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- Convenors:
-
Jenny Tang
(University of Cambridge)
Elizabeth Turk (Newcastle University)
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- Discussant:
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Jennifer Clarke
(Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel calls for a haptic turn in taking seriously imaginations of realities and futurities after the ‘post-’ (socialist, colonial, modernist). Centring the sensing body, we ask how embodied creativities dialogue with contested histories and disrupt epistemic life-worlds as typically theorised.
Long Abstract
Centring on the sensing body, this panel explores how people reckon with epistemic gaps generatively in diverse post-socialist/post-Soviet and post-colonial/decolonial settings.
While procreative aspects of absent knowledge have been explored in the aftermath of repressive political regimes (Højer 2009) as targeted practices and institutions that did not merely disappear but, rather, transformed into something new (Kloos 2022), scholarship has tended to eclipse the centrality of the body to such social forms. Recent critical reinterpretations suggest ways to re-imagine the archive as fragmented and generative. Saidiya Hartman (2008) suggests ‘critical fabulation’ as a narrative intervention in intimate or violent silences of the archival. Tanya Lurhmann (2010) suggests that our own embodied fieldwork experiences be considered as relevant ethnographic ‘data’. Battaglia, Clarke, and Siegenthaler (2020) consider ‘anarchives’ as embodied agents of creation. Simply put, placing the sensing body at the centre of analysis productively disrupts epistemic life-worlds as typically theorised.
This panel thus calls for a ‘haptic turn in anthropology’ (Tang forthcoming), inviting thinking from and by way of the body. More specifically, this panel calls for better dialogue between embodied creativities in art (often framed as feminist/decolonial, albeit not always well explained) and anthropologies of the medical, spiritual, and religious, as realms for exploring human sensorial-intellectual intensities. Such sensorial-intellectual intensities, whether experienced as profound excess or peripheries of the body’s attunement to its relational surroundings (Shapiro 2015), tend to resist a Cartesian mind/body split, just as they elude siloed and normative ways of knowing.
We are interested in how diverse and dynamic forms of embodied creativities dialogue with or perform silenced or contested histories, some of which may fall within ‘ritual’, ‘religious’, ‘spiritual’, or 'magical' frameworks. Leaving the ‘Post-’ open-ended, we seek to examine the ideological specificities and fluidities of embodied intellectual forms. We thus invite contributions traversing diverse geopolitical routes.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
The talk examines how the breadth and historical depth of the code and discourse about spirits and possession in Afro-Brazilian religions interacts with Japanese widespread imaginary about spirits, haunted places and wandering souls, and the history and memory of the atomic bomb.
Paper long abstract
After moving to Japan, where there is a widespread imaginary about spirits, haunted places and wandering souls; a history of natural disasters, wars, the atomic bomb, and a high rate of suicides and lonely deaths, Brazilian immigrants' experiences with spirits became more intense.
Afro-Brazilian religions offer ways to develop mediumship, comprehend and manage interactions with spirits, and heal individuals, places, and spirits. These experiences revolve around the sensitive body and ways of attuning and "feeling with" places and their more-than-human occupants. Afro-Brazilian religions' practitioners, in particular, are profoundly affected by the memories of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, which are etched in a devastated landscape and preserved through monuments, museums, artefacts, and events like Peace Memorial Day.
When radioactive ghosts persist in their wanderings, mediums perceive them through their cries, shouts, and vivid bodily sensations such as hunger, thirst, physical pain, and despair. These spirits can also take on strong performatic expressions in the distorted bodies of the mediums during "transport" (possession by suffering and obsessing spirits). Spirits are healed and assisted in transcending to the spiritual realm through rituals and prayers.
As I participated in the Peace Memorial Day in Hiroshima and observed locations, objects, and customs, my body became an additional tool of knowledge due to the impression of healing rituals for radioactive ghosts and their embodiment in mediums, and of the experiences, affects, and interpretations of my research participants.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in Northeast China, this paper examines how sexual foreplay services emerged under a “triple-post” (COVID, socialism, and industry) condition, shaped by state governance, local economies, and everyday anxieties, and how this transformation produced new imaginaries of desire.
Paper long abstract
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Northeast China (Dongbei, historically known as Manchuria), this paper situates the economic dynamics of contemporary sex workers within what I call a condition of “triple-posts”: post-pandemic austerity, post-socialist institutional legacies, and post-industrial decline. In developmentally blocked cities marked by population loss, fiscal contraction, and shrinking employment opportunities, intimate service economies have become a key site where governance, survival, and desire are renegotiated. Following the nationwide anti-prostitution campaign centred in Dongguan in 2013, which coincided with the first year of the Xi administration, sex markets organised around penetrative intercourse were rapidly dismantled. In their place emerged a form of commercial intimacy referred to as “sexual foreplay.” Neither fully legal nor explicitly criminal, foreplay involves non-intercourse practices such as erotic touching, sensory stimulation, affective performance, and guided fantasy. Under post-pandemic austerity, it has become the dominant mode of sexual commerce in many urban leisure venues. I further suggest that this transformation reveals how specific modes of governance generate specific markets. For local governments confronting tightened political discipline and economic exhaustion, such services constituted a negotiable grey zone through which employment and revenue could be quietly reassembled. Meanwhile, workers recalibrated bodily labour as techniques, while consumers, particularly young men, were cultivated into new desire logics that reshaped their understandings of money, romance, and women. Through this lens, the paper examines how embodied imaginations are reconfigured in China’s triple-post condition.
