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- Convenors:
-
JoAnn Conrad
(Diablo Valley College. Univ. of Iceland)
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius (Stockholm University Nordiska museet)
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- Chair:
-
JoAnn Conrad
(Diablo Valley College. Univ. of Iceland)
- Discussant:
-
Lotten Gustafsson Reinius
(Stockholm University Nordiska museet)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- TEMPORALITIES
- :
- Room K-205
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Modernity's evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives are premised on the assertion that modernity is defined by disenchantment. Everyday penetrations and perturbations in the landscape destabilize this notion. Our affective attachment to these sites have never been not enchanted.
Long Abstract:
The epistemological and ontological limitations that undergird the discourses of modernity divided the world into reductionist binaries: Nature/culture; reason/superstition; science/magic; progress/tradition; male/female; the West/the Rest. These hierarchical dualisms are embedded in Western teleological theories which hold that modernity is characterized by progress, a break with the past, and a state of disenchantment. But this androcentric fairy tale of modernity has no happy ending and has now delivered us into a cluster of existential crises. The interconnected Anthropocene, Pandemocene, Pyrocene, Plantationocene, and Capitalocene all represent a failure of imagination in dominant Western discourses and demand a different cultural frame of reference to stimulate our imagination into an entirely different epistemology and ontology.
In this panel we take the position that we have never been disenchanted. We call upon scholars from various intersecting perspectives to challenge and indeed negate the 'hyperseparation' of Western binaries by reexamining various penetrations, disruptions, perturbations, and reconfigurations in the cultural and natural landscapes as sites of enchantment that can serve to destabilize the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives. Taking inspiration from Haraway's "reinvention of Nature," we seek hybrid, multi-vocal narratives -- bio-political, bio-technological, eco-feminist -- to not only lay bare the structuring narrative of modernity by which dominations of race, sex, class, sexuality have been normalized in existing systems of exploitation, but to suggest narrative alternatives that acknowledge an affective attachment to the world in those everyday sites in which the marvelous erupts to create a sense of enchantment.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The presentation explores multivalent activities at the (re)sacralised island of Selja to discuss how ambivalence emanating from (re)connecting landscape, ritual and history at this location exemplify how the spheres of religion, cultural heritage and nature experience are traversed and negotiated.
Paper long abstract:
The island of Selja is counted as one of the oldest Christian sacred places in Norway, due to its association to the legendary martyrdom of St Sunniva and the veneration of this patron saint between the 11th and 16th centuries. Left to decay after the Protestant Reformation, the ruins of the Sunniva Church were (re)evaluated as cultural heritage from the late 19th century. In the last decades, Selja has been re-envisioned as a pilgrimage destination, thus becoming an arena for renewed religious rituals, as well as for extra-institutional spirituality - with and without references to the transcendent.
The presentation explores how Selja is regarded as “special” for various reasons, that is, experienced as an enchanted place. Attention is paid to the ways in which contemporary, multivalent interpretations of the history and experience of the island are affected by the situatedness of the interpreters. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it is argued that the ambivalence emanating from the various ways landscape, ritual and history are (re)connected in this (re)sacralised landscape exemplify blurred spheres of religion, cultural heritage, and nature experience. The overall aim is to contribute to discussions about the need to reassess the limitations created by the dichotomies of nature/culture, history/legend and the sacred/secular, in interpreting and experiencing (re)storied and (re)sacralised landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I aim to analyze the link made between enchantment and nature, especially the forest, in contemporary Nordic societies - and how the sense of enchantment can be found in quite unexpected places like tourist attractions.
Paper long abstract:
Far from the disenchantment world predicted by Max Weber, the contemporary world is, and has always been, perceived as enchanted although both the notions and medium might have changed.
