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- Convenors:
-
Marie Odgaard
(Aarhus University)
Wesley Brunson (University of Toronto)
Alonso Gamarra Montesinos (University of Toronto)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
We invite contributions that consider moments of ethnographic excess in method and analysis, and that respond to the demand for creating an ethical universe at the margins of a collapsing late liberal order by experimenting with the lyric essay.
Long Abstract
How can we write anthropology in a time of sweeping transformations, when violent upheavals and uncertainty disrupt our ability to stay attuned to one another? And how is the lyric essay as a form itself a way of knowing ethnographically; in-between concept and image?
As put by Deborah Tall and Troy D’Agata, who coined the term in 1997 as editors of the literary journal Seneca Review — the lyric essay combines an “allegiance to the actual with its passion for imaginative form” (Tall and D’Agata 1997, 7). It is a hybrid genre of writing combining elements of poetry, memoir, and essay, to explore ways of knowing beyond explanatory or narrative-based accounts. The lyric essay attentively inhabits, rather than overcomes, an impasse in affect and thought (Brunson forthcoming).
In these violent and uncertain times, we contend that moments of ethnographic excess become particularly important because they demand that we participate in the work of “bringing an ethical universe into being” (Cohen 2007: 103). What might come to matter, or matter otherwise, when we allow ourselves to suspend the primacy of explanatory modes and to dwell in ethnographic excess and its disquieting potentials? And how might we do this while insisting on both public communicability and academic standards?
We invite contributions that consider moments of ethnographic excess in method and analysis, and that respond to the demand for creating an ethical universe at the margins of a collapsing late liberal order by experimenting with the lyric essay.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Composed as a series of dialectical images, this lyric essay writes alongside periods of fieldwork, amidst a life lived, that refuse to materialize as planned—failed research projects, moments of incapacity—in an effort to listen and respond to that which cannot, and thus must, be given voice.
Paper long abstract
Composed as a series of dialectical images, written in the form of a letter in reverse, this lyric essay writes alongside periods of fieldwork, amidst a life lived, that refuse to materialize as planned—failed research projects, moments of incapacity, death and illness. We ask: How might the (ethnographic) subject-object create the minimal distance from itself necessary to inhabit, rather than resolve, the fundamental contradictions constitutive of (knowledge) re-production? How might we listen and respond to that which cannot, and thus must, be given voice? A mantle-archive of four texts that argue for an actively passive mode of receptive response at the limit of argumentation—Davé’s Indifference, Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul, Kohn’s How Forests Think, and Zupančič’s What is Sex?—produce and provide a moving ground for this work, from which it can lose and thus create itself—through which you lose yourself and create something in the body which is not fully there. A practice of “too close” reading of the texts of the mantle-archive works with and against the limits of both naive empiricism and reflexive critique that leaves itself unchanged, manifesting in a citational practice of “negative inclusion” that enacts and argues for an (anthropological) mode, more generally, oriented not toward the accumulation of knowledge but, rather, the constitutive gaps in knowing, from which being emerges. This essay, stated otherwise, is an effort at acknowledgment without resolution, through which something is resolved, as we share forth the general pain, learn to die better, pleasure and play amidst.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines speculative letter writing and dramaturgical character work as methods for engaging psychiatric archival case files and attending to hauntings anthropologically.
Paper long abstract
Psychiatric casefiles from archives and hauntings seem rather unrelated. Unless it is a horror story. Maybe it is a horror story. And if archival documents are “a tear on the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse into an unexpected event” (Farge 2004, 6) then reading them can be a sure way to being haunted. After all a haunting call for attention and refuses to be forgotten. But this is in fact less of a thrilling story about a method. It is a story about a method for reading psychiatric casefiles and attending to a haunting anthropologically. Rossbottom (1977) suggests that to write letters is “to attempt at the attenuation of the time and space that separates the correspondents (286). I turn to letter writing (Ralph 2020; Edmiston, 2021) and dramaturgical character work (Dunn 2017) in conversation with the lyric essay, a form that allows archival facts to coexist with imaginative practice. By approaching psychiatric casefiles through speculative letter writing, I stay close to documentary traces while opening onto what cannot be fully captured. The archive, a site of epistemic polarity that is conventionally framed as factual and stable becomes newly inhabitable through dramaturgy and letter writing as modes of attentive, careful engagement.
Paper short abstract
The two most-destructive earthquakes in Mexican history (1985 and 2017) both struck on the same date, September 19. How can ethnographic realism, with its commitment to process, the quotidian, and historical contingency, write about the experience of absurd and unthinkable events?
Paper long abstract
The two most-destructive earthquakes in Mexican history both struck on the same date, September 19. The first September 19, in 1985, was the most-destructive earthquake in Mexico’s modern history; the second September 19, in 2017, was the second-most destructive. After the coincidence, people across Mexico City developed a fear of September 19, and have theories of Mexican history in which the date plays an outsized role. These fears and theories were confirmed in 2022, when a 7.7 magnitude earthquake shook Mexico City for a third September 19. For residents of Mexico City, the third September 19 earthquake was at once profoundly strange and deeply expected. There is, in Mexico City, something wrong with September 19.
