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- Convenor:
-
Andrew Irving
(University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Nigel Rapport
(St. Andrews University)
- Track:
- Movement, Mobility, and Migration
- Location:
- Schuster Lab Blackett
- Sessions:
- Thursday 8 August, -, Friday 9 August, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The human body cannot exist in stasis. Movement is essential to life and a precondition of perception, experience and knowledge. The panel invites all kinds of theoretical, ethnographic, sensory, experimental and methodological approaches to the study of movement in social and cultural life.
Long Abstract:
The human body cannot exist in stasis. Movement is essential to life and a precondition of perception, experience and knowledge, right down to the movements of proteins and molecules found in organic and non-organic matter.
Every human movement creates the potential for a new social, existential and political reality. From formalised movements found on a production-line, prison or gymnasium to spontaneous, resistant and idiosyncratic forms, movement coordinates intentionality and action to shape our lived experience of the world.
We all have the capacity to move but not necessarily under the circumstances of our choosing. Thomas Hobbes defined liberty as 'nothing but the absence of restraints to movement', illustrating how control over movement is a key means by which power manifests itself and shaping people's lives. What is at stake—this panel asks—in the capacity to move? What are the possibilities and constraints of the moving body? How does movement exist in life? Or in non-life? Or in objects and materials?
Movement, once understood as a lived, whole-body experience indivisibly combining complex assemblages of thought, emotion and sensory experiences with heart-rate, lungs, muscles and nerves, reveals how seemingly congruent forms of social-action (commuting, working, migrating) and environments (streets, dancehalls, landscapes) might be experienced radically differently between individuals and groups.
Movement is not only way of belonging to the world but of belonging to it in a particular way. The panel invites all kinds of theoretical, ethnographic, sensory, experimental and methodological approaches to understanding movement in social and cultural life.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 8 August, 2013, -Sarah Pink (Monash University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore how we can understand the ways that digital media are implicated in human movement as part of everyday environments.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I explore how we can understand the ways that digital media are implicated in human movement as part of everyday environments. In doing so I investigate how movement can be part of a theoretical approach to digital media that focuses on the tension between understanding media content and comprehending the non-representational elements of our engagements with media. To do this I will draw on a range of existing examples to argue that to both digital media in everyday life, and contemporary/emergent experiences of movement, we can usefully focus on how content and experience are interwoven in the routes we take through the world.
Camilla Morelli (University of Bristol)
Paper short abstract:
I explore emotions (Latin movere, to move) as moments of intense bodily dynamism rather than fixed states. Focusing on Matses children in Peruvian Amazonia, I consider how childhood is based on a body-in-motion that continually opens up new modes of sensory perception, knowing and emotion.
Paper long abstract:
I explore emotions (from the Latin movere, to move) as moments of intense bodily dynamism rather than fixed states of being. Focusing on Matses children in Peruvian Amazonia, I consider how children's lives are based on a body-in-motion that continually opens up new modes of sensory perception, knowing and emotional entanglement with the environment.
Using cameras, I aim to grasp children's kineceptive knowing, which I define as a dynamic form of perception in which multiple perspectives are continuously being generated through action and movement. My inquiry into children's knowing encompasses their own 'view from the ground' and emotional experiences of the river environment. The cameras used from the embodied height and perspective of children allow us to see and understand the world in multiple ways that are predicated on the body-in-motion.
By taking seriously children's sensorial, dynamic and aesthetic engagement with the world, the paper moves away from mainstream theories in Amazonian anthropology, particularly those that focus on Amerindian thought and ontologies whereby the structures of the mind are privileged over bodily ways of knowing and lived experiences couched in movement.
Andrew Irving (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body and a city’s industrial architecture, namely the huge suspension bridges that dominate downtown New York. People’s movement across bridges, reveals them to be interesting sites of thought, sensation and experience that often generate complex streams of interior dialogue, emotional reverie and imagination ranging from the trivial to the tragic.
Paper long abstract:
"Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and from, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side"
(Heidegger: Building, Dwelling, Thinking 1951)
This paper explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body and a city's industrial architecture, namely the huge suspension bridges that dominate downtown New York. Towering 300 feet into the air and spanning 7000 feet across, the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg suspension bridges established a new sense of scale and materiality against which citizens could compare the size and finitude of the human body.
People's movement across bridges, reveals them to be interesting sites of thought, sensation and experience that often generate complex streams of interior dialogue, emotional reverie and imagination ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or fully a part of the city but are instead suspended beneath the sky and above the water, "making strange" people's perceptions of scale, sense of being on the ground and subjecting them to various delirious effects, such as the sensation of vertigo, of flying and falling. The material derives from a practice based, research project, New York Stories for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of strangers randomly encountered as they moved around the city.
Giovanni Spissu (University of St Augustine)
Paper short abstract:
This panel will explore how urban disorentation can be used as a method of observation for studying the city from an ethnographic point of view. The discussion will take as its starting point my research conducted in Cape Town into the signification of urban spaces in the post-Apartheid period.
Paper long abstract:
Is the state of disorientation we experience when we find ourselves in an unknown city a limitation or an opportunity when it comes to observing the city? In this panel the state of
being extraneous and of disorientation is understood as a privileged state for observing the city. Feeling uprooted and alienated are considered as fundamental moments which enable the researcher to raise himself to new cognitive possibilities through a result which is "soiled" by intermixing and chance encounters between rational, perceptive and emotional levels in a blend which only the city knows how to produce.
The wanderings of the French Surrealists, Guy Debord's Situationism, and the figure of the metropolitan flaneur described by Walter Benjamin represent the fundamental triggers for a deliberation on urban disorientation. Taking these works as my starting point, I will aim to develop a deliberation on urban disorientation understood as a privileged moment in the ethnographic observation of the city.
