Paper short abstract:

In Oukwanyama, practices of grief, enabling and channelling existential change after the loss of someone loved, are collectively called Eenghali. A detailed description of Eenghali is given, methodologically underpinned by ritual theory, and the close ties it holds to sound, rhythm and embodiment.

Paper long abstract:

On the 6th of October 2017, Anna Fikameni died while giving birth to her child. In immediate response to this sad news, her husband, close kin, and extended family gathered at her homestead, initiating through their coming-together the possibility of grief and catharsis. Formally, this signals a period of profound change, both for the people directly affected and the community to which they belong. This time is called Eenghali.

In Eenghali, rhythm takes centre stage. It is explicated on the microlevel in concrete bodily acts, as it harmonizes and synchronizes the mourners via wailing, singing and praying. On the macro-level, ritually given daily routines, weeks, and finally months, 'channel' individual responses to grief into a communal endeavour which consequently provides the means for personal transformation and societal reintegration.

On all these levels, sound aligns closely with bodily action and meaning-making practices. It marks and accompanies ritually and socially institutionalized moments of existential mobility, hinting towards these routinized practices' transgressive potential.

If 'work' may be 'defined as a continuous human activity aimed at producing goods and services' (Spittler), it here takes on a different meaning. The activities' purposes, extrinsic to the work done, in the process of the ritual, become intrinsic. Moreover, as rhythms become embodied, both, sound and rhythm, open a direct path to lived experience and shared imagination.

The focus on sound and the conscious dispensation of photo- or videography stems as much from an ethical choice on the part of the ethnographer as it did make sense for him methodologically.

Paper short abstract:

Through the accounts of bicycle couriers gathered in online interviews, this paper explores how bicycle couriers working in the gig economy deploy their senses, especially sight and sound, as they seek to manage the volume, scheduling and intensity of their work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how bicycle couriers working in the gig economy deploy their senses, especially sight and sound, as they seek to manage the volume, scheduling and intensity of their work. The platform or app they are bound up with induces different registers of rhythm from eurythmia to arrhythmia (in Lefebvre’s terms) as jobs fall into line or work is fragmented. Indeed, in the accounts of bicycle couriers gathered in online interviews, the operation of the app is felt as an augmentation of their senses and emerges as a digitalised extra-corporeal element of the nervous system. The vibration/notification of an order results in a habitual response from couriers. They hear the sound (of the possibility of work) and look at the screen. It demands a decision. This is a time-sensitive juncture, a moment of the couriers’ synchronisation with their platform(s). It tests their ability to decode the value of the opportunity and make a swift judgement: appraising the distance, direction, compensation and supplier, the effort required of the body against the rhythms of energy/fatigue… whilst always jostling with the chance that a better offer could arrive. Digital platforms embed uncertainty into the gig economy under the guise of flexibility, and so, the courier becomes a crisis connoisseur, negotiating between the digital and the analogue.

Paper short abstract:

I show how skilled practices on board tall ships shape taskship, which is both a place and a bundle of correspondences in which boat, environment and crew become entangled. Through this entanglement, the rhythms of the sea environment make everyone on board change their ways of doing.

Paper long abstract:

I analyse the materials I gathered during extended fieldwork aboard tall ships, which are old traditional rigged ships, as part of Sail Training, focusing in particular on ‘taskship’ on board. Taskship is the dialogue between lines of task and the non-human participation of the environment. Instead of scapes, the only form continually performed at sea are the setting of sails or the shaping of the boat at each moment. Therefore, a tall ship is always in continuous formation, as is our notion of place. With the notion of taskship, I wish to emphasize not the ship as a physical moving place, but as a place in which relationships are continuously in movement, thus shaping the boat. For instance, sailors love the wind and they suffer where there is none.

Oceanic rhythm (the relationship of one movement with another at sea) turns into social correspondences when a dialogue between human and non-human beings is established. Initially, crew members experience arrhythmia, loss of body control when the extended movement of the boat in their bodies results in vomiting and seasickness. They get their sea legs after three days of adaptation. Also, the lines shaping the sails entail tensions between humans and non-humans—contrary forces and frictions that need to be compensated by skilled adjustments. Trainees learn through skilled practices and correspondences when experiencing harmony, a feeling of mutual attention and memory with oceanic rhythms. Consequently, a moral commitment to feel changes their ways of doing.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I focus on practices of wayfinding and the creation of new routes on the dammed River Nile. Drawing on an experimental audio-visual installation, I explore the work of infrastructuring and sensing the unfamiliar as a way of re-inhabiting radical changing environments.

Paper long abstract:

Work, life and movement along the Nile in rural Northern Sudan are related to the cycle of seasons and the rhythm of the river. With the construction of the Merowe Dam, the River Nile was impounded, and thousands of peasants have been flooded out of their homes without warning. The inundation of agricultural fields and inhabited villages not only caused existential uncertainty and the loss of work but also disrupted socio-material entanglements and habitual patterns of sensory experiences. Flooded desert paths and routes as well as changing characteristics of river waters, winds and waves required the readjustment of the senses while navigating through ruined land and waterscapes; new sights and sounds demanded “focal attention” (Polanyi 2013). Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, I propose to analyse the aesthetics of the unfamiliar and the ways of learning to move through and see the environment anew. The new, yet unknown, rhythms of the Nile foreclosed certain routines and practices but also afforded new possibilities of movement, linkages and ways of knowing. River vessels became the main means of transport and travel. By focusing on local attempts of wayfinding and the creation of new paths and routes on and along the ever-growing reservoir, I explore the work of infrastructuring and sensing the unfamiliar as a way of re-inhabiting radical changing environments. After a short introduction, I will present an experimental audio-visual installation (work in progress) to reflect on multimodal formats as a way to examine sensory engagements.