It is difficult to argue that a date can cause an event. This is because anthropology’s focus upon the quotidian smooths ruptures and surprises into structures and processes, flattening time into a neutral, abstract plane. But in Mexico City, time happens, on some days more intensely than others, and truly encountering this experience requires questioning sacrosanct ideas in anthropological thought, such as agency, causality, and historical contingency. In order to recognise that an event can be both historically produced and utterly unthinkable, I propose that we make time happen in our ethnographic writing. Instead of inaugurating a new theory of the event, or outlining a new concept of experience, this paper uses a reverse chronology to both describe the experience of the three September 19s and to reconsider the relationship between time and history.
Paper short abstract
This paper combines flawed 35mm photographs of Berlin’s urban ruins with evocative moments of apparent fieldwork failures. Reworked as postcards, these materials counter heroic narratives of urban exploration while challenging academic obscurantism through emotions, creativity and speculation.
Paper long abstract
Urban exploration involves the trespassing of modern ruins, motivated by curiosity, and an interest in heritage, memory and preservation. Dominant textual accounts focus on transgression, adrenaline, and a sense of conquest, often articulating a form of heroism closely aligned with hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, the practice relies heavily on photography, producing carefully composed images that risk the aestheticization of decay. Over four months in 2014, I conducted an ethnography-led study with the author of Abandoned Berlin, one of the most meticulously curated urban exploration websites worldwide. Whilst disentangling social, temporal and material dimensions through an affective perspective, my field notes revealed repeated moments of vulnerability, fear, and disenchantment. At the same time, and since I employed a cheap, DIY 35mm camera to document fieldwork, my images emerged blurred, damaged, or superimposed (see: https://www.pabloarboleda.com/proyecto/abandonned-berlin/).
Drawing on the idea that “good pictures in anthropology will always be relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory” (Leon-Quijano 2022: 573), this presentation argues for a counterintuitive shift in which technically ‘bad’ pictures become conceptually productive as long as they appropriately mediate my urban exploration experience. Inspired by the postcard as a multimodal image/text device that embraces fragmentary micro-reflections and immediacy (Gugganig and Schor 2020), I paired flawed photographs with short vignettes narrating evocative moments of apparent fieldwork failures through situated, atmospheric prose. By linking (im)perfect images of (im)perfect buildings where I experienced (im)perfect moments, my work counters the dominant representation of urban exploration while advocating for an accessible academic writing enriched by emotions, creativity and speculation.
Paper short abstract
This essay weaves through media and auto-ethnographic reflection to dwell in moments of impasse produced in the social worlds around refugee solidarity in 2015-19 Athens, Greece—moments when people are bodily affected in a way that ethically prompts them toward actions not possible, or not enough.
Paper long abstract
Between 2015 and 2019, a social movement of support emerged, developed, and also disintegrated, as millions of people crossed Europe. Participants in this translocal movement and the social worlds that wove through it included anarchists expanding upon “NoBorder” networks, volunteers working with grassroots NGOs, refugees fleeing political persecution, and victims of non-targeted violence seeking sanctuary. In Athens, Greece, these stakeholders uneasily, impermanently came together in a networked field of “refugee solidarity” projects that crossed vast divides of political ideology and material capacity.
As first a participant and then an anthropologist studying the social worlds around refugee solidarity in Athens, I was consistently caught up in the contradictions and excesses that imbued the field—a community of people defined by precisely those binaries (“European” versus “migrant,” “refugee” versus “solidarian”) they sought to transcend. This essay is concerned with a fundamental mismatch between affect and ethics in political community-building in this field: What happens when people (refugees, solidarians, anthropologists) are bodily affected in a way that ethically prompts them towards actions (support, healing, representing, making visible) that are not possible, or where the scope of possible ethical activity can’t satisfy the affective push to act? I understand such moments as impasse, in the sense of irresolvable non-passage (Povinelli 2002) or affective and ethical “deadlock” (Mazzarella 2017). Weaving through published media as well as auto-ethnographic reflections on my own bodily and emotional reactions, this essay seeks to understand relationality in Athens refugee solidarity worlds by dwelling, momentarily, in the inevitability of impossibility.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic experiences with Brazilian migrants in Athens, this research inhabits the space between "the said and the unsaid", precarity and narrative trauma, reframing ethnographic knowledge through poetic writing as an ethical practice.
Paper long abstract
I have lived migratory experiences shaped by affective, geographical, and identity-based dimensions that have placed me in the position of a “mediator between worlds.” This stems largely from narrating the worlds I come from while listening to those I am gradually approaching, preserving the differences between them. By assuming this stance as an epistemological one, I am developing a doctoral research in Anthropology entitled Between Worlds: The Anthropologist as Mediator, through which I seek to mediate perceptions of the experiences of Brazilians who migrated to Greece throughout the twentieth centuries.
To this end, I employ the lyric essay—drawing on feminist critiques of science (Haraway, 1988; Collins, 1986)—as a method for engaging with narratives that exceed the analytical dimension of history. I work at the boundary between “the said and the unsaid”, interweaving literary language, ethnographies of the particular, Brazilian social phenomena, and contemporary global issues. Through scenes and poetic-essayistic passages, I demonstrate how mediation itself becomes an object of ethnographic knowledge, while simultaneously testing limits through rhythm, imagery, textual fragmentation, and the effects potentially generated in readers. I use this ethnographic writing as a way of approaching the precarity and uncertainty of migratory narratives.
Finally, throughout this research, the lyric essay emerges as the materialization of “listening between the lines” and as an ethical tool in the fictionalization of accounts of profound and indescribable trauma, enabling the inhabitation of these spaces while preserving their ambiguities, contradictions, and inquietudes as sites of anthropological knowledge production.