Short Abstract:

How does multimodal anthropology engage the sensorium to evoke more-than-human modes of being through the act of combing the Earth? A session on the possibilities to speak, think and understand the world with beings and processes on the edge of capitalism, when we purposefully expand our senses.

Long Abstract:

In recent years, multispecies entanglements, and their relevance in understanding our social worlds have been researched across many disciplines. In a moment of global emergency, the stakes are high and so is the pressure for simple explanations and definitive answers.

Multimodal anthropology, on the other hand, facilitates a slower, deeper engagement with land, where species and subjectivities become entangled. Film, photography, sound recording, composition create relations with more-than-humans through technological extensions: camera eyes, microphone ears that enter new realms. New ecologies form, amid existing ones. As humans and non-humans “churn the land”, making lifeworlds, anthropologically bent documentary media artists comb the Earth, over time-space. They follow new imaginaries, seeking poetics that may evoke them. In response to the many crises partly maintained by the extractive framework of mainstream commercial production, documentary worker-artists go beyond visibility, subverting totalizing description and explanation through audio-visual experiment that preserves a "rigorous ambiguity." (Voegelin)

Rather than media production, what comes to mind is more akin to foraging – a practice long associated with hunter-gatherer societies or the wilderness, that has taken on new forms in urban environments, on the fringes of society, and yet it also engages the global economy – as wild fruit and herb picking, or the collecting and upscaling, repurposing, recycling of human-made products. What are the beauties and complications of speaking, thinking, and understanding the world with beings and processes on the edge of capitalism, with sensory methods? How do visual anthropologists churn the land, foraging for new modes of being?

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