Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
has 1 download
1
- Convenors:
-
Sebastian Dümling
(Universität Basel)
Eberhard Wolff (University of Zürich)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building, LAN/0G/074
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel is dedicated to the question how "presence" as a fundamental form of lifeworld experience has changed and is being reshaped in the course of digital-media transformation. We invite contributions from media anthropology, the anthropology of the body and the senses to discuss this question.
Long Abstract:
In the theoretical tradition of phenomenology, "presence" is understood as a mode of fundamental human experience: I experience the world around me as my empirical lifeworld (Lebenswelt) because I am present in this lifeworld. Even more: The «I» experiences itself as an empirically concrete «I» because it experiences itself as present in the world.
"Presence" as a mode of experience understood in this way has, however, become fragile through processes of medialization and digitalization, or must be reconceptualized - not least through transformations in the pandemic everyday life: "Presence" now can be physical, face-to-face, digital, distant, online, virtual, contactless, personal, in person, in vivo, usual, real, home, offline, sensual, etc. From the perspective of an anthropology of the body and the senses, it is then fundamentally necessary to ask what this means for mutual body experience and body doing.
Thus, actors oscillate between different forms of presence and dimensions of reality. The panel will provide a platform to problematize presences with both theoretical and empirical contributions. Possible questions that the contributions can address are: Which different presences can be observed? How are different presences produced and experienced? How is presence used strategically as an argument? Are there political, cultural, economic actors that capitalize on presence? Accordingly, the panel is interested in the intertwining of medial, empirical, and sensory-physical transformations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
How do young people recreate social presence in a post-pandemic scenario? Focusing on social interaction of university students, the paper aims to understand the different dimensions of presence involved in students’ “interstitial relationalities” and their influence on young people resilience.
Paper long abstract:
The physical immediacy of others is a central component of the feeling of social presence (Kreijns 2021).However, in times of pandemic and social distancing how can we be together by staying apart?
On the basis of an ongoing ethnographic research, this paper focuses on students’ strategies to recreate social presence and proximity among the university population of the city of Padua, Italy.
The pandemic has strongly affected the ways in which young pepole interact. As a consequence of physical distancing presence for some students has become a virtual experience, this is also related to the withdrawal to an individual's private sphere and to a biological concern: the fact that our own body is to some extent something beyond our control, since it can be a vehicle of contagion in spite of our efforts.
At the same time, a different attitude can be observed, which entails the creation of “bubbles of social contact” that take place in interstitial spatialities and in fluid temporalities. In this sort of relational interstice, which is meant to be a place of refuge (Phelps 2018), students temporarily forget the concerns resulting from the pandemic and reclaim control of their perceptual and body experiences. Therefore, these relational bubbles entail a specific way of being present with each other that contributes to the establishment of a renewed sense of community and shared sociality.
According to these premises, this paper aims to understand the different dimensions of presence involved in interstitial relationalities and their influence on young people resilience.
Paper short abstract:
Spiritual incarnation and bodily presence felt through the tools of Virtual Reality and religious ritual.
Paper long abstract:
In Korea, we interviewed a VR-content developer, the success of whose re-educational VR therapy helps patients paralysed by cerebral strokes. Using simple video game effects based on mirror therapy, he aims to multiply and perfect the therapeutic contents.Being a Christian, he considers it a valid way to serve and worship God. In some Korean churches, we see a religious use of VR goggles, which allow people to participate in Sunday services, worshiping God with an enhanced feeling of presence of « being there, where God is ».
On the other hand, we have assisted in traditional shamanic rituals that are being forgotten, and marginalised. Condemning Christianity’s « religious monopolisation », a shaman was conducting the ritual of Jack-dou an assemblage of two sharpened blades. Literally the shaman ‘rides the blades’, implying an incarnation of spirits through his body and also as means of « transportation » in order to connect with a spiritual world.He confesses to feeling the presence of spirits, fully incarnated in himself, which become intrinsically real for him.
These two tools focus equally on « feelings of presence » no matter their methodological process : manipulation of human consciousness or spirit incarnation through the human body, to “transport” individuals to the desired place, whether physical well-being or spiritual communion.Guided by these two tools, our paper would deliberate on the confrontation between mind and body : the tendency to virtual dematerialisation of religious practice and traditional rituals in a new era’s focus on material proofs.
Paper short abstract:
Under the terms of the ‘Diaries of Silence’ experiment, participants abstain from using electronic media and oral speech for one week. The participants also keep self-observation diaries. The most dramatic discovery was the unbearability of the immediate interaction with oneself and the others.
Paper long abstract:
Under the terms of the ongoing ‘Diaries of Silence’ experiment http://silence.tilda.ws/eng, participants should abstain from using electronic media, gadgets, internet services and oral speech for seven days. The participants must also keep a self-observation diary. From 2012 to 2021, 150+ diaries of men and women aged 20-45 were collected. These diaries revealed such different emotions and experiences of the participants as "awakening of the senses" (better hearing, brighter taste, in one extreme case the first ever sense of smell) and the "muting of the senses" (one could not write poetry without being able to speak), etc.
Some of the crucial and most dramatic discoveries were those of the self and the others.
On the one hand, the company of the self and own body was often unbearable: feelings of loneliness and boredom, voices in the head, emptiness, lots of free time and an inability to fill it, disorientation in space and time, social awkwardness, dependence on others, and uncertainty about how others perceive oneself.
On the other hand, just as unexpected and unbearable were the reactions of friends and family: most often, their irritation and dissatisfaction; much less often, understanding, support and playing along.
Our invisible media, digital and oral speech, save us from the unbearable immediacy, they serve as a shield from the world and ourselves and allow us to fine-tune the way we interact with ourselves and the others.
Paper short abstract:
Through the stories of Brazilian professors and students in 2020 and 2021, later transformed into comics, this work has a goal to reflect: How did the transformations imposed by the COVID-19 produce a particular mode of presence experienced by our interlocutors in their daily life?
Paper long abstract:
The Class Diary is a lecture tool for registering the daily routine and the presence of students. In 2020 and 2021 we investigated ethnographically the transformations conceived by the pandemic through the stories of those particularly affected in the scholarly context, teachers, and students. These stories were collected and illustrated as a diary that explores anthropologically how the new ways of "presence" in the pandemic were experienced.
All these stories present their particularities, but also belong to the collective memory, crossed by experiences and sensations interconnected. The fear of the present shares space with the hope of change in the future. We were interested in the transformations conceived within the teacher-student relations, at that moment exclusively online, that resulted in a new mode of "presence" of these subjects, and consequently, a new way of experiencing their senses and the establishment of relations.
Appropriating the notion of Class Diary for the register of daily presence, we explored these reports transforming them into illustrations to comprehend and express sensitively this new sense of "presence" experienced by our interlocutors. The Class Diary would be a registration of stories, feelings, and the relationships among these subjects. But, how to represent hope in the future, if the future was extremely uncertain to those facing that moment? Our challenge was to transform these stories into a comic book, without missing the point of view of our interlocutors and the miscellaneous senses experienced that crossed them, seeking ways of expressing it artistically as illustrations.