensions of Ethnographic Knowledge Construction [European Network for Psychological Anthropology, ENPA].
Panel P008b at conference EASA2020: New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe.
This panel focuses on methodological and practical implications that bring to awareness the potentials of researchers' affects and emotions that less hinder than enable processes of anthropological and social scientific knowledge construction.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the role of researchers' emotions and affects in understanding 'the field.' Anthropologists have widely discussed and debated fieldwork reflexivity in terms of fieldwork ethics, methodological practices, colonial traditions inscribed in ethnographic encounters and modes of ethnographic representation. This panel focuses on methodological and practical implications that bring to awareness the potentials of researchers' affects and emotions that less hinder than enable processes of anthropological and social scientific knowledge construction.
The panel welcomes progressive proposals that constructively discuss researchers' affects and emotions, provides intellectual space for methodological, practical and epistemological debates and expounds the potentials and the limits of affectively aware scholarship.
Parca is a Belizean woman who plays Boledo, the national gambling game. She wins more often than she doesn't. This paper compares the conjuring acts of winning picks and writing as forces of an emergent affective attunement, an expression of relationality in a precarious Paradise.
Paper long abstract:
Parca is a Belizean woman living in a beach town that has "gone crazy" for tourism. She plays Boledo. Boledo is a national gambling game of Belize. The rules of the game are simple. Pick numbers and play as much money on them as your seductions dare you to. Parca's picks are a conjuring act, something about them agitates a world into refrains of endurance and sustainability that urges the incommensurate and the otherwise of her life in Belize. Parca's picks, my writing: both modes of expression, practices that gesture toward something generative in everyday moments of hunkering down, of dipping and dodging, and deep curiosity or some eerie apotheosis that takes her picks and my writing beyond some description of a fraying "good life" tropics and toward some figure of futurity. How do Parca's picks keep her poised at the chancy edges of the sensible where bodily agitations bother official images of Paradise to keep me attuned to the affective atmospheres of life expressing an ecology of the insensible and a poetics of relationality. How does it matter to write tethered to Parca's picks as an emergent otherwise, itself a swirling wave of repetition and difference composed of both potentiality and loss or to write connected to Parca's stiff attempts to maintain traction in a neoliberal present on the precipitous edges of Empire, in the spaces that "take place" in the course of historical forces of eroding edifices, images, and attachments? How are picking and writing enactments of change?
This paper describes when and how I comprehended the ways in which my interlocutors, Chechen war refugees in Poland, remade their worlds. The main aim of the paper is to discuss what role researcher's life experience can play in the ethnography of violence, as defined by Veena Das.
Paper long abstract:
In a highly acclaimed work on research ethics and methods in the ethnography of violence, Veena Das proposes that ethnographers study the lived experiences of the survivors of violent events in such a way that the interlocutors' knowledge marks the ethnographers. Das's approach raises the problem of the subject positionality of the researcher. If the ethnography of violence entails allowing others' pain to be inscribed on the researcher, how do ethnographers inexperienced in profound loss study others' remaking of their worlds? Based on the method of autoethnography, this paper describes my own positionality before, during and after ethnographic field research among Chechen war refugees in eastern Poland. The paper draws on Renato Rosaldo's concept of the positioned and repositioned subject to discuss the ways in which I comprehended the anthropological knowledge inscribed on me in the field.
Marked by raw territorial behaviors, protest movements animated urban spaces the last seven decades with utmost intensity in times of peace. Field research that involves participating in protest movements implies certain risks and difficulties that may impede, hinder or contaminate data collection.
Paper long abstract:
Urban environment is where the most intense and profitable economic relations are established, but also where the decisions and policies through which different institutions coordinate public life are made. Here, too, most conflicts arise spontaneously or organized by citizens, when their political, economic or social interests are harmed. Capital cities represent the "privileged" stage of social movements. Clearly marked by territorial behaviors, the protest movements represent events that animated urban spaces, in the last seven decades, with the utmost intensity in times of peace. In ethology, the term territorial refers to a sociographic space that an animal of one species dominates over other individuals of the same species and sometimes of different species.
Field research that involves participating in protest movements implies certain risks and difficulties that may impede, hinder or contaminate data collection. The psychology of crowds is inherently affected by a state of suspicion towards possible "infiltrators". And if an individual without a press badge carries and uses photo-video equipment (as is the case in visual anthropology) the "undercover" agent label is applied almost automatically. This can also pose a potential threat to personal physical or equipment integrity. Same risks can occur in case of a police bust. On the other hand, the sympathy for the supported cause can affect the attitude of maintaining objectivity and axiological neutrality. In situ research in such cases implies also a significant risk of informational intoxication.