It is also my intention to explore how the use of photography and the recording of ambient sounds can be crucial tools for the observation of the city through disorientation.
Finally, I will describe salient moments from my fieldwork in Cape Town with the aim of observing and representing the processes of urban signification in the post-Apartheid period.
Mira Mohsini
Paper short abstract:
Exploring "surprising" bodily movements that arise from crossing boundaries, I argue that such moments cannot be fully understood within the framework of habitus. Instead what ontological possibilities emerge, and how do these inform experiences of gender, marginalization and contingency?
Paper long abstract:
Why does the crossing of certain boundaries, whether visibly demarcated, imagined or culturally constructed, change the movement of bodies? What gives certain boundaries the agency to alter behaviour and how are these changes manifest in bodily expressions? In this paper, I examine the lived experiences of Old Delhi's Muslim residents by observing the changes in bodily movements when certain boundaries are crossed, such as between New and Old Delhi, between different neighbourhoods in the old city, and from the home sphere to public spaces. The concept of habitus could be a useful analytic frame to capture the bodily expressions of feelings of discomfort and dis-ease when crossing over into unfamiliar terrains - the sensorium of "existential risk" as anthropologist Michael Jackson has called the varying experiences of bodily ease and dis-ease in different contexts. For residents of Old Delhi, there are certainly experiences of boundaries that, when crossed, separate a confident body from an out-of-place body; however, I suggest that some moments of crossing defy the logic of habitus as the embodiment of structural conditions. I read these moments of crossing, where bodies undergo observable changes, as the conscious dislodging of habitus in order to create seemingly new ontological possibilities. I examine these new possibilities arising from moments of crossing boundaries - these "surprising" performances of bodily movements - and how they inform experiences of gender, marginalization and contingency.
Christopher Davis (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
On the face of it, walking the dog is the least likely of outings to qualify as a journey. After all, the only place one is ever really going is home. Yet, on closer inspection, it is precisely these reductive fixities that make walking the dog the prototypic journey, one shared with the prototypic non-human companion, and open to the simplest kind of serendipity.
Paper long abstract:
On the face of it, walking the dog is the least likely of outings to qualify as a journey. After all, the only place one is ever really going is home. The number of routes one can take is hardly infinite. The routine occurs several times a day, and in some respects isn't really about the process of walking at all. Yet, on closer inspection, it is precisely these reductive fixities that make walking the dog the prototypic journey. Using theoretical observations of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and others, the paper will begin by considering walking the dog as a kind of urban pastoral, with parks and pavements reconfigured through the shared experiences of small collectivities (what Kurt Vonnegut might call a duprass). This opens the way for ethnographically based observations about the passage of time, the social archaeology of community (that is, the neighbourhood as an open field, with layers of repeated meetings that build, over time, into friendships or remain as they are - tiny intimacies or nodding acquaintanceships), and the everyday serindipities that go along with simply being outside. The paper's intellectual excursion will conclude with thoughts about the abiding significant otherness to one another of dogs and people, and about our shared creaturely being as beasts.
Nigel Rapport (St. Andrews University)
Paper short abstract:
My starting point is the painting of Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) where the human figure appears as itself a form of movement. Can I draw links between Spencer and a cosmopolitanism that deems movement to be a human birthright? Anyone’s life-project is a future created as a personal work of art.
Paper long abstract:
My approach to the study of movement is via the art of Stanley Spencer (1891-1959). Spencer painted the human figure as itself a form of movement. I find the paradox intriguing: as if Spencer sought to overcome the physical conundrum of identity as a point in space as against identity as a process, a flow. Spencer wanted to paint the human figure in its authenticity and to do so he felt he had to paint the human figure in movement or as movement.
As well as this, Spencer wanted to paint the human figure—and every other object, too, from cabbage leaves to broken teapots—in what he termed a 'redeemed' state. As for Thomas Hobbes, it seems that for Stanley Spencer movement carried a moral quality. The moving human figure on his canvas embodied a 'heavenly' truth, beauty and propriety beyond outward and 'static' appearance. Spencer wished to do justice to the identity of worldly objects by allowing for the movement of their forms.
I am not only intrigued by Stanley Spencer's art for its own sake. I also wonder whether I can draw links between his emphases and insights and a cosmopolitanism that deems movement to be a human birthright. Anyone moves through a life-project. By right. No one is to be trapped in the stasis of social-structural categories that someone else has dreamed up: 'woman', 'Muslim', 'apostate', 'pure'. Anyone's birthright is a futurity towards which and through which Anyone moves as a personal work of art.
Rami Wadelnour (University of Bayreuth )
Paper short abstract:
The present paper is intended to provide an ethnographic account of corporeal practices, meanings and constrains on a desert road in Sudan.
Paper long abstract:
Lorry drivers together with their assistants and passengers spend several days on the Forty Days Road traversing networks of unsurfaced desert tracks linking western and central Sudan. Unlike the asphalt paved roads in other parts of the country, desert roads create a distinct way of corporeal experience that is marked by vulnerability against forces of nature and political circumstances.
Analytically, the lorry on the move provides a social milieu, a community, a moving space that is distinct. A window that is open to a world that is moving around the vehicle as well as within the body of the vehicle itself. The lorry on such a journey would arguably take a form of a vessel that is bringing individuals together - sharing the common aspiration of safe arrival, applying learnt skills to survive the journey without trouble, injury or serious dispute; often while having a limited (sometimes uncomfortable) spot being exposed to the sun, dust and wind. The spatial arrangements displayed at the beginning and during the journey provide a set of norms that contributes to the ordering of the travel community. A specific code of conduct is adopted during the trip that is constantly under creation, modification and transgression. The aim of this paper is to provide an ethnographic account on moving, to capture the dynamics of being on the move and the experience of traveling on a desert road.