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- Convenors:
-
Gaetano Sabato
(University of Palermo, Italy)
Stefano Montes (University of Palermo l)
Alessandro Lutri (University of Catania)
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- Chair:
-
Stefano Montes
(University of Palermo l)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Online
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
We consider living and becoming in connection to analyze ordinary and extraordinary events overtly including anthropologists’ perspectives. This is based on the idea that living can be seen as ethnographic research and ethnography as its translation. The role of the individual is emphasized.
Long Abstract:
In this panel we consider the human (and not-human) living and becoming in relationship with time and the environment. We consider papers from anthropologists who analyze ordinary and extraordinary events related to living by overtly including themselves and their perspectives in the analysis. Can we think of living as ethnographic research and, at the same time, ethnography as a translation of living? We intend to answer this question by considering living and ethnographic research as mutually connected (Taussig 2004; Pina Cabral 2013). We also think of living in relationship with becoming. One of our references is Deleuze since he subverts monologic definitions of living and becoming by focusing on the value of indiscipline. Placing emphasis on living and becoming also means giving value to the role of the individual within a culture. Some references, centered on the individual, are Rapport 2003; Biehl 2005; Heiss 2015; Piette 2017. By putting forward the notion of existence – wherever the anthropologist is located (Jackson 2005; Jackson, Piette 2015) – helps to reassemble in new ways the familiar and the exotic, the subjective and the objective, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and the multispecies, redefining them in the play produced by the becoming and the process (Pina Cabral 2010; Stewart 2007; Thrift 2007). We invite speakers to send proposals that consider fragments of their own and others’ lives analyzed with an anthropological gaze – ethnographies and auto-ethnographies – aimed at reflecting on the meaning of living and anthropology in a transformative perspective.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores how it is possible to perceive and conceptualize the passing of time within the household. Specifically, it posits that just as the notion of the household is synonymous with the idea of family, the temporality of the household is delineated by generations.
Paper long abstract:
The household constitutes a central space in social life (Buchli et al., 2004; Cieraad, 2006), serving as the backdrop for a significant portion of individuals' lives. Furthermore, it is within the confines of the household that fundamental principles are reproduced and socialized, forming the basis through which individuals comprehend and engage with the surrounding world (Bourdieu, 1972, 2007; Carsten, 1995, 2004; De Pina Cabral, 2019). Materialities comprising the domestic space, such as spaces, objects, and images, play a pivotal role in this process, functioning as both agents and indicators of these world configurations (Miller, 2001). Consequently, an analysis of household transformations, encompassing both discourses and materialities, can unveil how individuals and social groups experience and enact socio-historical processes from the most intimate perspective.
An approach grounded in diachrony confronts us with the perennial anthropological question regarding the temporality of social life, which does not align with absolute temporal systems (Munn, 2008). This presentation explores, through an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in working-class homes in Valparaíso and Santiago, how it is possible to perceive and conceptualize the passing of time within the household. Specifically, it posits that just as the notion of the household is synonymous with the idea of family (Muñoz Ebensperger, 2020), the temporality of the household is delineated by generations. The dwellings associated with different generations reveal differences and similarities that articulate profound changes in everyday life and in the ways individuals understand and relate to their surroundings.
Paper short abstract:
An autoethnographic narrative of my job as a video remote interpreter of English-Portuguese for a call center company, at my home office in Portugal. In what way is this kind of living and becoming (re)invented in daily interactions and routines? What kind of agency do these interpreters have?
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about an autoethnography of daily tasks and routines of precarious video remote interpreters at their home office for a big Portuguese call center company. This means autoethnography as a translation of living, as I’m also becoming an anthropologist while I travel through my daily routines at work. Interpretation as a job and ethnography as the translation of living will be discussed giving the example of health and healthcare interpreters. We are virtual migrants in the context of a neoliberal labour market in a space-in-between languages and cultures. I work full-time although being self-employed since September 2021, because of the type of contract I signed with this company. In spite of this, I like my job and the daily interactions I remotely maintain with other Portuguese or English-speaking people from many countries, nationalities and origins and the kind of agency associated with it. The clients sometimes call us “the machine” as we appear in iPads and other devices, appealing to a “cyborg manifesto”, so the borders between humans and machines get blurred. I will try to determine what type of agency do these remote interpreters have that allows them to have the strength to carry on despite precarity adversities. Through an autoethnographic narrative of my daily tasks and routines at my home office in Portugal, I will give concrete examples daily interactions that exemplify the kinds of agency that help us live and reinvent ourselves through our jobs.
Paper short abstract:
Contemporary households are frequently co-habitats and networks of agents of both “natural” and artificial intelligence. The paper will present an analysis of narratives about interaction between pets, plants, household appliances, in which all parties exhibit new properties and forms of agency.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary households are frequently not just multispecies ecologies but also co-habitats and networks of agents of both “natural” and artificial intelligence. It has been frequently noted how pets are constructed as persons (Austin, Irvine 2020) and how people interact with AI assistants (e.g. Alač et al 2021), but much less research has been done on vernacular conceptualizing of non-humans’ interaction without an intermediatory human.
