- Convenor:
-
César Enrique Giraldo Herrera
(Leibniz-ZMT Centre for Marine Tropical Research)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 24 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the whirling dynamics of embodiment and its cinematics. How rhythm, with its physiology, underlays and mediates action and perception, collective experience, shaping organisms and identities, constituting or dowsing personhoods, affording means of evoking and empathizing.
Long Abstract:
The different papers in this panel question and expand the notion of embodiment, exploring how bodies: physical, social, politic, and ecologic, come to be. They emphasize the role of iterative movement, of rhythm, mediating action and perception, enabling forms of collective experience that shape physiologies and identities, constituting or dowsing personhood. These rhythms of embodiment afford means of evoking, eliciting, enticing and empathizing through which representation can transcend itself. If we attend to the beat of embodiment, perhaps, we can spin around that solipsistic dream of the Cartesian formula "Cogito ergo sum" ([I] think therefore [I] am). Cogito: to think was already the contraction of co- + agitō (Lewis and Short 1879). The prefix co- already implies togetherness, mutuality and reciprocality. Agitō (from ago: to act) is to stir up, guide, agitate, drive, lead, pursue, to care about. Then Cogito then is already necessarily to co-agitate or to co-guide: to disturb and be disturbed, to lead and let oneself be lead, to act with something, mutually and/or reciprocally affecting one another. Co-agitō ergo sum: Acting together therefore exists. This alternative interpretation doesn't lend itself to solipsism and perhaps finally surpasses the mind/body dualism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper relies on Csordas's notion of embodiment and Laplantine's paradigm of 'sensible thinking' to explore an ethno-filmic methodology in which bodily and embodied rhythms (and disturbances) could be perhaps not represented but 'lived through' the practice of filmmaking.
Paper long abstract:
Csordas's influential elaborations on an existential notion of embodiment, and its implications for an anthropology which, in contrast, has traditionally approached the body as an object of cultural analysis rather than the subject of culture, will be confronted with Laplantine's modal anthropology which, from a non-phenomenological stance though, also signifies the body and rhythmicity as the central elements not only of ethnography but of an anthropology of the living or, of rhythm. Thus, I will firstly advocate that bodily and embodied rhythms can be best represented, and perhaps, simply evoked, through the practice of filmmaking whose sensible knowledge should be understood as co-constituted by, and produced for, an embodied spectator. Furthermore, if cinema has the capacity not to merely represent bodily and embodied temporalities but to allow us to 'live through' them and, equally important, to simultaneously address the emotive, embodied and material aspects of the challenges faced by people in the rhythmical and arrhythmical oscillations of their everyday lives, I defend that an alternate switching and cohabitation of diverse and complementary modes of, or attitudes in, experiencing the body in ethno-filmic methodologies may become crucial to understand and make sense of a, perhaps more than ever, uncertain world.
Paper short abstract:
This immersive ethnography of migrant night workers shows how they have turned into bio-automatons - human bodies subordinated to capital gains through disinvestment. This paper focuses on the embodied dimension among the multi-layers of precarity related by two respondents and the anthropologist.
Paper long abstract:
This fine-grained, immersive ethnography of migrant night workers shows how they have turned into bio-automatons - human bodies subordinated to capital gains through disinvestment. In global cities, characterised by occupational polarisation of the labour market (Sassen 2001), some bodies, like those of cleaners, taxi drivers, market workers, are disinvested, while others, like those of highly paid executives, are taken care of and fostered (Sharma 2013). While taking these and other discussions on the human movement and the global city seriously, the impetus of this paper is to interrogate main categories underlying them, thereby opening up the discussion to issues normally not considered together. Key among these categories to be investigated are the concepts of embodied precarity, seen as a dimension of precarity not a new notion, and nightwork and migrant bodies characterised by disinvestment and invisibility from the rest of the 24/7 society. This paper unpacks and explains not only the embodied kind but also the multi-layers of precarity on the basis of experiences of precarious night workers related by two protagonists and the anthropologist.
Paper short abstract:
Through ethnographic off the Pacific coast of Colombia and the North Atlantic, this paper explores how rhythmical movements affect the bodies, perception, and interactions of people working at sea. A biocultural analysis of nausea elucidates potential physiology behind perspectival exchanges.
Paper long abstract:
In his classical paper on Enskilment at sea, Palsson suggested a parallel between nausea and cultural shock and demonstrated how nausea and the development of sjáveiki or sealegs constituted fundamental steps in experiencing as part of the community of people at sea. Through ethnographic work on boats off the Pacific coast of Colombia and the North Atlantic, this paper dwells deeper and explores how rhythmical movements affect the bodies of people working at sea, their perception, and interactions. Analyzing experiences of nausea and the development of sealegs, and their underlying physiology, this research elucidates the role of rhythmical movements articulating respiration, neuroendocrine responses, perception, and interactions with others human or not human and with the environment, suggesting a potential physiology underlying perspectival exchanges observed in Amerindian perspectivism.
Paper short abstract:
Intending to research the knowledge embodiment and the ways to deal with forms of communication with the world that are given by the transe of ayahuasca in Brazilians's urban shamanism this experimental ethnographic film is direct by an anthropologist and a visual artist.
Paper long abstract:
This experimental film exploits the transe of ayahuasca in Brazilians's urban shamanism throught an ethnography of the trance language, their contact with cosmic forces, and magic beings embodiment. It proposes a sensorial dialogical cinema intending to research ways to deal with forms of communication with the world that are given by drunkenness: a body technique of altered state of reason.
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive brew originally from some indigenous traditions from western Amazon that has been widely spread by grouping of urban shamans reinventing and multiplying rituals since the 1970s.
In the field of ayahuasca shamans's practices of São Paulo, this film project aims to illuminate the way women build sorority, how they empower themselves and each other, their ability to understand and to perform politically in a unique manner based on the knowledge brought up by trance.
This research seeks to shed light on the trance, the doubts, and the knowledge produced by the performance of ayahuasca's ritual of urban shamans as a catalyst for sociopolitical hopes and anxieties since through the body in transe emerge utopias, hopes, and tensions.