Paper short abstract:

Amidst the intensity of urban change in contemporary India, housing brokers play a key role in 'conducting' the rhythmic patterns of city around them. This short essay film explores patterns of brokerage, worship, drinking and fish in Mangaluru, a smaller city in coastal south India.

Paper long abstract:

Mangaluru, a smaller city in coastal south India, is undergoing wide reaching and transformative urbanisation. The resulting change in everyday city life is characterised by an increased intensity of interactions between diverse, multi-scalar rhythmic patterns. Navigating the rhythmic city is to be a conductor of these different patterns – learning, anticipating, directing, inhabiting and leaving routinised actions where possible. One’s agentic ability to conduct the city around them is based, in part, on the relative position of a person’s caste, religious community, gender and class. This feeds into, and from, attempts to forge regular repeated practices in the city. Finding such regularity within one’s life is a key factor in being able to adapt to, employ and exploit change. This short essay film explores how the working lives of housing brokers in Mangaluru interact with rhythmic patterns of construction, worship, drinking and fish as they help create and sustain property relations in the changing city. It analyses the interactions between their everyday routines, the city’s repeating patterns, and how urbanisation reconfigures rhythmic relations.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution multimodally inquires mollusc gleaning, a sensory and emplaced practice, in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal and how gleaners bring together attention and routinized skill, engagement and omission as well as plan and situated action to co-constitute rhythmicity amidst volatility.

Paper long abstract:

Life in the Sine-Saloum Delta is all about moving within movement (cf. Vigh 2009). Mollusc gleaners embrace the so called Mbissa, a recurring period of around ten days when low tides occur between the not-too-early morning and the not-too-late afternoon. The Mbissa sets the pace for the gleaners’ mobility and social relations, yet every Mbissa has breaks, ruptures, expansions and contractions, relating among others to feasts, individual needs or changing weather. The Mbissa is thus a malleable, multistranded rhythm that relates to tides, molluscs, spirits and human individual and communal actions.

As the organization of gleaning, also the practice itself relies on the intricate relation between routine and rupture: Between high- and low tide, gleaners have very different experiences in terms of gravity, wetness etc., with the wind, sun, soil and water all playing their part. And so, while working continuously, they at the same time have to be attentive to their own body and to the changing circumstances. Furthermore, their gleaning is never ‘complete’ or ‘perfect’, because there are always molluscs that slip, or stay out there to be eventually found another day.

By the means of words, image and sound, this contribution seeks to trace the ‘attentionality’ (Ingold 2016) of mollusc gleaners, which entwines attention and routinized skill and bridges engagement and omission as well as plan and situated action amidst volatility. Thereby, it also asks how to multimodally inquire and represent layered/multi-rhythmicity as well as action and pause beyond linearity.

Paper short abstract:

This article will look at the relationship between work and cinema spectatorship through examining the exhibition of Bhojpuri films in Old Delhi. It will argue that the increasingly erratic rhythms of precarious labour experienced by workers in the area is mirrored in the space of the cinema.

Paper long abstract:

Screenings at the Moti cinema in Old Delhi are a disruptive affair, the cheap front seats are full of daily wage-labourers from the neighbouring market there to watch the latest Bhojpuri film release. As the film progresses the people wander in and out of the exits, called to work to make a delivery and later returning to catch the rest of the film. Indian cinema has been often characterised as a 'cinema of interruptions' in which song-and-dance sequences, censorship, other factors create a distinct visual and narrative time-space, however the role of work in this has had little attention.

The name of this paper is a reference to the first film ever shot 'Workers Leaving the Factory'. The purpose of this film above all meant to show the possibility of rendering movement in images, however the compulsion for the movement in the film is the end of work not the velocity of the image form. The act of leaving formed the first articulation of cinematic-motion; the same is now true in the cinemas of Old Delhi. It is rhythms of increasing precarious labour in the area that propels workers away from the cinema, transforming the experience of film into partial units of expression defined by work rather than linear narrative coherence. Using ethnographic fieldwork to probe these practices around work and cinematic spectatorship, this paper will outline how cinema in this context becomes destabilized as a coherent product becoming instead a measurement of duration for work-time, waiting and distraction.

Paper short abstract:

In the late twentieth century, cosmopolitan elites have embraced yoga as an alternative movement that can provide relief from the constraints of modern life. This paper considers to what extent visual and sonic representations of yoga are embedded in historically situated temporalities and rhythms.

Paper long abstract:

In the late twentieth century, the practice of yoga has surged in urban centers across the globe. Both mainstream and boutique style businesses present the bodily practice as an alternative movement and program that can help participants break through the stressful rhythms of modern life. Such businesses creatively draw on minimalist aesthetics and tempos in ways that position yoga as a form of post-secular spirituality. Emphasizing a slower and transcendent form of embodiment, such visual and sonic representations often position vinyasa or yogic flow as entailing a relief from the burdensome temporalities and weight imposed by capitalist labor regimes, global infrastructures, and health crises that constrain and stress the body in particular ways. This paper examines how visual and sonic representations of yogic practices in online advertisements and classes seek to enact emergent temporalities and rhythms in the face of periods of uncertainty and crisis. The paper considers to what extent these temporalities and rhythms can be considered alternative, novel, and creative forms of resistance in relation to capitalist and post-secular formations. In what ways are these visual and sonic aesthetics re-enactments of temporalities and rhythms set forth in previous historical epochs? Do these divergent temporalities and rhythms position particular persons and places as outside the frame of modernity? How can these complex relationships between the past and present, rhythm and arrhythm contribute to discussions about agency and constraint in global relations of power?