Send message to Author

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.

Send message to Author

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.

Send message to Author

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.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what happens to a marital or consensual relationship after separation, seeking whether the relationship is redone into a new form of voluntary kinship. Deep solidarity, identity, belonging and various family traits are present many years after couples' break up

Paper long abstract:

Through in-depth narrative interviews with both partners of ex-couples who still have a strong connection, the research displays how kinship is done in a fluid and creative way through everyday routines, enlarging the relevance of kinship for various social practices and relationships. A series of research have shown that former couples who develop positive post-relationships, do so because of children or related to later-life divorces and health crises. Post-break-up ties for couples without children or later-life problems were explored mainly in negative terms as bad attachments and when they were admitted as positive, they were analyzed in terms of friendship. This study demonstrates that the bond is beyond friendship. A former relationship of "real" kinship, of deep enduring solidarity, cannot simply turn into a friendship after separation. It can be broken, but when it is kept, it remains kinship. All the couples I investigated expressed familial love about each other, demonstrated by a multitude of everyday things that they continued to do fro each other, to the deepest sense of identity and meaning which they mutually confer. They saw each other regularly, went out for fun, spent holidays or vacations together with their new partners and families, cared for and supported each other when they got ill, cared for the other's children, celebrating their role as uncles or aunts, mourned the death of the other's parent, gave each other expensive presents or donated large sums of money, shared a deep closeness and gave each other meaning.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relation between the epic and the ordinary in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran through the author’s experience of time and the transformation of the everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

I was in Montreal when the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising erupted in Iran in September 2022 and turned our lives upside down. I experienced living in two different worlds. If time had been uniting the spatial disjunction of immigration, now time was disjointed too. The pace and force of events in the part of the world I came from had pushed me to a different historical era. I was transforming; it was revolutionary times. There, where I lived, it was the same old era, punctured by moments of crossing, for example, when I visited the elder Syrian shopkeeper who told me about his brother’s disappearance for a decade, hugging me and adding that Syrians were watching what was happening in Iran. When I visited Iran a few months after those epic events, a transformation in social relations was palpable. It was as if after the volcanic eruption, lava had melted the earth and rearranged its molecules. The epic flowed into the ordinary.

In this presentation, I will reflect on these experiences of disjointed time and the feeling of social transformation that eluded empirical substantiation or discursive articulation, and yet profoundly shaped my understanding of the events of that year. Attuned to the extraordinary in the ordinary (Lefebvre and Levich 1987) and the ordinary in extraordinary (Das 2006, Han 2012), I search for new conceptual and methodological approaches to the anthropologist’s experience of the everyday during significant historical events that upend and reshape the ordinary.

Send message to Author

Paper long abstract:

From epidemiological curves and lateral flow tests stripes, to physical distancing and confinement measures, to digital networks and ecologies of support, our everyday pandemic lives relied on web of lines of communication, restriction, and support, in sometimes coordinated and sometimes unanticipated ways. The life-line, in particular, evokes the image of a rope, link, or safety net that we rely upon to escape – or withstand – dance. In this paper, I explore how pandemic life-lines shaped our experiences of COVID-19 by engendering differential trajectories of disease risk, responsibility, and vulnerability. Through an experimental multimodal approach that combines multiscalar relational analysis and multimodal (auto)ethnography, I offer a first-person account of how I came to travel, test for, fall ill, and isolate with COVID-19 in an hotel room, in late 2021, followed by post-Covid syndrome. In this account, I further suggest that immunity is best understood as a process network (as opposed to a line of defence) and that such an understanding begets an experimental approach to multimodality, in the double sense of 'experimenting' and 'experiencing.' To conclude, I discuss how this conceptual and methodological foray is ultimately about ways of making and doing ethnography with one's whole body, senses, and living milieus.

Send message to Author

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.

Send message to Author

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.

Send message to Author

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.

Send message to Authors

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.