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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on local policy-makers active in 'the re-appraisal of the East German past' this paper explores how the physical, bodily and ethical experiences of commemorative events creates strongly felt senses of the dictatorial past that heavily informs the production of government discourse.

Paper long abstract:

The policy discourse and practice of Aufarbeitung (the re-appraisal of the East German past), which treats the GDR as a dictatorship that requires commemoration, museumisation and research into state violence, is usually explored in terms of the historical narratives it produces. Drawing from ethnographic research among a group of local policy-makers, directors of memorial museums and administrators involved in this work (Gallinat 2017), this paper explores how the physical, bodily and ethical experiences of commemorative events create a persuasive power that produces a strongly felt sense of the dictatorial past that heavily informs the production of this government discourse.

I will focus on two particular events from 2008: The first is an annual commemoration of the building of the Berlin Wall, which was conducted at a local, open air, border memorial where the composition of the participants, the flow of ritual actions, music and commemorative silences direct attention to the suffering of victims that turns administrative work into ethical promises to prevent the reoccurrence of political violence. The second event is a ceremony conducted on the annual People's Day of Mourning, which took place at a former Stasi-prison, now memorial museum. Here the SED-dictatorship is once again reproduced through the ritual discipline imposed on bodies and the very 'being there' in the 'authentic place'. Moreover, the victim association used the event to cultivate links with relevant policy-makers, over coffee and gingerbread, and utilised the heavily laden ritual moment to influence the political work they do.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the emotional power of ritual through the case of the eastern German Jugendweihe ceremony. It explores the skilful employment of visual, audio, and somatosensory elements to appeal to ritual participants across three generations.

Paper long abstract:

Ritual is not only an essential part of political life, it also frequently speaks to multiple senses to be efficacious. This paper takes the secular coming-of-age ritual Jugendweihe ("youth consecration") as a case study to explore the emotional power of ritual. From 1954 onward the East German state (German Democratic Republic/GDR) employed Jugendweihe as a secularisation tool and as an additional means for crafting 'socialist personalities'. Girls and boys in their eighth school year (13 and 14-year-olds) were prepared in ten extra-curricular 'youth lessons' for their future role as socialist citizens. Between 1955 and 1989 more than 7 million adolescents pledged allegiance to the socialist state during the public ceremony. When in 1990 the socialist state disappeared, its ritual did not vanish, but was transformed - now celebrated without the requirement of preparatory lessons and without any oath or other apparent state symbolisms, such as flag and anthem. But if the ritual's continuation after the socio-political rupture of 1989/90 exemplifies a state's power of creating a particular sense of belonging beyond its grave, then how was this sense achieved? This paper explores particular elements of the public ceremony that speak to three senses: vision, audition, and somatosensation. It argues that these elements are so skilfully employed - in both socialist and contemporary ceremonies - that they evoke emotions across three generations, rendering the ritual a powerful tool for creating social solidarity.

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Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores how a Bosnian village negotiates its history of war rape through the Taussigian lens of ‘public secrecy’. Rape is subject to certain verbal taboos and survival is often narrated through the body and somatic expressions of distress, which challenge local codes of silence.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation explores the intimate ways in which a small village in Bosnia remembers and negotiates its history of war rape through the Taussigian lens of ‘public secrecy’. The rape of women and girls during four years of conflict forms part of local history that is widely known, yet rarely acknowledged and repeatedly disavowed; a matter regulated by silence and the unspoken rule that such information should remain hidden from the public realm for its potential to unsettle moral and gendered orders. The revelation of personal experiences of rape, thus, represents a violation of certain deep-seated taboos and, for women survivors, the consequences are potentially devastating; disclosure may lead to exposure, and exposure, in turn, to social exclusion. The secret of women’s rape survival has, instead, come to be narrated in other distinctive non-verbal ways, most especially through the body and somatic expressions of distress, which challenge local codes of silence and informal sanctions against public articulation. In exploring some of the many complex imbrications of secrecy in the village, the embodiment of trauma is regarded as an affecting presence, a language in its own right, and a rich source of social, cultural, and political knowledge. In this way, the presentation emphasises the need for an extension of existing explanatory frameworks so as to more thoroughly attend to embodiment and the senses as frames of narration and as a means of listening around and beyond words to reveal fuller and more complex meanings in the articulation of women’s wartime experiences.

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Paper short abstract:

Camp Gallipoli aimed to help people "commemorate ANZAC Day as participants, rather than spectators". Immersed in a new ritual of swags, rations and trenches, participants imagined heroic Anzacs - yet the event's banal nationalism and militarism aligned Anzac with state (and commercial) interests.