Results of an ethnography about cisgender mens who are adept at "risky" sexual practices, such as bareback and "pig" sex. The aim is to analyze how it is possible to produce knowledge of sexual/erotic practices that challenge the political and subjective effects of disgusting and transgression.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I intend to present some of the results of an ethnographic postdoctoral research, still in progress, in which I follow face-to-face meetings of interlocutors who are adept at "risky" sexual practices, such as bareback sex (without condoms) and so-called "pig sex" (also known as "dirty sex", i.e. a set of sexual practices that involves eschatological elements or what we consider "dirty" or "disgusting"). The events are exclusively for cisgender men and take place in the city of Rio de Janeiro / Brazil. The goal here is to analyze how it is possible to produce knowledge of sexual / erotic practices that challenge the political and subjective effects of disgusting and transgression. It is a research that deals with the limits of what is naturalized to find healthy, safe or "conventional". This research seeks not only to understand the limits of the practices themselves, but also our own analytical tools by putting these issues into question. What are the ethical implications of following a field that deals with practices considered dangerous? How to develop research based on elements such as disgust, revulsion and risk sexualization? What kind of bodily and affective experimentation does such fieldwork produce for the researcher and help (re)think our methodologies?
Drawing on interactions with robot users in Japan organizing memorial services for Sony's pet robot AIBO, this paper illustrates how exercising playful attitudes toward artificial life can leverage affect to better capture and critique traditional anthropological treatments of animacy.
Paper long abstract:
What if the best response to a shared problematization among anthropologist and interlocutor was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of an affect? How should anthropologists in these cases treat social facts that manifest as feelings? Finally, how can anthropology as a discipline leverage affect not only as a method of anthropological inquiry but also as a reflexive critique of its dominant analytics? Drawing on interactions with interlocutors in Japan organizing memorial services for Sony's pet robot AIBO, we examine how robot users cultivate affects of amusement and care in collaboration with artificial agents to feel into perspectives on reality that challenge categorical divisions between inanimate and animate forms of life. By documenting our own affective transformation from a disposition of cynicism that protects against feelings of enchantment to another of playfulness that is receptive to it, we illustrate how affect can organize descriptions of social practices that traditional theoretical approaches would posit as logical problems requiring a "resolution," such as the treatment of robots as both artificial and alive. We argue that exercising amusement as an affective analytic that holds multiple and seemingly contradictory perspectives together can also generate opportunities to operationalize affect for cultural critique. Thus, by comparing an active cultivation of amusement with a passive understanding of enchantment, associated with classic critiques of commodity fetishism and the culture industry, we aim to reclaim enchantment's critical capacities, explored by thinkers like Jane Bennett and Yana Stainova.
I pay attention to the affective dimension of ethical practice at the moment of sleep disturbance of a resident with dementia, revealing the ways in which the ethical subjects (including the researcher) emerge in the making of ongoing, entangled ethical endeavours.
Paper long abstract:
How should anthropologists approach, perceive, and engage with everyday crises, such as sleep disturbance, without interrupting residents' privacy and day-to-day life in dementia care home? How can we allow medicalised bodies to be recognised as possibilities of subjects and possibilities of ethics, attending to their meaning-making actions and utterances? What should we do if we encounter situations where different traditions, ideas, and practices around what is morally/ethically good/right coexist and conflict with one another, or if the existing regulations, rules, and norms do not provide a sufficient resolution for an ethical dilemma? More directly, what should we do if a mother living with dementia asks us to call her daughter early one autumn morning in a care home? Building on a decade of voluntary work and a year's fieldwork (including six weeks' intensive observation of nightlife) in a Jewish care home in London, I pay attention to the affective dimension of ethical practice at the moment of sleep disturbance of a resident with dementia. Inspired by Heidegger's concept of dwelling, I understand the episode not as the pathological, but as a process through which the ethical subjects (including the researcher) emerge in the making of ongoing, entangled ethical endeavours.
In addition to paying attention to the affective realm of research, we need to explore how to do affective ethnography, quite literally, graphically in drawing and writing. How could the construction of ethnographic knowledge in two-dimensional text provide opportunities for affective engagement?
Paper long abstract:
Doing ethnographic fieldwork on drinking the Qur'an in Zanzibar led me to engage with local conceptions of the body. Liquefied Qur'anic verses were ingested for healing purposes - but what happened with them after ingestion, how did they relate to boundaries of inside and outside, bodily substance, and a spiritual force without which bodies would not be living bodies? Responding to my inquiries about the body, I sat with several interlocutors in interview-like situations where we were and had bodies. Skillfully, my interlocutors made extensive use of metaphorical descriptions. Although these metaphors directed attention away from the bodies that we were in these conversations, they also were designed for me to connect to the abstraction of the body in a different - an affective - way. In order to translate this affective dimension of what these metaphors did, it did not suffice to write about these metaphors - rather, I reverted to drawing the images that people had painted for me in words in order to allow my readers to have a different - an affective - encounter through that which they find printed in my text.
In addition to paying attention to the affective realm in doing research, I argue in this paper, it is also important to engage with how to do affective ethnography, quite literally, graphically in drawing and writing. Constructing ethnographic knowledge, even in two-dimensional text, includes providing opportunities for readers to affectively engage.
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