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.

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