Paper long abstract:

Reanimating a symbol's meaning requires energy, which often comes from invoking well-known conflicts (Turner 1967: 38). To mark 2015's Anzac centenary, I joined approximately 5,000 people at a staged military camp at Sydney's Moore's Park for the inaugural Camp Gallipoli - paying A$120 to grab a swag, eat eggplant moussaka and watch Russell Crowe on the big screen, "just like the diggers did". Through rhetoric, ritual, and symbolic objects, people immersed themselves in narratives of hardship, heroism, fear, and great suffering that Camp Gallipoli markets as the "spirit of Anzac … in the DNA of every Aussie". Participants embody this spirit by pursuing ancestor worship, moral crafting, communitas, virtuous nostalgia, reverence, fun - and purchasing branded merchandise. Here, Anzac serves as a master symbol for Australian nationalism, in which state symbols are brought within hegemonic ideologies like egalitarianism. By creating corporeal experiences of related, though not equivalent, sacrifice, Camp Gallipoli imprints collective memory on individual bodies and links this to the ineffable and transcendent, so that participating becomes "a small thing, after what the diggers did for us". Then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott urged Australians to attend Anzac commemorations in a spirit of "defiance" to support "our country, our values and our armed forces". Camp Gallipoli's interplay between emotions, the senses, agency and state ritual also demonstrates that, a century after the first Anzac services, these have been almost completely reworked symbolically - with a marked banal militarism which aligns them more closely with state interests then ever before.

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Paper short abstract:

As outdoor smoking in public is increasingly regulated, I conceive how the continued and patterned presence of discarded cigarette stubs and packets act as forms of everyday sensory resistance by smokers to the new cultural hegemonic norms of non-smoking

Paper long abstract:

While smokers believe that they are increasingly marginalised as many public spaces are 'claimed' by non-smokers (Bell et al 2010, Bell 2013) and smokers report that they feel expected to govern their smoking and act as considerate smokers in public places, there remain visible and tangible evidence of smokers' continued presence in public spaces. Discarded cigarette packets and stubs (also called buts or stumps) are still found in many cities where tobacco control policies have regulated indoor smoking. Their existence in places where bins and receptacles are located for people who smoke suggests an intention by smokers to leave a trace of their activity that goes beyond the merely careless or expedient jettisoning of 'litter'. These sensory markers of smoking often cluster to effectively signal the locations of 'safe sites' where other smokers can and do smoke: locations that may otherwise be largely invisible in the urban landscape and so remain undisturbed and unchallenged by non-smokers. More fragmented trails also exist in city streets and gutters, witnessing the ambulatory smokers' passing and effectively extending and amplifying the largely invisible act of smoking in the open air. By tracking the patterns and presence of discarded packets and stubs I position their presence as a form of everyday sensory resistance whereby smokers resist the rising cultural hegemony of non-smoking ideologies in urban spaces (Scott, 1985, 1993).

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Paper short abstract:

Sensory anthropology has been criticised for its inability to get at power. These criticisms overlook how sensory analyses permit insights into power relations as they work in subtle, everyday ways - often beyond self-conscious attention.

Paper long abstract:

Sensory anthropology has been criticised for its inability to examine power. These overlook how sensory analyses permit insights into power relations as they work in subtle ways - often beyond self-conscious-attention. The experience of eating might, for instance, be analysed in 'pre-swallowing' terms, as anthropologists have tended to do, where all foods come culturally prefigured. It might be analysed in post-swallowing terms, as nutritionists do, in which the effects of food on the body are traced in accordance with and as contributors to expert discourse on health. An analysis of tasting itself might centrally involve the tongue and the mouth in experiencing food replete with power; it is the mouth and tongue, and the experience of taste itself, that bears healthy food, Tasteful food, class food, super food, into the body, and thus it is centrally involved in the delivery of discourse on trans-fat, the evils of sugar, the dangers of salt, directly into bodies. As tasted thing and tasting mechanisms become indistinguishable, the consumer eats more than just the sugar-reduced treat, drawing discourse into the body - that's what it means to eat when the government comes to the table. Sensory experiences bear the understated, yet forceful forms of power exerted by 'big players' into everyday lives, and sensory experience forms the grounds for informing resistance to them. In this paper, I consider how the body is intimately governed, and the pitfalls of approaches to the senses that overlook the impact of intimacy and the resistance it brooks.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on an activist group from Bremerhaven, Germany, which fights the extension of a landfill holding filter dusts from a local destructor station. This dust threatens people's health, but can hardly be detected. The activists speak sense to power by translating what you cannot sense.

