- Convenors:
-
Federica Manfredi
(University of Torino (Italy))
Lucia Portis (University of Turin)
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- Start time:
- 21 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Sometimes words can't express what we would like to say. Communication seems to be in crisis when logocentric logic shows its limits. How can anthropologists go beyond words to communicate with research participants? And after fieldwork, can words be enriched by other communicative strategies?
Long Abstract:
Crisis challenges daily routines and comfort zones, influencing how we perceive experiences, communicate emotions and elaborate thoughts. Sometimes it's hard to put experiences into words and to have access to people's lives. Anthropologists can experiment with new communication strategies using creative tools, adapting fieldwork methodologies in order to go beyond a logocentric logic. Creative self-narratives can turn what is incommunicable into drawings, poems, sounds and other sensory inputs that fight against the crisis of the communication. Words can be substituted, enriched or completed to create connections.
At the same time, creative strategies of communication can be used after fieldwork to disseminate research findings not necessarily anchored to logocentric and oral communications. Multiplying research efforts, theatre, art exhibition, songs and creative laboratories can reach audiences beyond the scientific community of anthropologists.
This panel seeks contributions on creative ways to communicate during and after fieldwork, challenging ordinary communication and requiring creative strategies of expression.
How can anthropologists support creative communication with research or project participants? How do relationships develop when logocentric expressions are not the main strategy of communication? How are intimacy and trust affected by alternative communication strategies? What is the role of objects and handicrafts during and after fieldwork? How can creative communication help rethink the interaction between the anthropologist and the general public?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Enlarging the way social science can understand and act in matters of health and illness, this paper results from an art-based anthropological analysis regarding the experience of a Portuguese woman through the diagnosis and treatment of an endometrial adenocarcinoma.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation results from an anthropological analysis regarding the experience of a Portuguese woman through the diagnosis and treatment of an endometrial adenocarcinoma. Her embodied knowledge and narrative will allow us to grasp a specific set of health issues endured by women with gynaecological malignancies, understanding how perceptions of illness, treatment, corporeity, sexuality, womanhood, motherhood and resistance are intertwined. Methodologically, this analysis blends oral narrative, anthropology and creative scientific illustration, that is, ethnographic drawing and painting enhanced by the use of metaphor and imagination. This hybrid and collaborative exercise implied a levelled mixture of speech, text and image, grounded on the words of the interviewed woman. Conceptually, it understands creative visual practices as ontological, epistemological and performative resources, enlarging the way social science can understand and act in matters of health and illness. This illustrated analysis also intends to dismantle stereotypes entrenched in the ways we see and understand women, gynaecological malignancies and sexual organs, bringing into discussion a type of cancer that, although frequent, is absent from public discussion and collective imagery, being similarly disregarded by social science.
Keywords: endometrial cancer; brachytherapy; motherhood; anthropology; art
Paper short abstract:
Based on a fieldwork experimentation during the investigation of body suspensions, this paper focus on the co-participative production of handcrafts as attempt to go beyond words and to enhance the communication between ethnographer and research-participants.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary anthropology is characterized by several works where anthropologists, artists and curators are traveling into the blurred zone between visual (and not only) arts and anthropology, challenging disciplinary borders and exploring new epistemological paths.
This paper, based on fieldwork data about the co-production of handcrafts by ethnographer and research-partners, aims to propose a reflection about the use of creative practices as investigative tools. In the study of body suspensions, words were perceived as unsatisfactory: a creative laboratory where co-produced pantings, sculptures, drawings and other products, constituted a proposal to improve the oral communication.
Objects became materialization of concepts, spaces of expressions for unquestioned meanings and self-produced references to implement the logo-centric logic. Handcrafts forged relationships characterized by intimacy and reciprocal trust, redistributing the ethnographical power.
Conceiving the fieldwork as a intersubjective process involving aesthetic, senses, cognitive commitment and emotions, the present paper advocates for a consideration of creative practices as ethnographical knowledge, co-produced and invented as oral narrations, but based on colors, touches and smells rather than words.
Acknowledgements: This work is based on the doctoral project "Learning to Fly" (supported as doctoral grant from the Foundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. SFRH/BD/131914/2017). The research is inserted in the project «EXCEL - The Pursuit of Excellence. Biotechnologies, enhancement and body capital in Portugal», supported by the Foundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - grant agreement nº PTDC/SOC-ANT/30572/2017 - coordinated at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa by PI Chiara Pussetti.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we propose to examine some of the artworks featured in the online gallery “Art in Quarantine” (https://wreading-digits.com/art-in-quarantine/), in order to discuss the representational and therapeutical possibilities of visual arts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The “Art in Quarantine” (AiQ) project is an online gallery and digital platform curated by wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 collective and designed to host more than 900 artworks, produced in the first 40 days after the Covid-19 pandemic status (March – April 2020), by more than 350 authors from 57 different countries, following an international Open Call for (e)-mail art and art by e-mail.
Launched as a first response action to an unprecedented global crisis situation, not only in terms of public health, but with foreseeing impacts at cultural, social, political and economic levels, the AiQ project includes an interactive digital interface and map in which visitors can track the arrival of artworks by day and location. By doing so, the gallery’s visual interface symbolically conveys and subverts a logic of contamination, revealing, day after day, the transmission chain of another type of infection; that of benign artistic expression.
In this sense, the AiQ project potentially serves as a visual archive of one of the most critical periods of the COVID-19 pandemic so far, allowing us not only to access the individual experiences of each of the participating authors, but also to identify visual patterns from a collective experience of confinement.
In this paper we propose to examine some of the artworks featured in “Art in Quarantine”, in order to discuss the representational and therapeutic possibilities of visual arts, during this traumatic experience; the collective pathos in which we remain submerged.
Paper short abstract:
In research, communications are critical. Criticality demands creativity and creativity offers opportunities. It is this opportunity to collaborate theory, ethnography, art and performance by scholar, residents and artists to communicate with research participants about their old and new home.
Paper long abstract:
This research collaborates experimental and emergent ethnographic methodologies to communicate the word “home” with the residents of Barpak, Nepal who have rebuilt their village post-2015 earthquake of Nepal. This communication is built from the productive tension created by the collaboration of theory, ethnography, art and performance between scholar, residents, and artists. It is to challenge the deception of limitations of resources and mediums to study and present a sensitive, responsive and passionate subject like home in a contested space impacted by environmental, political, cultural and societal forces. The intent of this study is to understand and communicate the perception and conception of “home” of the residents of Barpak as they have recently experienced change, continuity and crisis with their homes; and also encourage communications in research that explores the use of visual, textual, poetic, performative, digital, reflective and imaginative methods to engage the research participants of this research in a more dynamic conversation and discussion. This study primarily builds on the memories and imagination of the residents when communicating their old and new home, and when the same memories and imaginations are presented to them creatively in the form of photos, paintings, writing, music and dance, it brings that world alive to the research participants and builds intimacy and trust with the scholar and artists. This whole process of double interaction with the research participants allows the scholars to indulge with not only facts and information but also instincts and emotions which are critical to the subject and the discipline.