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- Convenors:
-
Michele Feder-Nadoff
(Journal of Embodied Research)
Claudia Rocha Valverde (El Colegio de San Luis)
Lorena Ojeda Davila (Universidad Michoacana University of New Mexico)
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- Stream:
- Movement
- Sessions:
- Thursday 17 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel maps nomadic geographies and territories to re-interpret the meaning of place and home. Papers present ethnographies analyzing how material and immaterial creative practices stitch together distances, mend spatial ruptures and route new spatial-emo-haptic-sensorial correspondences.
Long Abstract:
Nomadic geographies looks at changing conceptions of territorial spaces and creative practices of adaptation, re-emplacement and re-representation. Territories are spatial-temporal imaginaries in which peoples and things correspond, move, navigate, interact, and are remembered. Human geographies cannot be fixed by impermeable borders, nor can places of origin be reduced to fixed temporal points. Places combine the imagined and the yearned-for. Places move with people weaving interconnected geographies. Places also shift through the making and circulation of things. Places and these representations, can navigate, penetrate and transform other places, peoples and things. We are interested in ethnographies mapping nomadic human geographies and creative performative agency. Narratives are welcomed sharing stories and analysis of forced or chosen displacement and dispersement.
According to this idea, the panel's two sessions will focus on three themes:
1. SPACE, TERRITORY, MIGRATION
• How are practices intrinsic to one place maintained through alteration in another?
• How can sacred spaces or pilgrimage paths be sustained within changing political and bio-ecological geographies?
2. AESTETHICS, ART, PERFORMANCE, RITUAL
• How do sensorial and performative practices, such as, craft or creative and/or religious rituals reconfigure human geographies?
3. ANTHROPOLOGY OF HOME, ALTERED LANDSCAPES
• How might we then approach an anthropology of home?
• How do people reconfigure cultural ecologically-based practices within drastically altered ecological or cultural landscapes?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 17 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the narratives of some Partition (of India) survivors who spontaneously drew maps whilst remembering their abandoned homeland, this paper analyses the rhetorical and semiotic intricacies through which these maps represent a memorialisation of space and a spatialisation of memory.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on a year (2017-18) of ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi and is part of a doctoral research project that aims to compile an ethnographic oral history based on first hand survivor accounts of the Partition of India. In this paper, I focus on the narratives of some of my informants who felt inspired to draw maps while remembering the Partition.
I analyse this spontaneous turn to mapmaking using Michel de Certeau's theorisations of space and place. My analysis treats these maps as 'speech acts' and 'acts of enunciation'. These maps and the way my informants explained them while drawing them, follow the structure of a tour. These maps do not just outline the lay of the land, but follow the structure of a predetermined itinerary in their retelling; guiding the listener's attention from place A to B. One of my informants, used spatial metaphors drawn from his childhood and described the Dera Ghazi Khan city-grid as 'hopscotch-like' and explained his map using the structure of a commute; a recursive tour-like structure that always returned to his home before embarking on a fresh route that led to marking a new location on the map.
Therefore, drawn from memory, these informal maps are best understood as documents of displacement that represent a memorialisation of space and a spatialisation of memory. Ultimately, remembering the Partition through discussions of place and space provides us with an alternative theoretical frame for discussing the experience of Partition displacement.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores continuities in the interrelation of community and place, expressed and maintained through art. It delineates these continuities through describing the changing significance of a museum artefact - a nineteenth-century model of an indigenous Siberian summer festival.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores continuities in the interrelation of community and place, expressed and maintained through ritual, poetry and craft. It delineates these continuities through describing the changing significance of a single museum artefact - a nineteenth-century model of a Sakha Yhyakh celebration. The indigenous Siberian Sakha people have experienced considerable displacement since the advent of Russian settlers into what is now the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), in the mid-seventeenth century. This displacement has generated the adoption of foreign paradigms into Sakha interrelationships with their homelands, as it has required Sakha communities to adapt to new spaces and territories. It was especially intense during the Soviet period, when The Soviet administration caused the Sakha population to move into Russian-style settlements and jobs, integrating them into standardised, secularist institutions and places. The Yhyakh has continued to be a key event within Sakha (Yakutia)'s yearly calendar, despite these transformations - although its form and significance have changed. It is rooted in an ancient Sakha onto-epistemology, which itself is predicated on the indivisible connection between place and community, both expressed and mediated in poetry, music and craft. A key function of the Yhyakh was and is a combined affirmation and consolidation of the benevolent relationship between Sakha communities and their homeland, manifested in poetic prayer, craft and sacrifice. The story of the Yhyakh model illustrates the alterations in Sakha experiences of community and place that have occurred in tandem with Soviet and post-Soviet transformations, in addition to the persistence of this interrelationship.
Paper short abstract:
Craft communities are often conceived romantically, as bounded places of origin, where artisans are settled and aesthetics are persistent and autochthonous. Yet, artisans are often itinerant travelers and gifted storytellers, whose agency is honed through social and aesthetic performances.
Paper long abstract:
Mexican craft communities are often romantically conceived as fixed and stationary places whose community artisans are settled and whose aesthetics are persistent and autochthonous. Visitors and clients come to visit. Yet, the artisan as Benjamin has pointed out, is also an itinerant traveler and gifted storyteller. Rather than only a passive receiver of tradition, artisans are curious and intelligent makers, whose crafting builds multiple bodies of knowledge.
In Mexico traveling to sell ones wares has often been part of one's trade. This suggests that the artisan's talents lie in a conjunction of social and aesthetic performances in which they reproduce their objects and represent their trade and collective communities. This presentation focuses on the travels of the master coppersmith Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas (1926-2014) of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán and its impact on not only his own family forge and their aesthetics traditions, but how these sojourns continue to impact the community today.
From the perspective of an anthropology of "making," this talk follows maestro Pérez's journey to analyze how artisan agency is honed in active flows and frictions between people, places, materials and things.