The paper will present an analysis of narratives about interaction between pets, house plants, household objects (from a robot vacuum cleaner to AI assistants like Siri or Alexa), in which all parties exhibit new properties and forms of agency. Based on interviews, ego-documents and digital ethnography, I’ll consider stable linguistic (Podhovnik 2018) and narrative forms of positioning non-human agents in the network of family connections (e.g., Krylova 2023). I’ll specifically focus on texts about the domestication of technology through the mediation of animals, forms of humanizing non-humans by detecting or constructing their emotional lives and formulating new forms of family bonds, ties and hierarchies by introducing non-humans to the family network.
Paper short abstract:
To breathe life into the concept of sufficiency, this paper provides an auto-ethnographic illustration, weaving threads of ecological philosophy into the fabric of my everyday food practice, examining individual 'becoming sufficiency' as a transformative approach to envisioning climate futures.
Paper long abstract:
Sufficiency—not too little and not too much. In this paper, I explore the concept of 'sufficiency' from an ecological philosophy perspective, framing it as both a fundamental objective and a practical approach to achieving reduced consumption while attaining contentment with 'enough'. In ancient Chinese philosophy, 'sufficiency' generally emphasises an individual's self-cultivation of contentment attained through the moderation of desires, prioritisation of virtues over material wealth, and the practice of living with harmonious relationships for personal and societal well-being. In an attempt to breathe life into the concept of 'sufficiency', I provide an auto-ethnographic illustration, weaving threads of ancient Chinese ecological philosophy into the fabric of my everyday food practice. This examination of the living of 'becoming sufficiency' encompasses both individual self-cultivation and a transformative approach to envisioning climate futures.
Paper short abstract:
How deep can anthropological immersion go? To what extent can ethnographers go native? Can we think of anthropological fieldwork as being correspondence (in an Ingoldian sense) even on a cellular level?
Paper long abstract:
Geamăna was a village in the Western Carpathian mountains of Romania, which has been continuously flooded since the 1980s. The sterile waste and acid waters that are continuously being released from the nearby copper mine, are in the process of engulfing the last few remaining houses as I write this. Today only a handful of households still exist on the shores of the growing sterile lake, and the families still living there continue their traditional lifestyle: they have cattle, pigs and poultry, and they collect hay and produce vegetables in their shrinking gardens and lands. During the few days of fieldwork this January I ate meat and dairy from animals that have breathed the air (mixed with the gases evaporating from the lake), drink the water (laden with heavy metals that seep through the layers of earth into the wells), and eat the grass (that grows on toxic soil) of the frail environment. I drank coffee and tea made with water from the wells. As a result, at least some of my cells incorporated molecules laden with the history of human and non-human correspondence of that landscape. Focusing here on ideas and narratives of toxicity, I propose to follow anthropological immersion. I propose to disentangle some ways in which anthropologists become in their respective fields, and anthropological knowledge is produced through more-than-human assemblages.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the act of driving a car shapes identity and considers how a person becomes a 'driver' only after recognizing and accommodating for their relations with the objects, environments, and people they come into contact with while operating a motor vehicle.
Paper long abstract:
So often in our social interactions individuals are recognized through the roles they inhabit or actions they repeatedly undertake, whether that be teacher, father, gardener, etc. These roles are not solidified identities, but are rather performances that an individual must temporarily embody in accordance with the circumstances they find themselves in. In this paper I will be examining how an individual takes on the role of a driver of an automobile by being in relation with their surroundings. For many people, driving is a mundane practice that enables 'more important' activities in their daily lives, and yet for the time that a person operates a motor vehicle they must make their embodiment of that role a top priority. Using auto-ethnography, I will be looking at how a person 'becomes' a driver when they are driving by locating themselves in relation with their surroundings and how those interactions may shape identity for the duration of time that a person is driving. I will be considering how the individual is an intermediary point of contact in a web of relations and how responses to those interactions can shape how that person shows up in the world. This paper will be drawing from a forthcoming article that I will have published later this year in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry.
Paper short abstract:
We compare the meaning “becoming” (Deleuze) and “passage” have (Van Gennep) and we apply our reformulation of these notions to the becoming-group of some Sicilian motorbikers with a passion for slow motorcycling.
Paper long abstract:
Our presentation is divided in two parts. In the first part, we’ll discuss the meaning “becoming” gets in the philosophy of Deleuze and we’ll compare it with the meaning “rite of passage” gets in the anthropology of Van Gennep. If for Deleuze “becoming” is based on the weakening of beginnings and endings, for Van Gennep “passage” is based on their emphasis. We’ll take into account these notions (“beginning” and “ending”, “passing” and “becoming”) to discuss a specific case: the becoming-group of some Sicilian motorbikers with a passion for slow motorcycling. In the second part of our presentation, we’ll focus on (i) the virtual and realized forms of space encountered by these motorbikers during their motorcycling and (ii) on the production of specific forms of sociality and solidarity created by them. From a theoretical point of view, in this second part we’ll concentrate more specifically on the opposition established between notions such as “representation” and “process” and we’ll take into account a few scholars including Thrift and De Certeau.