- Convenors:
-
Barbara Pieta
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Re-imagining care is key in creating better futures. Building on this belief, while also directing attention back to it, we invite papers that explore the intermingling of care with imagination, images and image-based technologies. How are care relations transformed by visual (research) practice?
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists increasingly think of care as a speculative practice, involving activity that is more-than-human. Plants, microbes, animals, water and soil as well as technologies, ghosts, songs, and images are now recognized as agents of care. Caring has broken away from previous oversimplified associations with protection, affect and doing good as well as from fixed notions of personhood and individualized non-permeable bodies. Our common futures are now understood as being anchored in the capacity to reimagine and responsibly intervene in current relations of more-than-human care.
This panel will interrogate these efforts to reimagine care. We will ask how care is or can be related to imagination and more broadly to imagistic (technology- assisted) practices embedded in multisensory experience. If care and vision are intertwined, in what past and current regimes are these intertwinements grounded and what futurities do they generate or limit? How, and to what extent, can images and image-making transform the power asymmetries and epistemological tensions that shape the experiences of illness, healing, ageing, caregiving, care-receiving or death in the multispecies world? If images or visual technologies can be phenomenological lenses through which we "open up" care, what new possible (or existing but marginalized) meanings emerge? Finally, to what extent are both emic and anthropological image-making shaped by ethics of care? We invite ethnographically-inspired contributions and experiments that allow us to think with and beyond these questions. By doing so, we hope to probe the potential and limits of care as an embodied visual (research) practice.
This panel is sponsored by the EASA's Age and Generations Network (AGENET) and Visual Anthropology Network of EASA (VANEASA).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Combining digital ethnography, content analysis, and interviews with TikTok users from Turkey, this study argues that users' perceptions of the reciprocity between curating algorithms and receiving “caring content” on repeat function as a self-care activity within the context of covid-19 lockdowns.
Paper long abstract:
The coronavirus outbreak in Turkey, which attested to the numerous lockdowns, coincided with the popularity of TikTok. Spending time on the platform in hopes of soothing videos became a welcome distraction from the restrictions on social life in the country. Combining digital ethnography, content analysis, and interviews with TikTok users from Turkey, this study explores how users interact with the algorithms offered by the platform as part of their “new” self-care routines to cultivate mental calmness. I discuss that TikTok users carefully curate the platform’s algorithms in hopes that the latter presents them with audio-visual content that they distinctively perceive as nurturing “because they are empathetic to the everyday mental struggles of the pandemic.” The convenience of repeatedly watching such content (thanks to algorithms) also constitutes the self-care discourse, as individuals believe they lack the capacity for full mental engagement during the lockdowns. While the relationship between “addictive” algorithmic content, well-being, and mental health is viewed mainly in an unfavorable light, this study discusses users' perceptions of the reciprocity between curating algorithms and receiving “caring content” on repeat function as a self-care activity within the context of covid-19 lockdowns.
Paper short abstract:
During the height of COVID-19 virtual re-imaginings of the medieval Catholic pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, emerged to “mediate” access to the site. I argue that these virtual platforms and their entwined extensions of “care” challenge ideologies about the Camino’s physical rootedness.
Paper long abstract:
The Camino de Santiago is a medieval pilgrimage route transecting the north of Spain. At the height of COVID-19 it closed down abruptly, catalyzing a variety of virtual pilgrimages. Some of these pilgrimages, like Camino for Good, used their virtual networks to raise money for pilgrim hostels along the pilgrimage route struggling financially during the pandemic. Others, like the Camino Forum’s virtual pilgrimage, emerged to keep the Camino alive for those unable to access it. This paper examines one particular virtual pilgrimage, that of Pilgrimage in Place, initiated by American pilgrim, Annie O’Neill, in May 2020. Throughout the pandemic, pilgrims from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds met weekly on Zoom to discuss books and films about the pilgrimage, and to extend mutual support to one another. Pilgrims posted photographs of mini pilgrimages around their neighborhoods and memories from past pilgrimages along the Camino. Connections formed and friendships developed. Building on Turner’s (1978) notion of “communitas,” this paper considers how the community space of Pilgrimage in Place evolved around mutual acts of “care”— acts predicated on “mediating” (Meyer 2011) access to a far-flung pilgrimage route for members not only unable to reach the route due to COVID-19, but also to those without the capacity to reach the route, due to disabilities, health concerns, and financial and personal barriers. I argue that the technological space of Zoom became utilized to mediate (Meyer 2011) gestures of “care” that challenge longstanding “semiotic ideologies” about Catholic pilgrimage’s ontological roots in materiality.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a Dutch/Indian funeral film, ‘Dead Body Welcome' (2013), and my own anthropological work on 'funeral traveling', my paper speculates how the ethnographic temporality of receiving the dead as a deceased can be turned into a cinematic duration of care.
Paper long abstract:
Dead body welcome (2013; Kees Brienen) is a Dutch/Indian film. The ‘plot’ of the film, which I propose to use as an ethnographic field, is that the filmmaker has come to receive his compatriot Dutch friend who has died mysteriously in North East India. This intention to receive the dead friend is articulated in the film's opening scene as a prologue where a pact of promise between the friends is revealed. The filmmaker addresses the camera as his dead friend and reminds him of the promise he had made to the filmmaker about seeing the total solar eclipse together. Now, the filmmaker and the friend are on two sides of the eclipse. The promise must be kept, however, and the friends must meet. The prologue ends, and the film's title reverberates on the screen in a full frontal bold font with a stroboscopic echo of deep electronic sound while blinding beams of street light, seen-unseen from the taxi window, pass. I refer to this passing duration through the film as the funerary cinematic duration, based on my ethnography of funeral traveling as a contemporary mode of receiving the dead. This duration in the anthropology of death is the social time marked from the moment of death to the ritual restoration of the deceased. In the case of the film, I suggest, it offers a speculative aesthetic form of funerary duration where the dead and the living come together figuratively to grieve and live for each other.