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Paper short abstract

This proposal explores the challenges of representing the entanglements of phantom limb perception, interrogating how the experimental process of creative ethnography can help understand the fluctuating nature of experience.

Paper long abstract

This proposal addresses the extraordinary experiences called “phantom limbs” which usually appear after amputation, radically disrupting individuals’ perception and their sense of reality. In the chaos and confusion introduced by this phenomenon, amputees individually must learn to manage and make sense of the new sensory reality, reconfigurating the boundaries of their bodily experience and representation, as well as their sense of self. This isolating subjectivity is usually dealt with in isolation, where people improvise various strategies, especially when it comes to painless phantom sensations which are least known of. Through ethnography of neuroscientific diagnostic and mapping practices, I found that the questionnaires, interview methods, specific vocabulary and visual representations used, all act as technologies to conjure, stabilize, and negotiate different levels of consciousness and sensory nuances of the phantom phenomenology. These situations bring out a great variety of individual experiences, where the sensations of “presence” of the amputated limb engage different memories (mental, sensory, affective…) and “somatic modes of attention” (Csordas, 1993). In my current research, I have been collaborating with amputated participants on the challenges of communicating these complex and fleeting experiences which do not fit into the dualisms (or polarities) of visible-invisible, material-imagined, present-absent. This communication focuses on the challenges and contributions of this “creative ethnography” (Culhane and Elliott, 2017) on the topographies of phantom limb perception – experimenting with the tensions between the limitations of verbal and of visual representations of invisible and unexpressible extraordinary experiences.