I aim to analyze the link made between enchantment and nature, especially the forest, in contemporary Nordic societies - and also how the sense of enchantment can be found in quite unexpected places like tourist attractions. Motifs in folklore, children’s literature and fantasy literature are used to create the illusion of The Enchanted Forest (Trolska skogen) - a tourist attraction based on Swedish folklore located in Hälsingland, Sweden - as a magical place. Narratives created between visitors and actors are used to reimagine a future in which humans can fight climate changes and live in harmony with the earth. These notions are intertwined with the view of the past as a utopic time with less stress and closer relationship with nature than today. The forest is pictured as an animated place, not just within the frames of the tourist attraction but also outside of it. At the same time fairy tales are linked to science, both in the narrative itself and in the ideals conveyed to the visitors.
This will be discussed from an interdisciplinary point of view with theoretical inspiration from folkloristics, religious studies and literary studies, with special focus on Christopher Partridge´s ideas of correlations between folklore, re-enchantment and popular culture and Donna Haraway´s thoughts on nature and science.
Tora Wall
Nordic Folkloristics at Åbo Academy University
Contact: torawall@gmail.com
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on gendered tropes of polar history in collections and exhibitions of two museums. Souvenirs and sewing were exchanged as gifts between explorers and "waiting women" in the high era of Arctic fever. White magic returns to haunt and partake in white mourning of failed modernity.
Paper long abstract:
The return of Vega - the first ship through the North East Passage and back - to Stockholm in 1880 was a moment of national pride. Among the ritual devices to celebrate the home coming was a black silk dress, sewn to be worn by the captain´s wife Anna. As her husband was granted rank as nobility, she was included in the rite of passage.
The theme of a waiting woman and a long-gone husband is a narrative trope, celebrating ideals of gender, faith, love and sexuality; know from classic tales. In narratives of 19th century polar expeditions, the women who waits for a brother, lover or husband plays an active, but under-research role. Anna Charlier remarried when her fiancé Nils Strindberg was lost in a failed attempt to reach the North pole in balloon. She is said never to have stopped mourning. Her embroidery was found on the remnants of clothes, worn by Nils. And her heart was reburied with him, according to her last will.
The study explores how Polar narrative tropes of waiting women have been materialized and turned into collective memory in two Swedish museum: Nordiska Museet in Stockholm and Grenna museum. Another question is how such themes may reside and emerge today. Do the gendered practices of polar magic forge with contemporary white melancholy as ghosts of modernity and its constructions of home, nation, destabilizing the dichotomy of nature and culture? Or do they also convey other disturbing, or maybe liberating messages?
Paper short abstract:
This paper rejects the story of modernity's disenchantment. Using material from the Swedish context and engaging with Bruno Latour’s dual concepts of “translation” and purification, I argue that there are both new potentialities for enchantment and for exploitation masquerading as enchantment.
Paper long abstract:
The rupture with the past that undergirds the teleological narrative of modernity is characterized by relentless progress, the triumph of Culture over Nature, and reason over superstition -- conventionally reduced to Weber’s “disenchantment of the modern world.”
This paper rejects the story of disenchantment despite its rhetorical dominance and asserts that we (moderns) have never been disenchanted. Not only was the putative break with the past anything but precipitous, there are also emergent forms of enchantment. Engaging with Bruno Latour’s concept of “translation”, which creates hybrids of nature and culture, I argue that mutations and transformations that escape categorical bounds allow for new potentialities for enchantment. Such enchantments can be enabled by technology -- nano-technology, genetic modifications, vaccinations and the human immune system, symbiotic and cyborg technologies; or they can arise from the fantastical worlds and effects of cinema, animation, advertising, and commodity culture generally. Rather than re-enchantments or a return, contemporary enchantments are those that erupt, disrupt, or penetrate our everyday life worlds, conventional temporality, and the general order of things.
Latour’s second principle of “purification,” however, warns of the masking or denying of the first principle of hybridization, and there are many ways in which exploitation masquerades as or utilizes conventional tropes of enchantment. This is informed by Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” but also in the fractured fairy tale of modernity that has resulted in a cluster of existential crises.
This paper uses material from the Swedish context to examine the uses and abuses of “enchantment.”