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates how milk fermentation accounts for an embodied practice of continuity as carried out by Mongolian herder women. With a focus on lactic ferments and multi-sensory milk processing, questions of biosocial growth emerge as counter-narratives to post-socialist progress and crisis.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I investigate how milk fermentation accounts for an embodied practice of continuity as carried out by Mongolian herder women. By drawing on ethnographic and scientific fieldwork, I discuss how dairy starter cultures generate biosocial wealth while facing severe challenges stemming from international developmental dynamics, neocolonial food systems, and environmental destruction. By centering lactic ferments and multi-sensory milk processing, questions of biosocial growth emerge as counter-narratives to post-socialist progress and crisis.
Studies in anthropology and STS address how localized heritage biowealth such as plant seeds becomes absorbed into the dynamics of global capitalism, often resulting in the alienation of these valuable biosocial entities (Livingston 2019; Yates-Doerr 2017; Tsing 2015). In Mongolia these dynamics appear inverted. Pastoral households rely on homemade ferments that are neatly incorporated in home ecologies as biosocial commons that are incommensurable. Such pastoral human-microbe interactions are slowly undermined by the introduction of allegedly superior ferments from large European biotech companies. The acclaimed superiority of European ferments roots in standardization as a central element for more stable and profitable dairy production. Homemade ferments, to the contrary, are devalued by being considered too sour, unstable, and unclean, echoing orientalist tropes figuring pastoralism as “backward”.
Against these tropes, I investigate standardized and pastoral dairy ferments within capitalist modes of production vis-à-vis multispecies timescapes and gendered biosocial knowledge systems. I argue that pastoral ferments embody stability and continuity by being neatly incorporated into domestic micro-ecologies, maintained by the often-unacknowledged meticulous work and knowledge of herder women.
Paper short abstract
Examining two moments from my research in Guatemala– carrying an image of a Catholic saint, and being burned by a ritual fire– this paper argues that anthropologists have much to learn from paying close attention to their own senses of hapsis (touch) and proprioception (bodily position/movement).
Paper long abstract
As Tanya Luhrmann (2010) has observed, becoming a member of a religious community entails a socialized attunement to certain subjective mind-body states as cosmologically meaningful. Over the past two decades, I have drawn on this insight and learned to pay attention to my own embodied experiences as a useful source of ethnographic data in my research on religion among Q’eqchi’-Maya people in Guatemala (Hoenes del Pinal 2022). This paper examines two key moments in my fieldwork– the first, carrying an image of a saint in a Catholic procession; the second, being burned by a fire during a ritual offering to a mountain spirit– to argue that anthropologists have much to learn from paying close attention to their own senses of hapsis (touch) and proprioception (bodily position and movement in space). I argue that committing to a fully embodied form of participant observation is a useful technique of data gathering that supplements more traditional forms such as interviews, and allows ethnographers to better document the religious life-worlds we study. Moreover, developing an analytic language to talk about the embodied experiences one has while carrying out that form of ethnographic work can serve as a means of better theorizing how it is that members of the communities we study come to experience the world in their own distinct ways.
Paper short abstract
Centring sensing bodies in post-socialist Warsaw's anthropocene, I focus on embodied communality (Rakowski 2013): co-presence/co-creation against Capitalocene predations (Malm 2016). Inspired by co-city and intangible heritage, Varsovians reforge rituals for future urban utopias (Harvey 2000).
Paper long abstract
Centring the sensing bodies in Poland’s capital, Warsaw, this paper probes generative epistemic gaps in post-socialist lifeworlds that persist today, intersecting with anthropocene crises demanding novel communal forms of being. David Harvey (2000) posits "living labour" as the foundation of hopeful urban utopias – collective action transforming space amid capitalist predations. Yet, in post-socialist Warsaw and Anthropocene/Capitalocene realities (Tsing 2005; Malm 2016), hope resides in embodied communality: bodies needing co-presence, co-creation, and co-action (Rakowski 2013), forging not mere community but active city-making actors able to react and create against crisis.
The paper investigates how Warsaw's diverse resident populations: autochthonous Varsovians, internal economic migrants, and international newcomers from various countries and continents collectively constitute the urban fabric of the capital and its body. They enact spatial and experiential practices that remain largely uncharted in existing scholarly analyses, producing the social product of urban space (Lefebvre 1974). Employing the conceptual framework of intangible cultural heritage, I draw on phenomena inscribed on Poland's National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the "co-city" model (Schreiber, Klekot 2020). I want to illuminate how local histories of "heritage protection" meet global norms of heritage governance in complicated ways (Taylor 2009).
In the post-socialist city amid the precarious anthropocene epoch, intangible heritage emerges not as static relic but as a space for constructing the future. Through an ethnographic lens on senses, and embodied knowledge, I examine how Warsaw’s intangible heritage is contemporaneously created, recreated, and constituted by sensing bodies and decision-makers.