Paper long abstract:

Big harbour cities usually smell different than other cities: the sea adds its own odours of fish and seaweed, plus a salty taste, mixed up with the exhalation of the heavy ships and marine industries. In the German city of Bremerhaven, one of those major seaports, my informants noticed a different smell in the summer of 2014: the stench of waste unloaded and temporarily stored near the city's touristic hotspot of the fishery harbour. This waste came from other European countries and was to be burnt in the local refuse incineration plant. Whilst the public outrage in reaction to this malodour forced local authorities to react swiftly and remove the waste, other places related to the city's 1970s destructor station are not sensed so easily. This paper concentrates on the work of a local activist group fighting the extension of the landfill where the plant's toxic filter dusts are deposited. Particularly this carcinogenic dust threatens people's health. However, you can hardly smell it. The activists tried to force an end to the private public partnership between the city and one of the biggest international waste corporations, which runs the landfill and the plant. A group of former scientists, they speak sense to power by translating not just what you cannot see, but even what you cannot, or can only hardly, sense into knowledge that takes centre stage in local politics. Although my informants' attempts failed time and again, the imperceptible threat to their health continued to fuel their politico-sensory agency.

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Paper short abstract:

An ethnographic account of the aspiration to monitor and control the presence of individuals connected to the tobacco industry within the ritual space of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and the sense of unease that such tactics were not working.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on theoretical perspectives straddling material culture studies, sensory anthropology and political discourse, this paper considers the aspiration of the WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) to protect public health policies from the vested interests of the tobacco industry. This concern is played out in the work of the biennial Conference of the Parties (COP), the governing body of the FCTC, where every effort is made to establish the venue as a tobacco-free ritual space, in terms both of the substance itself and of people who are connected to the tobacco industry. Based on participant-observation at the last four COPs but particularly COP7 held in Greater Noida, India, in November 2016, this paper charts the growing sense of unease amongst tobacco control activists that tobacco was present, if hidden, amongst various categories of person attending the event. Two issues became particularly contentious at COP7. One was the status of 'Members of the Public' (many of whom represent tobacco industry interests) and their access to the conference. The second was the proposal to screen Representatives of Parties in order to identify those with links to the industry, with the expressed goal of 'maximizing transparency'. While creating a smokefree space may be relatively easy, a space free of corporate tobacco interests is not. We consider various ways in which the influence of corporate tobacco interfaces with those of state representatives, such that seeking a tobacco-free space is strongly challenged by concerns about sovereignty and the relationship of national to international laws.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper attends to the processes of ballet bodies becoming, requiring a move away from the oft visual analyses of ballet. Instead, employing a moving touching analysis delivers rich insight into the subtleties of institutional-body relations and how these powerful relations are experienced.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have often 'read' professional ballet bodies for what they can tell us about gender, society or culture, but have paid little attention to how ballet bodies are created. However, moving away from these predominantly visual analyses and taking a more Foucauldian approach allows us to closely attend to the experiences of ballet bodies becoming within institutions and how they relate to those processes. Doing so in and through the prism of touch - the primary mode in which ballet is experienced by its practitioners - allows us to move towards an understanding of the experiences of bodies engaging in and being shaped by institutional relations. Drawing on almost 12 months' fieldwork at one of the world's leading professional ballet schools, this paper builds on Manning's (2006) work on the political and powerful nature of touch. To do this, a broadened definition of touch is required, becoming something within, between and external to bodies. Exploring the subtleties of institutional-body relations within that of a professional ballet school, whose pursuit is the crafting of ballet bodies-in-movement achieved primarily through the relational deployment of bodies and their parts through variations of touch, a broadened definition of touch offers rich insight into how bodies experience institutional power and how they participate in its relations.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on anthropological work on enskilled senses to critique dominant explanations of bodily unhappiness among teenage girls. Drawing from fieldwork in a London school, I offer an account that starts from embodied learning in daily life, rather than the assumed primacy of media images.

Paper long abstract:

In conventional research on bodily dissatisfaction and negative body image among teenage girls, a mind-orientated, representionalist understanding of subjective formation prevails. Bodily experience is viewed as fundamentally structured by the internalization of external images. Girls consume media images of thin models and celebrities and their subjectivity is negatively formed by this unhealthy diet of images. Vision is taken for granted as both objective and objectifying. In contrast, starting from ethnography of girls' everyday lives, I focus on the enskilment of vision (Grasseni 2004) through which girls learn to see their own and others bodies in particular ways. As I illustrate, this is in relation to global body and beauty ideals and their attendant politics of value, but also local hierarchies of status. 'Looking good' and 'good looking' can be seen as two aspects of the same processes of peer evaluation that pervade school life. From this perspective, girls are not reduced to pathological consumers, but are encountered as active and skilled participants engaged in the intense sociality of daily school life.